Humphrey Bogart was simply minding his own business when a 23-year-old model tried to steal one of his pandas. The panda in question was stuffed and seated beside the actor in a banquette at El Morocco, the legendary New York nightclub. “I only touched it,” Robin Roberts told the judge afterward. What followed was an alleged-shoving-match-turned-assault case against Bogart. When asked if he had been drunk at the time, Bogart reportedly replied, “Isn’t everyone at four a.m.?” The case was promptly dismissed to cheers—and some boos—outside a New York courthouse in 1949. Bogart’s lifetime ban from El Morocco, however, proved harder to overturn.
El Morocco, known as much for its blue zebra-print banquettes as for the people who occupied them—Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Salvador Dalí—is now being bottled into a line of fragrances. The aim is to capture some of its retro glamour and effervescence for an audience that may never have heard of the club or many of its habitués.
