As the Oscars get underway this week, a handful of five-star hotels in Los Angeles offer the opportunity to recline by a pool as Margaret Qualley paddles around like a naiad, cheerfully complimenting guests’ babies (the Chateau Marmont); observe Mick Jagger taking his ease (with excellent posture) in a booth where he’ll warmly greet anyone bold enough to say hello (the Sunset Tower Hotel); stand behind Keanu Reeves as he, like you, waits for a table at the Polo Lounge (the Beverly Hills Hotel). Each of these lodgings looms in its own battlemented way above Sunset Boulevard, where the gods of Hollywood parade their power and beauty. The last, when I drove past, was fronted by a mechanized Cerberus in the form of a black police trailer that flashed the LED message “WELCOME TO BEVERLY HILLS DRONE IN USE.”
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But hidden on Stone Canyon Road, invisible within 12 acres of drone-free gardens, is the Hotel Bel-Air, a place of fanatical discretion where gods can still act like gods—by remaining unseen. They won’t even see one another. The Hotel Bel-Air (or HBA) makes a point of illustrating what it calls “protective culture for the world’s most powerful players” with the following anecdote, on page one of a press handout called Anecdotes: “Once, the three then-surviving members of The Beatles—Paul, George and Ringo—were staying at the hotel without any of them knowing the others were there.” I imagine John Lennon, in shade form, knew and floated down the tree-lined paths between bungalows as Elton John’s words, “Can’t you come out to play in your empty garden, Johnny,” emanated from subtly disguised Bang & Olufsen speakers.
Listing the HBA’s famous habitués will consume my word count. So here are some who’ve lived there: Warren Beatty, Tom Cruise, Tony Curtis, Cary Grant, Tommy Lee Jones, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Kathleen Turner, Robert Wagner, John Wayne, and Robin Williams. Cruise liked to take clarifying walks in the gardens after a day in the editing suite. Monroe wore a black veil, like a Portuguese fado singer, in the public areas and filled her suite’s closets, per the hotel’s Anecdotes, with “approximately 558 pairs of shoes.” My favorite detail from the HBA press packet is that Kelly lived there “while vacationing from her castle in Monaco.”
Yes, the HBA is a place to vacation from your castle and offers numerous castle-like features (moat, secret doors, high walls) to satisfy the castle dweller. After leaving your car with a valet (there is no street parking in Bel-Air), you cross an arched bridge, pass through a breezeway, and are greeted by a large color photograph of then-president Ronald Reagan walking his daughter Patti down the aisle at her 1984 wedding at the hotel.
Beyond the breezeway is the best bar in L.A., monochromatic in palette, full of life-size, better-than-Avedon photographs of a joyful Tina Turner, Ray Charles, Cher, and Joni Mitchell by Norman Seeff, plus an always-played grand piano and an always-lit fireplace. (The staff turn on the AC and keep it going when it’s too hot, as Richard Nixon used to do in the White House—more on what he did at the HBA in a moment.) The live music and live flames and black-and-white photos of musicians in this black-and-white room make you feel that you’ve slipped into some intimate living room of the past. It’s also one of the only bars I’ve ever been to where people who didn’t arrive together talk with one another, perhaps because so many of them are locals.
The bar is open to the public and doesn’t reserve tables, but the parking valets double as gatekeepers for the drive-in clientele. One night, when the bar was open as usual, I watched a valet deftly decline to park a man’s Pulse Red Hyundai Kona. This valet, who looked uncannily like Florida congressman Matt Gaetz (hair like a bluff), simply said, “Sorry, the bar’s closed tonight for a private party.”
“But you never close the bar,” said the man, who seemed to know (because, reader, that man was me).
Gaetz was unruffled. “That’s true,” he replied. “This is the first time we’ve ever done it.”
When I called the next day to investigate, I learned that there had been a jazz trio playing that night, like nearly every night, and the bar hadn’t been crowded.
Nancy Reagan ate at the bar’s adjoining restaurant almost daily until just before her death, in 2016. She never varied her order: the Spa Salad (chicken, avocado, tomato, cheddar, egg, turkey bacon, and a Meyer lemon vinaigrette). She requested it chopped—more and more and more chopped with the passage of time. I imagine it eventually reaching a quasi-smoothie state, bringing it in line with the times.
Now it’s listed as the “HBA Nancy Reagan ‘Chopped’ Salad,” and, as a waiter told me, “it’s the bread and butter of the menu.”
After leaving the White House, Nixon also headed for the Bel-Air and wrote his memoirs in the Swan Lake Suite. (Reviewing it for Foreign Affairs, historian Gaddis Smith said, “Nixon writes more clearly than Truman, Eisenhower or Johnson, but he whines more.”) There is a lake at the hotel—and swans with names like Chloe, Athena, and Hercules. Beautiful whiners all.
The gardens surrounding the lake have a seductive influence on visitors, including the most sober representatives of the fourth estate. Take this description of an HBA guest, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, that appeared in the New Yorker in 1992: “Under a magnolia tree at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, with desert boots on his feet and a small Navajo silver necklace, along with a Tibetan silk cord, around his neck, he talks about Ireland.”
The mind adds cloven hooves and a panpipe and, obviously, a pot of gold. To pay the bill.
There is something mythological about the place. Given free rein to walk around during a recent visit, I did not think I was in a city at all, let alone Los Angeles. Or even on Earth. As I walked a hilltop path, I could see the world spread below, a fiery haze of sun making buildings, windshields, and ocean flicker together. I had an unexpected moment of delight, not an easy thing for someone who lives most of the time in New York. Usually luxury makes me feel debased or undeserving, manifested as it often is through servility, snobbery, ostentation, and absurd pretension. But here, I was on the top of a mountain in a city in a hotel. At the HBA, you rarely encounter anything but nature. Like paparazzi, feelings of guilt or judgment have nowhere to lodge themselves.
Later, I met up with Aubree Ungar, the marketing and communications manager for both the Bel-Air and the Beverly Hills Hotel, a juggling act, she told me, of “very different clients,” albeit both holdings of the Brunei Investment Agency. I had asked if I could see the HBA’s Presidential Suite, the largest hotel room in Los Angeles, which is really a compound, with its own pool and separate street entrance—a metal door that looks as if it leads to a municipal water-shutoff valve but actually offers invisible access from Chalon Road to thousands of square feet of heated white limestone floors, a handmade chandelier of rock crystal suspended above a paradisiacal arrangement of white orchids, an appliance store’s worth of Bang & Olufsen flat-screen televisions, and a full chef’s kitchen.
After taking it all in, we stood before the pool, which looked exactly like a blown-up color chip for Pantone Cerulean Blue 639 U.
I dipped a finger in. Ninety-two degrees? Ninety-five? (The main pool is heated to 82 degrees year-round—but this was warmer.)
And then, channeling my daughter’s all-things-lead-to-Taylor-Swift outlook, I said, “It looks like somewhere Taylor Swift would stay.”
Ungar hesitated for half a beat before asking, in a perfectly neutral tone of voice, “Why do you say that?”
The HBA is uplifting and exclusionary in the unbending way of a holy text. It is utterly sui generis, and its wonders are unique, existing outside of both time and trends. Also, the truth is, sometimes you do catch a god unawares. During one visit, I passed a figure in a black hoodie and black sweatpants standing quietly beside the path.
Swept away by my reverie, I offered up a cheerful, “Good morning!”
The response was alarm—as if I had just popped up in this figure’s bedroom—and I was immediately blasted by twin bolts from blue eyes ablaze beneath the hoodie.
For a second, Eminem looked like he wanted to chop me smaller than a Nancy Reagan Salad.•
Sean Wilsey is the director of the film IX XI. He’s the author of the memoir Oh the Glory of It All; an essay collection, More Curious; and, in collaboration with the actress Molly Shannon, the memoir Hello, Molly!
