Polo Lounge at 50--It’s Still the Place to Be Paged : Landmark: Careers have been made and unmade over the Dutch apple pancakes. Considering the star power, $5 for orange juice is a bargain.

If the walls of the Polo Lounge could talk, a lot of people would be on the phone to their lawyers.

Fifty years old today, the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel is as much stage and office as restaurant. In a town where breakfast is often a power play, careers have been made and unmade over the Polo Lounge’s famous Dutch apple pancakes. Errol Flynn caroused here. Yves Montand romanced Marilyn Monroe here. Nixon aides John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman learned of Watergate here. Julia Phillips gave interviews here for her venomous autobiography, “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.”

At the Polo Lounge the phones are more important than the food. The action starts at 7 a.m. when the industry’s early risers ask morning maitre d’ Bernice Philbin for one of the choice booths in the Loggia, the restaurant’s inner room. At lunchtime, one of the three phone-equipped booths in the Green Room, opposite the bar, is the place to be.

Rumor has it that some of the town’s major power eaters have defected and are breaking their bagels (toasted, no butter) at the Four Seasons these days. But the Polo Lounge continues to attract the rich, the famous and all those who know that $5 for a glass of orange juice is little enough to pay for a good seat at the best improvisational theater in town.

Dominick Dunne, the novelist and magazine writer whose recurrent theme is power, calls it a magical place.

“I’m kind of a voyeur in life, and I always love to watch the big deals that are going on there,” he says. Dunne, who has been making reservations at the Polo Lounge for 30 years, has a favorite table with a panoramic view, and he has a favorite meal--lunch. But he also likes the atmosphere of intrigue that suffuses the place at night.

“I’ve just seen everyone in the world in there,” Dunne says. He recalls that he missed by minutes one of the more raucous incidents in the lounge’s history--in 1966, he was a hair too late to see a Frank Sinatra crony bean art collector Frederick Weisman with an ashtray. “I would have used it in a book if I had seen it, I’ll tell you,” Dunne says.

The Polo Lounge opened July 11, 1941. Previously called El Jardin, it was named for Darryl Zanuck, Walt Disney, Spencer Tracy and the other polo-playing buddies of then-owner Hernando Courtwright. It was not long before being paged in the Polo Lounge became almost as much a part of the Hollywood legend as the casting-room couch, although, Philbin insists, “really, really important people don’t want to be paged.”

The Polo Lounge has three maitre d’s in the course of the day: Philbin at breakfast, Emilio Trejo at lunch and Nino Osti in the evening. A handsome woman of a certain age, Philbin has been on the job for almost 40 years. She recalls that the hotel management promoted her at a time when upscale service usually meant a host, not a hostess. “You saw very few women who were at the door.”

In her tailored clothes and sensible shoes, Philbin is part diplomat, part traffic controller. “We get some of the most important people in the world, business-wise,” she says. “You have to know who not to seat next to whom.”

Philbin keeps abreast of the changing fortunes of her clientele by reading the trade papers, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal daily. Hotel guests and regulars have dibs on the best booths and tables. Although she has an exquisite sensitivity to rank and status, Philbin doesn’t banish regulars to restaurant Siberia when they experience such professional setbacks as being fired as head of a major studio.

“When somebody’s lost their job or been replaced, we treat them as if they were just as important as they used to be,” she says. “They’re going to get another job, probably better than the one they had before, and they’re going to remember.”

When Philbin began, there was a strict dress code. Women wearing slacks were barred. Marlene Dietrich, who rarely wore anything else, was once told she would not be served unless she changed. She checked out of the hotel instead. “Now the dress code is more relaxed,” says Philbin. “We have a lot of people in the music business, and they are not exactly fashion plates.”

Guests in shorts are seated on the open-air Patio, which is dominated by an 86-year-old pepper tree. People in flip-flops need not apply.

The Polo Lounge coddles its clientele, says Philbin, special-ordering grits, kippers and other non-menu items when guests and regulars request them. And the staff makes it a point to remember the specific likes and dislikes of returnees. “I once met a man in the lobby, and I couldn’t remember his name, but I sure knew how he liked his eggs.”

If only to make sure that high-profile diners come back, the Polo Lounge tries to protect them from unwelcome intrusions. Autograph seekers are discreetly discouraged, not always successfully. “Sometimes people get up and go up to a celebrity’s table, and there’s not much you can do about it,” says Philbin. “You can’t knock them down.”

Like other hotel employees that last, Philbin is closemouthed about what she has seen and heard during her decades at the door of the Polo Lounge. There are confessors with looser lips.

Philbin wouldn’t dream of tattling, she says. “I could probably write a book and never eat breakfast in this town again, but I would never do that.”