Biltmore Bellhop: 46 Years of ‘Selling Service’
When Gene Summers bought the Biltmore Hotel in 1976, he called Willis Eden to his second-floor office.
“I want to talk some business with you, Willis,” Summers declared. “I’m an architect, Phyllis Lambert (then Summers’ business partner) is an architect. Neither one of us knows how to run a hotel. Tell me how to run a hotel.”
Willis Eden knows his limits, and they stop short of running hotels.
The Best Bellboy
“I told him, ‘Mr. Summers, I don’t know everything there is about running a hotel. But I do know the best way to do it is to hire a good general manager.’ ” His point made, Eden stood up, shook Summers’ hand, walked out the door and went back to work at a job he does know everything about, which he succinctly describes as “being a bellboy.”
Willis Edwin Eden is a bellboy the way Dwight David Eisenhower was a doughboy: the best.
For 46 years Eden has been making people comfortable at the Biltmore, which Summers and Lambert sold in 1984 to Westgroup Inc. “I’ve been offered other jobs where I could make more money,” Eden said. “But this is the job I like.”
At 4 a.m., five days a week, the 76-year-old former farmer from Missouri drags himself out of bed in his Huntington Beach home, a block from the ocean.
His wife, Frances, a volunteer escort for senior citizens, sleeps as Eden dresses quietly and rapidly. He’s out the door by 4:20, clad in faded jeans and a Levi jacket.
Ten minutes later Eden is tooling along the San Diego Freeway in his well-kept, 6-year-old white pickup with 130,000 on the odometer. His only cargo is an ancient Azuki bicycle.
Eden parks curbside half a dozen blocks from the Biltmore, hauls his blue bike out of the truck, and pedals to the hotel. “I save a lot of parking money,” he said.
After breakfast and a change into a snappy tan and green uniform with a pillbox hat that he hates, Eden goes to work at 7 a.m.
Work, it turns out, is a succotash of physical labor, salesmanship, common courtesy and chutzpah that Eden wraps up in one word: service.
Mulling His Thoughts
“That’s the only thing I’ve got to sell,” he says. He stops, mulling his thoughts, and decides he’s covered all bases. “I’ve got nothing else to sell but service.”
Eden gets into his routine the moment he sees anyone checking in.
Ambling up behind his prospect, the bellman glances at the guest’s luggage tags. Now the visitor has a name and a home town. Eden stands 10 or 12 feet off to the side, far enough to be unobtrusive, close enough to be unavoidable.
He waits, hands folded behind his 6-foot, 2-inch frame, rubbing his right thumb and forefinger together in a nervous mannerism. He could be a pitcher reading his catcher’s sign. In fact, he’s a bellman reading his guest.
In this case, the guest is a bespectacled fellow in a business suit who looks tired and very tense, as if he’s just crossed the country, which turns out to be the case.
Not a great prospect. He might well want to carry his own bags. “He was right on the fence,” Eden said later. It was time to tempt him off the fence.
The bellman strolls nonchalantly up to the desk. “Hello, sir,” he says. “Where are you from, sir?” Rhetorical question, since Eden had checked the luggage tags, but a good opener.
“Connecticut,” comes the reply, tautly. The guest is surprised at Eden’s greeting. Bellmen don’t start conversations, they carry bags. The man, who is an engineer, is stiff as starch. He looks nervous.
“Oh, that’s beautiful country, sir,” responds Eden, a hearty good-will ambassador. “I was there two years ago. I went all through Connecticut, Maine, up to Montreal and Quebec, then back to New York where we stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria, sir.”
It is less than half a minute since Eden approached his prospect, and the engineer looks like a new man. He is smiling now, relaxed, leaning against the desk instead of standing at rigid attention.
Mission Accomplished
“May I show you to your room, sir?” Eden asks. Another rhetorical question. The engineer is nodding and Eden has his bags in hand before the query is finished.
Ten minutes later, when Eden and the pleased New Englander part company, the guest knows the locations of the hotel bar and restaurants, he understands how to work his card key, TV, air conditioner and dead bolt, and Eden is $1.25 richer.
If the occasion had arisen, Eden could have told the engineer how to get to the nearest McDonald’s or the bank of his choice, or to parks, movie studios, colleges, hospitals, churches, consulates and restaurants that serve various kinds of food at various prices. Eden has neatly penciled such information into a 4x6-inch notebook, its brown paper cover worn by constant use.
A Lot of ‘Sirs’
Eden is a master of small talk, information and courtesy. “I use a lot of ‘sirs.’ They like that,” he said. Most importantly, he loves his job.
“I love it because things change, I have different things to do all the time. And I like the people I work with. I’ve had good general managers. Most of all I like to give service to the guests. I get pleasure out of seeing people happy and satisfied.”
Eden began satisfying hotel guests in 1929 when he left the farm to become a bellman at the Robidoux Hotel in St. Joseph, Mo. A decade later, because his parents’ health demanded a warmer, drier climate, Eden moved to California, “way out in the country” to the city of San Fernando.
He got a job behind a drugstore cigar counter. Five transfers, five raises and a year after selling his first Corona, he came to loggerheads with a “bossy” manager and quit on the spot.
On April 29, 1940, he joined the Biltmore staff as a baggage porter. It took him a year to become the hotel’s head porter. In those days, porters carried heavy luggage like trunks, and bellboys dealt with lighter suitcases.
700 Salesmen
At the time, the Biltmore hosted many trade shows. Eden quickly got to know hundreds of salesmen. They shipped their trunks ahead and, before the salesmen arrived at the hotel, Eden would select rooms for them, carry their trunks to those rooms, then unpack them and set out their wares, right down to pencils and order pads. “I knew at least 600 or 700 salesmen, and what rooms they needed,” Eden said. “I had keys to all these fellas’ trunks. I had hundreds of keys.”
By the early ‘70s, merchandise marts and convention centers had taken away most of the Biltmore’s trade show business. Ten years ago, Eden moved from being the hotel’s last porter to being its oldest bellman
“I’ve worked under nine general managers,” Eden said. “Most of ‘em were really good. My favorite guest was Harry Truman. He and Bess were terrific. He was down to earth. Just before the 1960 Democratic convention (in Los Angeles) he told me, ‘We’ve got to beat those SOBs.’ He meant the Republicans.”
Presidential Bellhop
Eden has carried suitcases for, and therefore chatted with, Presidents Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, Bob Hope, Jack Benny (“He wasn’t tight like he pretended on the radio”), Betty Grable, Lana Turner, Harry James, Jane Fonda, Olivia Newton-John, a host of baseball figures ranging from Pee Wee Reese and Willie Mays to Tommy Lasorda and Johnny Bench, the Bishop of Canterbury and Eleanor Roosevelt (all the bellmen wanted to serve her because she gave $10 tips).
Gang figure Mickey Cohen gave Eden $10 tips just for crossing the lobby to buy a cigar. Cohen once invited Eden to dinner, an invitation he accepted on condition that they dine behind bullet-proof glass. Eden and his wife ate alone that night.
Eden described his work while standing off to the side of the desk in the Biltmore lobby. He told hotel tales with the verve and relish of a retired Army top kick telling war stories. But there is nothing retired about Willis Eden.
In the middle of a yarn about why he wears blue jeans and a Levi jacket to work (“I want to look like a bum so no one will hit me in the head”), two Japanese businessmen, each with a huge sample case, approached the desk.
“I got to get a truck,” the bellman said, and hustled off. In less than a minute he was back with a cart for the sample cases. He wheeled it up to the Japanese, stepped to the side, and bowed twice from the waist. “How do you do sir? How are you sir?” The guests bowed back, and Eden was on his way to making two more travelers comfortable.
