What’s Not Cool

It was, apparently, the redefinition of “cool.”

The Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood is paying a high price, more than $1 million, to nine former bellmen who didn’t fit a rather limited definition of the cool Hollywood image.

Did the bellmen fail in their service to the customer? Were they rude? Were there serious performance issues? No. But they were, according to a handwritten memo by owner Ian Schrager, “too ethnic.”

Oops. Schrager said later in a deposition that what he really meant was that some of the employees had too many tattoos.

That didn’t wash with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which pursued a racial discrimination complaint filed by the nine bellmen, fired after the hotel’s renovation in 1996. Of the nine, two were Latino, three were Filipino, two were Cambodian, one was black and one was white. The EEOC alleged that the white bellhop was fired because he was associated with the minority bellmen.

As the hotel readied for reopening, the EEOC said, it based its hiring on whether applicants were “pretty,” “handsome” or “cool.” The nine bellmen were replaced by 15 white bellmen apparently deemed to look more suitable.

“We worked there for a very long time but . . . we weren’t the Hollywood look. Everybody knows we have excellent service,” said one of the dismissed bellmen, who had worked at the hotel seven years.

The EEOC settlement avoids a trial that was set for October. The civil rights commission has said it believes that the hotel has tried to remedy the situation, and hotel management has promised change from top to bottom.

For all the linguistic gymnastics in search of hip, the policy, intentionally or not, was just old-fashioned racism.