The Beverly Hills Hotel is a recurring Los Angeles setting in the diaries, serving at different times as a sought-after address, a gathering point for visitors from New York, and a base for celebrity encounters. The entries give it no single fixed character: it is glamorous in its associations, useful for its centrality to the narrator’s social itinerary, and ultimately memorable for rooms and facilities he found exasperating.

An Elusive Room and an Unpromising Return

In February 1977, the hotel was the first choice after the group arrived in California, but it had no rooms available. The party had traveled from New York with Suzie Frankfurt, whom they dropped at the Simons’ home on Sunset Boulevard, and had to stay instead at the Beverly Wilshire. The failed booking placed the Beverly Hills Hotel in the role of a desired but inaccessible destination before the diary had recorded an actual stay there.

The hotel became their lodging on a later Los Angeles trip. In March 1977, Susan Pile met the group at the airport with a limousine and promotional materials, and they checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the rooms were described as particularly unpleasant. The entry supplies no detailed inventory of what made those rooms bad; its terseness leaves the complaint as a practical counterpoint to the hotel’s celebrated name. The party gathered in Suzie Frankfurt’s room before Joan Quinn invited them to dinner at a Mexican restaurant, so even this brief stay appears through the movement of guests between hotel rooms and the city’s social engagements.

A Social Hub for Visitors from New York

By March 1985, the hotel functioned less as a booking destination than as a meeting place. After arriving in Los Angeles, the group went to the pool, where the diary notes that people from New York were gathered, including Ahmet Ertegun and Mark Goodson. The pool linked the Los Angeles visit to a familiar New York social world: the visitors encountered one another not at a formal event, but in the hotel’s shared leisure space.

The same trip carried the narrator between hotels and parties. After a day on the set of The Love Boat, a canceled lunch with Suzanne Somers, and a visit to Doug Christmas’s place, Jon met the group and took them to the Beverly Hills Hotel for drinks. They then faced an expensive taxi ride to the Hotel Bel-Air before dressing for Swifty Lazar’s Academy Awards party at Spago. The Beverly Hills Hotel was therefore one node in a tightly scheduled chain of meetings, fittings, transport, and celebrity appearances—not the night’s final destination, but a place where the group could rendezvous before continuing across Los Angeles.

The Hotel During a Celebrity Weekend

In August 1985, the group reached the Beverly Hills Hotel after an unusually long flight delay. Their plane had remained on the ground for twelve hours because storms blocked the route; tensions rose among passengers, including Diane Keaton and Steve Rubell, before the plane finally arrived in Los Angeles at about 1:30. The hotel provided the immediate landing place after that ordeal and became the base for a weekend built around Madonna and Sean Penn’s wedding in Malibu.

The following day, Steve Rubell stayed in bed at the hotel making phone calls rather than joining the outing to see Dolly Parton. The narrator used his behavior to reflect on Rubell’s cultivated public persona: the repeated, highly specific performances of his tastes seemed designed to make him memorable. The hotel room thus appears as a setting for private routine as well as a launch point for celebrity visits. From there, the others took a cab to Sandy Gallin’s home, where Dolly Parton was hosting them; she was protective of her address because she had received death threats, and the visit had been arranged as a star-filled gathering.

Discomfort Behind the Address

The diary’s strongest judgment of the hotel came after the wedding weekend had begun. The narrator said he hated the Beverly Hills Hotel, pointing to two televisions without remote controls, a bathroom compared unfavorably with a 1950s Holiday Inn, and inadequate lighting. He could not tell whether a new bathroom device was a hairdryer or a telephone. These details turn the hotel’s polished reputation into a series of small, stubborn inconveniences: the room offered abundance in the form of two televisions, yet neither could be operated remotely, and the bathroom’s unfamiliar gadget only deepened the impression of poor design.

The complaint also distinguishes the Beverly Hills Hotel from the Hotel Bel-Air. The narrator thought the Beverly Hills Hotel’s security looked conspicuous, while the staff at the Hotel Bel-Air blended into their surroundings. That contrast makes the hotel more than a backdrop to the weekend’s celebrity traffic. It shows how the diary measures luxury through the ease—or awkwardness—of ordinary experience: a working light, a usable television, a comprehensible appliance, and security that does not call attention to itself. Across the entries, the Beverly Hills Hotel remains socially useful and densely connected to Los Angeles celebrity life, but its name never shields it from the narrator’s unsparing attention to how a stay actually feels.