The Mystery of the Spanish Kitchen

The Mystery of the Spanish Kitchen

By Don Ray

The mystery surrounding the Original Spanish Kitchen had been haunting people for years.
Then one day a reporter set out to find an answer. He wouldn’t stop until he had it.

Outside, the desert sky was clear, filled with stars. Nearly 400 miles of highway were behind me. I reached for the knob on my radio and tuned in a Phoenix country-western station. In another few hours I’d be face to face with Patricia Arnold—the woman I’d spent days looking for—the one person who might finally give me some answers to a mystery that had been haunting me and a lot of other people in Los Angeles for a long time.

Twenty-four years earlier, Patricia’s mother, Pearl Caretto, suddenly closed the Original Spanish Kitchen. Afterward she’d turned into a recluse, a modern-day Miss Havisham, straight from the pages of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Her restaurant never reopened. Instead it became some kind of weird shrine to the past. I wanted to know what her daughter knew.

The mystery actually began in 1961 when the Original Spanish Kitchen restaurant closed its doors. The owner, Johnny Caretto, had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for some time. When he could no longer even stand without leaning against a wall or counter for support, he checked himself into Orchard Gables, a plush Hollywood rest home that had counted people like Judy Garland among its patients. For a few months afterward, Caretto’s wife, Pearl, ran the Spanish Kitchen by herself. Then, in the summer of 1961, she put a sign in the front window that read “Closed for Vacation. Be Back August 23^rd” and then climbed the steps to her second-floor apartment. The sign didn’t come down until four years later—when it fell down.

At first no one paid much attention to the closing. Restaurants in Los Angeles close every day, and in most people’s minds, the Spanish Kitchen was no exception. After a few years, though, people began to suspect that the Spanish Kitchen was no ordinary restaurant and that perhaps there was more to the closing than anyone had at first imagined.

The clues were almost eerie. A passerby staring through the windows in, say, 1965 would see the restaurant just as it had been left the day Pearl closed it. Half-filled sugar containers sat at regular intervals on the counter; a pot of enchilada sauce was still on the heavy-duty stove. And in the back dining room, the small, square tables with red-and-white checked tablecloths and place settings remained untouched.

In time a local legend grew up around the place. So many people began wandering by peering into the windows and asking questions, that one neighboring businessman put a sign in his front window, A DOLLAR FOR INFORMATION REGARDING NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR.

Nearly everyone, it seemed, had the same questions: Why would anyone close a successful restaurant—and why so suddenly? How cold the owner afford to keep the place? After all, the building was on the fringe of Beverly Hills and worth a lot of money. Most of all, why did Pearl Caretto refuse to talk to anyone about it?

By 1979 the restaurant had attracted the attention of a Los Angeles Times reporter, David Larsen. Like a lot of people, Larsen spent some time looking in the windows and digging around for answers. Several of Pearl Caretto’s neighbors said they almost never saw her. The postman for the neighborhood thought there was a daughter in Oklahoma. One women told him she saw someone bring her food every day but never saw Pearl. “All we see is a hand at the door,” she told him. Larsen also tried knocking on Pearl’s locked door but was greeted only by a voice from behind it.

“Why did you call me by my name?” Pearl asked.

“Because people are interested in your restaurant,” Larsen answered.

“I don’t want to talk about that.” And she didn’t. Larsen didn’t hear another word from her.

After the Times article appeared, interest in the Spanish Kitchen mushroomed. Tour buses began to drive by the restaurant. Hundreds of letters poured in. One woman from Virginia wrote to Pearl saying that she wanted to meet her; she was a recluse herself, she wrote, and perhaps they would have something to share. Pearl never wrote back.

The realtors and developers weren’t quite as friendly. Hardly a day went by that one of them didn’t pound on her door, asking her to sell the now valuable building.

Eventually the story spread across the country. A writer for the Lou Grant Show fictionalized the story, added a 30-year-old unsolved murder, and set it in a place called Baby Duarte’s Cantina. On the show, Grant’s newspaper staff investigated the shooting death of Baby, the co-owner of the Spanish Kitchen’s imaginary counterpart. The TV mystery, which the fictional L.A. Tribune solved in one prime-time hour, drew even more attention to the Spanish Kitchen.

Not surprisingly, Pearl’s reaction to the increased publicity was to draw inward, become even more isolated. Even her closest friends and family learned not to bring up the subject. Only Pearl, it seemed, knew the answer to the mystery surrounding the Spanish Kitchen—and she wasn’t talking.

My own introduction to the restaurant was the piece in the Times. After reading it I did what probably a hundred other Angelenos did that day; I drove down to look at the place. I took a few pictures and walked around the outside for a few minutes. Later, when I was teaching an investigative journalism course at a local university, I took a few of my students by. I’d even haul my out-of-town friends down there when they visited. There was no question about it; I was curious.

After watching a rerun of the Lou Grant episode one day in 1985, I decided to find out what I could get. I got started on a Saturday morning in early May. I knew from the Times article that Pearl’s husband, Johnny, was from Arizona. Voting records—I keep a copy of the microfiche index at home—led me to a Joseph Caretto, who was living in Montebello, a middle-class area east of Los Angeles. The index showed that he was born in Arizona and he was now in his 80s—had to be Johnny Caretto’s brother, I surmised. I had already tried the phone book—no Caretto’s listed anywhere in L.A. County. So I called the library near his house and asked the reference librarian to look up his address in the reverse telephone directory. There was a name and number listed—but it was a woman’s name—Florence C. Sir Jesse. I called her.

When I asked for Joseph she explained that he was renting a room from her—had been for the past 62 years. He was a young man when he took a room there, she said, and ended up staying following an accident in 1937. He had been working for an ice company. He had fallen off an ice truck and seriously hurt his head.

“Mr. Sir Jesse and I told him he could stay on with us and he’s been here ever since,” she told me. “My husband passed away some years ago, but I kept taking care of Mr. Caretto. He’s just a boarder—there’s nothing going on between us,” she said with a smile in her voice. When I told her why I was calling she told me that Mr. Caretto wasn’t too good with talking on the phone—maybe I should come by and visit him, she said.

I jumped in the car, drove across town and knocked on the door of the white, one-story house. Mrs. Sir Jesse had prepared a snack and had it waiting for me. She then took me into Joseph Caretto’s bedroom where he was sitting quietly on a wooden chair. He was happy to have a visitor and was willing to talk, but he wasn’t much help—at least regarding anything past 1937. He’d not spent much time with his brother and couldn’t remember much of anything about the restaurant. He didn’t even remember if he had any relatives nearby who might know. “I hurt my head a long time ago and so my memory isn’t too good,” he apologized. I asked Mrs. Sir Jesse if maybe Mr. Caretto had any relatives that visited him. She said some people do call for him and occasionally visit, but she couldn’t remember their names.

“Do you have their numbers written down somewhere?” I asked. She didn’t.

“Does Mr. Caretto have a phone book?” He did, she said.

Inside the little old red book, I found the listing “Dorothy Parrent, Niece.” There was an address in the nearby community of South Gate listed, but no telephone number.

It was late in the afternoon but I knew I had to drive to that address. When I arrived, it was almost dark. I found the house sealed up—someone had taped newspapers over the windows. But there was a car parked out front and a faint light shining through the newsprint in the front window, so I knocked on the door.

A tall man in his 60s came to the screen door. I told him I was wanting to talk with Dorothy Parrent. Without asking me why, he turned and called out for his wife.

A few minutes later, I was sitting at the dining room table, talking to Dorothy. She offered coffee and apologized for the newspapers on the windows—they’d been painting, she explained. I asked her what she knew about the Spanish Kitchen.

“I used to go there all the time,” she told me. “We even had our wedding reception there.” Her daughter and two of their grandchildren wandered in to listen. She lit a cigarette, took a long drag, and released a smoky sigh.

“My Uncle Johnny went from busboy to head maître d’ at the Coconut Grove—you know, the restaurant at the Ambassador Hotel?” Johnny, she said, teamed up with a guy named Charlie Vidano to open the Spanish Kitchen. They had started the first Original Spanish Kitchen in downtown L.A. in the mid-‘20s. In 1932 Johnny opened up the West Side version of the already popular restaurant.

“Johnny was real dedicated to the restaurant,” she said. “He was a hard-working man. I doubt if he ever got more than four hours sleep at night.”

“What about Pearl?” I asked.

“She was a dancer at one time. I think,” Dorothy said. “I remember that she had beautiful blue eyes, beautiful skin—like white porcelain—and graying hair tied up in a knot behind her head. She’d come down from upstairs every so often to visit with us or some of the regular customers. I haven’t talked with Pearl in years.”

I had hoped that Dorothy could steer me toward Pearl’s daughter. The Times article didn’t mention her name, and I knew she was the key to the puzzle. But Dorothy could only remember that her name was Patricia and that she was Pearl’s daughter by another marriage. Dorothy suggested that I talk with Carl Vidano, a nephew of Johnny’s partner. She also mentioned a distant relative of hers who might be of some help. She also gave me the name of her late cousin’s widow—Dorothy Gillespie—now a real estate agent in Palm Springs. Her late husband, Jack, and his twin brother, Jimmy, had worked at the restaurant when they were in school, she told me.

I spent most of the next day, Sunday, on the phone. I tracked down Carl Vidano in Long Beach through voting and property records, but he couldn’t tell me anything I hadn’t learned from Dorothy Parrent. He admitted that he’d stayed in touch with Pearl over the years, but wasn’t about to bother her if he didn’t have to.

“I don’t phone her unless it’s something real important,” he told me. “She’s very shy about people calling. If I were to call her on your behalf, she’d probably never speak to me again.”

My luck ran a little better, though, when I contacted Dorothy Gillespie in Palm Springs. She remembered that Pearl’s daughter, Patricia, and her husband had moved to Arizona sometime in the ‘40s, where she thought he had a gasoline distributorship—maybe Chevron?

“Oh, you know who might know Patricia’s last name?” she said. “Merrill Cozzens. He was a waiter at the Spanish Kitchen for years. I’m not sure how you spell it, but it’s pronounced ‘cu-zins.’ The last I heard, he lived in Burbank.”

After the call, I spent a half-hour looking through the phone book but failed to turn up a Merrill attached to any name that even remotely resembled Cozzens. I called Dorothy Gillespie back and pressed her for more details. After a few minutes, she remembered Cozzens’ wife’s name, Francis, and the street they lived on, Griffith Park Avenue, in Burbank.

I checked every spelling I could think of for a Francis Cozzens’s and found her registered to vote on Griffith Park Avenue in Burbank. Bingo. As it turned out, Merrill Cozzens’s real name was Mark Merrill Cozzens and he was listed only as Mark M. Cozzens in the phone book. I tried calling, but there was no answer. Ironically, the Cozzens lived only two blocks from my house. I’d probably passed their place a hundred times walking my dogs. Early the next morning, Monday, I scribbled a note and left it on their front stoop, then scurried down to the L.A. Civic Center to dig into public records.

The Hall of Records was already crowded when I arrived a little before 10 in the morning. I started poring over documents and register books, looking for one thing—the marriage between Johnny and Pearl. That would give me Pearl’s name from her first marriage, which would also be her daughter’s maiden name. I could look for Patricia’s marriage to find out her married name and her husband’s first name.

What I didn’t anticipate was that Pearl and Johnny might have been married in some other state. There just wasn’t any marriage between them on record. I went to the phone and called the number I had for Cozzens. Pay dirt. This time he answered and, having already read my note, was happy to tell me Patricia’s married name was Arnold, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember her husband’s name.

I was close now—and I knew it. I dug back into the marriage records, this time looking for the a man with the surname Arnold marrying anyone named Patricia. The noise caused by all the office workers around me and by the kids running through the hallways was starting to get to me. I couldn’t find the marriage. Had I looked right past it? I searched the entire set of books again—this time looking for a man with the last name of Arnold marrying anyone.

Finally I found what looked like it could be it: a handwritten entry in the 1946 marriage index showing a marriage between a Benjamin Lawton Arnold, Jr., and a woman named Ruth Patricia Summerton. It just had to be them. I immediately requested a copy of the actual marriage certificate and shouted out when I read it. It showed her address at the time to be 7373 Beverly Blvd.—that’s the Original Spanish Kitchen restaurant. And it showed his birthplace—a small town in Arizona. Everything was falling into place. Now I could relax a little. Now that I had Patricia’s first and last name, I could easily track her down in Arizona. I looked up from the books and realized the rush was over. The office was quiet.

At home I started calling directory assistance, voter registrars, county assessors—anyone in Arizona I could think of who might have records on Ben and Ruth Patricia. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. Nothing turned up. I remembered that Dorothy Gillespie had said that Patricia’s husband maybe had a Chevron gasoline distributorship in Arizona so I called nearly every gasoline supply company in the state. No one I talked to had ever heard of him.

I went back to my notes. There had to be a clue I had overlooked. There was. The marriage certificate had listed Benjamin Arnold’s birthplace—Coolidge. It was a small town—that would make it easy. But it was already late afternoon. All the city and county offices were closed. So I phoned the public library there. Librarians have always been my heroes.

“No, I’ve never heard of anyone by the name Ben Arnold,” a very young woman told me. “Sorry.”

“Wait, please” I said. “There must be someone in town who knows who the old-timers are. Some old pioneers maybe?”

“No,” she insisted. “If they’re pioneers, they’ve either left or they’re dead. I can’t help you.”

“A historical society? A genealogical society? “

“No.”

I wasn’t about to give up. “Don’t hang up,” I pleaded. “Is there anyone in the building you’re in who is at least one day older than you?”

She was angry now—I could hear it in her voice. “Just a moment, sir.”

A moment later a supervisor was on the phone. “Gary Frannsen. How can I help you?” I quickly explained why I was calling—I was looking for Ben Arnold.

“Ben Arnold? Are you looking for Ben, Sr., or Ben, Jr.? Ben, Sr. was a judge here and a state senator—Ben, Jr., was in the gasoline business. Everyone in town knows the family,” he sad. “But they’ve both died recently—Ben, Jr., died last year—his father just recently passed away. I’m sorry.”

I asked him if he knew what became of Ben, Jr.’s wife Patricia—or maybe Ruth. He didn’t know her personally, he said, but he knew who would probably know—the woman who had worked as a secretary for Ben’s father. I called and explained that I was looking for Ben’s widow, Ruth Patricia.

She told me that Patricia had recently moved to a new desert resort community near Phoenix. This time I asked directory assistance for Patricia, not Ruth in that community. “I have a P.S. Arnold. Could that be the person?” Patricia S., I thought, “S” as in “Summerton”—her maiden name. I took the number.

Instinctively I started to dial—but just as quickly I put the receiver down. If Patricia knew how her mother had been harassed by curiosity seekers, real estate agents, and journalists, how would she respond to a call from me? I guessed she’d politely tell me she wasn’t interested and hang up. I decided to pack a few clothes and set off for Arizona. I knew when I got there I’d have maybe 30 seconds to make my case. I had 400 miles in front of me to think of what I’d say.

I arrived at about midnight at my friend’s house in Tempe. I really couldn’t sleep—I had too much on my mind. It seemed as if the Tuesday morning sun would never rise.

It did and somehow I found Patricia’s street and house as if I’d been there before. I rang the brass school bell hanging above her front gate. No answer. I checked with a neighbor to make sure she wasn’t on vacation. She wasn’t. “She’s always coming and going,” the neighbor told me. “She probably just went to the store.”

The temperature was already pushing 100 degrees. I drove to a nearby shopping center and stopped for a Coke. The time moved slowly. After 45 minutes, I couldn’t wait any longer. I drove back to the house—just in time to see the garage door closing behind Patricia’s car. I knew she’d have to walk out of the garage through a door that was just inside that locked gate and then walk to her front door—about 15 feet away.

I parked quickly and jumped out of the car. I had to catch her before she went into the house.

My heart was pounding through my shirt as I rang the bell. She turned, smiled, and turned toward the gate. In the few seconds I had, I told her my name and tried to explain what I was after.

“I’m a reporter. I’m writing a story for Tables Magazine—I’m writing about the Original Spanish Kitchen.” I saw her brow begin to frown so I kept talking. I’ve driven 400 miles—all the way from L.A. I came here first because I didn’t want to bother your mother.”

For a moment we both just stood there on either side of the front gate. Finally she shook her head. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to help you,” she said. “I promised my mother I wouldn’t cooperate with any reporters.”

I knew it; I’d lost.

“But I’d love to hear how you found me. Come on in.”

She offered me a seat in the living room and asked me what I wanted to drink. I glanced around at the modern furnishings while she disappeared into the kitchen. The place even smelled new. Outside, some golfers were walking down the fairway just beyond her patio. A moment later she brought me a soft drink. I told her what I’d found out and waited for her reaction.

“My mother is not what you people make her out to be,” she said finally. “She’s not a complete recluse. She has friends she talks to all the time. She reads the paper. She’s nothing like the way she’s portrayed.” Patricia lit a cigarette and shook her head. “That article in the Times devastated her. And then when that Lou Grant program came out, she really went inside herself.” She paused for a few moments and stared out the window.

“Why can’t people just leave her alone?” she asked. “It’s her life.”

Her plea caught me off guard, and I began to have second thoughts. After all, the family—especially Pearl—had been through enough already. Another article would almost surely rekindle interest in the Spanish Kitchen, attract more reporters, more realtors, more tour buses. I placated myself with logic. If I didn’t do the story, somebody else would—maybe somebody less considerate of Pearl and her family. Besides, I reasoned, if I found the answer to the mystery, the knocks on her door would stop. She’d finally be left alone.

I knew Patricia wasn’t going to talk. But she had no problem listening. So I started doing the talking—speculating. She would not confirm or contradict anything I was saying, but her subtle changes in body language somehow told me when I was getting warmer or cooler. It’s as if she guided me to the answers.

After nearly two hours with Patricia, I began to understand how much of what happened in 1961 led to the restaurants closing and to Pearl’s behavior afterward. People had told me that Johnny Caretto was devoted both to the restaurant and his wife. Everyone, it seemed, remembered his warmth. Customers came into the Spanish Kitchen as much for that as for his enchiladas. When Parkinson’s disease forced him into the convalescent home, a less gregarious Pearl tried to fill in for him.

As I talked to Patricia, I wondered out loud if something hadn’t been quite right at the restaurant after that. Maybe the place wasn’t the same without Johnny. Sure. The customers knew it, the employees knew it—and Pearl knew it. It was her devotion to Johnny and his restaurant dream that caused her to finally throw up her hands in frustration and “temporarily” close down. She felt she had failed.

Patricia nodded. I was on the right track. In Pearl’s mind, the closing was temporary. She was sure Johnny would recover, sure he’d come back to the restaurant he’d built and loved. But he didn’t recover—and Pearl kept the place intact right up to his death in 1967. After that she just couldn’t let go. Too much time had passed, too many emotions had been invested. By then she couldn’t let anyone else change what had once been Johnny’s. So she did nothing.

This time Patricia wouldn’t even nod. She apologized for not being able to talk about the restaurant—she had promised her mother that she wouldn’t discuss it. Again she asked me not to write anything that might cause anyone else to bother Pearl.

“She’s hurting no one,” she said. “She has the right to live as she pleases.”

For most of the drive back to L.A., I thought about what Patricia had said—and about what she didn’t say. I was sure now: I’d never meet Pearl, and I’d never set foot in the restaurant. Still, I knew more about the Spanish Kitchen than probably anyone outside the family.

Back in L.A., I kept an appointment with Merrill Cozzens, who had once waited tables at the Spanish Kitchen. He had fond memories of Johnny and Pearl and was eager to talk. One incident he remembered, occurred on his second day on the job in 1935. He was carrying a sizzling hot omelet across the room. The place was crowded with people, and somehow the omelet slid off the plate and fell down the back of a woman’s dress.

“I knew how hot it was, so I just grabbed the back of her dress with one hand and reached down it with the other. I pulled out the omelet and then took a glass of water and poured it down her back to put out the fire.” At closing time, Cozzens recalled, he went up to Johnny and said he guessed he wouldn’t be needed anymore.

“Why?” Johnny asked.

Cozzens reminded him of the incident.

“Hey, things like that happen,” Johnny said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Johnny wouldn’t even let Cozzens pay for the cleaning bill. “That’s the kind of guy he was.”

There was still light traffic on the boulevard that runs past the Original Spanish Kitchen. I felt compelled to drive there after I left Cozzens’ place around midnight. A valet from a restaurant across the street parked a customer’s car in front of the darkened building and ran back to his station. I walked up to the front door and shined a flashlight through the dirty window, and illuminated the murals above the counter—scenes of caballeros and beautiful señoritas. I aimed the beam at the stools and then at the small tables with the salt and pepper shakers still on them. For a moment I closed my eyes and pictured Johnny in the kitchen, sliding a plate of steaming enchiladas to a much younger Cozzens.

I walked back to my car, trying to hold the image. A light was burning in one of the windows above the restaurant. Pearl was still awake.