A Peek at the Pink Palace’s Private Parlors

The one part of the newly refurbished Beverly Hills Hotel that has not been on view before will be revealed to a select group Oct. 8. Benefit committee members, board members and patrons of the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s upcoming fall fund-raiser will be the first to peek inside the French chateau-style estate of Kerman and Christina Beriker--he’s the hotel’s CEO--which is now being completed by Hirsch Bedner Associates, the firm that redesigned the Pink Palace.

How was entree made to the former Slatkin residence, which is behind the hotel? By Elizabeth Hirsch, wife of Hirsch Bedner’s Howard Hirsch. She’s the chairwoman of the Master Chorale’s St. Petersburg Fantasy Ball coming up Nov. 11 at the Biltmore.

Planet Hollywood: A final thought on last week’s Planet Hollywood opening-night party in Beverly Hills. It will be hard for any restaurant, any corporation, any entity to outdo the Rodeo Drive extravaganza at which 2,000 people helped themselves to plates of caviar and mountains of shrimp--and those were just some of the appetizers. (Has anyone checked the price of shrimp at Phil’s lately?)

PH president Robert Earl put the party’s price tag in “the seven figures,” and didn’t even flinch when he said it.

If that’s not enough, you should also know that goody bags contained not one customary logo-emblazoned T-shirt, but three, plus a PH hat and a PH pin.

Out of the TV Loop: At dinner Saturday night, a group of five friends spent a good hour discussing movies. Nothing unusual about the dialogue. A long time was spent on the greatness of the year’s small budget films like “The Brothers McMullen” and the duddiness of most of the big-budget movies.

Then we talked about the movies we were looking forward to seeing this fall (Claude Lelouche’s “Les Miserables”).

Amazingly, not a single breath was spent on the vast numbers of new television series now debuting. Um, maybe it’s because everyone in the group was in their early to mid-40s and considered over the hill by prime-time advertisers.

--COMPILED BY THE SOCIAL CLIMES STAFF