Gloria Somborn Daly, the daughter of legendary actress Gloria Swanson and restaurateur Herbert Somborn, who inherited and ran her father’s historic hat-shaped Brown Derby in Los Angeles, has died. She was 80.
Mrs. Daly, who, with her children, negotiated the controversial sale and transformation of the distinctive movie industry gathering spot, died Dec. 11 of brain cancer in Carmel, Calif.
A celebrity from birth, Gloria Swanson Somborn was born Oct. 7, 1920, to the glamorous actress and the second of her six husbands. The pretty blond child, often compared with her mother, was sought by Hollywood as an actress but chose a different life.
Her father, an early motion picture producer and distributor and a millionaire businessman, married Swanson on Dec. 20, 1919, and divorced her Aug. 9, 1922, charging, like first husband Wallace Beery and others who followed, that the actress had deserted him.
Somborn created the Brown Derby on a bet with screenwriter and longtime friend Wilson Mizner, who dared him: “If you know anything about food, you can sell it out of a hat.”
Somborn added three more Brown Derbies, although only the original was shaped like a hat. The last closed in 1985.
When Somborn died in 1934, his daughter, then a schoolgirl in Switzerland, inherited the bulk of his estate, held in trust until she was 30. Managing the trust were her father’s close friends, business manager Robert H. Cobb (of Cobb salad fame) and attorney Victor Ford Collins.
After a freshman year at Stanford University, she married Robert William Anderson, in the summer of 1939. They had three children, who survive her.
In 1952, she made an arrangement with Brown Derby stockholders to relinquish her interest in the other restaurants to gain sole ownership of the original Brown Derby.
Although the Hollywood glitterati gradually left the restaurant for tonier venues, it continued to flourish as an internationally known tourist attraction. But by the late 1970s, even the tourists had gone and Somborn’s heirs were having trouble selling food out of the hat, closing Sept. 19, 1980.
The property was sold to developers and the parcel was turned into the peach and blue Brown Derby Plaza, a shopping center.
