Great read that
When it comes to Red Star/ Yugoslav football I dont't think anyone can beat this tale...have eaten at his reatsuarant in West Hollywood and sitting surrounded by murals of Brentford in the 70's takes some getting used to in that environment
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,678192,00.htmlHollywood supporter
His name is Dan Tana, he runs Hollywood's hottest restaurant, and he's spent much of a remarkable life immersed in football. A rising star at Red Star Belgrade, he defected, hid in a nunnery, landed a job in the movies, started the US soccer league... and in between times developed a lasting affection for Brentford FC. If they made a film of his career, nobody would believe it
Rhidian Brook
Sunday 7 April 2002
Observer Sport Monthly
If you are ever in LA and want to see a star, forget the 'Hollywood hangouts' listed in your guidebook. Instead, get out on the Santa Monica Boulevard until you cross Doheny Drive. There, on the left, you'll see a yellow, clapboard house with the name 'Dan Tana's' over the front door. It doesn't look much, but there's a better than even chance you'll spot a superstar there.
Inside, you'll find a restaurant with shuttered windows, 16 dimly lit booths with chequered tablecloths and, on the dark panelled walls, between the Chianti bottles, some very obscure memorabilia: a still of the entire cast of Dynasty; a poster for a forgotten Carl Malden film; a signed picture of TV star Bob Urich, who played the character 'Dan Tanna' in Vega$. And then there's the football stuff: pennants from Red Star Belgrade and Anderlecht; signed posters of the 1992 Yugoslavian national team. And, strangest of all, a blown up photograph of half-naked men drinking champagne. The caption reads 'Brentford Football Club win promotion to Third Division.'
Take a closer look at the photographs and you'll notice a man with Slavic cheekbones and Lee Van Cleef moustache appearing, Zelig-like, in each of them. That's him standing at the end of the row with Red Star Belgrade; there he is with the cast from Dynasty. And yes, that's him wearing a shirt and tie in the Brentford changing room.The photographs give the clue to an extraordinary life: the striker with Red Star Belgrade and Anderlecht; the actor and film producer; the chairman of Brentford FC; and the owner and founder of one of Hollywood's best loved eateries. This is the story of the man behind the memorabilia. A story not even Hollywood could get away with.
On a cold October night in 1953, a 17-year-old Yugoslavian footballer was eating dinner at a Brussels restaurant with the rest of his teammates. He was in Belgium with the Red Star Belgrade junior side to play Anderlecht and the team was enjoying a little capitalist indulgence under the watchful eye of their commissar. After dinner the band began to play a tango and some couples got up to dance. The handsome young inside-right watched in admiration and at the end of the dance he applauded enthusiastically. The commissar was not impressed.
'How can you clap a capitalist dance?' he asked.
'I wasn't aware that this dance belonged to capitalists,' the young striker replied.
The commissar proceeded to rant about the excesses of Western culture. Unable to listen to any more of the propaganda, the young man rose and walked from the room. Out in the street he breathed in the cool air and looked around. Instead of heading back to the team's guesthouse, he set off in the opposite direction. After walking for 10 minutes he came across a police car. He walked up to the policemen, crossed his arms to affect a sickle and hammer, and said, 'Communist'. The bemused policeman took him back to their station and put him in a cell for the night. The next day they found an interpreter who quickly established what the young man wanted.
'He's no communist,' he told the police. 'He wants to defect.'
Days later, the Red Star junior team returned to Yugoslavia minus their star striker. On the train home the coach shook his head. 'He will be a loss. He was to be our next Mitic,' he said, referring to the then charismatic and much loved Yugoslav captain.
'Have no fear,' the commissar replied. 'We will get him back. And when we do we will hang him in the Terrazzo.'
Tana's career with Red Star began when he was 12, and was spotted playing football by a man who had connections with the club. He was immediately offered an apprenticeship and over the next five years he developed into an extremely strong and skilful striker. He was happy. Playing for a top club meant more than playing football, it meant travel - in Fifties Yugoslavia the only people officially allowed to leave the country were athletes or people working for the government.
All his life Tana had lived under totalitarian regimes - the despotic King Alexander, the fascists, and now the communists - and when he was 11 he had seen his father arrested by the communists because he ran a successful (ie, capitalist) restaurant. Now the teenaged Dan was coming into contact with people who had been to 'free Europe' and from them he heard about the world beyond the Iron Curtain. It was a world given form and colour by the Hollywood movies he watched at the state cinema. These movies, starring Humph- rey Bogart, John Wayne, Laurel and Hardy, convinced him that there was a better way of life out there. Football was going to be his ticket to it.
After applying to defect, he took refuge in a Brussels nunnery for three months before acquiring the papers he needed to stay in Belgium. Now he needed work. That season the senior Red Star side were playing a friendly match against Anderlecht and Dan went and watched his old team crush the Belgian side 6-1. He tried to keep a low profile but at half-time the captain Rajko Mitic (the player Dan had been groomed to succeed) was substituted. As Mitic walked into the tunnel he saw Tana 'the black sheep' behind the bench. Ignoring the comments of his fellow players Mitic went and hugged his former protégé.
'You should be out there,' he said. 'If not for us then for them. I'll see to it that the people from Anderlecht know you are here.'
True to his word Mitic informed the Anderlecht authorities that they had a serious talent on their doorstep and a trial was arranged. After being watched for an hour Tana was offered a four-year contract, but because he was a defector he was unable to play club football in Belgium for two years. Instead he was loaned to Hanover, then in the Southern German League where, because the country was still occupied, the usual rules didn't apply.
Tana was glad to have the chance to play, but he was nervous. There were plenty of stories of political escapees being 'kidnapped' back to Yugoslavia by the secret police, and he lived in daily fear of being forcibly repatriated. Six months later came the chance to put a lot more distance between himself and the commissars - Tana was offered a contract to play for Montreal in the Canadian League. It was an easy decision. In the summer of 1955, he boarded a boat in Bremen and set sail for a new world.
Where in Germany Tana had been the loan foreigner in the side, in Canada Tana found himself playing in a league full of European exiles. The Montreal team alone had five ex-pros from the Eastern Bloc, and in the two years after he arrived won successive league titles and the Dominion Cup, the Canadian equivalent of the FA Cup. At the end of his second season Tana was staying with his friend and compatriot Luca. Tana was wondering whether to fulfil a long-held ambition to cross the border into the United States when the two got into a game of poker with some men who had just been paid for a winter's stint working in the Yukon. They bet everything they had: $100. They won $5,000 - a fortune in those days.
'Now we have the money to go to Hollywood,' Tana said.
A few days later they drove a green Chevrolet south across the border. They had no valid passports but they were loaded. A few days after arriving in Los Angeles they were walking to get the bus when they passed a luxury shoe shop and Luca decided that he wanted a pair of proper shoes. Tana sat outside. Moments later, he looked up to see a big, black limousine pull up, two men get out, accost Luca and take him to the car. To this day Tana doesn't know who they were, but he assumed then (as he still does) that they were immigration officers.
If so, he faced a big decision. To turn himself in, return to Canada, his football and his club. Or to stay and find a new career. Luca had the $5,000; Tana had 10 bucks. It seemed an obvious choice. But Tana stayed. He couldn't miss the chance of seeing Hollywood.
Holding himself back, Tana waited for the black car to disappear. When he stepped off the bus on Hollywood Boulevard, he looked around and wondered what he was going to do. Across the road, a man was swizzling bread to make pizza, and in the window he saw a sign: 'Experienced Dishwashers Wanted.' An hour later he was in the kitchens when he heard a heavily accented voice behind him speak his footballing nickname.
'Bata? Is that you?'
The man, a Serb, had recognised Tana from his playing days in Canada.
'What are you doing here?'
When Tana explained that he had no money, no change of clothes, no place to stay and no legal papers, the man offered to put him up for as long as he needed. Within a week he was put in touch with a football team - Yugoslavian American - that played in the Californian League. The team were able to offer him a small contract by arranging a ghost job (in the local tuna cannery). It was a long way from Red Star, but the contract enabled him to remain in the country legally.
Tana now set about improving his English. He found a drama teacher in Hollywood who was prepared to help him. After only a few weeks his teacher suggested that Dan's looks and accent might land him some 'bad guy roles' in the movies. His teacher 'knew a lot of people in Hollywood' and arranged for an audition. A month later Dan won a small part in a Curt Jürgens-Bob Mitchum picture called The Enemy Below. He was paid $20,000 for eight weeks work and before long he was at the top of most casting producers' lists for playing fascists, commies or gangsters. Dan was now earning more money than he ever could have done in football.
In 1960 one of Tana's old clubs, Hanover, tracked him down and offered him the chance to return to Europe and play football. Dan was 24 years old and still had time to fulfil his potential at the highest level. The trouble was that though the offer was substantial, he was earning a handsome living, both from the movies and now from his Hollywood nightclub, Peppermint West, a venue that became famous for introducing the Twist to the West Coast. He stayed.
But though film and food were beginning to dominate his life, Tana couldn't forget his first love. As well as playing for Yugoslav American, he began to put his energies and new found wealth into developing his favourite sport in America. 'I was on a mission,' he says. 'I had this grand ambition to get the greatest country in the world playing the greatest game in the world.'
The next few years saw Tana get steadily more involved in what Americans call soccer (he became general manager of the LA Toros and helped found the first professional soccer league in the USA) while at the same time developing his business career - and opening the restaurant that was to make his name. A close friend told him that with his contacts and friends he would have an instant clientele. And so it proved. Dan Tana's was an instant success. Twenty years after defecting from his country, Dan found himself raising glasses with the very stars he had watched in the stark, state cinemas of his youth. John Wayne, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire were among the first people to eat at his restaurant. Dan Tana's was at the beginning of a 30-year heyday.
By the early Seventies, Dan Tana had
success, he had money, he had a family, and he had freedom. But still something was missing. 'I was homesick for soccer,' he says now. 'I felt I had more to give to the game and to do that I had to be in a soccer culture. Football was calling me home.'
With his restaurant virtually running itself and his children still young, Tana decided to make his next move. Yugoslavia was still out of the question; so he settled on what he describes as 'the cradle of football'.
'I always felt I owed something to England for giving me my start in life, my trade. If it was not for England who knows what would have become of my life.' And so in the summer of 1973, the Tana family swapped Hollywood for Brentford and moved to London.
It was the year of the three-day week, the year England failed to qualify for the World Cup. The national team were going nowhere but Tana was just glad to be back in a 'football crazy nation'. His friend, the playwright Willis Hall, invited him to join a football-mad group that met regularly just to talk football. Other group members included Michael Parkinson and Jimmy Hill. At one of their lunches the then manager of Brentford FC, Frank Bluntstone, turned up and invited Tana to come to watch his team. Tana went to a few games, met the directors and within weeks was asked to join the board, a privilege that required him to be a shareholder. He bought five shares at 50p each.
At that time, Brentford were at the bottom of the Fourth Division, with big debts and low gates. Tana, though, had fallen in love. Brentford had the same strip as Red Star - red and white stripes; they also had a loyal following of about five thousand. 'I had big ambitions for Brentford,' he remembers. 'At that time English football was in trouble. If now you have the best professional league in the world - which I think you do - then the hooligans and poor facilities made it a very poor form of entertainment for anyone but young men. Most stadiums didn't have toilets for women. I wanted to feel comfortable taking my wife and children to a game. In America 30 per cent of the fans in stadia were female. Here it was about one per cent. If America needed English football, England needed American facilities.'
Over the next 10 years Dan became chairman of the club and watch a side that was on the verge of receivership clinch a couple of promotions and move into profit. During these years he also became more deeply involved in the English game. He became an influential member of the Football Association, eventually being voted onto its international committee. He became close friends with Ted Croker - then the secretary of the FA - and in 1981 suggested to him, long before anyone else, that English clubs might benefit from employing foreign expertise. 'It was the missing piece of the jigsaw for England,' he remembers. 'The league had the potential to be the best in the world. It had the support, the stadiums. They just needed to open themselves up to new ideas. Then they could be world beaters.'
By the end of the Eighties Brentford had become a self-sufficient club, and Tana's children were grown up. It might have been a good time to retire. But one evening in 1988 he got a call from an old friend. It was Tana's former Red Star team-mate, Miljan Miljanic. He had become president of the Yugoslav Football Federation, and wanted Tana to join the federation. 'You know we have all the talent in the world in Yugoslavia,' he said. 'But we have no organisation. We need you to bring some of that English know-how back home.'
Tana felt he had no option. In 1990 Tana went to the World Cup with Yugoslavia, and found his loyalties divided. 'I found myself supporting the two best teams there. They both lost on penalties. But England and Yugoslavia should have been in the final.'
A year later he had to choose between the two when England played Yugoslavia in a European Championship qualifier. 'That was when I knew it was time to put all my weight behind Yugoslavian football,' he says.
In 1992, after holding himself back from re-election to the English international committee, Tana was heavily involved in preparing what he still regards as 'an awesome Yugoslav side' for the European Championships in Sweden. But the country was in the midst of a bloody civil war, and as the reports of atrocities grew Uefa complied with the UN's sanctions on sporting relations with Yugoslavia and banned the country from the competition's finals.
Tana suddenly found himself the sole negotiator of his country's destiny in future tournaments. The irony of Yugoslavia's exclusion from the 1994 World Cup (in the US, where he had made his fortune) was not lost on Tana, but he also watched the country of his birth return to the international fold. Then at the European Championships in Holland and Belgium two years ago his football life came full circle. One evening in his Brussels hotel he received a phone call from the president of Red Star Belgrade.
'Dan, we'd like you to join the board.'
'You must be kidding,' he said.
'We are deadly serious.'
'Only if it's a unanimous decision. People have long memories.'
A few days later, the vice-president of Red Star, Dusan Maravic, came to the hotel where Tana was staying and handed him a business card. 'Congratulations,' he said. Tana looked at the card and saw his name embossed above the red and white stripes of his old side. 'You were unanimously elected.'
The trouble with celebrity hangouts is that the night you go there's always a danger you'll get the extras from the daytime soaps or the obscure former tennis pro now coaching the stars. On the evening I go to meet Dan Tana a star-sighting looks unpromising. With only a few regular bar-flies and anonymous families in so far, the photographer is getting twitchy.
'Don't worry,' Dan reassures her. 'Someone will be in.'
Looking at the place, with its bizarre football decorations, and dimly lit booths, the photographer is sceptical. 'It's hard to believe anyone A-list is going to show. What do the stars make of all the soccer paraphernalia anyway?'
'About 25 per cent like football already. The other 75 have had to learn to like it. We get plenty of Brits in here - homesick for football. Sean Connery, Kenneth Branagh. Years ago Rod Stewart was in. I suggested he take up a contract to play for Brentford. He should have accepted. He could have been a real star then.'
Just then Dan raises a hand to acknowledge the arrival of a group of guests.
'Good evening.'
'Hi Dan. How are you?'
'I'm fine.'
'And how are Brentford doing?'
'Right now, they are doing very well thank you. They are top of their division.'
'That's great.'
The person doing the asking is Cameron Diaz. Is she a Brentford fan?
'Why not?' Dan says, before exchanging pleasantries with the rest of the Hollywood contingent of the Brentford fan club - James Woods, Benicio del Toro and Jim Carrey. (Tana remains a Brentford fan, though he resigned from the board in February. In his letter of resignation to club chairman Ron Noades he wrote, 'I cherish 30 years that I have spent with Brentford where I have learnt how to win and how to lose. For the rest of my life I will be a Bees supporter.')
While the photographer takes his pictures, Tana remains steadily himself: polite, natural, relaxed. A little later the barman explains his secret. 'All these stars come to Dan Tana's because of Dan Tana,' he says. 'Sure, the food is good, the atmosphere is good, but this place is about him. I think they know he's a man with a history. Sure, he's one of them; but he's different: he's lived a very different life.
'He knows there's a life beyond Hollywood. Look around. All the other joints in 'L' have signed pictures of stars on their walls. Dan could have a signed picture of just about any star you could name, if he wanted. But apart from that Vega$ poster, he's just got this soccer stuff. He's not obsessed with Hollywood. Sure it's helped him, but it's not the biggest thing in his life. That's why they all come here.'
