photograph by michael donahue
The Hollywood first opened in 1969. It’s become a local institution.
I remember pulling into the parking lot of The Hollywood Café in Tunica Resorts (formerly Robinsonville), Mississippi, on a moonlit night. A woman, later to be immortalized in a hit song, was playing a piano in the window and singing, “When it’s darkness on the Delta, that’s the time my heart is light. When it’s darkness on the Delta, let me linger in the shelter of the night.”
That’s one of the most beautifully haunting memories I have about the South.
I recount my memory to Bard Selden, who founded The Hollywood. “It’s a bright spot in the middle of a very, very big sky,” he says.
This is the place immortalized in Marc Cohn’s 1991 song, “Walking in Memphis.” He talks about Muriel playing the piano at The Hollywood. That was the late Muriel Wilkins, the pianist in the window. She played on weekends, Selden tells me.
photograph by kathy mclellan
With a large photo of musician Marc Cohn looking on, the author plays the café’s vintage piano — the same one played by Muriel in Cohn’s song, “Walking in Memphis.”
I begin my dinner with the restaurant’s iconic quarter-sized fried dill pickles. And later that night, on that same old piano, I play “Roll Mississippi” from the 1935 Bing Crosby movie, Mississippi.
The original restaurant was in Hollywood, Mississippi, Selden says, housed in an old commissary built in the 1870s. “That was the Tate Commissary. Those are relatives of mine. My grandmother was Connie Tate.”
Selden and his wife, Wendlandt Hasselle, still live in the house where he was born, which is across the street from where the commissary stood. “It was a nice building,” he says. “It was my great-grandfather’s commissary, my mother’s antique shop, and then it sat vacant for a couple of years.”
He opened The Hollywood (“Café” was added later) in 1969 when he was 19. “My father had gotten sick,” he says. “I had to drop out of college and assist in running the farm.”
photograph by michael donahue
Longtime employee Karen Mitchell
As for the name, Selden says, “I just called it ‘The Hollywood’ ’cause I didn’t have any money for a sign.” A highway marker directing people to Hollywood, Mississippi, doubled as the restaurant’s sign. “It said, ‘Hollywood.’ And it had an arrow. That’s how it got the name.”
At first, The Hollywood “was just me running this place. I didn’t have a cooking staff or anything like that.”
Even so, it was popular. “I guess within six months I had the top Anheuser-Busch account in the district, and there wasn’t any draft beer in Tunica. I put Michelob on draft.”
People could drink beer in Mississippi when they were 18. “So, I got a lot of service people from Millington.”
The only food Selden sold back then were Stewart’s sandwiches out of a machine and the famous fried dill pickles, which were created by his brother, Tate Selden. “I had hair down to my waist and a beard down to the second button of my shirt,” he says. “If I was going to have a kitchen, I would have had to wear a hair net on my beard. That’s why I didn’t have it.”
Selden ran The Hollywood for a number of years before renting it to a man named Bob Hall, who added a full kitchen and turned it into a steakhouse.
He finally sold the property to Hall in the early ’70s. “I didn’t want to be running a beer joint for the rest of my life,” he says. “And I went back and graduated from college and went to law school. In fact, that’s how I got the money to go to law school.”
photograph by michael donahue
A basket of fried dill pickles
The Hollywood “became something of a fixture” but the building was destroyed by fire in 1985. Someone didn’t turn off the deep fat fryer when they closed for the evening, Selden says. “That’s what caused the place to burn down.”
He remembers a friend saying to him, “Hey, it’s daylight outside.”
“And that was at night,” Selden says. “I looked out and it was The Hollywood on fire.”
Today, the rebuilt Hollywood Cafe, now owned by Bill and Angel Lee, features a range of items including catfish, barbecue, and hamburgers. Perhaps the most famous item on the menu is “The Hollywood Belly Buster” — two half-pound beef patties, fried dill pickles, fried green tomatoes, lettuce, and six slices of cheese (two American, two Pepper jack, and two Swiss). It’s topped with a fried onion ring.
A framed photo of Selden hangs on one wall, and a large photo of Cohn hangs over the piano. When Selden owned it, The Hollywood had a couple of pinball machines, a shuffleboard table, and coin-operated pool table. “I also had a big beer can collection,” he says. “It lined a wall for about 30 feet.”
Selden obviously has fond memories of The Hollywood, “which he calls a nice place in the middle of nowhere.”
The Hollywood Café, 1585 Old Commerce Road, Tunica Resorts, Mississippi
