Trumps is the West Hollywood restaurant where Bret’s lunch with Terry Schaffer turns a polished social venue into the setting for an unsettling private approach. The restaurant’s playful glamour and carefully arranged access to adult status surround a meeting that begins with questions about Bret’s relationship with Debbie Schaffer and ends with Terry offering him a writing opportunity that draws him closer into Terry’s world.

Setting and Social Atmosphere

Trumps stood at the corner of Robertson Boulevard and Melrose Avenue, across from Morton’s. Bret understood the contrast between the two: Morton’s was a central restaurant for the film industry, while Trumps was less formal, less businesslike, and distinctly more gay. The restaurant’s identity was part of its appeal. To Bret it represented Los Angeles, artifice, and a new, freewheeling California cuisine that was supposed to be fun.

The building made that promise visible. A small pink handwritten neon sign marked the entrance, and massive double doors opened onto a bright, oversized room beneath an atrium. Wheat-colored stone tables filled the high-ceilinged space, which could seat roughly a hundred people. At night Bret had seen Trumps dimmed by candlelight, but its daytime light made it feel unexpectedly spacious: dramatic and modern, yet whimsical and unpretentious. Ed Ruscha prints ran along the white wall above the bar and continued through the lounge into the dining room.

The restaurant also displayed social distinction in concrete form. Most cars were parked behind the building, while a selective VIP area beside the valet held Ferraris, Bentleys, and Porsches. The contrast between the relaxed setting and its visible luxury made Trumps a place where informality did not erase status; it gave status a more playful presentation.

Bret’s Arrival and the Public Scene

Bret arranged the weekday lunch through Steven Reinhardt, who said Terry’s weekend schedule was packed. When Steven proposed Wednesday at one o’clock, Bret accepted, pretending to consult a busy calendar despite having nothing scheduled. The plan took Bret from Sherman Oaks to West Hollywood in fifteen minutes. He arrived early, considered driving around the block, then left his car with the valet and went inside for a drink to settle himself before the meeting.

By the time one o’clock approached, Trumps was packed. The hostess explained that Terry had not yet arrived and offered Bret the option of sitting at Terry’s table or waiting at the bar. Uncomfortable with the idea of sitting alone at Table One, Bret chose the bar. The hostess introduced him to the bartender as Terry’s guest, presenting him as someone who belonged to the restaurant’s scene, a young player rather than an ordinary schoolboy arriving on his own.

The room’s famous patrons intensified the sense that Bret had entered a world beyond school. He spotted California governor Jerry Brown with two men and a woman whose face he could not see, and hoped she might be Linda Ronstadt, whom Brown had been dating. Erik Estrada, Elizabeth Montgomery, and producer Allan Carr were also dining there. Bret recognized the painter David Hockney, who watched him with interest, apparently registering his school uniform. Bret had left his Buckley blazer with its Griffin insignia in the Mercedes; in gray slacks, a white button-down shirt, and striped tie, he looked like a prep-school student without the explicit school emblem.

At the bar, Bret ordered a Greyhound made with freshly squeezed pink grapefruit juice. The bartender asked for identification, studied it longer than Bret liked, then looked at his clothes and called him cute before making the drink. Bret was seventeen, but Trumps let him order what he wanted. That small breach of the usual boundary between adolescent and adult life belongs to the same pattern as the lunch itself: the setting offers access, while leaving Bret exposed to judgments and advances he is not fully equipped to interpret.

The Lunch with Terry Schaffer

Terry arrived wearing jeans, a collarless Pierre Cardin shirt with its top three buttons undone, and the Porsche Carrera sunglasses he favored. He greeted the hostess with a kiss on the cheek, then moved through the room with assured, efficient gestures. Before reaching Bret, he stopped to speak with two tables and raised a hand to Jerry Brown, who returned the greeting. Bret found Terry’s composure something to emulate: he seemed like a professional adult, the kind of person Bret wanted to become.

Terry praised Bret’s appearance, then removed his sunglasses and studied him over the menu. Bret, embarrassed by the public attention, concentrated on the menu and later found himself scanning the dining room as the restaurant gradually emptied. Terry ordered Perrier and white wine; Bret asked for ginger ale. The lunch placed the seventeen-year-old beside a forty-year-old man whose age, clothes, connections, and ease gave him control of the social scene, even as he treated their meeting as casual.

Terry first offered a glimpse of the cultural world he inhabited, saying that he knew Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and might invite them over so Bret could meet Didion, Bret’s favorite author. The prospect seemed entirely plausible within Terry’s world. Yet the conversation’s glamour did not make Bret feel more at home: he wondered what he was doing at Trumps on a Wednesday afternoon with a forty-year-old man instead of being at school. Jerry Brown came over and shook hands with Terry, who stood to greet him but did not introduce Bret. After the governor left, Terry returned to the table and continued to study Bret while the room thinned out.

A Private Offer in a Public Place

Over lunch, Terry asked how serious Bret was about Debbie, noting that they had started dating at the beginning of the summer. Bret confirmed that they had begun seeing each other in June and said they were fairly serious, though he answered vaguely. Terry insisted he was merely curious and told Bret there was no need to look alarmed. The question made Debbie part of the meeting without her presence: Terry’s interest in the relationship established a personal frame for what could otherwise have been an ordinary business lunch.

The exchange ended with a promise about work. As Bret turned away after thanking Terry for lunch, Terry suddenly grabbed his wrist. He told Bret that Steven would call to arrange a time for them to start talking about a script Terry wanted him to write. The gesture and offer shifted the encounter from a lunch arranged through an adult intermediary to a direct personal invitation. Trumps had given the meeting a public, prestigious setting; Terry’s touch made the closing moment intimate and difficult to mistake for routine professional courtesy.

Narrative Significance

Trumps brings together the novel’s recurring contrasts between appearance and access, adolescence and adulthood, and public display and private intent. Its bright rooms, pink neon, celebrity tables, and luxury cars make status visible as performance. Bret enters partly disguised by the absence of his school blazer, yet his age remains legible to the bartender and Terry; the venue lets him cross into adult spaces while keeping the imbalance between the young guest and his older host in view.

The restaurant’s social ease also sharpens the uncertainty surrounding the lunch. Terry’s connections and promise of a script make his world attractive to Bret, while the questions about Debbie and the wrist-grab give the meeting a personal charge. Trumps does not resolve that tension. Instead, it supplies the polished stage on which professional possibility and private approach become difficult to separate.