STYLE / DESIGN : The Return of the Pink Palace : What Becomes a Legend Most? For the Beverly Hills Hotel, a Multimillion-Dollar Face Lift, Lots of Banana Leaves and, of Course, the Polo Lounge.
At 16, when such things mattered, I thought the Beverly Hills Hotel was cool. This was a place older than the city itself. Located halfway between Los Angeles and the sea, the Pink Palace was a place to go to feel a part of something, where seminal events in my life took place. I’m sure for the same reasons that kids in New York went to the Plaza’s Oak Room Bar, we went to the Beverly Hills Hotel. My senior prom was held in the Rodeo Room, I partied in the palm-shrouded bungalows and drank chocolate milkshakes at the amoeba-shaped counter of the Fountain Coffee Shop downstairs. In a landscape of multiplying mini-malls and chain restaurants, the Beverly Hills Hotel felt like my home away from home.
I remember the first time I was allowed entry to the Polo Lounge. It came a year after an embarrassing attempt to fool the maitre d’ with my rented tuxedo and fake ID. I was a freshman at UCLA. I felt a guilty pleasure when that same maitre d’ faintly smiled and nodded stiffly for me to follow his lead across the plush carpet for what seemed like miles. Sinking into one of the giant green booths, I finally dared to look around me at the swank crowd, the fat green pillars, the bubble-gum-pink tablecloths topped with matching pink vases and rosebuds. Even then, I thought the slightly musty lobby, those icy greyhounds and martinis, the pink swizzle sticks and private phones, seemed stuck in another era. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I felt comfortable, the way I do when I’m wearing the battered Tretorn sneakers that I’ve had since 10th grade.
My car back then was an old BMW, and like the hotel, it had seen better days. I drove it faster than I should have, and as a result, I had one too many collisions. Temporary remedies were applied--a little bodywork and new spark plugs for the car, a fresh coat of paint for the lobby and new upholstery for the Polo Lounge. My car and the hotel may have been a little worse for wear, but both held a past for me. I didn’t want them changed. That is, until the night I drove up to that familar green-striped overhang and took a ticket from the valet. How could I have known that, while I was inside with friends, outside my car had spontaneously burst into flames? The attendants had put out the fire (discreetly, no doubt) and waited until I was ready to leave to break the news to me. That great old car sat in the hotel lot, hood blackened, for two weeks before I could tow it away.
When I could afford to, I bought a state-of-the-art BMW. It had power windows. The air conditioning worked. I changed the oil every 3,000 miles instead of every 300. And while I missed my old car sometimes, the new car was, well, better.
Eight years ago, a company controlled by the Sultan of Brunei, maybe the richest man in the world, purchased the Beverly Hills Hotel. There were rumors that he would use it as a private residence or that it would be razed. When the hotel finally closed its doors for a “major restoration,” I was sure that the Pink Palace, built in 1912, would go the way of so many places before it. After all, Kiddieland is now the Beverly Center. The Picwood Theater is the Westside Pavilion. The Virgin Megastore sits on the old site of Schwab’s. And now, even Chasen’s is no more. I imagined a restored facade, but I knew the interior would be irrevocably altered. The Polo Lounge and the happy mishmash of architectural styles and the pool with those cabanas were going to disappear forever.
Two and a half years and more than $100 million dollars later, the face lift is finished. Although the hotel won’t reopen to the public until June 4, I managed a sneak peek. Somehow the place isn’t quite the way I remember it. The dowdy but lovable lobby is now awash in boudoir shades of apricot, its curvy ceilings sparkling with gilt. The massive cut-crystal chandeliers wear lights shaped like rosebuds. The glitzy new Tea Lounge is a curvaceous mini-balcony decorated to a Fred-and-Ginger froth with oversized peach velvet sofas and chairs, swags of peach sheers and a gold baby grand painted with sparrows and magnolias. Yet the Paul Williams-designed Polo Lounge, with its plush power booths, is still the color of money. The Fountain Coffee Shop, with its banana-leaf-patterned wallpaper and Formica counter, hasn’t changed a bit. (I don’t know if the milkshakes will ever be as thick.) The bungalows are stylishly updated. And the pink stucco exterior is still pink. The whole glamorous place appears to have been fashioned by a set designer asked to re-create the Beverly Hills Hotel of our collective imagination.
Even those of us who are too young to have spotted Katharine Hepburn poolside have learned the value of landmarks that remind us where--and who--we are. The Pink Palace is back, and when we pass through its gates or glimpse it off Sunset, we’ll know we’re home.
