Wandering into the Polo Lounge of the soon-to-reopen Beverly Hills Hotel, Kermit Beriker, the general manager, happily greeted several workers who were applying final touches to the lush forest-green pillars.
“Nothing has changed here-it’s exactly as it was,” Beriker said, walking into the lobby. “We’re back!”
Yes, the Beverly Hills Hotel, the so-called Pink Palace, at 9641 Sunset Boulevard, is making a comeback after more than two years of extensive renovation, rumors that it would never reopen and concern that the garish and lavish architectural site would somehow turn into a conventional box of a hotel.
Not to worry. Unlike aging movie stars who undergo extensive facial surgery, with terrifying results, the Beverly Hills Hotel has been left with few scars from its makeover, which in effect turned the clock back to its heyday.
A hotel that was identified more than any other with Hollywood glamour, romance and even intrigue has revived itself at a cost of more than $100 million.
The hotel reopened its doors with a benefit sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Guests began checking into the hotel’s 194 rooms, suites and bungalows, which is down from the previous room count of 253. Room rates range from $275 to $3,000 a night. Many nights, especially in June and July, are booked up.
“The goal was really to preserve the hotel exactly as it was,” said Edward C. Friedrichs, a vice president of Gensler Associates, the Los Angeles architectural firm that reshaped the hotel.
“Our aim was to have people come back to the hotel and say, `Gee, I didn’t realize how good this place looked.’ Fundamentally, we restored the hotel as it was when it was first built in 1912.”
Built on bean fields as a resort for rich visitors from the East Coast, the hotel had aged badly as it endured several owners.
It was owned for awhile by Ivan F. Boesky; his wife, Seema, and her family but in 1986 was sold to Marvin Davis, the Denver oilman, for $135 million.
The sale came after Boesky’s $100 million settlement of insider-trading charges and a family feud over accusations that Boesky had improperly used the hotel’s funds for stock speculation.
In 1987, eight months after Davis bought the hotel, he sold it to a company headed by the Sultan of Brunei for $187 million.
It was this new owner, Sajahtera Inc., a subsidiary of the Brunei Investment Agency, that opted to restore the hotel, which was-and is-faced with such popular competition in Los Angeles as the Four Seasons, the Peninsula, the Regent Beverly Wilshire and the Bel-Air.
“The floors were undulating, the structure was creaky, there was considerable settlement in the footing of the hotel,” Friedrichs said. “There was no air-conditioning; only window units had been put through walls. The plumbing, the wiring, the electricity dated back to 1912.”
In renovating the hotel, the architects sought to preserve the original design by Elmer Grey.
The original structure “was very fanciful, very romantic and considered one of the splendid examples of Mission Revival architecture in California,” said Dr. David Gebhard, an architectural historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a co-author of “Architecture in Los Angeles: A Compleat Guide.”
Years later, the architectural style merged with the sleek fantasies of Paul Revere Williams, who designed its Crescent Wing in 1949 and revamped the Polo Lounge, the coffee shop and lobby areas.
Williams was a leading designer of movie stars’ homes from the 1930s to the 1960s, as well as one of the few black architects in the nation to achieve extraordinary success.
“It was a very loose, very elegant post-World War II modern style,” Gebhard said. “The style was a decided contradiction to the original building, but both styles existed well together because of Williams’s sense of scale and detailing.”
Gebhard has viewed the exterior of the “new” Beverly Hills Hotel.
“It’s successful and delightful,” he said. “They retained the very friendly ambiguousness that exists between the original and the Paul Williams addition. They really haven’t changed any basic theme of the building.”
Virtually everyone connected with the restoration said the hotel’s architecture and style could exist in only one place: in the never-never land of Beverly Hills.
“This architecture belongs in Beverly Hills,” Friedrichs said. “It’s unique. It’s the only commercial property in probably the most expensive residential area of the country. We were very cautious. We did not want to look like the Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons. It was a real test for us to look like the Beverly Hills Hotel.
“There’s always the risk of criticism that this isn’t architecture but stage decoration. Well, yes, it is. Is that so bad?”
Walking beside Friedrichs in the hotel’s lobby, Howard Hirsch, a senior partner in Hirsch/Bedner, one of the leading hotel interior design firms, picked up the theme that the Beverly Hills Hotel was, in fact, a stage set.
The 1978 comedy “California Suite,” written by a frequent guest, Neil Simon, was filmed there.
“The outside of the hotel is California Mission, and the inside is late Art Deco,” Hirsch said. “There’s no common theme. But this is Hollywood.
“The interior is a stage set, it’s theater, and we’ve upgraded that. Hotel guests are actors and the audience at the same time. It’s a people-watching hotel. On the one hand, some people don’t want to be seen. On the other hand, staying at the hotel is very important.”
What has been added to the hotel, almost discreetly, is a swanky tea lounge in the lobby, all gilt and velvet. There’s the new dinner-only Polo Grill, a health club and some lavish public rooms, with the largest one, the Crystal Ballroom, accommodating as many as 1,000 people. A new staircase has been added to connect the lobby to the ballroom.
Guest rooms have been gutted and are larger than the old ones. Amenities include walk-in closets, sitting areas, large marble and granite bathrooms, fax machines and computer modem capabilities. Regular guests will even be assigned a permanent phone number to use whenever they stay at the hotel.
Otherwise, the hotel remains more or less the same: the Polo Lounge still has its green booths, pink tablecloths and matching pink vases; the Fountain Coffee Shop has kept its Formica counter and banana-leaf-patterned wallpaper, the pool and cabanas are still there (now with 52 phones and fax lines).
Perhaps equally important to longtime guests, said Beriker, the general manager, several hotel employees are back, including Nino Osti, the Polo Lounge greeter for 25 years; Svend Petersen, the pool and cabana manager since 1959, and Alex Olmedo, the tennis pro who has taught the stars and lesser mortals for nearly three decades.
The CIA could learn about secrecy and discretion from these men and other longtime staff members. Of course, everyone knows which bungalow was shared by Clark Gable and Carole Lombard while Gable was still married. And the bungalow that was used as a rendezvous for Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand while they were filming the comedy “Let’s Make Love.”
Beriker noted that Elizabeth Taylor used the bungalows for various honeymoons.
“She had honeymoons here with six of her seven husbands,” he said. “The exception was when she married Nicky Hilton. She couldn’t stay here for that honeymoon.”
