The Dark Story of Hollywood's Most Famous Hotel: The Pink Palace

There is a building on Sunset Boulevard

that has witnessed more romance, more

betrayal, and more power than any palace

in Europe. The Beverly Hills Hotel

stands at the corner of Sunset and Rodeo

Drive, wrapped in salmon pink stucco and

surrounded by 12 acres of tropical

gardens. When it opened in 1912, Beverly

Hills did not exist. There were no movie

studios, no stars, no industry. There

was only dust and bean fields and one

man's impossible dream. The hotel would

become the throne room of American

celebrity. The place where empires were

built over breakfast and destroyed by

sunset. It would host presidents and

gangsters, legends and frauds, artists

who changed the world and criminals who

nearly ended it. For more than a

century, fortunes have been made and

lost behind those pink walls. Affairs

have flourished in the bungalows. The

Academy Awards have been born in its

ballrooms. And through wars, scandals,

boycots, and threats of demolition, the

building has survived.

This is the story of the Beverly Hills

Hotel, Hollywood's Pink Palace. In 1906,

the stretch of land that would become

Beverly Hills was nothing.

Dirt roads cut through abandoned bean

fields where Mexican laborers had once

harvested crops for the ranches that

sprawled across the coastal plane. The

occasional pepper tree offered shade to

road runners and ground squirrels. Los

Angeles proper ended miles to the east.

The movie industry did not exist.

Hollywood was a temperance community of

modest homes and church socials. But one

man saw something different in that

emptiness. Burton Green was a

Michigan-born oil man who had come to

Southern California in 1900 seeking

petroleum beneath the dusty hills. He

found none. What he discovered instead

was land, 4,000 acres of it, purchased

as the Rancho Rodeo de las awas. When

oil drilling produced nothing but dust,

most investors wanted out. Green

proposed an alternative. They would

subdivide the land and create a new kind

of community, a place designed not for

farmers, but for wealthy easterners

seeking sunshine and status. In 1906,

Green hired the landscape architect

Wilbur David Cook to lay out streets

following the natural contours rather

than the rigid grid that dominated Los

Angeles. Cook's curving boulevards would

give the development an air of

established elegance as if the community

had existed for generations.

They named it Beverly Hills after

Beverly Farms in Massachusetts where

wealthy Bostononians summered. But Green

understood that no one would buy homes

in a development that existed only on

paper. He needed something to anchor the

community. He needed a hotel.

Green approached Margaret Anderson, a

Los Angeles businesswoman who had made

her fortune managing apartment buildings

downtown.

Anderson recognized opportunity. She

agreed to build and operate a luxury

hotel on a 12 acre site at the corner of

Sunset Boulevard and what would become

Rodeo Drive. The location was strategic.

When automobiles became common, Sunset

would be the main artery west. Anderson

commissioned the Los Angeles architect

Elmer Gray to design the structure. Gray

had trained in the Boosearts tradition,

but understood that Southern California

demanded different aesthetics. He

proposed a building in the mission

revival style, a romantic interpretation

of California's Spanish colonial past

that suggested history, permanence, a

connection to the land that Nuvo Ree

clients desperately wanted to purchase.

Construction began in 1911. The hotel

would contain 325 rooms arranged around

interior courtyards in the Spanish

Manor. The main building stretched along

Sunset Boulevard, three stories of

reinforced concrete clad in salmon pink

stucco. Gray chose the color

deliberately. Pink would photograph

beautifully. It would stand out against

brown hills and blue sky. It would be

memorable. The grounds mattered as much

as the building. Anderson hired

landscape crews to plant 12 acres of

tropical vegetation that had no business

surviving in a semierid climate. Date

palms from Egypt, banana trees from

Central America, birds of paradise from

South Africa. The effect was

deliberately exotic, a fantasy of

eternal springtime maintained by

constant irrigation from wells drilled

deep into the aquifer. The total cost

approached $500,000,

equivalent to roughly $15 million today.

For 1912, this was an extraordinary sum

to invest in a hotel located in the

middle of nowhere. Anderson was betting

that nowhere would soon become

somewhere. The Beverly Hills Hotel

opened on May 12th, 1912. 7 months

later, the surrounding community would

incorporate as an independent city. But

on opening day, Beverly Hills remained a

real estate speculation. Only a handful

of homes had been completed. Most lots

stood empty. Guests arrived by

automobile or took the Pacific Electric

Railways red cars to Santa Monica

Boulevard, then hired carriages to

travel the remaining distance up dirt

roads. The opening ceremony attracted

Los Angeles society, which in 1912 meant

ranchers who had struck oil, merchants

who had profited from the city's

explosive growth, and a handful of

wealthy Midwesterners who had relocated

for their health. The Los Angeles Times

praised the hotel as a triumph of

California architecture.

What the Times could not predict was

that within 3 years, an entirely new

industry would emerge just miles away.

In 1915, DW Griffith released The Birth

of a Nation, a technically revolutionary

and morally reprehensible film that

demonstrated cinema's power to move mass

audiences. The movie industry centered

in New York and New Jersey began its

migration west. Southern California

offered year-round sunshine, diverse

landscapes, and cheap land for building

studios. Within two years, Hollywood and

the surrounding communities had become

the capital of American motion pictures.

The Beverly Hills Hotel was positioned

perfectly. It offered privacy. It

offered luxury. It offered proximity to

the studios rising in Hollywood, Culver

City, and Burbank.

and it offered something that mattered

more than anything else to people whose

faces sold tickets, discretion.

Margaret Anderson understood her

clientele.

She instructed her staff never to

acknowledge celebrities by name in

public spaces. No autograph seekers

would be permitted on the grounds. No

photographers in the dining rooms.

What happened at the Beverly Hills Hotel

stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. This

code of silence would become the

foundation of the hotel's reputation.

The first movie star to discover the

property was Douglas Fairbanks, the

athletic leading man who would become

one of the biggest names in silent film.

Fairbanks checked in shortly after the

hotel opened and immediately recognized

what Anderson had created.

This was not merely a hotel. It was a

refuge.

In 1919, Fairbanks married Mary Pigford,

America's sweetheart, in a ceremony that

made them the most famous couple in the

country. They honeymooned at the Beverly

Hills Hotel. Their presence gave the

property a celebrity endorsement that no

advertising budget could buy. Within a

year of that honeymoon, the hotel's

guest registry read like a catalog of

American fame. Charlie Chaplan took a

suite on the second floor. Gloria

Swanson held court in the dining room.

Rudolph Valentino, the smoldering star

whose death in 1926 would cause mass

hysteria, maintained a permanent

residence. Will Rogers, the cowboy