Beverly Hills Hotel, 1967

Life is full of typos… especially my life! Last week I called the Beverly HILton Hotel the Beverly HILLS Hotel. So I’m a lousy proof-reader! Maybe the two hotels can merge and become the Beverly HILLSTON Hotels — just an idea!

Anyway, this is If this were a perfect slide of the Beverly Hills Hotel that 1955 Oldsmobile, missing a hubcap, would be a white Roll-Royce. Oh well. Miraculously this oh-so glamorous hotel looks exactly the same today. The titty-pink and bluish-green color scheme, “handwritten” signage, and those palm trees lining the motor entrance like soldiers remain unchanged.

The Beverly Hills Hotel has been a landmark at the corner of Sunset and Beverly Drive since it was built in 1912. It really was the beginning of Beverly Hills. The “new wing” you see in the foreground was built in 1948, the year after the aging hotel was redecorated, painted pink and nick-named the “Pink Palace.”

The hotel’s coffee shop is one of my favorite “vintage” places to eat if and when I’m passing through the Hills of Beverly. The free-form breakfast and lunch counter is cozy. There are no booths or tables. And it too is virtually the same as it was when it opened in 1948.

A few years ago I ate breakfast there on what just happened to be the morning of the Academy Awards. As I sat down at the quaint coffee shop counter to eat I had a psychic vibe that someone famous was going to come in and plop right down on the stool beside me. Sure enough not twenty seconds later here comes -of all people- Joan Collins traipsing in. Yes, she sat down right next to me. The only other thing I remember is that she didn’t like the way her bacon was cooked! I would’ve eaten those savory, crispy pig slices. They looked fine to me. But they weren’t offered. Then the bill came. She refused to pay for the bacon.

Here’s to the typos, The Beverly Hills Hotel, bacon and YOU!

Charles Phoenix

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