When you first pull up to the Beverly Hills Hotel it presents itself as a fortress, and it relies on this impression to keep you from getting inside. It’s a stance of intimidation. There are no real walls to keep you out, no gates nor gatekeepers, only twelve acres of lush tropical gardens—which should not exist. Not in Southern California, not in Los Angeles where there are year-round Santa Ana winds, where fire season can now be any month. All those lush plants give you pause. Maybe you should not go in—there’s something unnatural going on in there. But somewhere beyond those winding paths, if you choose the right one, you’ll be spit out into the hotel’s plush lobby, and then: the Polo Lounge. The hotel’s beating heart, the place where you can reach back into time and touch the past.
It almost needs no introduction. Event companies have its candy-stripes-banana-leaf-print-vibrant-bougainvillea-floral aesthetic down to a menu option for your baby shower, your wedding, your New Year’s Eve soiree, etc. Recently it was a rooftop pop-up at the Dorchester Hotel in London, and the Plaza Athénee in Paris, complete with the fabled McCarthy salad, on the menu since 1948 when millionaire polo player Neil McCarthy requested the dish. Chicken, cheddar, bacon and egg diced within an inch of its life because I imagine McCarthy had veneers and could only chew cud, like a cow, which consequently is what Beverly Hills was originally: a muddy cow plain. All those prehistoric looking banana plants, the fuchsia and hibiscus, the palms and ferns that conceal the Polo Lounge, fertilized from cow shit.
I am convinced this is where the American Dream peaked, probably in the mid-century, around the time the Beverly Hills Hotel was being remodeled by architect Paul Revere Williams, responsible for creating the hotel’s renown aesthetics, which have essentially remained unchanged. That iconic script, the Beverly Hills signature, is his own handwriting, drawn at a time when Williams, a Black man, could not be a guest at the hotel. He sat across from his white clientele and drew it upside down.
So, this is an appropriate place for late stage capitalism to spend its final days. Since the beginning of the pandemic revenue is up 20%. It seems like everyone is heading to the Polo Lounge bar, to commandeer a booth or one of the patio tables beneath the pepper trees, willing to pay $44 for salad, $36 for Avocado Toast, god knows how much for a martini—a word of advice, stop looking at the bill. The present has become too surreal, too insane. The future unthinkable—so back, back they all must go. Relive those glory days when Marylin Monroe had a favorite booth, the Rat Pack too. This is where Kathrine Hepburn said screw your dress code and strode into the bar wearing slacks. Where Cary Grant bought all his fine suits, and Liz Taylor ate ice cream sundaes with Michael Jackson and Bubbles cloistered in one of the eight secluded patio tables, the monkey’s collar and leash, both encrusted in gemstones. Never mind what Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson had for brunch while seated at booth number six, a favorite of Nancy Regan. Did you know Gore Vidal spent his final days seated beside the lobby fireplace? The Beatles once snuck into the pool after midnight, I wonder if there was underwater music then (it’s French electronica now).
But none of these stories are why I am pulled back to the Polo Lounge—or maybe they are part of it but I also have my own history, my own fables tied to this place. Since moving from my native Los Angeles to Berlin earlier this year, I’ve begun to understand that these stories, what passes for oral history, are our cultural currency. They belong to all of us. Not just Angelinos, but anyone who abides by the dress code (no ripped jeans, no hats after eleven) can belly up to the Polo Lounge bar and find a bit of history they feel some personal connection to, because we all know the stories. Hollywood permeates us all. It’s difficult to be from a place where history and fable collide, but then I guess it’s in the name—Hi-Story, how do you do?
To understand why I circle this tropical jungle, trying to find my way in, anxious and hesitant, you must first understand that I was raised by my mother’s family and from a young age it was made very clear that I did not look like any of them. I am not fair skinned or blue eyed or petite. She takes after her father, they liked to say. So, when I think of my father’s mother, I think of her in terms of time lost, of the years that I did not have her in my life where I might have felt some sense of connection. My dad likes to accuse me of being like her—this year on my birthday he drunk texted to say I had inherited her essence. What the fuck does that even mean?
At my age, thirty-nine, his mother had long since divorced his father, a heroin addict, an alcoholic—a charming, handsome dark-skinned Sephardic Jew, who came from old school post production money, which in the business is very different from all the other movie money. In the divorce agreement he got my dad and she took their daughter, my Aunt, to New York City. She remarried into absurd wealth, and whenever she visited my father she no longer stayed at the Chateau Marmont. It was always the Beverly Hills Hotel, in a Bungalow. So that you understand: Sultans rent out floors of the actual hotel for their staff. The bungalows are for the Sultan’s family.
Have you heard of memory DNA? These are the things MRIs and X-Rays and blood tests cannot detect. These are inherited, or maybe it’s more like a haunting. I am haunted with whatever dark hole my grandmother tried to fill with expensive things, it conflicts with that other part of me that orders a double gin and tonic, and snaps a Vicodin in half and takes it with the bubbly so that it dissolves quicker. What I’m saying is I am a product of people I don’t know. My father’s family is a mystery to me. Both his father’s side (the addict), and his mother’s (the glamour). Sometimes I wonder if those of us living are the real ghosts.
So onward, I charge through that goddamn tropical garden, dewy and humid when it should be anything but.
The Beverly Hills Hotel was one of the first buildings in what would become the crowned jewel of the new money city of Beverly Hills. Where the Hollywood puppeteers lived—the puppets, the stars, lived in more modest (what was considered modest then) ranch homes and cottage homes built in the canyons, in places like Brentwood, where my father grew up. Not the one you are thinking of now—with its multimillion-dollar mansions and Mathew McConaughey jogging down San Vicente Boulevard. The version in the sixties was more like the Mar Vista my husband and I lived in when we first married, almost twenty years ago now. Nothing but run down beach cottages and small streets with nowhere to park, a long closed Shakey’s Pizza where the homeless kept warm on those cold ocean nights. Even this Mar Vista is gone, we can no longer afford the current one, with its fancy pizza restaurants and boutique shops. How much a neighborhood can change in the span of two generations in Los Angeles, from modest to affluent, from affluent to a parking lot. It’s astonishing. It makes you feel older than you are. Coming back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, to the Polo Lounge, is like going from the past to the future but also the past again. I’m not explaining it right.
The Polo Lounge is an American history lesson in miniature. The hotel must anticipate the future while holding fast to its own origin story and aureate present. It must encompass all points: past, future, and right now. Fossilized in Hollywood gilded amber.
Do you know how rare this is in Los Angeles? This is an entire city that understands that this is where the American Dream ends. If at first we don’t succeed, try, try, again. We will raze the Viper Room to make condos, turn the Hanging Gardens of Babylon into a parking lot, the Staples Center is now the Bitcoin something or other—there are no plaques, no memorials. It’s all about what’s next. Even LACMA was demolished during the pandemic. When I was little I thought LACMA was OZ, the Emerald city. Now it might as well be a foreign airport. My editor recently went there for the first time and fell in love with the modern architecture, the new landscaping. All I could think of was that it was not the one I had known and loved as a child, and that I was watching in real time how these histories are weaved into personal narratives and mythologized.
For instance, waiters at the Polo Lounge will forever understand the importance of proper stemware and that steak tartare should be made tableside. They will tell you stories of Lana Turner and Frank Sinatra, how Howard Hughes hid sandwiches in the garden, all while they make sure to get out of your Instagram shot. They understand the assignment. It is a restaurant, it is a séance, it is where to go for a Plymouth martini with blue cheese stuffed olives. I have seen Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito at the next table drinking cold gin and arguing over their friend Kathleen Turner. I’ve seen the late Dionne Warwick celebrating with her entire family, the waiters all singing happy birthday, soufflé in hand, candle on the side, erect in thick whipped cream. I have seen Jon Lovitz shit-faced yelling at the valet, and Jamie Lee Curtis speed dialing Arnold just to say hello on speaker phone.
When I took a tour of the grounds the guest director showed me the newly renovated Marilyn bungalow. Everything very pink. He was not the guest director when my grandmother stayed here with my teenage Aunt all those years ago—I wish I could meet that person. I wish I could see them arrive from the porter’s perspective. I wish I could be at the front desk, or in the elevator, or maybe pass them in the hall, catching the brut musk of her Channel No. 5 perfume. It is the same carpet, it is the same CW Stockwell Martinique wallpaper (hand-printed in Los Angeles since 1942). The booths in the restaurant have not changed. The candy stripes and hunter green remain untarnished. But still I cannot find her.
Imagine those tiny blood vessels, the kind that split off in a bloodshot eye, minuscule but infinitely connected. That’s the web I feel whenever I drink in the Polo Lounge. If I were to just trace the right one. Like those many pathways in the garden just beyond the restaurant’s patio walls. They lead both toward and away.
The first time I came here and actually sat in the Polo Lounge I instantly imagined my grandmother in her bungalow, pacing the room because her new husband was having an affair with his secretary. I knew the stories. How her trips to Los Angeles were ostensibly to visit her son but also because her second marriage was just as tumultuous as her first. And to make things worse my father was furious with her for leaving him behind. She’d left him willingly and moved across the country with his sister because—and this I’m sure of because it’s why I would have done it too—she loved him to such an extent it made her weak. Unacceptable to someone who could only shine her light on one person at a time, which always, almost always, had to be on herself. Daughters understand this, we learn to become an offshoot of our mother’s beams before we find our own. So, she sacrificed her son, eventually her daughter too. Otherwise, who would shine the light? She came to the city to escape another failed marriage and to see her son, who would not see her, so she sequestered herself in the Polo Lounge eating wedge salads and drinking gin martinis with blue cheese stuffed olives, tipping all the staff outrageously because she had no money of her own and she was swimming and sinking at the same time when all she wanted to do was fly.
That first trip to the Polo Lounge I was eighteen and on a day pass from rehab, where a famous UFC fighter (also a patient) had taken me for brunch to meet his much talked about girlfriend. I got absolutely shit-faced, trying not to cry at the thought of my lonely grandmother who died when I was baby. I ordered pancakes. Small silver dollar ones, which when they arrived looked exactly like the ones my dad used to make for us when we were kids. A mimicry, I realized, of the ones he’d eaten here. He must have visited her at some point when he was young enough that they were whimsical and impressed upon him a kind of consistency within his emotional insecurity. It was enough to make me weep in the gilded bathroom. How do you fault a child that finds respite in a place that exists for all the wrong reasons?
When I call or email to make a reservation, I know they are measuring my name against whoever else is on the books. I know they see my table preference and maybe there is a note saying I wrote a novel that takes place there (god help them and possibly my lawyers too). I know that there are doors that need to be opened, gardens that need to be ‘unlocked’ and that with every point I pass I am also reaching out to the past. I am ordering a gin martini, I am looking at the pool and wondering when the last time they emptied and refilled the water and if it’s the same water my father swam in as a child, alone, waiting for his mother to shine her light on him. Before even pulling onto the hotel’s street I pass the park just opposite, where my Aunt lost her virginity. She told me, giggling, after we reconnected several years ago. It happened during one of those trips to visit my dad. My aunt a pre-teen running amuck with Joan Larson, not yet christened Joan Jett, and Kim Fowley and all the rest. Her mother shut up in her bungalow, a glamorous stranger to them both.
How do you enter a place so intimately unfamiliar, where those tiny blood vessels keep dividing again and again, until you ask yourself, Do I even belong here?
The answer: you can’t, and you don’t. You book the table, sit at whichever one they give you. You take the tour of the bungalows, which they’re obliged to give because you have a fancy publisher and a book contract. You eat and drink in the Polo lounge, repeatedly, with different friends—with anyone who will give you an excuse to conduct your little seance. Grandmother, who are you? Grandfather, did you even try? I can see him at the Polo Lounge bar, never a table, god no. Not his style. But I can see and feel his heartache. Made stronger when she left him and upgraded. Did you come to the hotel looking for her? Did you ever send flowers to her bungalow?
An entire familiar history has played out in a place that does not even know my name. It’s a hallway of mirrors in which I see myself, my grandmother, my father and aunt, my grandfather too. But I cannot reach them, and never will. I leave the Polo Lounge every time with a bill I can’t afford, an expensive reminder that my family history begins and ends in my imagination.
Maybe this is why Los Angeles is so dear to me—why I journey to the Polo Lounge too. When your story is so entwined with a city’s lore it allows you to blend fact with fiction. It means I can hear She looks like her father and pretend there was someone who, if living, would wrap me in their Chanel No. 5 embrace and say Why yes, she does, and then order two Plymouth martins with blue cheese stuffed olives, because damn the consequences.