Park Excellence : He’s Been the Driving Force at Posh Hotel for 50 Years

The tall man in the green uniform has greeted moguls and movie stars, presidents and poseurs.

For 50 years, Leon Smith has stood under the awning of the Beverly Hills Hotel, smiling at celebrities, wanna-bes and the merely well-to-do before temporarily taking their automobiles off their hands.

Technically, Smitty, as he is known, owns and operates the hotel’s parking concession. But, more important, Smitty is the imposing embodiment of the legendary pink hotel and, as such, has been a witness to Hollywood history. He has seen it all, from the studio system’s decline to the fluctuating fortunes of hundreds of stars.

Now semi-retired, Smitty was present in 1941 at the creation of the Polo Lounge, when the name of the hotel’s bar was changed from El Jardin at the request of Will Rogers, Spencer Tracy and the other equestrians who slaked their post-match thirst there.

Smitty was there when Errol Flynn stole John Barrymore’s body from a local mortuary and brought it back to the hotel so the Great Profile could attend his own boozy send-off bash. Smitty was manning the hotel door when Yves Montand rendezvoused with Marilyn Monroe, when John F. Kennedy sported impolitically with Judith Campbell Exner, one-time girlfriend of former Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana, and when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton screamed and broke dishes in a hotel bungalow.

Not that you’ll hear any of these juicy stories from Smitty. He didn’t last 50 years at the Beverly Hills Hotel by being a blabbermouth.

Smitty believes that guests of the hotel, famous or not, have the right to privacy. Even deceased guests have survivors whose feelings can be hurt.

Smitty’s is equal-opportunity reticence. He doesn’t even like to talk about himself, which is why he reluctantly agrees to an interview every 20 years or so. And whatever the source of his discretion, it certainly isn’t fear of losing his job. Writer Garson Kanin, who has been staying at the Beverly Hills even longer than Smitty has been gracing its portals, once described him as the only millionaire in America who works in uniform every day. Smitty laughs but doesn’t deny he is a very wealthy man.

Perhaps he is simply shy, surprising in a man who greets people for a living. When Britain’s Princess Margaret visited the hotel with then-husband Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Smitty was asked by reporters what it was like to welcome royalty. “I said we try to treat everybody like royalty,” he recalls, “but I was nervous as heck.”

Despite Smitty’s confounded tact, a few facts emerge. Born in Iowa 67 years ago, Smitty hitchhiked to California during the Depression.

California was “the Golden Land of Opportunity,” he recalls. “When your back’s to the wall, there’s no place to march but forward.”

He finished his education at Beverly Hills High School and in 1940 began parking cars for Tanner Motor Livery, which then had the concession at the hotel. “It was a job,” says Smitty, who never intended to stay and still appears pleasantly surprised at how well it turned out. The hotel, which had struggled to survive the 1930s, prospered during World War II and so did he.

During Smitty’s early years at the hotel, it was owned by a group that included Harry Warner, Loretta Young and Irene Dunne (it is now owned by the Sultan of Brunei). “The women wore hats and gloves,” Smitty recalls of that era.

“They looked so damned elegant.” The cars, too, were swank. “There were lots of Packards, Pierce Arrows and Cadillacs,” he says.

One automobile particularly impressed him. “The first Rolls-Royce I ever drove was Gloria Swanson’s,” he says.

Not every celebrity had a fancy car. Movie mogul/industrialist Howard Hughes, who was always eccentric and became more so over the 30 years he lived at the hotel, often showed up in a rented Chevrolet. The people who worked for Hughes, Smitty says, would arrive in their Bentleys, Rollses and Cadillacs, and then climb into the boss’ modest rent-a-car.

Once Hughes borrowed Smitty’s car. He “disappeared for two days with it. You just did those things for those people,” Smitty observes. “This guy was a real customer. “

Today, Smitty drives a Cadillac, one of the few cars he can easily get his 6-foot-4 frame in and out of.

In the course of 50 years, Smitty has become an expert on the psychology of car ownership. He knows, for instance, that drivers typically look closely only at their side of the car. Thus, when one of Smitty’s drivers delivers a newly washed auto to a guest at the hotel, Smitty counsels the attendant to park the car out of the sun, which is liable to spotlight existing dings on the passenger’s side that the owner was previously unaware of.

Parking cars may not be brain surgery, but it is sufficiently risky to warrant Smitty’s spending in excess of $100,000 annually for insurance. He also tries to hire friends and relatives of people he knows “so you have somebody to go back to” if something goes wrong.

“It’s exciting, I’m telling you,” Smitty says of the profession he has practiced for half a century. “I should have kept a diary. Everybody from Mark Spitz to Sammy Davis Jr., they’re all here for some reason or another. It’s like their club.”

Not that Smitty caters only to the prominent guest. To do so would be bad business as well as bad form. “You can’t care for just the famous people,” he says. “You’ve got to have a lot of regular people, who are just as wonderful.”

Smitty is loath to single out favorite clients for fear of hurting other nice people, but, as a devout golfer, he acknowledges that Arnold Palmer has a “charisma about him.” Smitty also likes Joe Namath. The former football player was a superstar when he first came to the hotel, recalls Smitty, who was prepared not to like him. But Namath won Smitty over by being “a class guy.”

Namath, Smitty recalls, “comes out and says, ‘Good morning, sir,’ to you, and he does it to this day. That’s the way he was raised.”

Through the years Smitty has made it a point not to socialize with the people he meets on the job. One of the rare exceptions, he says, was accepting Ed Sullivan’s invitation to attend his daughter’s wedding--she lived at the hotel while attending UCLA.

Smitty, who lives with his wife in Encino, retired last year for several months but is now back on the job part time.

“I thought I had a lot of things to do but you do miss the people--the nice ones,” says Smitty, who now plays golf four days a week but dons his green uniform again most Saturdays. He also has his investments to keep him busy. “You don’t get rich by working,” Smitty admits. Rather, he made his money the California way--in real estate.