For about 30 years now, my goddess wife and I have lived in Beverly Hills. It’s a leafy, charming ’hood that stands out in Carbon-Monoxide Los Angeles because of its old-fashioned charm and its proximity to expensive stores and restaurants. It’s famous for the many famous men and women who have lived here. I never intended to live here. But my wife-for-life always wanted to do so, and so here we are.
There are breathtakingly expensive homes here. Ours is not one of them. But ours is a rambling home with a startlingly large swimming pool and a green, inviting front lawn.
Most homes here have large driveways and parking lots in front of their front doors. Ours is not one of them. Ours has a green, rich, deep green front lawn. But we park our cars in a garage serviced by an alley. Above that garage is an office where I write endlessly about issues of the day and about our little family.
I love our house and so does my saintly wifey. But it’s not a show house. It’s just a house with a number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Its main glory is its location. It is less than a 15-minute walk to the kinds of stores you read about in novels. It is ringed with Bentleys and Rolls-Royces. If you wanted to show off to your friends from home, this is where you would come.
Our house is about one-eighth of a mile from the local public junior high school. Our son, no longer among the living, went to that junior high. He hated it. But we soon got him out of there and into a boarding school in New England.
For me, the ultimate paradise of our house is that it is not even half a mile from the Beverly Hills Hotel. This is an immense pink palace right at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Drive. It has become my second home. I don’t just like it: I LOVE IT.
From the instant I pull up to the entrance, I am greeted by the valet parkers, all of whom I know by name. They know me. Yes, unlike the other customers, I have a modest, AMERICAN-made 20-year-old sedan from General Motors. It squeaks when I apply the brakes. It is not as expensive as a house in Chevy Chase. It is my car, though. And the valets treat it as well as if it were owned by an oil sheik. They are MY friends.
In the lobby, there are flowers and Christmas ornaments. The desk clerks call me by name and ask me how my wife is and how I am. I walk to the elevator and get a “hello” from other guests. I stroll by the famous and charming “Polo Lounge.” The notes of “old standard” American songs caress my ears as I go down to a floor where the barber shop and a lounge of breakfast foods greet me like old pals.
Then, outside by a garden made beautiful by constant tending, and then to the fabulous pool and adjoining “Cabana Café,” I am greeted by the cheerful hostesses and then shown to my usual table, from which I can see the immense swimming pool. Lately, it’s been empty because the air is a bit too cold for swimming and that’s fine with me. The pastel blue of the water, illuminated and ringed by palm trees, is more than I need and deserve.
The hotel is a sort of world atlas. The guests are from every country you can think of, with special emphasis on France and Britain and the Middle East and China and Israel. As far as I can tell, everyone gets along with everyone else. I usually go with one of my male nurses. They all speak every kind of language that is associated with travel and eating. They are also experts at determining what languages my neighbors in the Cabana Café are speaking.
The great genius essayist, Samuel Johnson, wrote that no other entity had been developed that yielded so much happiness as a warm, welcoming tavern. For me, that was the dining room of my glorious college fraternity, the Alpha Delta Phi. And here in Hollywood, the fabulous taverns were Morton’s On Melrose (not the steakhouse — a restaurant owned and run by Peter Morton, the son of Arne Morton, the steakhouse genius of Chicago) and Mister Chow, probably the most prestigious restaurant in Los Angeles.
But far outpacing them is — again — the Cabana Café at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a five-minute drive from our home. Magnificent and modestly priced food, friendly, neatly dressed hostesses and servers. When I am in there, I am in paradise.
Please do yourself a huge favor and spend time there. It is exactly what Dr. Johnson recommended. It is a perpetual motion machine to produce happiness.
The valets are great. The bathrooms are palaces. There is a cheery fireplace. You cannot go wrong.
I usually get a chocolate milkshake and inhale it.
My father, whom I worship, learned to love chocolate milkshakes when he was at Williams. “Never waste a moment you could spend drinking a chocolate milkshake,” he said hours before his demise. He added, “My main regret in life is that I didn’t drink more chocolate milkshakes.”
The apple does not fall far from the tree.
