But in some respects, Greenacres was a strange house. Harold was consumed by his hobbies . . . and by young women. Everybody else was left to more or less fend for themselves. Mildred Davis, his wife, quietly drank. His son Harold Jr. was gay, and had a strained relationship with his father. It was a huge place for only five people, and it would have been possible to go for days without seeing anybody.
Harold died in 1971, but I retain a soft spot for both him and his unparalleled home; I shot episodes of Switch and Hart to Hart there—my way of staying in touch with my old friend. Harold’s granddaughter Suzanne has shepherded Harold’s movies—the most valuable part of her inheritance—with great diligence and care, so that future generations will always be able to appreciate what a great comedian and producer Harold was.
Harold, his family, and Greenacres will always be in my heart.
By the time I started going to the Beverly Hills Hotel in the late 1940s, there were already legends about the place, and there would be more in the future. Here are some that I know to be true:
Will Rogers and Spencer Tracy did play polo in what used to be a bean field behind the Polo Lounge. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard did have trysts there while waiting for his divorce to become final. “We used to go through the God-damnedest routine you ever heard of,” Lombard recalled. “He’d get somebody to go hire a room or a bungalow somewhere. . . . A couple of times the Beverly Hills Hotel. . . . Then somebody would give him a key. Then he’d have another key made, and give it to me. . . . Then all the shades down and all the doors and windows locked and the phones shut off. . . . But would you believe it? After we were married, we couldn’t ever make it unless we went somewhere and locked all the doors and put down all the window shades and shut off all the phones.”
That was Garson Kanin reporting what Lombard had told him, and I think it’s accurate until the end, when she claims that Gable had performance anxiety unless the place was locked down tight. I knew Clark, and I can assure you that, while he would have made sure the door was locked, that would have been the extent of his paranoia.
The pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Photofest
Guests playing mini-golf on the grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Photofest
In other romances, Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand did carry on their affair in bungalows 20 and 21 while making Let’s Make Love, and Elizabeth Taylor did spend several of her honeymoons in the bungalows.
Howard Hughes kept three bungalows rented at a time. For around thirty years beginning in 1942, Bungalow 4, which had four rooms, was for Hughes’s personal residence. Bungalow 19, which he kept for Jean Peters, his wife, had three rooms. (It should be mentioned that Bungalows 4 and 19 were far apart.) Bungalow 1C was for his bodyguards.
There were times when Hughes would have as many as nine of the bungalows rented, a couple of which would be occupied by girls he had signed for RKO. The rest would be empty.
He also would occasionally book the Crystal Room on thirty minutes’ notice. The Crystal Room held a thousand people, but Hughes’s meetings usually involved only four. Once, Hughes’s Cadillac was parked at the hotel for two years without ever being moved. The tires all gradually flattened, but nobody inflated them and nobody moved the car.
Were any average hotel guest to leave his Cadillac on the grounds to deteriorate, the car would be towed and the owner would be presented with the bill. But Hughes was too good a customer for the hotel to take any such drastic measures.
By 1948, Hughes’s injuries from his Beverly Hills plane crash were beginning to overwhelm him. He would stay inside Bungalow 4 for months at a time. I remember the staff at the hotel mulling over Hughes’s eccentricities—the way he would order roast beef sandwiches (the hotel went so far as to designate a “roast beef man,” who was the only one who had been able to master Hughes’s careful instructions about how to prepare them) accompanied by pineapple upside-down cake. He would tell the staff to stick the sandwiches in a tree, then retrieve them when nobody was around, so no one would know in which bungalow he was staying. He also liked Hershey chocolate bars and Poland Spring water.
In 1949 John Steinbeck met his last wife at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was in town working on Viva Zapata! and a friend offered to fix him up with Ava Gardner. Gardner wasn’t interested, so the friend fixed him up with Ann Sothern instead. They hit it off, and he invited her to visit him in Monterey. She brought along a friend named Elaine Scott, who was married to Zachary Scott. But not for long—Steinbeck and Elaine hit it off to such an extent that both Ann Sothern and Zachary Scott faded into the distance. Supposedly Sothern never forgave Steinbeck . . . and quite probably never forgave Elaine Steinbeck, either.
Other bungalows had other famous guests. Bungalow 5 was the favorite of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and Paul and Linda McCartney liked it as well. Bungalow 9 was the home of Jennifer Jones and Norton Simon for five years. Bungalow 11 sheltered Marlene Dietrich for three years, including her custom-made seven-by-eight-foot bed. Bungalows 14 to 21 were known as “Bachelors Row,” and were the favorites of Warren Beatty and Orson Welles among many others.
By the 1950s, the Beverly Hills Hotel was synonymous with Beverly Hills itself. But in fact, in 1933 the hotel had closed because of the Depression and stood vacant for two years, until the Bank of America reopened it a year later.
In 1942 the hotel was purchased by Hernando Courtright, who was a vice president at the Bank of America. He had no experience in the hotel business, but he knew a good opportunity when he saw one, so he raised one hundred thousand dollars from Harry Warner, Irene Dunne, and Loretta Young*—notice the pedigrees. Then he borrowed another seventy-five thousand dollars to remodel the place.
Rita Hayworth posing poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Getty Images
That same year Courtright rechristened the El Jardin Restaurant the Polo Lounge to pay tribute to demon polo enthusiasts Will Rogers, Tommy Hitchcock, and Darryl Zanuck—and as such it’s been more or less constantly successful ever since. Toward the end of the decade, Hernando gave the place its first major redecoration. In 1947 he opened the Crystal Room and the Lanai Restaurant, which later became the Coterie.
Courtright’s wife, Firenza, described what he accomplished: “He had a business side and a social side and his business was hospitality. He was a showman, setting the stage for each visitor. He had a great sense of style and, as well, an extra effort to push himself harder than anybody else. In many ways, running [the] hotel was like running a small country.”
Hernando also broadened the number of amenities available at the hotel. Francis Taylor, the father of Elizabeth, opened an art gallery in the downstairs shopping area in 1939, and through the war years the Francis Taylor Gallery became an increasingly important venue for art. Francis sold a lot of California Impressionists, such as Granville Redmond (a deaf artist who had a studio at the Chaplin lot on La Brea for a number of years and who also appeared in some of Chaplin’s films). Francis also sold work by Augustus John. His prices were reasonable, so actors who were also discerning collectors, such as Vincent Price, James Mason, and Greta Garbo, purchased a lot of art from him.
Interestingly, although its “Pink Palace” moniker may seem as old as the hotel itself, the hotel wasn’t actually painted that color until 1948 under the direction of Paul Revere Williams, who also designed the customized cursive script for its logo. Williams was a very dignified, classy man who was born in 1894 and who encountered all the discrimination you might expect would face a young black man in that era. “I determined, when I was still in high school, to become an architect,” said Williams. “When I announced my intention to my instructor, he stared at me with as much astonishment as he would have displayed had I proposed a rocket flight to Mars. ‘Who ever heard of a Negro being an architect?’ he demanded.”
Williams knew that he
was going to have to depend almost entirely on white clients, so his first impression had to be faultless. Paul was light skinned, always impeccably dressed, and had taught himself to draw upside down. As soon as a client sat down with him, Paul would start sketching out the plans upside down, which would quickly disarm anyone who was taken aback by the fact that his architect was black. And then Paul would ask for suggestions, and the customer would become a full partner in the project. Brilliant psychology.
In 1949 Williams created the new Crescent Wing, which added 109 rooms to the hotel, and turned it from a T plan to an H plan. Also overhauled were the Polo Lounge and the Fountain Coffee Shop, and the lobby took on its timeless pink and green color scheme that’s been maintained ever since.
The pink and green banana leaf wallpaper, however, was actually the work of Don Loper, who made his name as a dress designer for, among many others, Marilyn Monroe.
It’s a mark of how brilliant Paul’s design for the Polo Lounge was that his is the only hot spot I can think of that has survived unchanged from 1949 to the present day.
Paul is an example of the remarkable openness of Los Angeles to the new, the untried in architecture and style. I think this was possible because you had a set of circumstances that weren’t replicated anyplace else in the country: a basically thriving local economy, a large group of talented architects, and—most important—clients who were interested in anything theatrical or new.
When I started going to the Polo Lounge in the late forties, it wasn’t terribly expensive by Hollywood standards—a daiquiri might cost you seventy-five cents, but a Pimm’s would run more than a dollar and a bottle of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge champagne from 1929 would set you back more than twenty dollars. So the tourists stayed away simply by dint of the tabs.
Paul Williams had completed all his additions to the hotel by the time Stanley Anderson died in 1951. Stanley was one of the pioneers of Southern California, but outside of his participation in the birth of Beverly Hills and the hotel that bears the town’s name, he’s not remembered by many people. But he’s very much remembered by me.
Hernando Courtright sold the place in 1953 for $5.5 million, and by that time the Beverly Hills Hotel was the premier hotel in the area. He continued managing the place for a couple of years, but he didn’t like the new owner, a man from Detroit named Ben Silberstein. And then things got really interesting: Hernando’s wife left him for Silberstein. Courtright then took over the Beverly Wilshire, which he ran very successfully until he sold it a year before his death in 1986.
Hernando Courtright was a good man and a wonderful hotelier. He really knew how to run a place, and he ran it beautifully. Scandals, whether on the part of the guests or the staff, happened mostly out of range of the newspapers, and completely out of range of the guests. The atmosphere was smooth and utterly unruffled. As far as the public was concerned, the Beverly Hills Hotel was the chicest place in town. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor would stay there when they were in town, as would Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. When Charlie Chaplin came back to Hollywood in 1972 to accept an honorary Oscar, he stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. A lot of the people went there for Hernando as much as they did anything else. When you drove down to the hotel and went into the Polo Lounge to have a drink, it was different than going to any other place in town.
Hernando’s great innovation was psychological. In his view, Beverly Hills was not a resort area, nor even a suburb: it was uptown Los Angeles. Hernando wanted to make the town the equivalent of Fifth Avenue in New York or Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, and the Beverly Hills Hotel was, you might say, the anchor store—the prestige destination in a town full of them.
Today, the twenty-two bungalows are set amid lush tropical gardens, with private walkways that snake through groves of coconut palms, oleanders, and bougainvillea. The landscaping is dense in order to give the bungalow inhabitants the privacy they desire, and often need.
The bungalows, which are basically tile-roofed mini-haciendas, have “privacy lights” instead of “Do Not Disturb” signs. They all have fireplaces, full kitchens, and fresh orchids in the bathrooms. Some bungalows have two or three bedrooms, others four.
Since 1987, the Sultan of Brunei has owned both the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Hotel Bel Air, and you may make of that what you will. The sultan is an oilman, but he also loves to play polo, so in that respect the ghost of Hernando Courtright should be pleased, although as far as I’m concerned it’s outsourcing gone berserk.
The Beverly Hills Hotel is emblematic of the best aspects of the town it anchors. People who don’t know any better think the movie business and, by extension, America, has always been just one thing, permanent and unalterable, but the closer you look at history, the more you realize that everything that lasts—like, for instance, the Beverly Hills Hotel—has been reinvented numerous times and by numerous people.
When men like Hernando die, there’s a loss of great personalities, not to mention a loss of history. No matter how well a corporation runs a hotel or a restaurant, the personal touch is gone.
Just one example: They took out the tennis courts at the Beverly Hills Hotel, so the two men who ran them for years, Alex Olmedo and his brother, David, also disappeared. Alex was a joy, a Peruvian who won four NCAA titles and played on the Davis Cup team for America. Kate Hepburn took lessons from Alex, as did Robert Duvall and Chevy Chase.
Bill Tilden taught there. Many wonderful people went to those courts. It was a little piece of Hollywood history, but, like so much of Hollywood history, it’s gone.
Just about the time I arrived in Hollywood, if you rode down the ramp from Ocean Avenue to Santa Monica, Marion Davies’s palace—I don’t use the word lightly—was just off to the right, and the beach houses of Harold Lloyd, Norma Shearer, Louis B. Mayer, and Jesse Lasky were farther on in that direction. To the left off the ramp were Leo McCarey, George Bancroft, and Norma Talmadge, and a couple of places owned by Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels.
Norma Talmadge’s place at 1038 Ocean Front had a particularly distinguished list of inhabitants. Randolph Scott and Cary Grant had lived there in the mid-thirties, and Cary had kept the place when he married Barbara Hutton. After that, Brian Aherne lived there; Howard Hughes rented the place for a time, as did Grace Kelly. Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate lived there as well. Douglas Fairbanks was a couple of doors down in a house he had initially bought as a weekend getaway, but converted to his full-time residence after his divorce from Mary Pickford.
Norma Talmadge is forgotten today, which is sad, because she was a fine emotional actress, and one of the three or four biggest female stars of the silent era. (The reason nobody remembers her is that very few of her films survive.)
When she built the place in the late 1920s, she was married to Joe Schenck. I’ve always wondered whether the Norman design of the house was an elaborate pun on her name. The interior was decorated mostly in a Spanish motif, although Norma’s bathroom was done with tiles from Malibu Pottery, which was among the most beautiful work ever done in that medium. Interestingly, Norma had almost nothing in her house that indicated she was a movie star, other than a portrait of her over the fireplace in the living room.
Norma lived there for about five years, after which she divorced Schenck and took up with Gilbert Roland, a good friend of mine in later years. Gil always regarded Norma as the great love of his life, which, for a compulsive ladies’ man, is really saying something.
Although Norma’s career ended after only two sound pictures, she had held on to her money—something that couldn’t be said of a lot of silent film stars. She had two other beachfront properties in Santa Monica, as well as other real estate investments around Los Angeles.
These Santa Monica and Malibu houses—always excluding Marion Davies’s place, which could have sheltered an army—looked quite modest. They still do—most of them are still there, although they’ve been heavily altered over the yea
rs. Most of them were a complete change of pace from the Spanish influence that was predominant in Hollywood. Some derived from Cape Cod style; others reflected a Newport or Monterey influence.
If Hollywood was prone to strange fads—the famously arrogant director Josef von Sternberg had a house designed by Richard Neutra in Chatsworth that looked like an aluminum pillbox that just happened to have a moat around it—it had an even stranger love of huge parties, as if in defiance of the Depression. Hearst loved to throw dos at San Simeon, but also at Marion Davies’s huge house in Santa Monica, which the naive often assumed was a resort hotel. Actually, it was the only competition Harold Lloyd had for the most lavish movie star estate.
The Santa Monica beach house was by no means Marion’s primary residence. That was actually a Spanish-style mansion at 1700 Lexington Road in Beverly Hills. The Beverly Hills house was Marion’s preferred venue for parties, simply because the Santa Monica house was too damn big—it could supposedly hold two thousand guests, which sounds more like Buckingham Palace than Santa Monica, but then Marion’s place wasn’t much smaller than Buckingham Palace.
There was a small-town atmosphere in Hollywood then. One or two nights a week, Davies would invite a few close friends to her place. Since her close friends were named Chaplin and Fairbanks, it may sound like an intimidating evening, but the evenings mostly consisted of dinner and charades. A few weeks later, Chaplin or Fairbanks would return the favor. Sometimes Marion would hire a bus, fill it with ten or twenty friends, plenty of food, maybe a musician or two, and take off for Santa Monica beach, where they would have a late picnic and a bonfire.
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood's Golden Age Page 8