Billy Wilkerson published the Hollywood Reporter and used the trade paper's leverage to build the Sunset Strip's most glamorous rooms. The Cafe Trocadero opened in 1934 at 8610 Sunset and became the place the studio era went to be photographed. Ciro's followed in January 1940 at 8433, a third of a mile east along the boulevard, and the Mocambo opened almost next door to the Troc in 1941 under Charlie Morrison and Felix Young. The glamour was the public floor. Behind it, in a back room downstairs, ran the card games where studio men lost sums that would have alarmed their shareholders, and it was Wilkerson's own appetite for those games that eventually carried him to Nevada. He began building the Flamingo in Las Vegas before Benjamin Siegel and his partners took the project over, a story usually told with Wilkerson edited out of it. He has a place in the other great Strip legend too. In the winter of 1936 it was Wilkerson, not a casting director, who noticed a fifteen year old named Julia Turner at a soda counter near Hollywood High and sent her to an agent; Mervyn LeRoy signed her to Warner Brothers, and the world came to know her as Lana. The Trocadero and the Mocambo are long gone. Ciro's building survives as the Comedy Store.
Getting there
34.0922, -118.3797
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
