Illustration by Jean-Philippe Delhomme

Until just a few weeks ago, no American seemed on better terms with fortune than Irving V. Link, who had spent most of the past half century playing gin rummy by the side of the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, in Los Angeles. For forty-two years, from the time he discovered the hotel, in 1950, until it closed, last December 30th, Irving’s days had been as well ordered and as predictable as the Sun King’s. At seven o’clock every morning, wearing one of the many perfectly fitted tropical-weight suits that have been a special affection of his since a memorable day in the nineteen-thirties, he would stroll over from his house, in the lower reaches of Beverly Hills; enter the hotel under the long, sloping green-and-white striped awning that extended all the way from the driveway, above Sunset Boulevard, to the main entrance; turn right in the lobby; and arrive at the Polo Lounge. Often he and the hostess, Bernice Philbin, would be the first two people there, and they would have a polite conversation before Irving took his place in his booth—the first half circle to your left as you came in—and ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk.

Occasionally, when the weather was particularly fine, he would take his breakfast outside, under the great Brazilian peppertree on the curving flagstone Polo Lounge patio. Then, at around nine, he would stroll back through the lobby and follow the curving, carpeted stairs down to the lower hallway, where he would stop to say good morning to all the people in the downstairs shops: to Tony, the barber, for instance, who would just be laying out his razors and scissors, and Amir, the haberdasher, who specialized in cashmere coats with chinchilla linings, and who would often be at work on a new suit for Irving. Then Irving would walk out through the glass door at the end of the hallway into the allée of jacarandas and bougainvilleas that led to the Beverly Hills Hotel pool. He would wave good morning to Sven Peterson and his pool crew, who would be scrutinizing visitors from the safety of a small, tollhouse-style booth, and walk down the concrete steps toward the pool itself. One of the pool boys would scamper ahead to “set up” a chaise for Irving—that is, drape a flamingo-colored towel over the chair’s buff-colored vinyl—on the south, or sunny, side of the pool while Irving went over to his cabana, on the opposite side, to change into his swimming trunks. Then he would sunbathe for a few hours on the chaise. At noon, Irving would retire again to his cabana and change for lunch, which he would occasionally eat under an umbrella-shaded table in the Patio Club, or sometimes at the Bistro Garden, on Canon Drive, a favorite spot of his. After lunch, Irving would return to the cabana, change again—usually into what is called “resort wear”—and set up a table just outside for the gin game. On any reasonably sunny day, the pool would by then be echoing with the names of well-known people being called to the phone, as well as with the names of unknown people being called to the phone by themselves in the forlorn hope that one day this would help them become well known, too.

From his vantage in front of his cabana, Irving could not only watch the parade go by but get the parade to sit down with him and play cards. Over the years, his gin game included Hollywood luminaries ranging from Tony Martin to such lesser figures as Ken Berg, the Koo-Koo-Roo King. Irving is an inordinately polite man, and words like “starlets,” “moguls,” and “kibitzers” never cross his lips; the world he saw was one in which, as he put it, “magnificent-looking young women, full of theatrical drive,” lay on chaises in order to impress many of the astute businessmen who had decided to “take a fling in the picture business.” All through the day, Irving’s own business—a hard-to-follow mixture of liquor distribution, real-estate deal making, and all-around middleman stuff—would be unhurriedly intertwined with all his other activities, like creepers rising on a trellis.

Irving would play cards until sunset. Most days, in fact, he and Sven closed the pool together. Then Irving would either walk back home to his wife and two children, or, after his wife died, in 1990, change yet again, and have dinner at the Bistro Garden.

Except for a brief period in the early sixties—when Irving, through no fault of his own, became trapped in the contest between Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa and was in effect banished for a while by Kennedy from the Polo Lounge—one day of Irving’s has been almost exactly like the next. By the end of 1992, he had spent approximately fifteen thousand days by the side of the pool. (Irving has never learned how to swim.) “I guess I’m a creature of habit,” he says.

In recent years, people would come by the pool and ask to meet Irving, just so they could say that they had at last met a man who had it all figured out. His circle of admirers, probably larger than that of any other man who has spent his days by the side of a pool, extended from the pool boys (“I’m in awe of him,” one of them said the week before Christmas, watching Irving sun himself on an icy Southern California morning. “He’s what—ninety?” Eighty-seven, actually. “And he’s sunproof. He’s cancer-proof. What does he do? How does he make his money? How does he do it?”) all the way to Richard Koshalek, the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, who has admired Irving from an aesthetic distance, as though he were a Diebenkorn seascape. “It’s one of the great performance pieces in Los Angeles history,” Koshalek says. “He exemplifies something important about L.A., which is that the fragmentation of the city, which everyone always decries, also means that there are these remarkable subcultures all around, where people with very specific, amazing plumage flourish.”

Last December 30th, however, the Sultan of Brunei, who has owned the Beverly Hills Hotel since 1988, decided to close it—for reasons that are either sensible and as plain as day, if you ask people who work for the Sultan now, or murky and irrational, if you ask people who were working for him up until December 30th. Officially, the hotel will be closed for renovations for two years—“twenty-four months” is the formula the Sultan’s people prefer—but there are people who think that it may be closed much longer, or even for good. Irving now has to figure out another way of spending his days: Louis XIV expelled from Versailles and shuffling back and forth among other guys’ châteaux.

“The Sultan is the only owner of the hotel in the past forty years who has not been a close personal friend of mine,” Irving said one morning in the last week of December, as he sat at breakfast in the now nearly empty Polo Lounge. “Manny Borenstein, Ben Silberstein, Marvin Davis—I played cards with them all. I wish the Sultan and I might have sat down together. My experience with potentates is larger than you might think. I once had a maharaja as a warm personal friend. Now, observing the Sultan’s policy, I’d say that he is a very astute businessman.” Irving toyed, a little sadly, with his banana and granola. “And in the long run what we all have to believe is that this sabbatical will prove to be an extremely astute move, and that we’ll all be grateful when we recommence in two years. If it is astute, however, I don’t yet grasp how it’s astute. I run the figures through my head very often, and the project doesn’t cost out in terms of what he paid, what he’ll have to invest, and how hard it will be to reassemble this—this magnificent cast of characters and memories and associations.” He stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the peppertree, dominating the abandoned Polo Lounge patio. Then he went on, “Of course, what we’re all learning—” By “we,” Irving meant the hotel regulars, who are now being dispossessed—a group for which he serves as a sort of unpaid, ex-officio chairman, and on all of whom he has bestowed royal titles: Sven Peterson the Pool Prince, Bernice Philbin the Queen of the Polo Lounge, Chris Dunn the Crown Prince of Parking. “What we’re all learning is something new. Which is that if you’re a sultan it really doesn’t matter how astute you are. If you’re a sultan, you get to do whatever you want to do. Astuteness is somehow not your problem in life.”

Irving is one part Meyer Wolfshiem, one part Colonel Stingo, and eight parts everything your grandfather in Fort Lauderdale would dream of being if only he could get loose from your grandmother. He is certainly the best-dressed eighty-seven-year-old in America. He is slim, has beautiful, almost silver-white hair, a dashing white mustache, which recalls those of the rakish leading men of the forties—Cesar Romero or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.—and a wardrobe that extends into new vistas of rococo elegance every time you see him. His appreciation of fine clothes is mostly untouched by narcissism. Spying an old friend just arrived at the hotel and wearing, let’s say, a white linen suit with a blue shirt and a flowered Liberty print tie—nothing much at all, really—Irving, dressed in a black cashmere Edwardian coat, chocolate kid gloves, and a camel’s-hair scarf, might pause before crossing the lobby and, after a warm handshake, say, “I didn’t want to come over too quickly. I was having too much pleasure in admiring that wonderful suit you’re wearing, and observing how perfectly you’ve accessorized it.”

On the Tuesday of that last week, I met Irving at the hotel (we had become friends several years before), got into his gold Lexus, and drove off with him to have lunch at the Bistro Garden. On the drive, which, in the best Beverly Hills tradition, took us eight blocks, Irving began to hum. “Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few,” he sang under his breath as we waited at a light and looked out across the depopulated streets. “I’m thinking of moving to the Beverly Hilton. Have you seen it? It’s the white building on Santa Monica Boulevard. Merv Griffin owns it, and it seems to be a promising place. I’d be grateful to have your view. What I’m thinking of right now is: have breakfast at the Century Plaza and then move to the Beverly Hilton for the gin game in the afternoon.” The thought of breaking up his day seemed to depress him a little, and he sank into silence, until he spotted a mild, ferrety man slowly walking up Canon Drive. “Now, there’s a very good friend of mine,” he said. “One of the most astute businessmen and lawyers in California.” He slowed the car and gave a honk on the horn. The man stopped and turned warily. He cautiously tried to make out who was inside the car, and then, spotting Irving at last, broke into a smile and gave a solid, official wave. Then he walked on. “That’s my good friend the legendary Sidney Korshak,” Irving explained. “He was Hoffa’s lawyer, and played a part in my dark years, which I’ll tell you about at some point.”

We walked together into the Bistro Garden. Irving said a warm hello to the owner and then to the tuxedoed maître d’, and took his usual table, on the edge of the garden. He ordered his lunch—baked whitefish—and began to talk about how he had come to spend so much of his life at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“My story begins on the Lower East Side of New York,” he said. “That’s where I was born, the ninth child of a rather important rabbi. I was the only one of the family who was born in New York—everyone else had begun life in Vienna. My father died when I was twenty, and the truth is that I never really felt I knew him well, though he was, I’m told, an exceptionally astute Talmudic scholar, and he did like to play cards.” Irving smiled. He was wearing a navy-blue pin-striped suit whose stripes were outlined in gold thread; a hand-painted silk tie decorated in a soft pattern derived from Monet’s water lilies; a shirt with fine red checks and a white collar, and with the points of the collar edged in the same red check; a cream cashmere vest; and a pocket square in the same hand-painted water-lily pattern as his tie. Small gold threads ran through the pocket square, and his cuffs were closed with two shields of silver, with his initials, “IVL,” set into them, and a small stone to punctuate each monogram.

In August, 1933, when he was twenty-seven, Irving married Nan Ofgang at his older sister’s house, in Brooklyn. “I had to borrow ten dollars to pay the rabbi,” he said. “We had nothing but guts and faith, and my wife had a job at the cosmetics department at the Thrifty Drug Company. I had heard from a friend, however, about a novelty company that had gone broke and abandoned a million units of a fortune-telling device in a warehouse in New York. This was called the Fortunscope. I borrowed money to lay claim to the inventory, and Nan and I decided to go on the road. There were a million Fortunscopes in that warehouse, and I was determined to sell them all. Now, the Fortunscope was a device in which you spun an arrow and found your fortune. All the fortunes were complimentary. I had a sample case, and would offer the Fortunscope to retailers. Once they placed an order, I would send it back to the New York warehouse, and Fortunscopes would be shipped to the retailer. It was a painstaking business: a gross to a department store, a dozen Fortunscopes to small five-and-dimes. I bought them for two cents and sold them for fifteen cents. In our first two years, we couldn’t afford sleeping cars, so we slept sitting up, in the day coach.

“Oh, those were wonderful days, though! We travelled from Philadelphia to Seattle, through the Middle West, Minnesota, and the various Dakotas. We were determined to visit every city with a population of more than twenty-five thousand. It was one day in some small city in one of the Carolinas—I can no longer remember which—that I was walking down a street and saw three magnificent Palm Beach suits in the window of a men’s store. One was cream, one was white, and one was navy. I went in and bought them all, eighteen dollars apiece. I’ve tried never to be badly dressed since.

“Our odyssey ended here, in California, where I took the stake we had made through the Fortunscope and went into the dress business. We liked California, but we both became homesick and decided to try moving back East. We actually found a house in Connecticut, and were ready to close on it. But then thoughts of California filled our heads. So we tossed a coin to see where we should go, and it turned up heads—California. We came back out in 1949 and bought a little house here in Beverly Hills for six thousand dollars. By then my beautiful daughter, Gale, was born. I have a son, Rand, as well, who’s a dean at Sonoma State University. I’ve always been an early riser, and so one morning—not wanting to wake my wife and children—I slipped out of the house and went looking for breakfast. The hotel was at the bottom of the street, on Sunset Boulevard, so I slipped into the Polo Lounge and ordered breakfast, and my life at the hotel began that day.”

The Beverly Hills Hotel that Irving walked into that morning was, though Irving did not know it then, in the midst of a transformation. The hotel had been built in 1912, at a time when Beverly Hills was still essentially rural; in fact, the hotel was the first large building that the city had seen. It was decorated in the heavy, leadfooted style then called Mission Revival. The halls were uncarpeted, the rooms had exposed beams, and the hotel’s various amenities had a severe, purposeful look: the swimming pool was a place where people went to go swimming, and the Polo Lounge, which had been christened by Will Rogers, looked more or less like the kind of rough-hewn place in which you might actually wish to lounge after playing polo.

By 1941, the hotel had been in and out of bankruptcy, and it was bought by a consortium of show-business people headed by the banker Hernando Courtright, who decided to have the place remodelled in the style today loosely referred to as Deco but actually called by experts Coffee Shop Moderne. Courtwright had a new wing built along Crescent Road, on the east side of the hotel, and the interior of the hotel was redesigned: its hard Spanish angles were rounded off, and it became a paradise of curving stairs, recessed lighting, and pink and green stucco. The Fountain Coffee Shop, with its famous black S-shaped counter, was installed downstairs. A thirty-foot-high sign—“The Beverly Hills” inscribed in low relief in a looping, almost feminine cursive hand—was visible from Sunset.

It was during this period that the Beverly Hills Hotel pool achieved its familiar form. The pool was set in a tropical garden. On the eastern and western edges were three rows of lounge chairs; each group of three chairs was punctuated by a small table topped with translucent glass, and a telephone rested upon each table. At the north end, a small white fountain played all day. To the south, behind a hedge of lime trees in white urns, lay the Patio Club: ten white metal tables under umbrellas, with a small bar in the back, and eight shaded booths set into one side wall. On the west side of the pool were the cabanas—little tents with striped awnings, like jousting tournament pavilions. Each had a chair, a chaise of its own, and a small door leading to a changing room just behind. (A second group of cabanas was mounted, more discreetly, above the chaises on that side, nestled into a little overhanging promontory, like a Tibetan monastery; these upper cabanas were, by legend, favored by Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe and other movie stars who were either too chubby to be looked at or too nude to be respectable.) The only sounds at the pool—aside from soft piped-in classical music and the sound of people being paged—were the metallic whirring and put-put of the blender at the bar, preparing frozen drinks (it was a tradition for the pool boys to make the rounds of the chaises every day at two-thirty with sherbet freezes in the heraldic house colors, pink and green), the breeze in the palms, and the constant murmur of boastful, wheedling, confident monologue.

It is sometimes said that the heyday of the pool dates from the heyday of the great studios, but in fact its heyday was just after theirs: its high period occurred in the mid-fifties—the era of Sam Spiegel (who stayed in the hotel for a long time) and Joseph Levine (who did, too) and Stanley Kramer and the other independent producers who began to assemble films from the ground up. It was the era of “international” casts, freelance directors, and creative financing. There was a new kind of negotiating to be done, which required a neutral place to negotiate, and the place that a lot of people chose was the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“Now, how I got my cabana had a great deal to do with what happened at the hotel,” Irving was saying. He and I had returned from lunch and were sitting together by the side of the pool. There would be no gin game that day; the regulars had all gone off to other hotels. The weather had turned unseasonably chilly; at certain moments, you could actually see your breath. But a solitary man in brown trunks, whom Irving referred to as the Hamburger Hamlet King, was lying bare-chested on a chaise on the other side of the pool. (“If you get yourself focussed in the sun,” he had said when we walked in, “it’s actually quite warming.”) “Looking back, in later years, it’s quite remarkable that I got my cabana at all,” Irving went on. “What happened was that Hernando Courtwright, who was responsible for the renovation, sold the hotel in 1953 to a couple of gentlemen from Detroit—Manny Borenstein and Ben Silberstein. Silberstein was a lawyer; Borenstein was a very astute businessman.” Irving’s tone implied that Silberstein was not. “They began to make a great deal of money. But Silberstein wanted to keep the profits for himself, and Borenstein wanted to plow the money back into the hotel. They quarrelled endlessly, for years, but neither could budge the other. Now, each had forty-five per cent, and two or three other people had the rest. Silberstein’s sister, for instance, owned two per cent. That turned out to be important, as you’ll see. They agreed to sell—Borenstein to Silberstein. Silberstein got a good deal, and Borenstein, as part of the package, got a ten-year lease, for no money, on a suite and a cabana. But his cabana was next to Silberstein’s, and by that time there was so much bad blood between them that he didn’t want to be anywhere near Silberstein, so he gave the cabana to me. We were friends. I had begun the gin game several years before, and Manny enjoyed it.

“So, because of the ill feeling and misunderstanding between Borenstein and Silberstein, I had my cabana, when only two or three years later grown men would have killed for that cabana. There were thirteen cabanas, and in summer months they were almost impossible to get, even at a hundred dollars a day. A cabana meant power, it meant glamour, it meant that you had a place in the world. Everyone came to the hotel then. Every important personality in the picture business. I knew them all. Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, John Wayne, Buddy Rogers, Don Ameche.” Irving is essentially a democrat; Buddy Rogers and Clark Gable exist for him on more or less the same plane. “Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich. How well I remember that memorable day when Dietrich broke the dress code in the Polo Lounge! Women were not allowed to wear slacks. It was an absolute prohibition. Now, Dietrich entered the loggia room in slacks.”

“What happened?”

“They let her in. She was Marlene Dietrich, after all.”

The Hamburger Hamlet King jogged over—there were goose bumps all over his almost purple tanned skin—and he and Irving began to talk. Then the Hamburger Hamlet King returned to his chaise and peremptorily summoned the one remaining pool boy. “Can you believe that? Only one,” Irving said. “Now, in those days the people who worked here at the hotel had influence. They had power. To get a good chaise from Sven, a good table from Bernice—well, grown men would plead with me to put in a good word for them. Even the parking was competitive. Who parked your car. It was in the nature of the picture business, you see, to be like that. It is a nest of insecurities. Now, I have sat here”—he waved toward the cabanas behind us—“for forty-two years and watched the picture business, and the thing that I have learned about the picture business is this: Keep out of the picture business. They can strip you naked and leave nothing behind. I knew everyone who mattered in the picture business, and the ones who made real money were the ones who expanded beyond the picture business.

“The only time I ever really got involved in the picture business was when several gentlemen were making a picture with Hal Holbrook called ‘The Kidnapping of the President.’ They came to me to see if I could introduce them to anyone who could help with the financing. Well, at that point I wanted to do something surprising for my grandchildren, so I encouraged these gentlemen, and they offered me a bit part in the picture, as an Air Force general. When the picture came out, my grandchildren were delighted.

“Now, I was explaining how the hotel came to be sold to the Sultan, which has led us to all this. You see, the two daughters of Silberstein inherited the hotel, and one of them, Seema, at the time of Silberstein’s death was married to Ivan Boesky. Boesky, who was also very astute, decided to sell the hotel. The sisters didn’t get along—the Beverly Hills Hotel curse, you could call this. So he bought the two per cent the aunt still had—you recall the aunt I mentioned?—and got it for himself. The balance had tipped, and now he could sell the hotel. There were two real bids: one from the Sultan of Brunei and one from my good friend Marvin Davis, whom I once tried to help buy CBS. Marvin—do you know Marvin? Well, in addition to being a wonderfully astute businessman he’s—” Irving groped for a word. “He’s a wonderfully Falstaffian figure,” he said at last, delicately. “We had breakfast together once, and he asked me to teach him how to dress. I said, ‘Draw up a contract!’ But he never did. Anyway, Marvin Davis explained to me that both he and the Sultan of Brunei offered a hundred and thirty-five million, but that Muriel wanted to sell it to an American rather than to a foreigner. So Marvin bought the hotel. But it was only after he bought the hotel that they pursued the due diligence—checking the plumbing, the wiring, the corroding. He realized that it would take millions to fix it. ‘Irving,’ he told me, ‘I made a bad deal.’ Then he gets a call from the Sultan of Brunei. The Sultan is still dying to buy the Beverly Hills Hotel. ‘Not for sale,’ Marvin says. He’s an astute Sultan, as sultans go, but no match for Marvin Davis. Marvin has nerves of steel. Of course, it’s much easier to have nerves of steel when you have money of gold. That’s a maxim of mine. So the Sultan ended up paying a lot more than a hundred and thirty-five million.

“It was too much to pay, of course—what the Sultan paid. People have a hard time understanding the hotel business. There’s an interesting sidelight to this story. Let’s go back to the late fifties, when Howard Hughes had three bungalows and twenty-one rooms permanently taken at the hotel, although he only visited for a few weeks each year. I used to observe Mr. Hughes going from one bungalow to another: one bungalow for Jean Peters, his wife; one for Hughes; and one for his mistress, who was rotated every month. Now, this is the interesting part. Ben Silberstein came to me upset, because he was going to have to throw Hughes out. Throw out Howard Hughes! I asked why. Because the rooms were not producing any income. No food, no services. Hughes thought that everybody must be holding him in awe because he had all those rooms, and in fact they were going to have to kick him out. So Hughes checked out, and went to Las Vegas. He was not terribly missed by any of us. My point is that the hotel business is not as simple as it looks. The Sultan owns the hotel, but he discovers that it needs work to bring it up to date. So he’ll spend millions. The problem is that if you close the hotel and spend the millions, by then all the regulars will have moved on—to the Hilton, the Peninsula, the Bel-Air. Did I mention to you that I was thinking of moving to the Hilton? I should go over and spend more time there before I decide. But I hate to leave the hotel.”

In its last weeks, there were only a dozen paying guests left in the Beverly Hills Hotel; Sven Peterson at one point was even seen waiting on tables at the Patio Club. The doors to the unoccupied rooms were often left open for hours by the maids, and, peering inside, you saw a kind of anthology of forlorn, forgotten de-luxe styles: rooms lined with mirrors and Buffet-like paintings; rooms with wall-to-wall shag carpeting; rooms with “Persian” rugs and small terraces; rooms that looked like sets for James Bond movies; rooms that looked like sets for Doris Day and Rock Hudson movies.

Over the past twelve months, the decision to close down the Beverly Hills Hotel and remodel it has been much argued over in Beverly Hills, but, Beverly Hills being Beverly Hills, the argument has taken a peculiarly Beverly Hills form, with much of the argument conducted in the weekly “giveaway” papers. The Beverly Hills community, which is heavily Jewish, has always mistrusted the Sultan, who is, of course, Muslim, and whose little, wealthy country has voted against Israel in the United Nations, and this larger mistrust took the local form of suspicion that he and his minions intended to destroy the hotel “landmarks”—the Polo Lounge and the pool, in particular. There were even dark rumors—not entirely implausible, given the shaky state of small Islamic principalities—that the Sultan wanted the hotel remodelled in order to have it ready to use as a palace in exile.

Most hotel people, however, think that the Sultan is doing what the Sultan has to do. “The whole thing began to come apart very quickly,” a hotel-business insider explained. “Until the mid-eighties, there was a ninety-per-cent occupancy rate, and the hotel wasn’t even allowed to be booked by tourist agencies. But then the occupancy rate declined suddenly and precipitously. What was happening was that the clientele was dying off, and it wasn’t being replaced by younger Hollywood people. The occupancy rate dropped into the mid-sixties. And the competitive situation became intolerable: the Beverly Wilshire was upgraded, and then the Beverly Hilton. The Beverly Hills, by comparison, still had—well, it still had window units instead of central air-conditioning.” (When you talk to Los Angeles hotel people, this issue comes up again and again: “window unit” is always pronounced a little sotto voce, in a tone that might be reserved in other hotel circles for the term “chamber pot.”)

Officially, the renovation of the hotel will include the construction of an underground parking lot and a reduction in the number of rooms. Each suite will have a “luxury” bathroom, with a double marble sink and a television. A fax machine will be installed in every suite. “People—show-business people—used to want a hotel that created an illusion of leisure,” one hotel man told me. “Welcoming your guest out onto the patio of your room for breakfast in your terry robe—that kind of thing. The Beverly Wilshire, though, pioneered an illusion of power, which is what wealthy people, and particularly people in show business, want now. You’re in your suite, faxing stuff, when people come in. The hotel has to respond to that change.”

Although in the last few years the hotel made a halfhearted effort to promote itself as a kind of dowager empress—with stories planted in the press about the history of the place, the enduring charm of Bernice, the unchanged décor of the Polo Lounge—that kind of nostalgic, ironic appeal seemed not to be very alluring to the powerful movie-and-television industry people the hotel was losing to the competition down the street. What veterans of the leisure industry call the South Beach Phenomenon, after the Miami Beach strip—a phenomenon in which what had been innocently luxurious to one generation then became slightly passé to an in-between generation, only to suddenly become fashionable once again, to a still younger crowd—never took hold in Beverly Hills. Richard Koshalek feels that this lack of historical affection is a typically Los Angeles phenomenon. “You know, we based the entire color scheme of L.A. MOCA on the colors of the Polo Lounge—that green and pink coloring,” he says. “It seemed to Isozaki, the architect, that they represented a kind of mystical, heraldic, symbolic coloring of Los Angeles. But it’s very hard to get people in L.A. to care about their own disappearing monuments. The hot-dog stand, the Brown Derby—the things that have seemed to outsiders to define authentic L.A. culture—leave most moneyed people here very uneasy.”

Koshalek’s principle seems to be borne out by the evolution of the hotel’s clientele in its declining years. Movie people, the theory runs, tend to value extreme clarity in their lines of power and obligation. (One non-movie person who has regular dealings with movie people says that whenever a certain agent has even the smallest favor done for him, he immediately sends lavish and expensive gifts not only to the one doing the favor but to all of that person’s secretaries and assistants, whom in many cases he may never have met.) Hollywood is essentially a feudal society, and in a feudal society what matters most is that the feudal powers never put themselves in even a mildly ambiguous situation—that they never run the risk of looking ridiculous. Hollywood people, this argument goes on, like to build their own, indubitably serious establishments as soon as they can—I. M. Pei’s C.A.A. building is an example of this compulsion—instead of taking over old ones. Irony—even the kind of simple, nostalgic irony that involves appreciating the dated, period look of a slightly passé swimming pool—is a disruptive, cosmopolitan virtue, favored in cultures, like New York’s, in which the primary social skill is not obtaining a fixed place within a hierarchy but being able to enter as many circles as you possibly can.

Throughout the eighties, a number of “European” hotels were opened in Los Angeles, with an eye to a New York crowd that was supposedly put off by the presumed tackiness of the Hollywood hotels, but those new, elegant hotels tended to be frequented by show-business types, while the Beverly Hills Hotel was the one that became a favorite haunt of New Yorkers. In recent years, the clientele of the hotel had become particularly heavy with professional ironists—New York art-world people. On one morning about two years ago, in fact, the only people at the pool (except, of course, for Irving) were a good chunk of the staff of the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Painting & Sculpture. William Rubin, the director emeritus, was down in the shallow end; his wife, Phyllis Hattis, was dangling her legs in the shallow end; Lynn Zelevansky, the senior curator, was sunning in a chaise (Kirk Varnedoe, the department’s current director, had left the hotel only a couple of days before). Lounging in chairs at poolside were the art dealer Larry Gagosian and the photographer Sheila Metzner. You can’t make a living on a crowd like that. Irving’s own notes on the hotel, from a set of recollections he has prepared about his life, record this change simply and plaintively: “Polo Lounge. Power breakfasts and lunches. Lines at night extended deep into lobby. Not anymore.”

“I’ve heard very encouraging things about the breakfast at the Century Plaza,” Irving said. We were having coffee in the Polo Lounge one afternoon. He was dressed in a cherry-red turtleneck, high-waisted black slacks, and a black leather bomber jacket. “The Century Plaza is very near where I live. What I ought to do is go there for breakfast one morning soon and try it out. I hate to jump off the deep end without a parachute. But that would mean giving up breakfast here, and I don’t have many left. The days dwindle down, dwindle down to a precious few. Everyone else is moving. The Bel-Air, the Peninsula, the Wilshire, the Hollywood Hilton. But I’m not ready to leave yet.” Irving was in what was for him a lugubrious mood. The day before,another of the pool regulars—Mark Goodson, the game-show producer—had died. (The obituary in the L.A. Times, seeking to explain how Goodson had come by his forty-million-dollar fortune, pointed out that he had “created a plethora of now-familiar television concepts—such as having contestants compete against one another; using the ‘bell and buzzer’ to signal which contestant answered a question first.”) “I never liked Goodson,” Irving said. “He was the only man I knew who could strut sitting down.” But then he added, “Still, I hate to see the regulars dying off. He was only seventy-seven. Pretty soon, who will be left who really knows the pool—who can bridge the gap between the pool’s closing and its reopening? There’s not going to be any continuity at the pool.”

I had been trying for a long time to get Irving to explain to me exactly how his business worked. “I live on finder’s fees,” he said now. “I’m a middleman—a matchmaker. What I do is to bring people together, and take two per cent. For instance, that gentleman who’s staying in the hotel right now, the Hamburger Hamlet King? Well, I knew that an old friend who had created the entire Hamburger Hamlet concept was ready to sell, and from my network of friends I also knew who might be interested in going into the restaurant business on that scale. It isn’t simply pool people, but the pool people help. I’m a middleman, a matchmaker, an observer. I observe who’s ready to sell and who’s eager to buy.”

We had made a date for Irving to take me to see a couple of “landmark suites”—the Boesky Suite, where Ivan Boesky had lived, and Suite 100, which was legendary as the place where Ben Silberstein had conducted what Irving refers to as his “extracurricular activities.” But as we were settling the bill Irving said suddenly, “I suppose I ought to tell you that tragic story I started to tell you about, since it’s about my business. Well, it all had to do with the Teamsters. In the early sixties, I was making good money in real estate, and everything couldn’t have been clearer. Then my daughter had the bad luck to make an unhappy marriage to the son of a man who ran the Teamsters’ pension fund. I took out a loan from him to invest in some real estate. It was all completely aboveboard and legal. But then Bobby Kennedy came to believe that he could put pressure on me to turn against my son-in-law and testify to terrible things. So one morning”—Irving was becoming uncharacteristically agitated—“one morning Kennedy came into the Polo Lounge, right here where we’re sitting, during breakfast and shook his finger at me and said, ‘Link, you do as I tell you, or you’ll be in trouble.’ He didn’t even call me Mr. Link—just pointed at me with that finger, and called me Link. So I held that finger, and I said, ‘Mr. Kennedy, I don’t do what anyone tells me.’ He was right, I was in big trouble. Bobby put the I.R.S. on me, and they ended up disallowing two hundred and forty-two thousand dollars in deductions. There was nothing illegal. Things like my son’s bar mitzvah, here in the hotel. They wanted me to testify, you see, and I had to protect my son-in-law. I had never met Hoffa. I was supposed to meet him, once. My son-in-law’s father wanted me to come to Washington and meet Hoffa. So I took a plane out to Washington. But I was troubled by an inner-ear problem in those days, and I got terribly, terribly sick on the plane. I damaged my clothes—a wonderful suit, in linen. When I arrived, he said, ‘I don’t want Hoffa to see you looking like that.’ So I never met him.

“But my business was ruined. The papers picked it up, and, since I wouldn’t testify against my son-in-law, they made it sound as if I belonged to the Mafia. It stopped me dead. People believe what they read. I went from the top to the bottom. But I was never depressed. I’d done nothing wrong. The measure of a man, I think, is how he can accept adversity with dignity. I decided to hold my head high. I still came to the hotel every day. But I often ate at the counter, and I curtailed my gin playing.” By “the counter,” Irving meant the Fountain Coffee Shop, downstairs. “I was eventually reduced to taking a job. My brother-in-law was a liquor distributor, and I joined his business.

“I was called in front of the grand jury four times. I took the Fifth. I went to visit my son-in-law’s father in jail one Sunday and told him I wouldn’t testify against him. He said to me, ‘You dumb son of a bitch, what more can they do to me?’ Here are the two cheering things that came out of this tragic episode, however. First, the enduring love of my children. Second, the friendship of Charles Z. Smith, one of the prosecuting attorneys. He knew that I was simply protecting my son-in-law. Mr. Smith and I became fast friends after the trial, and he is one of the most charming and delightful gentlemen I’ve ever met. We correspond, and call each other for Christmas. His son and I have actually breakfasted right here in the booth, where Bobby Kennedy pointed his finger at me. Bobby, I believe, always wanted his own way, whether he was right or wrong. You know, he caused me so much strife, but I believe he was sincere. I was watching him in early 1968, and I said to my daughter, ‘You know, I may vote for him.’ She just looked at me.”

Irving and I left the Polo Lounge, crossed the lobby, and went to look at the Boesky Suite and Suite 100—which turned out to be just hotel suites, from which the aura of power and sensuality had long since fled. We walked back toward the empty lobby, and bumped into Kerman Beriker, the hotel manager, who had just left a farewell party given by the Sultan for the hotel’s employees. “It’s a sad day, but it’s not final,” Beriker said. “Everything will be the same, Mr. Link, I promise you. New rooms, but the Polo Lounge will be the same, the swimming pool will be the same. It’s just—we need a face-lift.” He dropped his voice. “We still have window units in the rooms,” he said, and held his hands out, palms upward, in dismay.

A steady, melancholy procession of employees poured out of the Crystal Room, where the party had been held. First, a phalanx of Mexican and South American bellhops and maids, each clutching a pink plastic bag with the logo of the hotel imprinted on it. “There’s a present from the Sultan in each bag,” Mr. Beriker explained. Then, after a suitable interval, the royalty of the hotel came out, all in mufti: Sven, Bernice, Chris, Robert the concierge, clutching pink plastic bags that held parting gifts from the Sultan. They gathered around Irving and talked in low voices. (Severance pay had been arranged for most of the senior staff, but no one had been promised a job when the hotel reopened.) Irving looked around the lobby. “Well,” he said, “I have an invitation to a gin game at the Peninsula. But I think— No, I’m just going home.”

On my last afternoon in the hotel, I went down to have a sandwich at the Fountain. A young black woman, with elegant, aristocratic features, wearing a T-shirt that featured the cast of the classic Warner Brothers cartoons—Sylvester, Tweetie, Bugs, Porky, Yosemite Sam—was having lunch there, too. She was engaged in a conversation with the waitress behind the counter, who looked like a waitress supplied by Central Casting thirty years ago. The young woman gave the waitress a box. The waitress opened it, and exclaimed with delight when she saw that it was full of little sweet-potato pies.

“Those are good pies,” the young woman said. “I knew you’d like them.” Then she ordered a sandwich. “Jonny,” she said to the waitress, “can I have some ketchup and Tabasco when you come this way? And some chips?”

“Karen, I’ll have to send for chips,” the waitress said. “I don’t want to give you these I have here.”

The young woman turned to me. “This is the only decent food in this place,” she said. “Last year, when I was working on my book about my grandfather, I lived over in the Crescent Wing and tried the room service. But it was awful. I’ve been coming here since I was a little girl. My grandfather designed this hotel. His name was Paul Revere Williams, and he did all the Hernando Courtright-period remodelling, back in the forties. The Polo Lounge, the pool, the lobby, this place—all the color schemes and the staircases and the signage. They’re all his. Even the big sign out on Sunset. That’s his, too.”

The waitress brought over the Tabasco sauce and the potato chips. “This has been a horrendous year for me,” the young woman went on, after introducing herself as Karen Hudson. “All my grandfather’s papers were burned in the riot. This black S. & L. where I work, and that he helped found—it burned right to the ground. So that set me back. But, fortunately, I’ve got lots of other things in the house—his house, where I live, which he designed for my grandmother. It looks like this place, a lot. The curves, the recessed lighting, the inside-outside theme, the color scheme—that was the whole Paul Williams look. He’s just being rediscovered. My book—I’m doing it for Rizzoli—will be the first book about him. It’s funny how people are only just beginning to hear of him. He invented all this—took every straight angle he found in the hotel and turned it round, made it graceful and elegant. But when I called the L.A. Times to get an extra copy of his obituary, they couldn’t find it. They said to me, very querulously, ‘How do you know he had an obituary?’ I said, ‘I know he had two. Because we had them in the family scrapbook.’ He was the first black member of A.I.A. and their first black fellow, too. He was building houses here in Beverly Hills at a time when black people couldn’t even live there. It’s not true that he couldn’t stay here himself—my grandfather would probably have been welcome. He came to the hotel a lot for balls and functions, and so on. But he never wanted to put himself in a position where he could be humiliated. One day when they were creating the pool out there—one of the engineers told me this—my grandfather came out to talk to his crew, and he wouldn’t sit down. They thought, My God, the boss doesn’t want to come and speak to us. It wasn’t that. He would just never put himself in a position where he could possibly be humiliated. That’s why, though he designed hundreds of homes here in Beverly Hills, he would never live in one. Instead, he built his home in a black neighborhood, and always lived deep in the mid-city, in a black community.

“Nobody knows exactly why he got the job. He practiced from 1915 to 1973, in just about every style known to man. He built hundreds of houses around here—he had a completely adaptable, eclectic style. They’re all known, of course, by the pedigree of stars who’ve lived in them. One of my favorite houses that he built is owned by a terrific couple who bought it from Raquel Welch. They’ve got a room with a brass plate on the door: ‘Raquel Welch Memorabilia Room.’ He really designed two masterpieces, though—this place and the house I live in. I’ll take you there, if you like. I’ve tried to keep it unchanged.”

In Los Angeles, I had got used to jumping into other people’s cars and taking long drives to places I had never seen, so we went upstairs to the lobby, Karen got her car from Chris, and we set off. Along the way, she took me on a compressed tour of her grandfather’s work. He seemed to have designed every second house in Beverly Hills, in a bewildering range of styles: little absurd imitations of the White House; small, graceful bungalows done in a modified Frank Lloyd Wright manner; mini-Monticelli.

Then we drove south, through miles and miles of low, featureless buildings, and pulled up in a beautiful, palm-lined block that seemed to have been inserted, in one piece, from another, posher neighborhood. I asked Karen what part of Los Angeles we were in.

“Well, I think this is called Wilshire,” she said. “Until there’s a police disturbance, and then it becomes South Central again.” She led the way to a small, nondescript façade on one corner of the block, and opened the door.

A small vestibule dominated by a staircase with a curved ironwork railing—rather like the staircase that leads from the ground floor to the pool corridor in the hotel—lay just inside. The railing was wrought in the image of three stags, chasing each other upstairs. On the far side of the staircase lay the living room, with a hearth of agate-colored stone. The right wall was entirely of floor-to-ceiling glass and looked out on a curving, gently terraced, kidney-shaped patio—a doll’s-house version of the Polo Lounge patio, almost down to the last flagstone. The entire interior was orchestrated around a series of graceful S-curves—the curved living room echoing the curve of a green lacquered baby-grand piano, which, in turn, stood in front of a swelling built-in breakfront that filled an entire wall. The colors of the room were all subtly nuanced shades of emerald and moss—a quieter, domestic version of the Beverly Hills Hotel green.

“Let me show you the Ben Mayer,” Karen said, and opened the breakfront. Inside its doors was a five-foot-long painted mural signed “Ben Mayer” and dated 1951. It showed, in a spirited, cartoonlike style—half Stuart Davis and half Ben Shahn—the story of the architect Paul Williams’ life. A handsome black man in a perfect pin-striped suit, his wife, and their two little girls, in crinolines, filled the foreground. Behind the family was a montage, painted in uneven, shifting perspective, of Paul Williams’ most famous buildings: a Saks Fifth Avenue branch on a boardwalk, a pair of New Orleans-style houses. To the upper right was the sign of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and below were scenes from the hotel itself—the lounge, the awning, the pool. “That was his handwriting,” Karen said, pointing to the cursive writing on the sign, faithfully reproduced in the painting. “He just used it for the hotel.”

There was a single incongruous note in the mural. Above the beautiful family, a woman was depicted in black underwear, sitting, one leg drawn up, on the edge of a bed. “Ben Mayer put that in for my grandfather,” Karen explained. “He said he put it in because he and my grandfather agreed that prostitutes were the only people they had known who never discriminated against anyone.

“Before the hotel, my father’s biggest commission was the Al Jolson shrine. It’s this big memorial out at Hillside Cemetery. It’s funny, isn’t it? He made his early reputation commemorating a blackface entertainer.”

The living room was sunken, and the light came in from small windows facing a garden. I noticed that they were heavily barred. Karen caught me eying them.

“That’s new,” she said, a little grimly. “We’ve had so many break-ins here. Just this spring, they broke in and stole everything—all my files, all my computers, and, what was worse, the computer disks. They steal them for the programs. That meant that I lost just about the entire manuscript for my book, and I had to start all over again. Oh, it’s been a horrendous year. The fire broke my heart. The S. & L. where I worked was the oldest black-owned-and-operated S. & L. in the city. My other grandfather, my paternal grandfather, opened it in 1947, and brought Paul Williams on at the beginning. In the Watts riot, back in ’65, everybody knew that it was a black institution, so it was left untouched. But not this time. It burned right to the ground that first night, with all the papers in it. I’ve just had to write a new statement for our calendar.” She handed me the calendar. It read, in part, “Broadway Federal emerged from the ashes rededicated to the principles upon which it was founded. Fiercely committed to the belief in South Central and its viability for business, while understanding the importance of home ownership . . . Strengthened by your trust and support, we found many bright lights amidst the rubble.”

Karen showed me around the upstairs rooms, which were simpler in décor—a big Frank Lloyd Wright desk, a handsome faceted-glass chandelier—but had the same signature lulling rhythm of curves and recesses. “He lived here in such happiness with my grandmother,” Karen said. “He was entirely filled with her. At work, he was a martinet, but around here all you ever heard him say was ‘Yes, dear.’ It moves me, because he usually worked in whatever style his clients wanted. But this style was obviously his real style—it was the style he loved. It’s so funny—his most public building is done in this style, and his most private building is, too.”

I’d promised to say goodbye to Irving, and I was already late, so Karen drove me back to the hotel. As we turned the corner onto Wilshire Boulevard, I noticed, for the first time, that everything on the Boulevard looked odd. Not just empty—everything always looks empty in Los Angeles—but unnaturally dark, as though the gas stations and shopping centers had been crudely overprinted in woodcut.

“It’s all still burned,” Karen said softly. “Nothing restored yet. That burned, and that burned, and that burned.” She pointed at the gas stations and supermarkets and little shopping centers; they were, I realized, all charred at their edges. “Can you imagine?” she said, shaking her head. “But the house is still safe, thank God.”

“And where will you go?” Irving asked me. He was lying on his chaise, all alone by the side of the pool. By now, the weather had passed from unseasonably chilly to just plain cold; I was in a wool suit. Irving seemed impervious to it all; he was stripped to the waist and was peering at the thin, distant, hazy sun with deep satisfaction, as though we were in Hawaii in August.

When I returned to the hotel, I had asked Irving if he knew that the pool and the Polo Lounge had been designed by a black architect named Paul Williams. “I didn’t,” he said, and he looked shocked. But then he said, “If I looked surprised, it’s because I didn’t know that he had designed all this. You see, I knew the name, because he was the architect of the first house I lived in in Beverly Hills—the one I was living in when I walked over here that morning. I never met the gentleman, but now I realize that my entire adult life has been spent within his precincts.” Irving looked suitably impressed.

“And where will you go?” he asked again. I realized that he was asking what hotel I would stay in when I came back to Los Angeles, and that, for him, it was an important question. I didn’t know what to say. I vaguely remembered hearing from a friend that there was a nice hotel on a beach in Santa Monica, so I mentioned it.

“Really!” Irving said, with polite surprise. He considered for a few moments. “Well, why not?” he said, at last. “One of my maxims is ‘Try everything.’ ”

On the patio, two producers were having what one of them had loudly billed as “the last Beverly Hills Hotel lunch.” Their voices barked out across the empty pool.

“What do you mean ‘good family’?” one of them was saying. “What does that mean? What. Come on, what? They don’t take drugs, they give money to the poor—what?”

“I grant you that the expression is clichéd,” the other began.

I lost track of the conversation. Irving had walked over to the hedge of lime trees, and now he deliberately plucked a lime from a tree, walked back, and handed it to me. “Here,” he said. “Keep this.”

I put the lime in the pocket of my suit, and brought it back to New York with me. I still have it.

I spoke to Irving just the other week. “The Hilton turned out to be a pretty crummy place,” he said. “So I’ve moved my entire life over to the Peninsula. Now something quite remarkable has happened there, which seems agreeably unexpected.” He paused. “The entire royal family of Brunei has moved in here, including the Sultan’s brother! I helped them get rooms—there are forty of them already, and eighty more are coming next month—and we’ve become very good friends. They’re delightful, magnificent people. They’ve reassured me immensely about the future of the hotel, even though I’ve never met the Sultan himself. In fact, I’m coming to think that this time away from the pool may even be very invigorating and character-building. When we return to the pool, we may even appreciate it all the more, for having been kept away so long.” ♦

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