‘When they start the bidding out at $2,000 . . . ‘

The Encino Chamber of Commerce gave an early christening to a new Valley restaurant Friday, holding its annual auction in the Terrace on Ventura Boulevard.

Actually, the restaurant hasn’t been built yet. Only the room around it has.

And the Terrace isn’t the restaurant, though the name sounds right for one. The Terrace is a new office building occupying nearly a block near Densmore Avenue. Its low, massive form of layered floors terraced back from the street gives it the appearance of a white marble pyramid.

The building has just been completed. A bank occupies one corner. But much of the space has yet to be leased. The shops along an interior courtyard are still mostly vacant. And, until a lease is secured, the space reserved for a large restaurant has been left with bare concrete on the floor, glass insulation on the walls and large air-conditioning ducts hanging from the steel beam ceilings. Kind of industrial modern, like the new museum of modern art in Paris, without really meaning to be.

It was not any intimation of the avant-garde, however, that brought the Encino chamber to the Terrace for its auction. There was a more immediate motive.

“There are very few places you can get for nothing,” chamber member Judith Nesbitt confessed.

Completing the industrial theme, the chamber ran heavy-duty extension cords around the place to lights placed around the room on tripods.

Folding chairs were arranged in rows. In front of them was a portable stage and behind them a row of canvas tent tops covering tables handsomely arrayed with finger foods.

In the shadows behind the tents a man with a gray handlebar mustache and wearing a tuxedo sat at an electronic keyboard. He played movie tunes, Broadway melodies and waltzes, drifting from one to the next without beginning or end.

About 250 people moved around the room as gracefully as they could while holding paper plates and drinks and eating ribs and fried chicken all at the same time.

They formed groups that in most cases seemed to be organized by topic, some discussing bank notes and land values and others easier subjects such as fashion.

After a while, a small man in a mustard yellow Western suit walked to the stage and took the microphone. He was the auctioneer, Gene Bear.

“OK, keyboard man, you can cool it now,” he said.

The keyboard man folded up his keyboard and went away. A young man standing at another keyboard beside the stage immediately started playing “Hey, Big Spender.”

A woman in a white ostrich-feather cocktail jacket and tight black crepe dress seductively sang the original version of the cigar theme song.

Three men, looking as sexy as Encino businessmen can look, swaggered onto stage. Ten women in evening outfits and furs followed and smothered the men in embraces.

The outfits were donated by Encino clothing stores at cost, to be auctioned, Bear said.

The ostrich jacket and black crepe dress went up first. The minimum bid was $140 for the jacket and $180 for the dress.

No one bid.

After several more items, including a blue Norwegian full-length fox (minimum bid $2,495) and a red fox stroller (minimum bid $2,495), still no one had offered a bid.

“I have to tell you folks, Zody’s closed last night,” Bear finally said in a crestfallen voice.

A woman in the audience volunteered that she would never think of wearing the fur of an animal killed in the name of fashion. But that wasn’t why nobody was buying, she said.

She suggested that members of the Encino Chamber of Commerce are not all of that wealthy class of Encino residents with homes in the hills south of the boulevard.

“When they start the bidding out at $2,000 . . . “ To complete the thought, she rubbed her fingers together in the symbol for money.

The first item to receive a bid was a black wool dress and matching jacket with a rakish collar and epaulets. It looked stunning on model Ilse Jouette, a petite redhead who owns the IMJ Advertising agency.

Bear was about to let the outfit go for the opening bid of $190 when Jouette coyly raised one finger to indicate that she’d pay $200.

She got it.

Several more items failed to sell. The tension finally broke when a model came out in a fox vest over a pink leotard and glittery black tights.

“Why don’t you take your little fox thing off?” Bear asked. “Give me a little bit of Jazzercise.”

A woman in the audience, who said she buys and sells steel, got the leotards and tights for $50.

Soon enough, lots of less expensive and more useful merchandise began to sell.

“I bought the jump suit and I bought the set of dishes,” Hal Bastian of Julien J. Studley Inc., the company that built the Terrace, said excitedly.

Then he placed the winning bid on a kebob maker.

Before it was over, somebody bought a one-year gift certificate to McDonald’s, good for dinner for four, once a month. And somebody else took home a deluxe poker table for only $50.

The chamber made almost $3,500.

But nobody went home happier than Jouette, the redhead who bought the black skirt and jacket.

She said she picked up the outfit at a store called Upstairs for Fashion and knew immediately that it had to be hers. She also saw other things she liked.

“I bought a lot,” she said.