Culture
Doing the Hustle
Today, TGI Friday’s is sedate, but twenty years ago this month, the place started the singles era in Dallas.
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No less a fashion authority than Women’s Wear Daily was so impressed with the scene at the Dallas TGI Friday’s that it sent down a photographer to capture the action. “The girl-watching is good,” WWD wrote, “with lots of shrink tops, halterbacks and HotPants.” The Dallas Morning News, in turn, complimented the men’s fashions, saying one could see “anything from jeans and wide, colorful belts and shoes, to coat and tie and sleeveless sweaters.”
The heavy action of each evening, however, was the pickup scene, where Dallas singles tried out what were at the time never-before-used opening lines: “Do you come here often?” “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” and the all-time biggie: “What’s your sign?”
Of the three hundred people who would crowd in each night, estimated Henrion, 50 percent came for the action and 50 percent to gawk. Dallas Times Herald columnist Dick Hitt was so astonished by all the hustling that he called Friday’s “the bar where the Single Mingles hang out.” Soon the national press followed suit, turning the club into one of the most famous singles bars in the country. Glamour called it “a meat market for more reasons than its hamburgers.” And Newsweek, in a 1973 cover story noting the growth of the singles scene in America, used as its lead photo a shot of the Dallas TGI Friday’s with people preening and posing around the bar.
Former patrons can still remember the best places to stand at Friday’s. Some opted for the door next to the telephone booth; others preferred the steps leading to the bar. Harris would often arrive with a good friend, Cowboys quarterback Craig Morton, in Morton’s fancy Lincoln Mark III. Morton would park the vehicle near the front door so he could take women out there to see his brand-new eight-track tape system (“None of us had seen one before,” said a duly impressed Harris). Harris, meanwhile, had his own trick. He memorized the number of every table in the restaurant. That way, if he saw a pretty woman sitting in the distance, he could send her a drink.
On one memorable occasion, the ploy went spectacularly awry. Said Harris, “Craig and I saw two girls at a table and I told the waiter, ‘I want you to send table eighteen a round of frozen daiquiris and put it on my tab.’ I started smiling at those girls. Five minutes later, at the table next to them, ten men in cowboy hats—all out-of-towners here for some farmers’ meeting—stood up with those daiquiris in their hands and cheered me and Craig. Damned if I hadn’t gotten the table number wrong.”
After being there all Saturday night, many Friday’s faithfuls would return on Sunday morning for the champagne brunch. “Everyone tried to get to the brunches,” said Jan Rogers, “just so we could find out who had gone home with who the night before.” It was impossible to drive by Friday’s any morning without seeing half a dozen cars that had been left overnight in the parking lot, especially on the weekend.
And needless to say, there was a good possibility that a trip to TGI Friday’s would lead to a trip to the altar. “We had tons of marriages in those first years,” said Henrion. “Tons of them. I think we had no idea of the need singles had to get together.”
Some of the marriages lasted; others evaporated in the light of day. In 1973, a well-known Braniff flight attendant named Teresa Goforth parked her new Corvette and walked into the restaurant for her weekly lunch with other flight attendants. A man soon came up to their table to talk about her car. Two months later they were engaged. “I guess he wanted to marry me for my car,” said Goforth. “Looking back on it, I should have been smarter. But that was just the spirit of the place.” She divorced her husband several years later, but she harbors no ill feelings for the old TGI Friday’s scene. She now takes her own sixteen-year-old daughter to Friday’s to stare at the SMU boys.
Considering the fickle nature of the unmarried, it should come as no surprise that TGI Friday’s reign as king of the mountain did not last forever. Not long after Friday’s opened, nightclubs and discos sprang up nearby, transforming upper Greenville Avenue into a glittering singles mecca. No sooner would one club become the fashionable place to be seen than another would take its place, and then another and another. In 1981 Henrion sold out his interest in Friday’s and in 1987 Scoggin followed suit, both moving on to other ventures. Today, the restaurant chain is owned by Dallas-based Carlson Companies, and there are 180 TGI Friday’s in 36 states, including 6 in Dallas, 6 in Houston, and 1 each in six other Texas cities.
In the twenty years since its founding, TGI Friday’s has changed, quietly turning into more of a couples and family restaurant. On weekend nights, a cluster of die-hard singles still gathers around the bar, but the hectic pace that made the restaurant famous has slowed. The emphasis is more on eating than meeting.
On a recent Thursday night, Friday’s decor looked the same as it always has—the famous bell still hung above the bar—but the bartenders spent more time lazily chatting with the ten or so customers than hustling for tips. Only one couple occupied the bar, and they were engrossed in talking about their jobs. “This place used to be hot?” asked the man, looking around. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
In fact, the singles action has left upper Greenville Avenue altogether and is now centered in clubs near downtown on McKinney Avenue or in Deep Ellum. “But everyone in those clubs is so plastic, so false,” said Teresa Goforth when asked her opinion of the new scene—exactly the same criticism that was leveled at the Friday’s crowd twenty years ago.
Yet those who knew it in the early days—even those whose TGI Friday’s marriages didn’t last long—still have a nostalgic feeling for the old place. Strangely enough, they look upon that era as a time of innocence, as the first great fling of their adult lives, as a repository of fun before the age of herpes and AIDS. One editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News suggested in a column that a TGI Friday’s menu should be placed in the city’s time capsule “to show future generations where all the madness began.”
And although eternally optimistic bachelor Billy Bob Harris has moved on to other haunts, he still considers those first years at Friday’s as “the best nightlife in Dallas history. Nothing has compared to it.”
He paused and thought for a moment. “Well,” he said, “there’s been nothing to compare to it so far.”
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