More Comforts Than Home : Trends: For those who can afford it, hotel living offers the basics of life--plus room service.

For a handful of lucky people, home is defined by 24-hour room service, clean sheets every day, daily maid and laundry service and someone to screen calls. It comes equipped with gourmet restaurants, gift shops, an opulent lobby and a concierge to book time on the golf course.

These are people who call L.A.’s plushest hotels their homes. While most can only dream about life as Eloise, Kay Thompson’s plucky heroine who lived at New York’s Plaza Hotel, some actually live the fantasy.

Actor Tony Curtis has been back and forth to the Bel-Air Hotel for 25 years, but says it’s been his “pretty permanent place” for the last 2 1/2 years when he’s in Los Angeles. (He also has a home in Hawaii.)

“I should have known it was prophetic,” he says, sitting in the hotel’s restaurant recently, “when I was having trouble at home with my marriages, I’d get a single room here. Little did I know that Mama Bel-Air wanted me more than anybody.”

The Bel-Air’s secluded location and tranquil terrain (swans dot the creek that runs through the property) make it especially appealing for high-profile guests who want to escape the limelight for a while. Previously owned by Caroline Rose Hunt, the hotel was sold last year for about $100 million to a Japanese investment group.

“What’s particularly appealing,” Curtis adds, “is the steadiness of service. You get spoiled living like that. When I get home to Hawaii, I don’t have anybody making my bed every day. When I’m here I use the bed and the telephone and the TV clicker. That I find the most valuable. And, if you examine it, that’s all you or I want--a change of sheets, telephone messages and the clicker. And a clean bathroom. It’s kind of silly to talk about these things, but these are the things that make life pleasant and happy. If more people who were recovering from drugs and bad marriages and unhappy relationships and bad karma had a clean bathroom and a clicker and a way to shut off the phone, I think everybody would be a lot happier.”

Curtis took advantage of the hotel’s solitude while recovering from drug and alcohol addiction years ago.

“I used it as a place where I wasn’t disturbed, where I was left to sleep and read,” he recalls. “I’d go from here to meetings and back to my room. But forget about recovering. Suppose you’re not feeling well for a week. You don’t need a $300-a-day room to be able to do what I’m doing. You could do this in a very inexpensive hotel.”

Curtis chooses different rooms at the Bel-Air, depending on how long he plans to stay. While the daily room rate begins at $245, he says “there’s a rate of some kind that I get. I don’t mean a corporate rate, but there is some benefit.”

He’s currently in the throes of buying a home in Bel-Air, because “I’m here so much and I have some goods I would like to be able to see. But,” he adds, “I could never give up this hotel. I could have the most beautiful mansion half a block from here and every other weekend you’ll find me here. I’d take one of those little rooms in the back and put the ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door. I’m enjoying my life. And I’m able to enjoy it, literally, because of the conveniences of a hotel.”

If taking up residence in the city’s plushest hotels sounds like paradise, why don’t more people trade their homes, apartments or condos to live in the true lap of luxury?

There’s the cost, for one, daunting even to the wealthy. Some hotels offer monthly or yearly leases that offer a discount from the daily rate, which at top hotels can start at $400 a night. But a lease, too, can be costly, even with all the pampering thrown in.

Other hotels, like the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, charge the daily rate to everyone. Its suites begin at $395 a night (that’s $144,175 a year) and go up to $3,000 a night.

Why not put that money toward some substantial property? “My business manager asks me why I don’t buy a condo,” says one hotel resident. “I tell him, ‘Forget it.’ If I lived with someone, I’d think about it, but I don’t want to be in a house all by myself.”

Another deterrent to taking up residence is the hotels themselves--few are encouraging permanent guests these days. When business is good, as it has been recently, hotels can make more money charging guests the daily room rate than they can offering long-term leases.

Most hotels have only a handful of permanent residents. The Biltmore Hotel is down to one full-time guest, the Beverly Wilshire has six, the Beverly Hills has four. Most bring their own furnishings and decorate their rooms to their own tastes.

Other accouterments can be requested from the hotel. According to Sheila O’Brien, public relations director of the Beverly Hills Hotel, “Guests can request specific kinds of pillows or a certain kind of bottled water. Someone might want only white tulips in their room.” One resident has his own landscaped Japanese garden.

The few who do live in hotels rhapsodize about the life style, never minding the transience or lack of space. Any long-term hotel resident can also recite the minute details of who bought the hotel from whom and for how much, the temperaments of the various hotel managers and how costly any renovations have been. They also agree that after awhile, the staff becomes like family.

For radio personality and social activist Casey Kasem, living in a hotel was a lifelong dream.

“I remember when I lived in Detroit as a young man, being downtown and looking at one of the hotels, saying, ‘One of these days I’m going to live in a luxury hotel.’ I liked the simplicity of it. And I like being around people, from the concierge to the girl who runs the elevator.”

The decision to move into the Regent Beverly Wilshire wasn’t something he and wife Jean, an actress, agonized over. “After we got married, we got the mansion in Bel-Air, which was expected of us,” Jean explains, “and all of a sudden we woke up, and made this arbitrary decision over a cup of coffee. We decided this big old house was kind of empty, and we were the youngest people in the neighborhood. Casey always wanted to live in a hotel, so I said, ‘Why don’t you do it? Life is so short, and if you’re fortunate to be able to do some of the things you dreamed about as a child, why not do it?’ ”

They moved their furnishings from their 26-room mansion to a 3,000-square-foot apartment at the Beverly Wilshire in the heart of Beverly Hills in July, 1986, where they stayed for 3 1/2 years, moving out three months ago to another house in the platinum triangle on 2.5 acres.

Jean totally redecorated the eight-room suite, hauling in their Oriental carpets and painting trompe l’oeil on the walls to make it more like home and less like a hotel.

Although they weren’t exactly cramped for space, the Kasems did have to scale down their life style to fit the Beverly Wilshire’s space.

“I like the feeling of having fewer material objects,” Casey admits. “With that feeling comes more freedom, for some reason. If there were a way to exist with the clothes on your back and a few essentials, I’d probably do that. I also liked the idea that when we walked away from the hotel, we didn’t have to worry about who’s going to take care of the place.”

Jean Kasem discovered another benefit beyond 24-hour room service. “The people-watching was incredible,” she says. “You can watch the networking of business deals, and watch would-be stars and stars who have made it and lost it and are trying to re-attain it, and entrepreneurs, and they’re all trying to work each other. You tend to think of the hotel being only for the ritzy crowd, but it’s really a cross-section of people who gravitate to the city for whatever reason. You also get to know the goings-on of the neighborhood. It’s a really tight little community in that area.”

Hotel living’s only downside, according to Jean Kasem, was the occasional lack of privacy. “To be honest,” she says, “sometimes a desk clerk would call up and just to be helpful, say, ‘Your groceries, your potato chips and yogurt are here.’ And there were times when I wanted to say, ‘What if there was something in there you shouldn’t have seen?’ You do tend to lose a little bit of privacy, but more often than not the comfort and convenience outweighed that.”

The Beverly Hills Hotel has been home to David Tebet, executive vice president of Carson Productions, for 16 years.

He decided to move in while he was at NBC. At the time, he was living at the Dorset Hotel in New York, and while out here on business he would stay at the Beverly Hills or at friends’ homes. When he moved here permanently the then-owner convinced him to move in.

The love affair hasn’t ended yet. “It’s beautiful here,” he says of the pink palace, sold by businessman Marvin Davis to the Sultan of Brunei in 1987 for $185 million.

“There are flower gardens; the food is marvelous; you can’t beat the room service; you’ve got the pool, cabanas and there are always people around. When you come up the driveway and see the sign, to me, that’s coming home. There is no other home for me.

“When you’re alone,” says Tebet, who is divorced and lives in a two-room suite, “I think living in hotels is one of the great ideas. If you don’t have a family, why would you want to be in a house all by yourself? Here all you have to do is call the front desk to lock the place up.”

If there is a grande dame of hotel residents, it is Thelma Becker, who this month celebrates her 50th year at the Biltmore Hotel downtown. Becker also can’t imagine calling anyplace else home. She relishes her one-room abode, but calls the hotel’s opulent lobby her living room.

“Everyone--especially men--says, ‘Why do you want to live in a hotel?’ ” says Becker over coffee in one of the hotel’s sitting rooms. “I don’t know any different. My family traveled a lot when I was young and we never spent summers at home. We were always going somewhere, so I got used to hotels.”

That continued after college when she went to work for Barbizon Lingerie, constantly traveling the continent. She finally landed in Los Angeles and decided to make her residence the Biltmore.

“It was the only hotel (downtown), and this was the hotel for conventions, and we had all the market shows here,” she recalls.

Although she is now retired, Becker, who never married, still keeps up with the latest trends by visiting California Mart and nearby stores. She also sees friends for lunch, does a lot of reading and acts as the hotel’s unofficial greeter and historian. In recent years she’s become the hotel’s resident celebrity as well, granting interviews to papers and television and radio stations around the country.

“If I see someone who looks lost I ask them if I can help them find something. No, I don’t want to move out. I’m a city girl. I like to be downtown because you have access to everything. I wish to god they’d get the subway finished. And these panhandlers are all over the place. But a lot of them, they’re proud of me. They say, ‘Hi, Miss Biltmore! When’s your next TV show?’ ”