Brawling With Velvet Gloves
“Beverly Hills invites you to experience all the season has to offer,” said the newspaper ad, which reminded shoppers to be sure and check out the Baccarat chandeliers now lining Rodeo Drive.
I may want to experience more than one season. A citywide brawl is about to break out over the proposed five-star Montage resort in the heart of Beverly Hills, where traffic is already so maddening it has to be God’s revenge on people buying $6,000 handbags.
As for the chandeliers, I took one look and a thought occurred:
Where’s Cary Grant (“To Catch a Thief”) when you need him?
What a heist that would be, I told Beverly Hills resident Ellen Stern Harris, who was guiding me on a tour of what she calls the city’s “scandal sites.”
Harris is one of those gadflies -- every town has at least one -- whose life’s mission is to keep public officials honest. She said she needed lots of help in Beverly Hills, describing the relationship between public officials and developers as an orgy.
The first item to pique my interest involved City Councilman Tom Levyn, a real estate attorney. While he was mayor, Levyn got a $500,000 finder’s fee for introducing Merv Griffin to the guy who bought Griffin’s Beverly Hilton Hotel, as reported last month by my colleague Martha Groves.
It was only the latest reminder that I’m in the wrong business.
I had to get hold of Merv Griffin once, and here’s how hard it was:
I called and left a message.
He called back.
I’m not a Beverly Hills councilman. But I think I could have hooked Griffin up with anybody he wanted to meet. And my fee is only $350,000.
When I rang Levyn to ask how I could get into his line of work, he asked me to have breakfast with him at the five-star Peninsula Hotel. I get no such offers when I write about grubby politics in L.A. County’s southeastern cities, I can tell you that. When I hung out with South Gate’s former mayor, who got shot in the head and punched in the mouth, we didn’t even make it to Denny’s.
Levyn wore a fine dark suit for our oatmeal breakfast, which set me back $42.22, and he didn’t even finish. He offered to pay, but I wanted to make it perfectly clear I couldn’t be bought. The councilman got smacked around by critics for his $500,000 jackpot, because it forced him to recuse himself on the Montage hotel, which would compete with Merv’s old property.
Levyn was also about to have the distinction of facing a re-election challenge in March, with the challengers including his ex-wife. But before the coffee even arrived at the Peninsula, Levyn proved he’s no fool. He said he was leaving office at the end of his term, in part to avoid running against the ex-wife.
This isn’t a city, it’s a back lot.
I see a TV movie followed by a tawdry spinoff reminiscent of “Dallas,” viewer discretion advised. It would have plenty of philandering under the palms, well-preserved graybeards flashing Bulgari cufflinks, unfulfilled wives torn between Tiffany & Co. and Harry Winston, and money coming out of everyone’s ears, all of them miserable beyond the abilities of any shrink or surgeon.
You look at a place like Beverly Hills and figure everyone’s sleeping well. But as we speak, South Beverly merchants are spitting mad about city officials heaping all their love and affection on Rodeo Drive, which just got an $18-million face-lift.
“It’s like we’re the wicked stepchild and everything is done north of Wilshire,” the owner of Andrew Weiss Gallery told the Los Angeles Business Journal. “People don’t even know we exist.”
Bobbe Joy, of Bobbe Joy Makeup Studio, called the shabby treatment embarrassing. This doesn’t add much to the discussion, but I just wanted to write the words “Bobbe Joy, of Bobbe Joy Makeup Studio.”
Meanwhile, a newspaper snit -- if not a war -- has broken out. The Beverly Hills Courier and Beverly Hills Weekly are trading barbs about, among other things, which newspaper can be trusted to cover the mega-resort proposal without bias.
In a column last week, Courier publisher Clif Smith referred to his rival publication as the “small gossipy Beverly Hills Weekly.”
Speaking of gossip, I’m running out of room just sorting through it, so I’m going to have to come back later with more dope on the proposed Montage. The combatants are just now loading their cannons and figure to spend more than $1 million by the March election. Beverly Hills officials already have been eyeballed by the district attorney and the Fair Political Practices Commission.
The Measure A question is simple:
Thumbs up, or thumbs down, on a seven-story Montage that would be just north of Wilshire Boulevard and a block east of Rodeo Drive.
Supporters say it’s the smartest project for an under-utilized part of town, that it will generate between $5 million and $6 million annually for the city, and that despite having 214 hotel beds, 25 townhouses, a three-story commercial building and 1,172 parking spaces, it will not make traffic worse.
Huh?
That’s right. It says so in the glossy, eight-page insert Beverly Hills residents received last week with their newspapers, both the bickering locals and The Times. The cover had a full-color rendering of the Montage, along with the tout, “Only one place on earth could be home to something this spectacular.”
As Mayor Mark Egerman explained it to me, hotel traffic is not rush-hour traffic, and all the new parking spaces will keep people from driving in circles.
That’s preposterous, cry foes, who blast the city’s plan to serve as co-developer of the project and invest more than $30 million in parking facilities, a public garden and an adjacent building. Jilted Peninsula Hotel owners are pouring five-star cash into the opposition, wondering why the city didn’t cut them such a deal.
Opponents also scream that city officials relaxed height restrictions for the Montage, withheld public records and tacitly approved Montage efforts to keep the measure off the ballot by blocking the signatures of opponents.
“Goons,” Harris calls the signature blockers.
I’m thinking South Gate with crystal chandeliers.
Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.
