Behind The Bar: How Bruce Willis Made Magic at Cafe Central

In the few years before Moonlighting made him a familiar face, and Die Hard turned him into one of the most famous movie stars in the world, Bruce Willis was known as one of the most beloved bartenders in New York.

Yes, that Bruce Willis.

His training ground was a little joint on West 75th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in New York City called Cafe Central. The clientele—many of them young actors like Bruce—came to see him perform, shake a martini, pour a Manhattan, tease the customers, and maybe, if they were lucky, hear him play some blues on his harmonica.

In his day, the 1990s, Bruce Willis dominated the box-office as one of the most famous actors in America. With Die Hard, he achieved global fame, reinventing the action hero, bringing humanity and self-deprecating humor to the role of hero-cop John McClane. The esteemed critic Pauline Kael was a fan, describing him as a “much better actor than he’s given credit for.” In March of 2022, Willis’s family announced he’d been diagnosed with aphasia, forcing him to step away from acting. He was 67. Eleven months later, his family had a more specific diagnosis, frontotemporal dementia. It’s a progressive, debilitating condition with no cure, but the actor has been well looked after by his wife, Emma Heming Willis, and his five daughters.

But before the diagnosis, before his extraordinary career, Willis was already a star behind the bar, a one-man Rat Pack with style and swagger to spare, not unlike one of his heroes, Frank Sinatra. “He was generous, like Sinatra,” recalls the actor Dana Delany, a regular at the restaurant. “He was courtly towards women, like Sinatra. I remember when he met Demi Moore, he was so smitten.”

Cafe Central was a magnet for actors. The food was typical bistro fare, but there was plenty of cheap red wine, Delany says, “because when you’re 22, 23, you don’t care.” But what really made the place was Willis. “Everybody called him Bruno,” says Rosanna Arquette, who started going to Cafe Central when she was 21. “I wasn’t much of a drinker, but I got into this one drink Bruce would make for me, Vermouth and cassis,” she says. “He ruled the room. The persona you saw in Moonlighting and in those later films, you could see in the person you knew behind the bar.” He always had that twinkle in his eye, his Cheshire Cat grin. “He could play a tough guy, but behind it was a charming, kind, and lovable fella.” About 20 years later, they would appear together in the crime-comedy The Whole Nine Yards.

Delany was just starting out as an actor around this time. She recalls that Cafe Central was “a little bit of a fishbowl…there were tables alongside the windows, and a bathroom where the cocaine flowed, because by then it was the ’80s.” There was a phone booth across the street where striving actors would take calls from their agents, before cell phones.

Delany describes Willis as “a great bartender, full of personality, a lot like that Tom Cruise character in Cocktail. Everybody who later became stars—Jimmy Woods, Sean Penn, David Keith, Treat Williams, John Heard, Peter Weller, William Hurt, Eric Roberts, Robin Williams, Christopher Walken, all of the people from Animal House—hung out there. There were more men than women, and the women were like me—very young, wannabe actresses and dancers from American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet. Bruce Springsteen hung out there too, just as he was hitting it big.”

“The cafe was kind of the Yellow Brick Road for the arts,” co-owner Peter Herrero said in a 2014 interview, recalling a time when New York was a place “you could come and be lucky.”

When word got around, more famous people started popping in, Delany says. Andy Warhol and Liza Minnelli and Al Pacino and Robert De Niro and Cher. “It was when people were leaving LA and coming to New York. It was cooler to be a New York actor at that time—you were taken more seriously. Kevin Bacon. Sean Penn. Val Kilmer. A skinny, handsome John Goodman,” Delany recalls. “I remember Bruce, when he’d been doing a long shift, and he’s pumped up, we’d then go to the after-hours clubs till dawn.”

What made Bruno so good behind the bar? “We grew up in that era of the drinking age at 18, and we were going out a lot. It was all about having every possible experience you could have. And he was very much like that,” says Delany. “And it was the New Jersey in him.”

Willis had run away from home, away from a series of dispiriting, dead-end jobs in New Jersey, to New York, where you went to get lucky, and where a thousand hungry actors bloomed. Willis enrolled at Montclair State College, a mere 17 miles from Manhattan. But for Willis, it must have seemed a million miles away. Still, his talent was noticed in school. In John Parker’s 1997 book Bruce Willis: The Unauthorized Biography, one of Willis’s drama teachers recalled his “impatient, simmering aggression.” His persistence brought him to New York, where he rented a fifth-floor walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen for $170 a month. He would live there for six years, hanging onto the lease even after his early success and fame, a memento of leaner times.

Enter co-owner Larry McIntyre. McIntyre was impressed with Willis and hired him as a bartender. At 24, “Bruce was in his element” behind the bar, McIntyre told Parker. Sometimes, late into the night, he would leap up onto the bar and play his blues harp. “He would talk with people like James Taylor or Treat Williams. Treat and Bruce used to talk forever. Or James would sing while Bruce played his harmonica.”

As Stephen Eads, a close friend, recalled to a Willis biographer, at an earlier incarnation of Cafe Central Bruce “used to roller skate into the place dressed in big baggy pants, a ripped T- shirt, and a headband, then he’d get behind the bar and start work, which was a performance.”

That was another hallmark of Bruce, a.k.a. Bruno, bartender nonpareil: his penchant for making big entrances and exits. John Goodman, who became a good friend of Willis’s at Cafe Central, remembers going into a bodega on St. Patrick's Day when, “all of a sudden, the door slams open. Willis comes sliding in like he’s heading for second base—a hook slide into the newspaper rack.

“It’s the first time I ever knew somebody with that much charisma,” recalls Goodman. “He was very funny. He was magnetic. He kept it going and he kept all the drinks in his head, made them all very well, and he kept up a monologue. People were drawn to him. I was drawn to him.”

Goodman first went to Cafe Central with Kevin Kline one night in 1979, “and I kind of never left,” he says. “Everybody who was anybody wound up there. I had some dough from doing commercials, so I didn’t have to scrounge to go there. It was a great hang and always a friendly crowd, but Bruce was, number one, very attentive—a charming son of a bitch, confident in the way that I wasn’t.

“He would get so stoked when he’d come back from a good audition, you’d have to tie his feet to the ground,” Goodman says.

Delany wasn’t sure that everyone knew that he wanted to act. “I think he bided his time until he was ready. But he knew when he did, that would be it—no more bartending. When he took over Fool for Love, I think people were shocked and delighted at how good he was.”

Willis didn’t limit himself to Cafe Central, though. When a former maître d’ at Cafe Central, Kirke Walsh, opened the Kamikaze Klub, Willis was hired and became the attraction, “jumping around and playing his harmonica.” Walsh told Parker. That’s how he got the role of Eddie in Fool for Love, according to Parker, when the actor Will Patton let it drop at Kamikaze that he would soon be quitting the role in Sam Shepard’s tour de force about love, obsession, and the American West.

As things happen, Parker reports, playing Eddie in Fool for Love led to the agent Gene Parseghian sending Willis to audition for a part in that quintessential ’80s film starring Rosanna Arquette and Madonna, Desperately Seeking Susan. It didn’t happen, but Willis would soon be on his way to LA to audition for Moonlighting. Before he left, Willis stopped in at Kamikaze to say goodbye. “I’ll be broke when I get back,” he told Walsh, who reassured him that his job would be waiting for him.

In Moonlighting, Willis’s big breakout success, the character he played, David Addison, could have been Willis’s double. He was “quick-witted, and he had that great delivery,” Goodman says. “When he came back to New York from the audition,” Goodman recalls, “he was so goddamn excited, I think he might have started crying at one point, and I was so happy for him.”

One of Willis’s closest friends is the musician and record producer Robert Kraft, who was performing in New York City in the late ’70s, early ’80s. Kraft remembers playing a gig at “a very swank club in SoHo called Green Street in March of 1980. And I had some wonderful friends who came down to see me perform that night. We were all around 25 years old.” As Kraft began one of his numbers, suddenly he heard someone in the audience playing harmonica along with him. “As you can imagine, it was terribly distracting! After a few minutes of this, I finished the song, looked out into the audience and said, ‘Listen, whoever you are, I’ll give you two choices. Shut the fuck up or come on stage.’”

That was Willis, and he came up onstage, and Kraft they found out that “we liked the same amount of drugs, alcohol and women—and we were both from Jersey. We just bonded in an awesome way.” When Kraft later played the Bottom Line, Willis showed up, this time with “a blender, some limes, some tequila, some rum, and he made cocktails in the green room while I was performing, so they’d be ready when we got off stage and the party would start.” Even after pulling an all-nighter on top of work, “he was just go, go, go! When he crashed and took a nap, Bruce would bolt awake and ask, ‘What’d I miss?’ He just never stopped.”

When Willis flew to Los Angeles to audition for Moonlighting, he stayed with Kraft for a couple days. “And then he got that call from the agent who had sent him to this audition, telling him that Tony Thomopoulos, then the president of ABC Television, had said, ‘Bruce who? We’re not putting some unknown next to Cybill Shepherd in this series. No.’” Shepherd, the show’s costar, was already a cover-girl model and well-known actor, having starred in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show and Daisy Miller.

The initial rejection didn’t phase Willis, says Kraft. “He said, ‘I’m outta here.’ That’s the way he was. And he flew to Miami because he’d gotten two lines in a Miami Vice episode. And he called from Miami two days later to say that Glenn Gordon Caron, the showrunner and writer of Moonlighting, said, ‘That’s the guy I want for my series. I want him to come back and screen test with Cybil.’ It was like a nuclear bomb hit Willis. Boom. He was on TV!”

The show was an immediate success, running from 1985-1989. Audiences couldn’t get enough of Willis’s fast-talking, music-loving, romantic David Addison, a detective who ends up working for former fashion model Maddie Hayes, who was cheated out of her fortune and begins to rebuild by backing Addison’s detective agency.

Kraft also credited Willis with much of his own success, when he produced the actor’s The Return of Bruno, released by Motown in 1987, a record that was certified gold. Kraft had never produced an album before, but Willis insisted that he be hired for the job. “Bruce didn’t say, ‘Get me Richard Perry or get me Quincy Jones. He said, ‘Call my friend, Robert Kraft.’” Under his alter ego, Bruno Radolini, Willis covered some of his favorite R&B songs, such as “Under the Boardwalk,” with The Temptations, no less, and “Respect Yourself,” backed by the Pointer Sisters, which reached No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Kraft recalls that it was “unorthodox for Motown to sign a white TV guy, but they made the call.” Kraft went on to lead Fox Music for 18 years, beginning in 1994, where he would oversee the scores and soundtracks for over 300 movies. Together, Kraft and Willis would cocreate the 1991 film Hudson Hawk.