Battle Royal : IRS Will Auction Diner Unless ‘the Queen’ Dishes Up Rescue

The owner sports tattoos the entire length of her right arm.

The waitresses were “the meanest in the world,” according to their T-shirts. They regularly threatened children with eviction, ordered smooching couples to stop and men to doff their ties.

The customers at Millie’s--from high-priced attorneys to the homeless--ate it all up, especially on weekends, when the line for breakfast would sometimes seem endless.

But the cafe’s hash-slinging days are apparently over.

Three weeks ago, Internal Revenue Service agents seized the tiny, 1940s-style restaurant and locked out the owner, Magenta, for allegedly failing to pay $47,000 in employee and personal income taxes.

For 92 years, the 25-seat diner on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake had dished up slices of L.A. life along with its spicy scrambled eggs, meatloaf and three-inch-deep apple pies.

Now, the big black stove at Millie’s is cold. Mae West and Montgomery Clift photos, along with old metal Coca-Cola signs, forlornly adorn the walls. Heavy white plates lie stacked in piles. Tables--still loaded with paper napkins, knives and forks, ketchup, mustard and menus--sit empty.

All of it is scheduled to go on the auction block Monday to pay for back taxes, unless Magenta, the colorful owner who uses only a first name, can pull off a last-minute rescue.

“I still have a few things up my sleeve,” Magenta said. “I think Millie’s is definitely worth fighting for. It’s home for all the people that eat there.”

The sudden closure has befuddled regular customers who peer through the window and gaze at the hand-lettered sign that Magenta left.

“Millies Has Been Working With the IRS,” the sign reads. “This Is How They Work With Us. We Should Be Open in a Few Days. The Queen.”

Former employees say they miss the fun, the laughs and the neighborly feel that dominated Millie’s. Only now are they reluctantly starting to look for work.

“It’s sad and hard,” said Heather, a 23-year-old cook who did not give her last name because of the cafe’s tax problems. “It’s going to be hard to go back to the normal way of waitressing.”

Meanwhile, owners of the half a dozen businesses in the vicinity who prospered from the cafe’s overflow crowds say they have been hurting since the closure.

“Since that happened, this is a blighted area,” said Caroline Lopez, owner of Super Value Center, a small discount store. “Her customers kept us all busy.”

That a nondescript, brown brick building 10 minutes west of downtown Los Angeles and smack in the heart of a culturally mixed neighborhood should become almost a city landmark says much for Magenta.

A 37-year-old Idaho native, Magenta came to Los Angeles more than 10 years ago for a “life change.” As part of that change, she tried out different names on tags she was required to wear at a fabric store job.

“I tried mostly J and M names, like Jasmine and Justine,” she said. “But when I wrote ‘Magenta,’ everyone said it was so pretty. . . . It just felt good.”

Equipped with a new name, she tried her hand at making earrings of crosses and wire baskets with pearls inside. When department stores began selling them and she saw women wearing them, she considered herself a success, even without L.A. essentials such as a car and phone.

But Magenta lost it all, she said, for the love of a “lowlife jerk” whom she followed to San Francisco. After that failed romance, she returned to a loft in downtown Los Angeles. One day, a friend who was called to work on a movie asked Magenta to fill in for her as a dishwasher at Millie’s.

She did so well that she became a permanent employee, earning the title “the Queen of Biscuits” for her baking skills. After the owners could not make a go of the restaurant and closed it in 1988, Magenta got loans from friends to buy the business and reopen.

‘It didn’t really cost that much,” she said. “All the stuff there is old.”

Under her ownership, the cafe followed the motto: “The waitress is queen and the customer is always wrong.”

That meant waitresses were free to ring a big cowbell and shout at demanding patrons: “Problem customer!”

If a waitress rolled out of bed late, it was perfectly OK to toss a T-shirt over pajama bottoms and come in to wait on tables. Waitresses could tease, joke with, insult, order and cajole customers.

That did not keep punk types, city workers, parents with children, movie lot tekkies and Silver Lake residents from lining the sidewalk on weekends just to get into the sweltering, non-air-conditioned cafe with its jukebox blaring rockabilly and reggae.

Magenta said she also set her sights against waste, recycling her leftovers for the cafe’s bread pudding and chili. The rest she put out for the homeless, who picked it up from containers left on newspaper vending boxes outside.

But bookkeeping is one skill Magenta admits she lacks. Soon she was in trouble with the IRS and turned to a Utah-based tax protester group for help. That move only got her into deeper waters, she said.

The 6:30 a.m. March 2 raid by six armed federal agents was the final move in the legal dance between Magenta and the IRS.

Nancy McCurley, an IRS spokeswoman, said the business is being put up for sale at auction for alleged non-payment of employee Social Security and income taxes dating back to 1989.

But Magenta argues that the IRS should let her stay in operation and make payments on her back taxes, instead of selling the few possessions that constitute her business.

“They can’t sell Millie’s,” she said. “I am Millie’s.”