Barney's Beanery

Barney's relocation to West Hollywood, combined with the fact that the owner extended credit and occasionally gave away food, made the bar popular with people of diverse backgrounds, including artists, writers, and other celebrities. Older Hollywood actors such as Clara Bow, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Judy Garland and Rita Hayworth were all regulars in their day. By the 1960s, the neighboring Sunset Strip had become an important music center, and Jim Morrison (who was reportedly thrown out of Barney's for urinating on the bar) and Janis Joplin became regulars (Barney's was the final place Joplin visited before her death in October 1970). Poet Charles Bukowski hung around, as did artists Ed Kienholz and others associated with the Ferus Gallery, which was located nearby on La Cienega Boulevard. Quentin Tarantino also allegedly wrote most of the screenplay for his film Pulp Fiction sitting in his favorite booth at the original Barney's Beanery in West Hollywood. Jon Taffer got his start in the nightclub and bar industry here as a bartender while performing as a drummer in a live band.

Homophobia

In the 1930s, 1940s, or around 1953 John Anthony put up a sign among the old license plates and other ephemera along the wall behind the bar that read "FAGOTS [sic] – STAY OUT". Though Anthony was known to be antagonistic towards gays, going as far as posing (in front of his sign) for a picture in a 1964 Life article on "Homosexuality in America" over a caption where he exclaims "I don't like 'em...", the sign ostensibly was put up as a response to pressure from the police who had a tendency towards discriminatory practices against gays and consequently establishments that catered to the group.

After Anthony died in 1968, efforts to remove the sign continued. A coalition of gay activist groups organized a zap of the restaurant on February 7, 1970, to push for its removal; the sign came down that day. The sign was put up and taken down several times over the next 14 years, and the restaurant's matchbooks also bore the line, but that practice ended in December 1984, days after the city of West Hollywood voted itself into existence. Then-mayor Valerie Terrigno, the entire city council and gay rights activists marched into Barney’s and relieved the wall of the offending sign. It was held by Morris Kight for many years and now rests in the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives.