In the mid–1920s, as Hollywood Boulevard was transforming from a dusty trolley route into the film capital’s neon-lit main street, a veteran character actor named Henry Bergman quietly set about building a different kind of stage. Bergman, best known as a stalwart member of Charlie Chaplin’s stock company, had spent decades in theaters and on movie sets, playing everything from bartenders and mayors to comic foils. By 1925, he was ready for a venture where the audience could eat, drink, and gossip between pictures. With Chaplin’s financial backing, Bergman took over a storefront near the corner of Hollywood and Vine and created Henry’s Café at 6325 Hollywood Boulevard—part delicatessen, part late-night canteen, and, for a brief but glittering moment, one of the town’s most important meeting places.
By Allan R. Ellenberger for The Hollywoodland Revue
Bergman’s decision to go into the restaurant business was more than a whim. A San Francisco–born stage actor who had worked with Chaplin since the Mutual and First National days, he had seen first-hand how hungry crews and night-owl stars were stranded when the last shows let out. The working people of Hollywood were still a sleepy lot in the early 1920s. Cafés closed by ten or eleven at night, and actors who were off a call until all hours had no choice but to go home.
Bergman dreamed of an establishment that would be like an extension of the studio commissary. An unpretentious, comfortable room where one could get a sandwich, a plate of hot food and a strong cup of coffee long after midnight. Chaplin was grateful to Bergman for his loyalty, and was charmed by the notion. He agreed to bankroll it.
The building that housed Henry’s stood on the north side of Hollywood Boulevard, just west of Vine, in a block of low commercial structures put up in the early 1920s. City directories place “Henry Bergman’s” at 6325; a vertical neon sign shouted “Henry’s Café” from the façade, glowing above the sidewalk traffic of tourists, starlets, and studio men.
Inside, the décor reflected Bergman’s taste for simple comfort rather than ostentation. Restaurant photographs and a surviving postcard depict a long room of tables and banquettes, more European café than Hollywood nightclub. Waiters scurried in white jackets among the tables. Benign and bulbous in the center of the room, grinning over his egg salad sandwich, sat Bergman himself, host, proprietor and self-styled ringmaster of the after-midnight mob.
Left top: Henry's Cafe in the center of photo. Notice to the right is Sardi's Restaurant being built. Today that location is a strip joint.
Left bottom: The location of Henry's Cafe as it looks today as the Vine Theater.
From the start, Henry's was a working Hollywood restaurant, not a tourist trap. Actors, writers and technicians from nearby studios drifted in after wrap, reeking of greasepaint and arc lights. Chaplin was known to appear alone, walking from his La Brea studio to the boulevard, hat brim pulled low, for a quiet meal at Bergman’s tables. French director and Chaplin observer Robert Florey later recalled the poignancy of seeing the world’s most famous comedian slip into Henry’s after dark, seeking anonymity among his own tribe.
Henry’s quickly gained a reputation as the first real late-night restaurant in Hollywood. Gregory Paul Williams, in The Story of Hollywood, notes that it was considered the boulevard’s earliest establishment to stay open after midnight, a godsend to actors emerging from preview screenings or directors finishing night shoots. By the latter half of the decade, before the Brown Derby’s Vine Street location took over as the town’s reigning celebrity refectory, “Where shall we eat?” often meant Henry’s. A hungry newcomer might find himself at a neighboring table to Wallace Beery, a young Clark Gable, or studio brass quietly taking a late supper.
Henry's was never a temple of cuisine in the grand manner; as befit Bergman's origins, it was always more delicatessen than palace. The menu emphasized more substantial items, soups and sandwiches and "hearty plates," the familiar mainstays of the studio clerk and the star on deadline. Its combination of fair prices and easy, clubby atmosphere rendered it democratically inclined in a place not always noted for such virtues. Chaplin's participation lent an aura of glamour, but Bergman's never put his name on a marquee; there were no photos of the Tramp on the wall, no gimmicks beyond the fact that the man who made the world laugh might be sitting in the next booth.
An ad appearing in the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News on July 14, 1915, announcing the opening of Henry's Cafe
Like so many other Hollywood dreams, Henry's burned bright and brief. Sources agree that Bergman's restaurant opened on July 15, 1925, and lasted only a few years before going the way of so many ephemeral enterprises, victimized by changing tastes and cutthroat competition and the churn of Hollywood real estate.
By the mid-1930s, Henry’s property was renumbered to 6321 Hollywood Boulevard and in 1934, reopened as Perry's Brass Rail, a lively establishment that catered to the same sort of mix of studio hands and night-owl regulars who had long animated the block. By 1936 it had become Weiss Café, another modest refuge in what was still very much the working Hollywood of light crews, contract players, and script men. By the time Henry Bergman died in 1946, still associated with Chaplin’s studio, his café was a memory, its role in the town’s social life overshadowed by glitzier successors.
Hollywood Boulevard also was changing. Neon grew brighter, traffic heavier, and the studios that once sent their crews across town for a late-night sandwich now built their own cafeterias and executive dining rooms. By 1940, as Hollywood shed its adolescence and stepped into a sleeker, more confident era, the old Henry’s space was stripped to its bones and reborn as the Admiral Theatre; a streamlined, modern picture house designed by S. Charles Lee. Over the decades it reinvented itself again, first as Rector’s Admiral and, after a sweeping 1969 remodel, as the Vine Theatre. The block around it morphed wildly, even hosting a strip club in the former Sardi's next door, a reminder of the Boulevard's uneasy drift from movie-colony Main Street to neon-lit carnival. And yet, for those who know where to look, the ghosts are still there.
Henry’s Café may be gone, its tables long since cleared and its lights dimmed, but its brief life captured a special moment in Hollywood’s story. It was a bridge between the old, intimate village of the silent era and the sprawling entertainment machine to come—a place where stars and strivers could share a sandwich after midnight, and where the world’s most famous clown could walk in from the shadows, hang up his hat, and feel at home. For Lost Hollywood, Henry’s stands as a reminder that some of the city’s most important stages weren’t on a soundstage at all, but on the corners where people gathered to eat, talk, and dream.
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