Queer Places:
100 Crescent Dr, Glencoe, IL 60022
Old
Spaghetti Factory Cafe & Excelsior Coffee House, now the Bocce Cafe
Italian Restaurant, 478 Green St, San Francisco, CA 94133
Savoy Tivoli, 1434 Grant Ave, San Francisco, CA 94133
Frederick Walter Kuh (May 19, 1927 - November 6, 1997) was a colorful entrepreneur and bon vivant who for years ran North Beach's famed landmark restaurant -- the Old Spaghetti Factory Cafe & Excelsior Coffee House. A legendary personality, Freddie Kuh called himself "a bohemian businessman" and was a well- known restaurateur and saloon keeper for more than 30 years in North Beach. Herb Caen once proclaimed him "the father of funk."
Frederick Walter Kuh was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of a Chicago stockbroker. Kuh was raised in Chicago, attended the University of Illinois and graduated from Lake Forest College. He served in the Army in North Africa. Although he couldn't ride a horse and didn't know how to drive, he was put in the mechanized cavalry division until he ran over his lieutenant and broke his arm -- which landed him in the infantry. After the war, he studied the arts in Paris and made lifelong friendships with Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Noel Coward, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, Janet Flanner and Alice B. Toklas.
In 1948, Ralph Pomeroy, with his sulky, petulant-lipped beauty and blond bangs, was known on the Left Bank of Paris as le faux Truman. The "real" Truman was Truman Capote, who had recently made a sensational debut with Other Voices, Other Rooms and its come-hither photo of the author on the back cover. Much better-looking than Capote, Ralph was what Capote should have looked like. Equally precocious, at eighteen he had already published poems in Poetry, at that time the absolute pinnacle of poetry magazines in America. In an article for "The Gay & Lesbian Review," (2005), Edward Field remembered: I first noticed him--impossible not to, he radiated such golden youth, such fun--with Freddie Kuh, his childhood friend, in the mail line at American Express, both looking absurdly young in short pants--at most, I thought, fifteen and sixteen respectively. Ralph was from Evanston and Freddie from nearby Glencoe, I learned later, when I met them in the cafes of the Left Bank where the artsy youth of that era gravitated from all over the world-- with a large American contingent among the expatriates. Young Jimmy Baldwin was there, giving enraptured southern Americans their first taste, and a foretaste, of the pleasures of integration, and Gore Vidal, whose French boyfriend--the "Bicycle Boy" we called him--turned heads as he pedaled by the lively cafes clustered around the ancient, dignified church of St. Germain. Actually 22, Ralph was being subsidized by his businessman father for a year abroad, though--I didn't know it then--his free-spending style was helped along with contributions from older admirers. The paradox was that he was both a serious poet and a dedicated hustler who didn't mind being anybody's sex object. Paris after the war was our playground in a Europe that was in ruins. London was grim with rationing. Germany still shivered. Displaced Persons camps were full of the suffering flotsam of humanity. Nazi leaders were on trial. Boats of desperate concentration camp survivors were being sunk, trying to get into Palestine. But in Paris, in the final days of food rationing, we ate meals to die for, even if we suffered frequent coupures, when the electricity or water went off for hours. The French themselves went around sourly, in a rage against what they had gone through during the war and the Occupation, against the prices, the low wages, and, especially, against the rich "Amis" with their powerful dollar--the same dollar that actually bought me, incredible as it seems now, a year in Paris for a thousand dollars. But none of that bothered any of us young Americans, dazzled as we were by Paris and the intellectual excitement of Existentialism, or just being there in the red hot center of the moment.
Kuh arrived in San Francisco in 1954, worked as a waiter and bartender at the old Purple Onion nightclub and rented a small apartment on Telegraph Hill. Enamored of virtually everything Victorian, he gradually filled the flat with huge, overstuffed pieces of furniture, statuary, draperies, baubles, gewgaws and knickknacks -- much of it lovingly culled from the basement of Butterfield & Butterfield's auction house on Sutter Street. "Eventually it got so crammed with stuff, you couldn't move around the place," recalled James Armstrong, a retired photojournalist and former Bay Area correspondent for After Dark Magazine. "Finally, Fred's friends -- and he had more friends than anybody I've ever known -- told him that he either had to get a bigger place, stop going to Butterfield's or open a nightclub." So he opened a nightclub. In 1956, he leased a defunct old pasta factory at 478 Green St., and turned it into the city's first camp- decor cabaret/restaurant. Calling it his "personal fantasy architecture," he filled the cavernous, barnlike building with his huge collection and created a whimsical parody of Victoriana -- replete with chairs hanging from the ceiling, fringed and beaded lampshades and kitschy bordello furniture. It was an instant hit -- and before long Fred Kuh's Old Spaghetti Factory was a North Beach institution. The Factory even served as unofficial local headquarters for the 1956 presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson. In the heyday of the Beatnik period, from the mid-'50s until the early '60s, the place was renowned not only for serving bargain- priced pastas but was an incubator and magnet for local talent.
In 1967, Kuh bought the Tivoli, an Italian bistro on Grant Avenue owned by Nick Finocchio. He added Savoy to the name, jazzed up the restaurant by installing a silver fountain in the center of the dining room, painting the support columns with faux bark and topping the posts with aluminum palm fronds. It was there that a fledgling cabaret act was born called Beach Blanket Babylon.
Frederick Kuh died unexpectedly on November 6, 1997, of a cerebral hemorrhage at Le Vieux Reve, his estate in St. Helena. He was 70.
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