There”™s money and there”™s old money and frankly it doesn”™t get much older than at The Beverly Hills Hotel, high up on Sunset Boulevard and built so long ago ”” in 1912, to be precise ”” that Norma Desmond was still a Gibson Girl.
It goes without saying that everyone”™s stayed at The Beverly Hills, from Charlie Chaplin to Marilyn Monroe to John and Yoko. Elizabeth Taylor honeymooned at the hotel with six of her seven husbands. And Frank Sinatra had his own bungalow, one of 23 nestling discreetly in the hotel”™s lush gardens and styled to be an exact replica of his home in Palm Springs, with a dressing room the size of New Jersey.
The bungalows, by the way, have just been through a three-year long renovation, overseen by designer Alexandra Champalimaud, that respects their Hollywood history with original artifacts, motifs and cultural references while also bringing them bang up to date with the zingiest fabrics and the spiffiest technology. They are bright, fresh and utterly delicious and inviting.
But you don”™t most likely come to The Beverly Hills for its history, just because the Duke and Duchess of Windsor hobnobbed here (where didn”™t they?), or because Yves Montand and Marilyn Monroe actually did make love here while filming “Let”™s Make Love.”
No, this is the hotel you choose because, whether you”™re here for business or pleasure, of all the great hotels in Tinseltown, and there”™s no shortage these days, there”™s nowhere that is as blue-bloodied but simultaneously laid-back and fun as the “Pink Palace,” as The Beverly Hills Hotel is known.
Pull up at the entrance on the crest of the semicircular drive, saunter down that impossibly long red carpet and hey presto ”” you know this is the right address. Meryl Streep could turn cartwheels in the light-filled public rooms and no one would bat an eyelid. Al Pacino could plop down next to you on a sun-lounger by the vast, Hockney-blue hotel pool and, honestly, all you”™d do is lower your aviator specs for a surreptitious look, then raise them up again, sigh, and order another daiquiri. Which is not to say this wonderful hotel is somewhere you will ever feel blasé about. The freshness and wholesomeness of The Beverly Hills Hotel jumps out at you like a toe-tapping Doris Day tune.
Rooms and suites, as you might imagine, are bright and cheery, but restrained, never flash. Designer Champalimaud was always going to keep the place classy. And as for the food, it may not be the most cutting edge in LA, but it”™s somehow exactly what you want when you want it ”” eggs Benedict for breakfast in the retro Fountain Coffee Room; Californian salads at the poolside Cabana Café, meeting place of the beautiful and tanned; or a steak tartare or lobster risotto in the Polo Lounge and Bar ”” either inside, where it”™s as “clubby” as California ever gets, or outside, in that dreamy walled garden, spilling over with bougainvillea and hibiscus.
A little more sophisticated (is it possible?), a touch more demure (how can that even be?) is Hotel Bel-Air, seven short minutes away from the Beverly Hills Hotel along meandering Sunset Boulevard. These two hotels, both part of the Dorchester Collection, are effectively twins, fraternal of course because they couldn”™t look more different ”” and yet their DNA is inherently the same.
Like the Beverly Hills, Hotel Bel-Air also has a highly developed sense of noblesse oblige. This means that as you swing your rented Ford through the Bel-Air”™s discreet entryway, having overshot it twice in error as all neophytes inevitably do, the valet will greet you as though you were Prince Harry (or possibly Bob Iger) and proceed to park your tinny rental among the Lamborghinis and Maseratis without turning a hair.
But let”™s talk about the hotel. It”™s an out-and-out class act. Never showy, never vulgar, just wonderfully low-key, a hotel made for the kind of folk who know they”™ve “arrived” without having to smoke a massive cigar or otherwise shout about it.
Check-in is no more than a whisper, the nasty business of IDs and credit card pre-authorizations dispensed within an instant. Then you”™re whisked to your room or suite ”” all boast gorgeous fabrics, exquisite bathrooms, the most flattering lighting ”” and left to your own devices. No one will bother you if you don”™t want to be bothered. Heaven knows how they do it, but housekeepers, room service staff, even gardeners (and there is an army of them,) seem to go about their business without making a sound.
So, you can stay cozy and cossetted or you can wander around Hotel Bel-Air”™s idyllic 12 acres, exploring its gardens, walkways and covered arches, delighting at the sympathetically scaled Spanish colonial “mission” architecture. There are 103 accommodations in total, not that you”™d ever know it, because everything is hidden away among the luxuriant flora ”” which is to say almost 500 specimen trees and 4,000 plants.
Feeling peckish? Puckish, more like it. Wolfgang Puck looks after the entire food and beverage operation at Hotel Bel-Air, which is to say the elegant outdoor restaurant, the signature bar (still Covid-closed on my visit earlier this year) and in-room dining. And when guests ask for a doggie bag, they mean exactly that, because Hotel Bel-Air loves pooches and pampers them with posh, custom-made doggie beds and bowls, as well as personalized dog cookies. Because just like you, your pets are treated royally here.
And everywhere, there are those friendly ghosts. Audrey Hepburn used to walk along these very same paths and Grace Kelly bathed in that wondrous, perfectly oval swimming pool, with its impossible, dazzling shade of pale cobalt, heated to 82 degrees year-round. The celebrities still come, of course they do, but you barely know they”™re there. Maybe you”™ll catch a glimpse of Oprah, marveling at the grace of the white swans on Hotel Bel-Air”™s very own Swan Lake (she celebrated her 50th birthday here). Or Robert DeNiro, emerging in robe and slippers from a Valmont treatment at the gloriously renovated spa.
Many years ago now, I passed a table in the restaurant, mid-afternoon, and spied Nancy Reagan and Olivia de Havilland, along with two distinguished-looking older gentlemen, playing bridge. Ah those, were the days. Correction: These are the days. “In time the Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble; they”™re only made of clay.” But like the love Ira Gershwin wrote about, the Hotel Bel-Air, 75 years old this year, “is here to stay.”
