Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. —Picasso
Warner LeRoy was raised in a world of in-house fantasy. He was five when his father, the redoubtable producer-director Mervyn LeRoy. dispatched Dorothy and Toto down that yellow brick road to see the Wizard. He is also the grandson and namesake of Harry Warner, founder of Warner Bros. By dual seignorial right, he grew up in the studios and back lots of Hollywood. "I had the whole world there," LeRoy recalls. "I could go around the corner and be in Singapore. Around another corner I was in Paris, and around another in the Land of Oz."
Many corners later, Stanford Graduate Warner LeRoy, now 41, commands a fantasy world worthy of both H. Warner and M. LeRoy. He is the inventor and presiding panjandrum of two Manhattan eating places that establish him as a restaurateur-impresario sans pareil. Almost with his left hand, he also created Great Adventure, a thriving 1,500-acre, $100 million amusement-safari park in New Jersey. Clearly, Warner LeRoy is a triumph of Ozmosis.
LeRoy is best known for the improbably named Maxwell's Plum, an art nouveau extravaganza on Manhattan's East Side that has been S.R.O. since its opening in April 1965. Characteristically, he calls it "the longest-running show in town"—it caters to as many as 1,500 people a day. Plum is at once a singles nirvana and an excellent restaurant, though it is so constructed that the noise from the bar constantly blasts into the dining area—making it a good place to take guests to whom one has nothing to say. Last month Warner extended the yellow brick road to Central Park. There he has opened a $2.5 million gustatorial pleasuredome that may in time rival its long-running Parisian counterpart, the Grande Cascade in the Bois de Bou logne. It is called the Tavern on the Green, but it bears as much resemblance to the 42-year-old landmark of that name as La Belle Sole de la Manche Meunière does to cheeseburgers (both delicacies will be available at the revivified Tavern).
LeRoy has transformed the seedy old building into a series of dining rooms that make the Tavern at once a country place in the city and a city place in the country. The Elm Rooms (so called for the tree that grows through them) are country-pub elegant, paneled in wormy chestnut and hung with copper artifacts and sculptures. The most sumptuous salon, the glass-enclosed Crystal Room, shimmers in pastel pinks, greens and yellows, sun-dappled by day, glimmering by night under Waterford and Baccarat chandeliers. Everything, from the silk-screened tablecloths to the neo-Tiffany lamps, was designed or selected by Warner.
Sensual Fantasy. The Tavern's first-night gala was more like an operetta than a restaurant opening, with five bands, fiddlers and jugglers introducing each of nine courses, and a wild array of plumage on all the Beautiful People that was a direct result of their host's request that they wear "garden formal." What is garden formal? LeRoy answered his question by wearing a gold-spangled suit with spangled blue-gold rep tie and rhinestone-studded glasses that made him resemble a well-padded Elton John.