THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Always on Stage : For decades, the Beverly Hills Hotel <i> was </i> Hollywood. Think mega deals, trysts, parties. After a face lift, can it again be a beacon for the beautiful?

In the husk of a New York winter, it must have warmed the dreams of businessmen: the fantasy poolside conference room that was the essence of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Indeed, this was what all the money-making was for, the chance to make that money beside an 80-degree pool shaded by birds of paradise and the spirit of Katharine Hepburn diving in fully clothed after six sets of tennis. And what more stylish way to sign an elephantine deal than within earshot of the chink of champagne glasses at the Polo Lounge?

“The hotel is not architecture so much as it is stage set. It’s a place for great events to take place,” says architect Edward Friedrichs of Gensler and Associates, which helped design the hotel’s just-completed $100-million renovation.

Of course, the Beverly Hills Hotel was also Hollywood’s clubhouse, and the entertainment industry’s idea of a great event is a mega-deal; its brand of sentiment, the dewy-eyed memory of signing this big act or that huge star. The hotel pool was the backdrop of Norma Shearer’s career-launching words to industry wanna-be Bob Evans: “Are you an actor?” The Polo Lounge refreshed the players in Charles Bluhdorn’s acquisition of Paramount Pictures for Gulf & Western.

“Nobody is allowed to fail within a two-mile radius of the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Gore Vidal once said.

Unless, of course, the failure is of historic proportion: John Mitchell learned of the botched Watergate burglary while watching television in his Beverly Hills Hotel room.

Such high rollers generally demand amenities like running water, a chancy luxury before the renovation given a plumbing system that had been sputtering along since the Beverly Hills opened in 1912.

“A lot of people in New York I knew stopped staying there because they would complain about the bathrooms,” says longtime regular Joan Didion. “ ‘It didn’t have this’ and ‘It didn’t have that,’ and it didn’t.”

But the 4 1/2-year renovation presented a delicate challenge to its design team: How do you upgrade creature comforts and still retain the singular sense of history embodied by the elegantly frayed stage set of the old Beverly Hills Hotel? How do you maintain the fragile marriage of pricey pleasures and mystique for a world-class hotel that not only helped put the Beverly Hills into Beverly Hills, but preceded it? Would anyone believe Marilyn Monroe slept here before central air conditioning was installed?

“It’s a fine line between capturing something that feels like an old hotel and the expectations of a contemporary guest,” Friedrichs says.

The Beverly Hills is betting it can dance down that line, and it celebrated its reopening Saturday after two years of planning and 2 1/2 more of construction with a $1,000-a-plate benefit for the Academy Foundation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Hollywood was expected to turn out in force to check out its old hostelry and dine on venison and smoked swordfish. The curious were to have included Frank Sinatra, Martin Landau, Dennis Hopper, Steve Martin and Debbie Reynolds.

What they found was that some things were better left alone, or merely reupholstered along memory’s lines: the iconic Polo Lounge, the Fountain Coffee Shop and the banana-leaf wallpaper designed by Don Loper and reproduced by the Los Angeles company that has been making it for 55 years. Of course, the Pink Palace, as it was nicknamed by Hollywood Reporter columnist George Christy, will be ever thus, repainted “Beverly Hills Pink” with color computer-matched to old paint samples. The Beverly Hills Planning Commission required that those elements stay the same after public hearings.

“The neighbors came and the people who lived here for a while associate this place with most of the major events in their lives--when they were courting, when they got married, when there was a bar mitzvah, a coming-out party, everything from their first date,” says Ruth Nadel, the city’s director of planning and community development. “It was very important to preserve those aspects that--the older word would have been gestalt, now they say ambience --feeling the hotel had for people.”

So the faithful will still have their Polo Lounge comfort fare, the Dutch Apple pancakes and guacamole. But while purists savor the past, the hotel is also mindful of the culinary present and the competition forged by such nearby power restaurants as Morton’s and Eclipse. Back to back with the Polo Lounge is the new Polo Grill, an undulating expanse of ribbon mahogany, leaf-embroidered booths and Deco detailing designed to feel like an ocean liner from the ‘30s.

In fact, much of the renovation is geared to take on the luxury-hotel competition that has sprung up since the Beverly Hills was built with the field to itself. The sorry bathrooms are yesterday’s news, expanded to accommodate double Grecian marble sinks, a telephone, a television and motorized draperies. Bigger bathrooms meant fewer guest rooms, which have been whittled in number from 252 to 194. Amenities for rooms, which start at $275, include three telephones, a plain-paper fax machine, computer, safe, butler-service button and Ralph Lauren bed linens. Top of the line is the $3,000 Presidential Suite, which boasts a private entrance, commercially equipped kitchen, chef and butler, two shower stalls and treadmill.

Also new are the Citrus and Crystal Rose gardens and the peach-colored, Deco-flavored Tea Lounge, featuring a gold leaf-covered Steinway painted with tiny birds by local artist Jeff Valenson.

Part of the new Beverly Hills’ goal is to redefine itself as a lure for the benefit crowd. It’s vying with the Century Plaza and the Beverly Hilton for the functions that had drifted away from its hopelessly quaint but inadequate meeting rooms. An entire wing was reconstructed for events, and the peach Deco Crystal Ballroom was reconfigured to accommodate 225 more guests than before--650 inside as well as 650 in the outer bar area. Before they dance beneath a massive 18-foot chandelier of crystal roses imported from Romano, Italy, guests will arrive , thanks to a new curving Gensler staircase that deposits them there in style.

“Our goal was really to maintain the legend of this hotel . . . to bring it back to the 20th Century, to make sure we were able to accommodate the clientele, as well as to compete with our competition,” says the hotel’s polished CEO and general manager, Kerman Beriker.

In the decade of downsizing, that tall order certainly goes against the business grain. But then the buck stops at one of the richest men in the world, Hassanal Bolkiah, the Sultan of Brunei, who keeps such a low profile that hotel staff say he has never stepped foot in the hotel. They also go to great pains to specify that the hotel is owned by Sajahtera Inc., a subsidiary of the Brunei Investment Agency, which also owns the Dorchester Hotel in London. The agency is owned by the Ministry of Finance. Which, in turn, leads back to the sultan?

“Make your own judgment,” the Swiss-born and -trained Beriker says with a clipped smile. “We just deal with the investment agency. That’s all I can say, really.”

Regardless, the sultan’s heavy tab is one that few could hoist. Added to the $185 million bill for buying the hotel in 1987, the renovation brings his investment to more than $285 million.

“This is one of those trophy properties,” says hotel consultant Scott Paschall, whose firm, PKF Consulting, advised on the restoration. “You don’t necessarily look at the return on the investment. It’s extremely difficult if not impossible at the $300-million level.

“It’s just one of those things where there may be two or three buyers in the world that might purchase that kind of property, while there may not be the annual return. [But] someone could come along in eight, 10 years and pay what the sultan has paid for it. It’s an ego play.”

Still, money doesn’t buy love, and the renovation is already drawing mixed reviews. Architectural critic Leon Whiteson chastised the designers for a bland aesthetic and failure to re-imagine the hotel in line with L.A.’s mission to reinvent the future.

“The Beverly Hills Hotel invented Beverly Hills kitsch, which is a mixture of . . . the old mission revival and touches of Art Deco, Art Nouveau and a bit of that wonderful vulgarity that is only Beverly Hills--empire chairs and chaise longues, things like that,” Whiteson says.

“So they have restored it, but I wonder if it really still flies. . . . It’s trying to be classy kitsch, but that’s an oxymoron. There’s something rather bloodless about it, and I wonder if it really doesn’t have that kind of attraction for a younger crowd.”

Architectural photographer Tim Street-Porter predicted that the design community would balk at the renovation.

“I was horrified by it,” he said. “Walking around I felt that the consultant was Zsa Zsa Gabor. . . . There are people who feel it was one of the best buildings in L.A. from that period. It was stylish and unique and quite wonderful. More sophisticated designers would have recognized this.

“They couldn’t have done a better job of sabotaging [late ‘40s hotel architect] Paul Williams’ work if they tried. The green and the pink, which were the signature colors, have been subtly changed into Zsa Zsa peach. The green isn’t quite the right green and the pink isn’t quite the right pink. And all that froufrou interior has completely ruined the spirit of the old hotel.”

But Jamie Wolfe, an urban preservationist and co-founder of the West Hollywood Urban Conservation League, applauded the designers for preserving the hotel’s essence.

“This probably feels now much more the way it felt when the hotel was new,” Wolfe says. “That’s a very interesting challenge, because people’s memories of something being at the tail end of its life had a lot to do with decay and frayedness and the kind of trade-off between sprucing it up and having it still seem decayed.

“I don’t know whether you can do that, but it seems to me that this seems pretty faithful to the feeling you might originally have had when things were freshly done here. It’s not the same experience of the Beverly Hills Hotel circa 1989, but it’s probably a pretty close experience to the Beverly Hills circa 1949.”

Of course, the key question is, can the Beverly Hills summon back the hotel diaspora, which scattered to the Four Seasons, the Peninsula, Drai’s and Cafe Roma during the past couple of Beverly Hills Hotel-free years?

Some regulars are counting the days until the reopening, among them Zsa Zsa Gabor, who signed her first film contract, for “Moulin Rouge” (1952), in the Polo Lounge. “We were so upset when the Polo Lounge closed,” she says. “It’s Hollywood completely. I’m sure everybody is going to go back.”

Rock manager Arnold Stiefel long ago reserved his pink wrought-iron seat for a 2:30 lunch today in the Fountain Coffee Shop.

“It looms like the writing in ‘Ben Hur,’ June 4, absolutely,” Stiefel says. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything. I’ve made some wonderful deals there. It’s a very good luck atmosphere. That’s where I signed Guns N’ Roses. [The waitresses] were in shock at all those people with things in their nose. I think it took the coffee shop six months to recover.”

But some observers wonder whether the reupholstered past can nurture the future.

“It’s like Chasen’s,” says longtime Beverly Hills publicist Joan Luther. “I’m afraid that day has gone. You’re not going to see Sandra Bullock and Bruce Willis sitting there.”

Others are waiting to see whether preservation efforts manage to encompass the intangible--mystique.

“I’m going to go back like everybody else will, just to see what will happen,” says publicist Lee Solters, who represented the hotel in 1986 under former owner Marvin Davis’ watch. “If I go back and nobody of note is there, why should I go back? Because I’m disciplined in making the rounds of going to places where it will do me some good.”

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The Beverly Hills Hotel was always intended to be the center of its universe. It was built in the middle of lima bean fields in 1912, two years before Beverly Hills itself was incorporated. The idea was “to make a there there,” architect Friedrichs says, to attract property buyers for flagging lot sales. Oilman Burton Green built it for $500,000 and named it after his home in Beverly Farms, Mass.

But while the Beverly Hills’ first address was noted as “halfway between Los Angeles and the sea”--nowhere, to be precise-- somewhere sprang up around it, and the 13-acre site was eventually able to surf its assets: its combination of resort elan and its central location at Sunset Boulevard and Rodeo Drive.

The hotel spent its youth in white gloves, cultivating a genteel, elderly clientele. That image began to change when Chicagoan Hugh Leighten bought it in 1928 for $1.5 million. The hotel began to court Hollywood, and when Greta Garbo wanted to be alone in 1932, she holed up in a hotel bungalow. Clark Gable checked in to dodge the press after separating from wife Ria.

By the war years, Hollywood didn’t merely hide out in the hotel, it owned it. In 1941, according to the hotel, Bank of America executive Hernando Courtright, a bon vivant and descendant of the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez given to serapes and Shantung suits, put together a group of buyers including Loretta Young, Irene Dunne and Harry Warner.

In those days, the bar was daintily called El Jardin, which had a je ne sais quoi somewhat out of tune with its hard-drinking denizens, W.C. Fields and John Barrymore. Courtright re-christened it the Polo Lounge when socialite and polo player Charlie Wrightsman turned up with his team’s silver trophy bowl, which was stored behind the bar. The legend grew in luster when polo players Will Rogers and Darryl Zanuck dropped in after their matches in Pacific Palisades.

In the early 1940s, when Katharine Hepburn was playing no-nonsense women of the year, her real-life role as Spencer Tracy’s mistress found her in far more vulnerable straits at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Tracy lived. Other guests would find her coiled up asleep outside his locked door. Tracy would let no one in while he was stewing himself in a case of Irish whiskey.

In 1942, Howard Hughes began an on-and-off 30-year stay. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, he laid year-round claim to four bungalows, two suites and two rooms. One bungalow was for himself; another for his wife, Jean Peters; the third bungalow, suites and rooms were for his bodyguards and guests, and the fourth bungalow housed the dusty blueprints for the Spruce Goose.

Hughes also savored a rare taste for roast beef--he liked to order sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and have them delivered inside a certain tree in the hotel garden.

No problem at the Beverly Hills, which was steeped in Courtright’s enduring philosophy of hotel service, “Mi Casa, Su Casa.”

“He never had hotel training, so he always worked from the guest’s point of view,” says Helen Chaplin, later Courtright’s assistant at the Beverly Wilshire. “He had us trained to reach across the desk and shake hands welcome.”

Not to mention peel grapes for the rarefied tastes of the emperor of Japan, haul in 30 Big Macs for the more proletarian tastes of the 400-pound king of Tonga, and borrow ski-resort snow machines to lend icy atmosphere to a Christmas luncheon.

The hotel’s taste-keepers note guests’ idiosyncrasies in a color-coded card system: white for commoners and blue for most habitues. The haute -est of the haute are pink, a status Aristotle Onassis enjoyed but L.B.J. didn’t, even after the word vice was crossed off his card. (The hotel found politicians and their posse of Secret Service agents unseemly, Sandra Lee Stuart wrote in the hotel’s history, “The Pink Palace” [Lyle Stuart, 1978].)

The hotel’s stringent sense of decorum has, at times, been challenging, even for its most celebrated guests--Halston was almost thrown out for not signing his last name on the register. And under the Polo Lounge’s former ban on pants for women, Mia Farrow was turned away, but not Marlene Dietrich, who was, after all, Marlene Dietrich.

Of course, the crown jewel of the Beverly Hills Hotel’s service has always been the staff’s discretion.

“All of us heard wild stories about what went on in the bungalows and how they hushed things up,” says Beverly Hills veteran Luther. “There are a lot of secrets in those walls.”

Occasionally, some slipped out anyway, such as fallen junk-bond king Michael Milken’s propensity for staging stag parties for certain money managers in the ‘70s. The more exclusive patrons of his “High-Yield Bond Conference” gamboled with starlets dispatched by a modeling agency co-owned by one of his business associates.

Of course, the hotel’s lush landscaping, its discreet bungalows and its science of ushering in privacy-minded guests without marching them through public areas has made it a mecca for trysts. They’re so intrinsic to the place that the hotel notes a famous extramarital liaison between Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand in 1959 on the official timeline included in its press materials.

But the hotel’s emphasis on discretion took on an elegiac tone in the late 1940s, when the prominent architect Paul Williams was overseeing a significant renovation. Williams, the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects, designed the signage, the pool, the lobby and the Polo Lounge. His palette has since become iconic of L.A.

“We based the entire color scheme of L.A. MOCA on the colors of the Polo Lounge--that green and pink coloring,” Richard Koshalek, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, told the New Yorker. “It seemed to Isozaki, the architect, that they represented a kind of mystical, heraldic, symbolic coloring of Los Angeles.”

Williams had a white apprentice, Herbert Widoeft, charged with working on Williams’ design for a major addition to the hotel. One day, Widoeft was eating lunch on the Polo Lounge patio when Williams came into the restaurant. Widoeft motioned to his boss to join him, but Williams demurred. The restaurant did not serve African Americans and Williams didn’t want to make a scene. He sat down only after senior hotel executives had joined Widoeft and seconded his invitation.

The hotel’s more genteel traditions continued under the reign of Detroit investor Ben Silberstein, who bought it in 1954 at his daughter Muriel’s behest. The legend was that young Muriel was so dazzled by the hotel’s glamour that she asked Daddy to buy the hotel. Daddy did.

That regime ushered in some fairly knotty familial situations. Silberstein, who insisted the staff address him as “Mr. S” so guests wouldn’t know who he was, fell in love with Courtright’s wife, Rosalind, a nightclub singer. The Courtrights divorced and Rosalind became Mrs. Silberstein, but their marriage was short-lived.

After Silberstein died in 1979, his daughters engaged in their own family feud. Muriel was married by then to Burt Slatkin, who was functioning as the hotel’s CEO. Her sister, Seema, was married to arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, later convicted of lying to federal regulators. The daughters had each inherited 48% of the hotel. And after the Boeskys bought up the remaining 4%, they effectively booted out the Slatkins: In 1986, Burt was kicked upstairs to chairman of the board and Muriel’s office at the hotel and her double cabana at the pool were taken away.

Later that year, oil magnate Davis bought the hotel for a steep $135 million, but when he saw how corroded the wiring and plumbing were, he turned around and sold it to the Brunei Investment Agency the next year, making a neat $50-million profit.

But the sultan didn’t just inherit infrastructure headaches. By the end of the decade, the luxury hotel market was plummeting, partly because the investment banking industry was taking a dive and cutting back on travel perks.

Meanwhile, the Beverly Hills Hotel’s occupancy rate, which had always cruised at the high altitude of 98%, plunged to the mid-60s because young Hollywood wasn’t replacing the older clientele as it died off, the New Yorker reported. Beriker said he doesn’t comment on occupancy rates, but he said the hotel was attracting a younger crowd before it closed. At any rate, the hotel shut its doors on Dec. 30, 1992, giving severance pay to most of the senior staff and promising no one a return ticket.

But for all the Sturm und Drang , for all the changes at the Beverly Hills Hotel, it has more than a few die-hard champions who are betting on it somehow staying the same. The faithful include Beverly Hills real estate agent Elaine Young, who has marked only her first 30 years having lunch every day at the Polo Lounge.

Says Young: “I met two of my husbands in the Polo Lounge, two husbands and one fiance. Why do you think I’m going back?”