Just try pinning Robert Earl down. It isn’t easy.
One minute he may be at the international headquarters of Planet Hollywood near Sand Lake Road in Orlando, where he is leading the theme restaurant’s recovery from the jaws of bankruptcy. The next minute he may be on a plane to London, where he is working on several new concepts including a chain of eateries called the Earl of Sandwich.
If he’s not in either of those places, you may find him in Las Vegas, where he is reportedly putting together a deal to seal his big comeback.
Or maybe he’s at his expansive home in the exclusive Isleworth community.
Not there? Where could he be?
“I am at what I consider to be the finest resort in the Caribbean.”
A phone call to Earl’s Orlando office has been patched through to him poolside at Parrot Cay, a resort on Turks & Caicos in the British West Indies. It may very well be the finest resort, but Earl’s judgment might be a tad clouded by the fact that he is also one of its owners.
His is a whirlwind life. He doesn’t sit still for very long, and even while sitting long enough to have lunch he may pull out his cell every so often and phone an assistant with instructions or requests. He is a born multitasker who seems happiest when he is busiest. He’s very happy today, but the last four years have not been much fun.
At 51, Earl is leading Planet Hollywood out of its second bankruptcy protection in four years. There were once 80 Planet Hollywood restaurants worldwide — now there are only 10 company-owned plus 22 franchised operations. At one time the headquarters had a staff of about 280; now there are 25.
When Planet Hollywood’s stock opened for trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 1996 it was valued at more than $30 a share. Those shares were worth about 75 cents when trading was halted in 1999. Many workers saw their retirement plans fizzle when Planet’s stock price tumbled. Earl estimates his own financial loss at more than $1 billion.
“The last four years have been dour,” he says. “I’ve had a great crash down to earth. It’s taught me a lot.
“I’ve been in the business 30 years. Twenty-six of them were meteoric.”
That career started in his native England in 1973 when he created Beefeater by the Tower as an employee for Joe Lewis, the man who would eventually develop Isleworth.
“It was in the basement of the London docks very near the Tower of London where they kept the convicts who would eventually become Australian citizens,” he says.
The first restaurant he created on his own was called Shakespeare’s, but both restaurants were similar. They were Medieval-style dinner attractions where entertainers — jugglers, acrobats, musicians and such — performed while the audience ate. It was the beginning of a career that would marry food and show business.
“I’m a frustrated entertainer,” says Earl, “and this was my way of expressing myself. That’s why Hard Rock, that’s why Planet Hollywood.”
His love of show business comes to him perhaps genetically. His father was a recording artist, a balladeer who toured throughout Great Britain and once performed on the same bill with Frank Sinatra.
But not all the businesses were show-oriented.
“At one point I owned over 100 restaurants at one time that spread over eight or 10 brands.” He says this with a matter-of-factness that might be easily mistaken for braggadocio. The restaurants were mainly in London, and went from pizza, pasta and burger joints “all the way to 100-bucks-a-head restaurants.”
About the same time that Earl was beginning his career as a restaurateur he met Tricia Prior. They were both invited to the same wedding in England, Tricia explains, and Robert asked to see the seating chart. He wanted, she says, to see what single women would be there. He recognized her name from a previous meeting and asked that his seat be switched. Feb. 14 was their 30th anniversary — unofficially.
“We lived the first seven years in sin,” says Tricia Earl with a grin.
Tricia helped Robert with his restaurants in those early days, assisting in the design and decoration. And Robert began to explore ways to expand his realm.
A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS
After opening presents in their London home on Christmas Day in 1982, Robert told Tricia that she’d missed one and handed her an envelope. Their first daughter, Beth, was 2 and only a month earlier Cara had been born. Tricia opened the envelope and took out a picture.
“I said, ‘What’s this?'” she remembers, “and Robert said, ‘It’s a house. We’re moving there.’ ” It was a picture of a house on Lake Sybelia in Maitland.
“Her reaction,” says Robert, “was one of shock. She said, ‘I’ll go and have a look, but don’t hold your breath.’ “
Today the Earls live in a lakefront house in the exclusive Isleworth, a gated estate inside a gated community. The home is, as are those of the neighbors, large and modern. It features a great room with a stone floor, ceilings as high as or higher than the span of the room. Besides two very large sofas — including one that faces a space where a television screen drops from the ceiling — there are antiques and collectors pieces and artwork around the room. On a side table is a bright bouquet of fresh flowers with a card from actor Matt Damon thanking Earl for having a satellite system installed during his stay at Parrot Cay (although Damon insists in the note the flowers are for Tricia).
The kitchen, which features a wood-burning pizza oven, would please any professional chef, and in fact the Earls have a full-time personal chef, Yves Ambroise, who at one time was the executive chef at the Orlando Planet Hollywood.
Tricia Earl does not fit the stereotype of a woman who would live in such a house. She is petite and young-looking with curly hair and a constant, easy smile. She is warm and gracious and comfortable in what is surely a regular role of entertaining guests waiting for her husband to finish a conference call or some other bit of business in the office he keeps at home. When a guest arrives, she is going over the homework of their 9-year-old son, Robbie.
Tricia characterizes herself as the grounding force in Robert’s hectic life.
Earl comes bounding into the great room, struggling with the cuffs of a brightly colored Paul Smith shirt, the tails untucked. For all the big dealing and seriousness of his business world, Earl is a jovial sort. His English accent has a lilt, and his voice the slight rasp of someone who participates in a lot of conference calls.
On this night Earl is in an especially playful mood. His two daughters — Beth, 22, who now resides in London, and Cara, 20, who is a student in New York — are back home, and Earl’s parents, who now live in Aventura, are up for a visit. He is fiercely protective of his children and their privacy but is prideful whenever he speaks of them. Most of Earl’s holdings are for the benefit of his children, he says, and are held in a family trust.
He regrets that the girls have no interest in his businesses. “But I’m definitely training Robbie,” he says. When asked what he teaches his son, Earl replies, “To watch and listen to everything that’s going on everywhere.”
EMPIRE IN ORLANDO
In April of ’83, Earl and then-partner, Joe Lewis, opened their first American enterprise, Shakespeare’s on Church Street. It had a medieval banquet theme and provided entertainment with the meal. A few years later it moved to International Drive and was renamed King Henry’s Feast.
They had originally discussed doing a deal with Disney, which at the time was getting ready to open Epcot.
“We loved the area,” Earl says. “We did not do a deal with Disney, but we thought Orlando was ready to explode, and we put down roots.”
The roots began to take hold. “I started to build an empire in Orlando,” he says. He acquired some of the area’s fine dining restaurants, including Park Plaza Gardens on Winter Park’s Park Avenue and Villa Nova, which was near the corner of Lee Road and Orlando Avenue in Winter Park, where an Eckerd’s now sits. There were other dinner attractions, including Wild Bill’s Wild West Show and the Mardi Gras, and other restaurants, such as Royal Orleans at Mercado and Caruso’s, both on International Drive, and Baby Nova next to the Villa Nova. All the restaurants were eventually sold or closed. The Caruso’s building, which Earl had built as an operatic-themed restaurant, is now Race Rock. Park Plaza Gardens is the only one still in existence.
In 1988 he set his sights on a small music-themed chain of restaurants that was based in London and had seven locations. It was called Hard Rock Cafe.
“I fell in love with it,” says Earl, “and thought I could grow it both in profitability and size, and managed to do that.”
HARNESSING STAR POWER
While he was still running Hard Rock Cafe, he began to develop another concept that would cater to the public’s hunger for movies and the people who make them. He teamed up with producer Keith Barish and movie stars Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger and other celebrities, and in 1991 the first Planet Hollywood opened on 57th Street in Manhattan, not far from the city’s Hard Rock Cafe.
It was a star-studded media event with all the excitement of a blockbuster movie premiere. For the Los Angeles restaurant’s opening, the city closed Rodeo Drive, and ABC produced a television special on the event.
And each successive opening night was carried out with the same hoopla and flash and extravagant party atmosphere.
And there were many opening nights.
Too many, probably.
Many industry analysts say the chain grew too big too fast.
And in the middle of it, Earl launched another theme restaurant, Official All Star Cafe, which was to sports what Planet Hollywood was to movies. But that concept seemed doomed from the start, and with all the other troubles Planet Hollywood was facing, most of the Official All Star Cafes were closed. (The All Star Cafe at Disney’s Wide World of Sports is operated by Disney under a franchising agreement.)
Earl still believes in the sports theme concept. “I’ll do another,” he says. But the reorganization forced him to limit himself to just Planet Hollywood restaurants.
In January 2000 Schwarzenegger ended his partnership with Planet Hollywood in a highly visible press conference. He was quoted in news stories at the time as saying, “Of course, I am disappointed that the company did not continue with the success I had expected and hoped for. I wish Planet Hollywood well, but I want to focus my attention now on new U.S. and global business ventures, and on my movie career.”
One would think that Earl and Schwarzenegger would not be on speaking terms, but that is far from the case. In fact, just last week Earl sponsored a fund-raiser that featured the star at the Isleworth Country Club, and Schwarzenegger stayed at the Earl home during his visit.
Beany Macgregor lost a lot too. Macgregor started with Earl in 1985 at the Mardi Gras Dinner Theater and Royal Orleans restaurant and eventually became corporate executive chef for Hard Rock Cafe. When Earl broke away to focus on Planet Hollywood, Macgregor followed as corporate executive chef for Planet.
Then, just before things went totally awry, Earl gave Macgregor the New Orleans Planet to run as his own. When the company began to falter, Macgregor lost all his retirement savings, a substantial amount of money, “a couple of million,” he says, and left the company.
But he doesn’t blame Earl for any of it.
“Robert was a visionary,” says Macgregor, who still lives in New Orleans but is a partner in a seafood chain on the East Coast. “I don’t have anything negative to say about Robert.”
Would he work with him again?
“Not as an employee,” says Macgregor. “I think I’ve progressed beyond that. But I’d work with him as a partner.
“I consider him my friend.”
MORE ON HIS PLATE
What’s ahead for Earl?
“I’ve become more active again,” he says, “huge amounts of activity, lots of businesses.
“I have gone into business with England’s No.1 chef. His name is Marco Pierre White. Marco is 41 years of age. He was the youngest chef in the world to get three Michelin stars and the first British chef to get three. And he has got involved in Planet Hollywood in England and substantially upgraded and excited the menu.
“We bought England’s oldest fish restaurant, called Wheelers, that’s like a hundred bucks a head. And we’re about to announce two or three other initiatives together.”
But wait, there’s more.
“In the U.K. again, we’ve opened another business called Bagelmania,” he says. “We’ve taken the American bagel to England, and we’ve got eight of them open.”
And then there’s the project with the 11th Earl of Sandwich, a member of Great Britain’s House of Lords, whose ancestor, the fourth earl, is credited with inventing the culinary device that bears the family name. The Earl of Sandwich sandwich shops will open soon in Orlando and New York at locations to be announced. When the Sandwich family struck on the idea to create the chain of shops, they contacted Robert Earl because, as Lord Sandwich says, “He’s quite famous, isn’t he?”
But all those projects seem to pale next to the one Earl hopes to finalize soon in Las Vegas. He and a group of investors, not yet identified but expected to include those involved as financial supporters of Planet Hollywood as well as Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, have been angling to purchase the troubled Aladdin resort and casino and rebrand it as a Planet Hollywood hotel. The story first emerged out of Las Vegas as a rumor, but when asked about it in December, Earl said at the time, “Were I doing something like that, I would equate that to a former great movie star having a $300 million-plus movie.” He did not deny the rumor.
Earl is hardly a Norma Desmond, but he is ready for his close-up. “I feel like I’ve been through the dark and I’m emerging,” he says.
The biggest regret of the last four years? Earl thinks for a moment and then sighs, “That it didn’t need to happen.”
