My Life in Beverly Hills
By an astonishing stroke of luck, my goddess wife, Alex, insisted about thirty years ago that we live in Beverly Hills. I, your humble servant, was sent out to find us a home. I wandered from neighborhood to neighborhood south of Sunset and East of Eden to look. To make a long story short, I did not see anything I liked that I could afford. And most of what I saw was not appealing.
Then, a miracle came into our lives. Just cruising along a truly wide, leafy street, I saw a true Spanish that we could afford and that I loved: a huge pool, an immense garden, and minutes from my favorite place in Beverly Hills, the Beverly Hills Hotel.
In front of the Beverly Hills Hotel are the masks that tell us all who owns these cars or rents them. In L.A. the cars own their drivers.
It had been owned by a group of Japanese bankers who wanted to get in on Beverly Hills real estate and then wanted to get out.
The time was roughly the late 1990s.
I flagged down the broker on the sign, had him come over and show the dwelling to my wife and me, and almost immediately bought it.
My wife loved it so much that she started to cry once we were inside.
Now, about 26 years have passed. We have lived in this house happily all of that time. Alas, I am immobile due to cruel musculoskeletal pain. My wife rarely leaves her bed and instead “reads” books on tape or follows spy movies I have never heard of.
The chief joys of our house though are our swimming pool, which is stunningly large and heated to a comfortable temperature year-round except when rain is falling — and our neighboring resort, the Beverly Hills Hotel.
That domain, some two and a half blocks away, is called by some, the Pink Palace. I lived there for a month or so when I first moved to Southern California in 1976. It was gorgeous. My room had a king-sized bed and a “lanai.” That’s a small garden outside the sliding glass doors of my room. I recall that the halls were long and cheerful with images of immense palm leaves on the walls.
There was a large circular lobby. On the end, just exactly opposite the check-in desk, there was a large fireplace. It was always decorated with a cheerful map of the immense Spanish land-grant ranchos. Each one had a name that our beloved Los Angeles still bears as a neighborhood: La Cienega, Costa Mesa, and many others I no longer recall.
For the last several years, the Beverly Hills Hotel has been the center of my life except for my wife’s suite. I have lunch in a plaza next to the swimming pool called the Cabana Café. I look across the room at the tourists and the movie stars and the gloriously blue pool. I eat a modest meal of fried eggs and toast and marvel at the blue, blue sky and the towering palms and the fleecy clouds. It’s a miracle of an old man and his perfect lunch.
To get in the door of the hotel, my nurse parks my ancient Cadillac in the valet parking area. The parking area is a magic showroom of the highest end cars and limos on this earth. Out of these cars come men of an old age and their young girls and women of an old age and their pals. (“In the rooms the women come and go and talk of Michelangelo.”) The scene reminds me of the student parking lot at Montgomery Blair, long and longer ago. In front of the Beverly Hills Hotel are the masks that tell us all who owns these cars or rents them. In L.A. the cars own their drivers.
And then I go home and talk to my glorious wifey about old times. We have been together more than sixty years.
Beverly Hills is high school with better cars. The stars aren’t athletes or BMOCs; they’re the people the valet and the hostesses at the Cabana Café recognize by name — and I’m one of them.
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