You Must Remember This (13 page)

Rita Hayworth posing poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

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That same year Courtright rechristened the El Jardin Restaurant the Polo Lounge to pay tribute to demon polo enthusiasts Will Rogers, Tommy Hitchcock, and Darryl Zanuck—and as such it’s been more or less constantly successful ever since. Toward the end
of the decade, Hernando gave the place its first major redecoration. In 1947 he opened the Crystal Room and the Lanai Restaurant, which later became the Coterie.

Courtright’s wife, Firenza, described what he accomplished: “He had a business side and a social side and his business was hospitality. He was a showman, setting the stage for each visitor. He had a great sense of style and, as well, an extra effort to push himself harder than anybody else. In many ways, running [the] hotel was like running a small country.”

Hernando also broadened the number of amenities available at the hotel. Francis Taylor, the father of Elizabeth, opened an art gallery in the downstairs shopping area in 1939, and through the war years the Francis Taylor Gallery became an increasingly important venue for art. Francis sold a lot of California Impressionists, such as Granville Redmond (a deaf artist who had a studio at the Chaplin lot on La Brea for a number of years and who also appeared in some of Chaplin’s films). Francis also sold work by Augustus John. His prices were reasonable, so actors who were also discerning collectors, such as Vincent Price, James Mason, and Greta Garbo, purchased a lot of art from him.

Interestingly, although its “Pink Palace” moniker may seem as old as the hotel itself, the hotel wasn’t actually painted that color until 1948 under the direction of Paul Revere Williams, who also designed the customized cursive script for its logo. Williams was a very dignified, classy man who was born in 1894 and who encountered all the discrimination you might expect would face a young black man in that era. “I determined, when I was still in high school, to become an architect,” said Williams. “When I announced my intention to my instructor, he stared at me with as much astonishment as he would have displayed had I proposed a rocket flight to Mars. ‘Who ever heard of a Negro being an architect?’ he demanded.”

Williams knew that he was going to have to depend almost entirely on white clients, so his first impression had to be faultless. Paul was light skinned, always impeccably dressed, and had taught himself to draw upside down. As soon as a client sat down with him, Paul would start sketching out the plans upside down, which would quickly disarm anyone who was taken aback by the fact that his architect was black. And then Paul would ask for suggestions, and the customer would become a full partner in the project. Brilliant psychology.

In 1949 Williams created the new Crescent Wing, which added 109 rooms to the hotel, and turned it from a T plan to an H plan. Also overhauled were the Polo Lounge and the Fountain Coffee Shop, and the lobby took on its timeless pink and green color scheme that’s been maintained ever since.

The pink and green banana leaf wallpaper, however, was actually the work of Don Loper, who made his name as a dress designer for, among many others, Marilyn Monroe.

It’s a mark of how brilliant Paul’s design for the Polo Lounge was that his is the only hot spot I can think of that has survived unchanged from 1949 to the present day.

Paul is an example of the remarkable openness of Los Angeles to the new, the untried in architecture and style. I think this was possible because you had a set of circumstances that weren’t replicated anyplace else in the country: a basically thriving local economy, a large group of talented architects, and—most important—clients who were interested in anything theatrical or new.

When I started going to the Polo Lounge in the late forties, it wasn’t terribly expensive by Hollywood standards—a daiquiri might cost you seventy-five cents, but a Pimm’s would run more than a dollar and a bottle of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge champagne
from 1929 would set you back more than twenty dollars. So the tourists stayed away simply by dint of the tabs.

Paul Williams had completed all his additions to the hotel by the time Stanley Anderson died in 1951. Stanley was one of the pioneers of Southern California, but outside of his participation in the birth of Beverly Hills and the hotel that bears the town’s name, he’s not remembered by many people. But he’s very much remembered by me.

Hernando Courtright sold the place in 1953 for $5.5 million, and by that time the Beverly Hills Hotel was the premier hotel in the area. He continued managing the place for a couple of years, but he didn’t like the new owner, a man from Detroit named Ben Silberstein. And then things got really interesting: Hernando’s wife left him for Silberstein. Courtright then took over the Beverly Wilshire, which he ran very successfully until he sold it a year before his death in 1986.

Hernando Courtright was a good man and a wonderful hotelier. He really knew how to run a place, and he ran it beautifully. Scandals, whether on the part of the guests or the staff, happened mostly out of range of the newspapers, and completely out of range of the guests. The atmosphere was smooth and utterly unruffled. As far as the public was concerned, the Beverly Hills Hotel was the chicest place in town. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor would stay there when they were in town, as would Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. When Charlie Chaplin came back to Hollywood in 1972 to accept an honorary Oscar, he stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. A lot of the people went there for Hernando as much as they did anything else. When you drove down to the hotel and went into the Polo Lounge to have a drink, it was different than going to any other place in town.

Hernando’s great innovation was psychological. In his view,
Beverly Hills was not a resort area, nor even a suburb: it was uptown Los Angeles. Hernando wanted to make the town the equivalent of Fifth Avenue in New York or Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, and the Beverly Hills Hotel was, you might say, the anchor store—the prestige destination in a town full of them.

Today, the twenty-two bungalows are set amid lush tropical gardens, with private walkways that snake through groves of coconut palms, oleanders, and bougainvillea. The landscaping is dense in order to give the bungalow inhabitants the privacy they desire, and often need.

The bungalows, which are basically tile-roofed mini-haciendas, have “privacy lights” instead of “Do Not Disturb” signs. They all have fireplaces, full kitchens, and fresh orchids in the bathrooms. Some bungalows have two or three bedrooms, others four.

Since 1987, the Sultan of Brunei has owned both the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Hotel Bel Air, and you may make of that what you will. The sultan is an oilman, but he also loves to play polo, so in that respect the ghost of Hernando Courtright should be pleased, although as far as I’m concerned it’s outsourcing gone berserk.

The Beverly Hills Hotel is emblematic of the best aspects of the town it anchors. People who don’t know any better think the movie business and, by extension, America, has always been just one thing, permanent and unalterable, but the closer you look at history, the more you realize that everything that lasts—like, for instance, the Beverly Hills Hotel—has been reinvented numerous times and by numerous people.

When men like Hernando die, there’s a loss of great personalities, not to mention a loss of history. No matter how well a corporation runs a hotel or a restaurant, the personal touch is gone.

Just one example: They took out the tennis courts at the Beverly Hills Hotel, so the two men who ran them for years, Alex Olmedo and his brother, David, also disappeared. Alex was a joy, a Peruvian who won four NCAA titles and played on the Davis Cup team for America. Kate Hepburn took lessons from Alex, as did Robert Duvall and Chevy Chase.

Bill Tilden taught there. Many wonderful people went to those courts. It was a little piece of Hollywood history, but, like so much of Hollywood history, it’s gone.

Just about the time I arrived in Hollywood, if you rode down the ramp from Ocean Avenue to Santa Monica, Marion Davies’s palace—I don’t use the word lightly—was just off to the right, and the beach houses of Harold Lloyd, Norma Shearer, Louis B. Mayer, and Jesse Lasky were farther on in that direction. To the left off the ramp were Leo McCarey, George Bancroft, and Norma Talmadge, and a couple of places owned by Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels.

Norma Talmadge’s place at 1038 Ocean Front had a particularly distinguished list of inhabitants. Randolph Scott and Cary Grant had lived there in the mid-thirties, and Cary had kept the place when he married Barbara Hutton. After that, Brian Aherne lived there; Howard Hughes rented the place for a time, as did Grace Kelly. Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate lived there as well. Douglas Fairbanks was a couple of doors down in a house he had initially bought as a weekend getaway, but converted to his full-time residence after his divorce from Mary Pickford.

Norma Talmadge is forgotten today, which is sad, because she was a fine emotional actress, and one of the three or four biggest
female stars of the silent era. (The reason nobody remembers her is that very few of her films survive.)

When she built the place in the late 1920s, she was married to Joe Schenck. I’ve always wondered whether the Norman design of the house was an elaborate pun on her name. The interior was decorated mostly in a Spanish motif, although Norma’s bathroom was done with tiles from Malibu Pottery, which was among the most beautiful work ever done in that medium. Interestingly, Norma had almost nothing in her house that indicated she was a movie star, other than a portrait of her over the fireplace in the living room.

Norma lived there for about five years, after which she divorced Schenck and took up with Gilbert Roland, a good friend of mine in later years. Gil always regarded Norma as the great love of his life, which, for a compulsive ladies’ man, is really saying something.

Although Norma’s career ended after only two sound pictures, she had held on to her money—something that couldn’t be said of a lot of silent film stars. She had two other beachfront properties in Santa Monica, as well as other real estate investments around Los Angeles.

These Santa Monica and Malibu houses—always excluding Marion Davies’s place, which could have sheltered an army—looked quite modest. They still do—most of them are still there, although they’ve been heavily altered over the years. Most of them were a complete change of pace from the Spanish influence that was predominant in Hollywood. Some derived from Cape Cod style; others reflected a Newport or Monterey influence.

If Hollywood was prone to strange fads—the famously arrogant director Josef von Sternberg had a house designed by Richard Neutra in Chatsworth that looked like an aluminum pillbox that just
happened to have a moat around it—it had an even stranger love of huge parties, as if in defiance of the Depression. Hearst loved to throw dos at San Simeon, but also at Marion Davies’s huge house in Santa Monica, which the naive often assumed was a resort hotel. Actually, it was the only competition Harold Lloyd had for the most lavish movie star estate.

The Santa Monica beach house was by no means Marion’s primary residence. That was actually a Spanish-style mansion at 1700 Lexington Road in Beverly Hills. The Beverly Hills house was Marion’s preferred venue for parties, simply because the Santa Monica house was too damn big—it could supposedly hold two thousand guests, which sounds more like Buckingham Palace than Santa Monica, but then Marion’s place wasn’t much smaller than Buckingham Palace.

There was a small-town atmosphere in Hollywood then. One or two nights a week, Davies would invite a few close friends to her place. Since her close friends were named Chaplin and Fairbanks, it may sound like an intimidating evening, but the evenings mostly consisted of dinner and charades. A few weeks later, Chaplin or Fairbanks would return the favor. Sometimes Marion would hire a bus, fill it with ten or twenty friends, plenty of food, maybe a musician or two, and take off for Santa Monica beach, where they would have a late picnic and a bonfire.

William Randolph Hearst built the Santa Monica palace for Davies in 1928, the last, flamboyant year of the silent era. Money was clearly no object. The house held down 750 feet of oceanfront real estate—and this at a time when anything more than fifty feet was regarded as a luxury. Hearst assembled the land piecemeal, using various pseudonyms in order to keep the prices down.