Tony Martin RIP

My lunch with Tony Martin (1913 - 2012): In March 1991, I was in Los Angeles visiting with my great friend Shirley Wilson who loves little more than taking me to cool "old Hollywood" hangouts -- knowing, as she does, my great love of all things "old Hollywood." On this trip, after a tour of an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she took me for lunch to the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Very few things in Hollywood say "old Hollywood" in quite the same way as the Polo Lounge. We sit there, among the banana-leaf wallpaper dining on something scrumptious when Shirley points out to me a man sitting by himself at a table across the aisle from me. She gives me a hint as to his identity but, alas, I have no idea.  Turns out it was singer Tony Martin (see photograph, next to a swatch of the wallpaper)! Embarrassingly, I still had no idea who he was. But, there he sat, by himself, eating lunch.