Post-Op Hotel: A New Wrinkle in Cosmetic Surgery Recovery

The double doors with their panes of etched glass are discreetly, but securely, locked at all times. Guests arriving at this Beverly Hills hotel do not set foot on its marble threshold but are whisked by limousine through a subterranean garage to an entrance shielded from public view. An elevator then delivers them to within feet of the sanctity of their dimly lighted rooms.

Le Petit Ermitage’s cachet rests to no small extent on its reputation as a place where one is not seen. Confidentiality is served up along with the croissants to a clientele with two commonalities: They have a healthy bank account and they have just had cosmetic surgery.

“If you’re used to nice hotels, you wouldn’t put yourself in a Howard Johnson’s to recover from surgery,” said a 38-year-old professional woman, wife and mother of five who booked a room, sight unseen, at $250 a day for three days after having her face done last month.

She knew the reputation of Le Petit’s mother hotel, the elegant L’Ermitage next door. And, she reasoned, while it’s “an expensive little proposition,” even to one who has just laid out thousands for cosmetic surgery, it’s “a whole lot cheaper than if you didn’t have insurance and stayed in a hospital.”

For her, peace and tranquillity were a large part of the lure, a three-day respite from the pressures of teen-agers and a 2-year-old.

During her stay at Le Petit Ermitage she permitted two visitors, her husband and her mother. When her husband came for dinner, he ordered from L’Ermitage’s regular room service menu while she chose from a special menu of easy-to-chew items prepared for guests at Le Petit Ermitage. Both meals were served in the privacy of her room, on fine crystal and linen.

Le Petit Ermitage has a nicely appointed public salon but it is seldom used. “The people that are staying there very much want to be left alone,” this woman said, observing that many cosmetic surgery procedures are at first “not real pleasant looking.” (Even on the fourth day, she said, her 2-year-old was “frightened” by the sight of her. She insists, however, that just being without makeup makes her frightening enough.)

Le Petit Ermitage--dubbed by one observer “The Face-Lift Arms”--started life more than half a century ago as the Burton Hotel, a walk-up hostelry with baths down the corridor. In its first reincarnation, it was rebuilt and opened about three years ago as a less expensive annex to the already well-established five-star L’Ermitage.

Principal owner Severyn Ashkenazy explained in a recent interview that when “the captains of industry, the superstars” checked into the all-suite L’Ermitage, it was usually with an entourage and “they didn’t necessarily want to put them up in a suite.”

Then, Ashkenazy said, “We realized more and more people were coming to sort of hide at L’Ermitage” after having their faces done, installing a private duty nurse in an adjacent suite “and, of course, spending an absolute fortune doing that.”

In short, he said, “We realized that there was a market.” With the infrastructure of the parent L’Ermitage, and the location on the Eastern edge of Beverly Hills. It “seemed a natural,” he decided. And it is doing “well,” said Ashkenazy, many of whose guests are referred by their surgeons. “The doctors like it,” he said. “It’s on their way home, and they can visit more than one patient.” And there is complimentary valet parking.

Music to His Ears

Its financial success is music to the ears of Ashkenazy, whose Ashkenazy Enterprises filed for bankruptcy protection early in 1986, a turn of events he blames partly on overbuilding for the 1984 summer Olympics (his 10 hotels, concentrated in West Hollywood, include Le Bel Age and Le Mondrian). But Ashkenazy said the company has now reached, or is close to agreement with all its lenders for new long-term financing that will enable Ashkenazy Enterprises to reorganize and keep all of its hotels.

Le Petit Ermitage is not the only facility of its kind in the greater Los Angeles area but it is, by consensus, the most prestigious, pampering a maximum of 16 patient-guests with amenities such as cable television, terry robes, 24-hour prescription delivery and limousines to transport them to their doctors’ offices for bandage changes.

For these, guests pay $275 per night per person ($375 for a suite, single occupancy, or $475 for guests sharing a suite after his-and-hers surgeries). Prices include three meals and nursing services.

Ashkenazy says that occasionally someone who hasn’t been near a scalpel checks in “just for two to three days at peace,” away from ringing telephones and doorbells. But most guests have had their faces or bodies tucked and trimmed and, he boasts, “Some of the greatest movie personalities in the world” have come through.

‘Deserving of the Best’

And, he added, “These people think very highly of themselves. They feel deserving of the best.”

Part of the lure, he said, is that they are “virtually guaranteed anonymity,” known only to a staff who “know they would be immediately dismissed if they so much as suggest who’s staying there.”

He points out, too, that, unlike in a hospital, there are no sick people at Le Petit, only people temporarily indisposed. And compared to a hospital, he said, his hostelry is “a bargain, an absolute bargain.”

Could it exist outside of hedonistic Southern California? Well, he acknowledged, Le Petit is drawing from a market of “people who are used to spending a great deal of money on body care. It used to be you were affluent when you had a psychiatrist as part of your regimen. Today a cosmetic surgeon has become part of your circle.” (There are more than 500 board-certified plastic surgeons practicing in California.)

Is there something just a bit decadent about a hotel to cater to this market? “Oh, no,” said Ashkenazy. We are living in a very daring, advanced society. This is a laboratory. What we do here today will be done 50 years from now in other places.”

He shrugged. “Some people laugh at it, but so did the French laugh at hamburgers after the Second World War.”

A Beverly Hills businessman who’d been a guest at the hotel for four nights the previous week had returned for an interview, arranged on the promise of anonymity. Removing his dark glasses, he revealed two black eyes from his face lift and eye job.

At 66, he said, he had double motivation for having cosmetic surgery. “I had watched a tape of my son’s wedding,” he said, “and I didn’t like the way I looked. Besides, I’m vain.” And, he added, “I have a beautiful young wife.”

His wife of six years, who’d come with him this day, had joined him in his suite for dinner each evening during his stay. She is “a little squeamish,” he said, and this was the perfect compromise. Besides, she is a professional woman and he didn’t want her to stay home to nurse him.

At Le Petit, she said, “I felt I could crawl into bed with him and comfort him. You can’t do that in a hospital.”

Like most guests, he had arrived, still a bit groggy, at the hotel directly from his doctor’s office. His operation was strictly secret: “I only told our sons and my secretary.”

Immediately after cosmetic facial surgery, he said, “You don’t even want to look at yourself. It is traumatic. You look like hell. I’ve seen better heads on cabbages.”

He gave rave reviews to the food and to the service and to the staff, who were never to busy to fluff his pillow or “listen to my lousy jokes and laugh.”

The care and pampering of Le Petit Ermitage’s guests is the responsibility of Carol La Fourcade, a registered nurse and a state-licensed cosmetologist. Her credentials are impeccable: Before taking the job last August, 21 months after the hotel opened, she was a surgical nurse for a noted Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.

On the average, she said, the hotel receives 20 new guests each week, “maybe 30% of them men.” The latter are, she added, “by far” the better patients--”Men rarely complain about anything.”

La Fourcade tries to keep a ratio of one nurse to every three patients. There are few medical crises, she said, but patients “need a lot of reassurance. It’s very scary. They have usually done the maximum to their faces. One little goof and they’re ruined. They need to know that what they’ve done is OK, and it’s going to be OK.”

‘An Ego About Their Looks’

She chooses for her staff women “who do have an ego about their looks . . . the type of women who would consider preservation of their looks” via plastic surgery. She herself is one of these women. A former model, she said, “I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute to do it myself.”

It goes beyond vanity, she believes: “It’s the pretty person who is accepted. We’re a society, fortunately or unfortunately, that’s very youth-oriented.”

As she took a visitor upstairs, she was greeted by a young man with plastic tubing strapped around his middle and draining blood into a pair of plastic containers the approximate size and shape of Mickey Mouse’s ears. His face was unbruised, unbandaged. One of the hotel’s growing number of post-liposuction guests, he had recently had a few excess inches sucked from his abdomen.

The rooms, in soft pastels, have lace curtains, art on the walls and plastic basins near the beds, in case a guest is feeling woozy. On check-in night, a nurse takes each guest’s blood pressure every four hours, watching for any negative reaction from general anesthesia.

As in all hotels, some guests--rarely the celebrities--go out of their way to be difficult. La Fourcade has never had to ask anyone to leave but, she admits, “It certainly has crossed my mind.” The unhappy ones, she says, are usually those who had the surgery for the wrong reasons, often in a last-ditch effort to hold a marriage together. “As younger women use having a baby,” she said, “older women (and men) use a face lift.”