Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 15, 1990 TAG: 9003143017
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID FERRELL LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Nearly 34,000 people call Beverly Hills home and, for the most part, they do so with pride. A good number are film stars, corporate executives or millionaire immigrants. They tend to be big dreamers and connoisseurs, and they can hold serious conversations about such things as poise and savoir-faire.
Beverly Hills' shady lanes are traversed by more Rolls-Royces per square mile than anyplace else on Earth. Each year, from off the lot of the Beverly Hills dealership, 150 gleaming new models roll out at an average cost of $155,000. The dealer reports that these automobiles almost always are driven home by white male buyers who already own one. They almost always pay cash.
It is possible in Beverly Hills boutiques to pay $25,000 for a leather jacket, $90,000 for a mink blanket. The costliest home is a hillside French chateau with 40,000 square feet, a disco, two gymnasiums, a tennis court and two-lane bowling alley, now listed for $30 million. The cheapest home is a 1,400-square foot structure with one bathroom just inside the city limits, priced to move at $665,000.
Wealth provides a moat of sorts. At a time when surrounding cities grapple with crime, gang warfare, urban decay, financial deficits, Beverly Hills remains what it always has been - a symbol of the finest in life, of quality and social refinement.
Under the glossy exterior, Beverly Hills is a complex, often-contradictory place, more than just the sum of its price tags. It is as fragile and intricate as a Cartier watch, a balance of big-city commerce and small-town quiet.
Nowhere are there bigger or better parties. Nowhere are the schools so consistently excellent. Nowhere are the donations to charity so blessedly enormous, or the servants so impeccably dressed, or the swimming pools so languidly beautiful.
Still, renters outnumber homeowners. Democrats outnumber Republicans. Jews outnumber Christians. Some of Beverly Hills' children actually qualify for free school lunches.
The city government is run by 654 employees, most of whom commute each day from lesser homes, lesser communities, from communities as far away as 100 miles. Only six live in town.
"Frankly, most of us just can't afford to buy a house here," said Fire Chief William M. Daley, who drives in every morning from Torrance, nearly 20 miles away.
There are, of course, some troubles in paradise. Drug abuse and wretched extravagance wage a silent, ongoing battle against the forces of philanthropy and public service.
Beverly Hills has one of the highest divorce rates in California. On a per-capita basis, it ranks among the nation's leaders in plastic surgeons and psychiatrists. Bedford Drive, at the base of the foothills, is so crowded with psychiatric offices that doctors facetiously refer to it as "Couch Canyon."
Each day, the city swells to 150,000 or more inhabitants - bankers, tourists, shop owners, maids, gardeners. Then at night, as the professionals return home, the gardeners load up their rakes and clippers in pickup trucks; the maids line up at the bus stops, heading for inner-city Los Angeles.
And, almost with a sigh, Beverly Hills shrinks back to size.
At his shop on Rodeo Drive, Giuseppe Battaglia caters to customers who think nothing of spending $15,000 to spruce up their wardrobe. At Battaglia, a pair of crocodile shoes is priced (but there are no price tags) at $1,700; a white satin shirt costs $600. Italian-made Brioni suits come in plain wool for $2,000 or with 14-karat gold pinstriping for $6,000.
"I'm not one of the crowd," Battaglia will tell you. "I was a genius."
The 79-year-old goes on to call himself one of the best-looking men of his era, claiming that his physique was once the equal of heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson. He was a gallant womanizer, knighted for his clothing designs by the government of Italy, who brazenly came to America in 1950 without knowing a soul or a word of English.
In 1961, he opened on Rodeo, then just a quiet, difficult street. "The first 10 years I never drew one penny of salary," he recalled.
Now Battaglia is a wealthy man, and Rodeo Drive is the spiritual heart of Beverly Hills - "the most staggering display of luxury in the Western world," in the words of author Judith Krantz, who re-created the street for the opening scene of her novel, "Scruples."
Success really began with a calculated marketing effort in the early 1970s, when shop owners chipped in to hire a publicist so they could exploit the abundance of celebrity patrons.
In time, nearly all the world's best-known designers were represented - Gucci, Cartier, Chanel, Ralph Lauren, and so on - as well as a chic assortment of art galleries and restaurants. The patrons became a mix of local shoppers and jet-setters from Japan, Saudi Arabia, Europe and elsewhere.
The popularity of the three-block strip has sent Rodeo Drive lease rates soaring, from $1 a square foot in the early 1970s to as high as $14 a square foot today. Turnover is high, and competition has further raised standards of service. At one clothier, for example, a shopper can order a drink at a complimentary bar and sip it in front of a fireplace.
Kerman Beriker, general manager of the Beverly Hills Hotel, strolled through the lush, Mediterranean-style grounds, past gloriously colored impatients and bougainvillea, past pool-side cabanas where movie moguls orchestrate deals by telephone, past workers scrubbing the carpeted outdoor walkway, and entered a bungalow featuring its own kitchen, patio, fireplace, fax machine and, not least of all, five telephones, including one in the toilet stall.
How much a night? he was asked.
"A thousand."
The Beverly Hills Hotel, shrouded in tall, elegant palms, is a setting for innumerable parties, bar mitzvahs, black-tie fund-raisers and, on average, 75 to 100 weddings a year. Movie stars and wheeler-dealers congregate in the pink-and-green environs of the Polo Lounge, where a phone rests at every booth.
"You need to go to the Polo Lounge because everybody goes there and you need to be a part of it," Beriker said. "If you're meeting in the Polo Lounge, it automatically gives some credit to that meeting."
Beriker sees to it that pool-side hotel guests are handed chilled towels during the summer. Frequently, day or night, he and his staff go on scavenger hunts to locate that perfect vintage champagne that a guest craves, or to find a record album that someone hopes to hear.
"They will come to us and say, `I want [to rent] a red Ferrari Testarossa and I don't want to have more than 5,000 kilometers on the car,' " Beriker said. "Or they will say, `I want [a Mercedes-Benz) 560SL, black, and I want to have not more than 300 miles on it.
"We don't ask why. . . . We manage it."
Howard Hughes lived in one of the bungalows for 11 years. He had another for his wife and two for his servants.
Among the extremely rich, self-indulgence often runs amok. Women have been known to dye their poodles pink or blue to match the color scheme of a party. Caterer Giovanni Bolla recalls seeing 45 limousines at the first large bash he handled 12 years ago.
Not everyone is impressed with such extravagance. Like the silent Indian in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," the hired servants tend to nod and obey, forming unspoken impressions.
Gloria Lopez, 37, a single mother who speaks limited English, was a maid for a time in one palatial mansion. Like most maids, who typically earn $350 a week, she stayed in the workplace during the week, as did her young daughter. They returned on weekends to an apartment in a community about 10 miles away.
Among other duties, Lopez was the keeper of the woman's closet, a cavern where she sorted dresses by color and kept 60 pairs of shoes lined up like marching soldiers - "high-heels with high-heels, boots with boots."
Although she spoke kindly of her former employers, Lopez found it an alien world, one she was glad to leave come week's end.
As children play with dolls and games, Dr. Ada Horwich, a Beverly Hills psychological therapist, watches from another room, hidden behind a two-way mirror. Often with a parent or two, she observes firsthand, as a scientist in a laboratory might, the anxiety and frustration on the faces of the young.
A few are hyperactive. Some crave attention or cheat at games or abuse their toy dolls. Some 7- and 8-year-olds regress to baby-talk and pacifiers.
The little playroom horrors make it clear that the rich do not always live happily ever after, Horwich said. Children, in particular, often suffer emotional problems in Beverly Hills, more so than in most other communities.
Acutely aware of how they fit in - or do not fit in - even many adults suffer. To the world they show one face, but inside they compare themselves unfavorably to more successful neighbors. Beverly Hills psychiatrists say they frequently treat depression, anxiety attacks, eating disorders and sexual dysfunction.
Fear of failure is heightened in such a town, a striving, assertive place where everyone seems to have connections in politics, business and community groups. So intricately woven is the gossip grapevine that one woman complained, "You can't even cheat on your husband."
Ellen Byrens called the maid to serve coffee cake and gazed out the window overlooking her pool and the city below.
The "hysteria" of these old women living up in the hills rankles her, she said. As chairwoman of the city's Fine Arts Committee, she still burns over the way fearful homeowners rose up, many years ago, to defeat plans to place the Hirshhorn art collection in the Greystone Mansion, a colossal, 55-room structure that still sits vacant - a civic white elephant.
For all that it has, Beverly Hills is without a single museum, concert hall or sports arena.
"Beverly Hills, in my opinion, is a cultural wasteland," Byrens said.
But after 40 years, she would not live anywhere else. It is not just the fact that she can call the mayor at home, or that friends pass and wave in their cars, or that, if she needs money for a phone call, she can stop in any number of shops on Rodeo Drive. Nor is it the kindness that neighbors showed - some of whom she hardly knew - after her son was killed 11 years ago.
The magic of Beverly Hills goes beyond all that. It is an intangible quality, a series of gestures over cappuccino, an iridescent evening in a lighted garden.
"The quality of life here," she said, "is wonderful."
by CNB