Happy 100th, Beverly Hills Hotel
While other cities have palaces, churches, and canals, Los Angeles’s great landmarks are, with a few notable exceptions, its hotels. One of the city’s greatest, the Beverly Hills Hotel, celebrates its centennial this month—May 12, to be exact—commemorating 100 years of coddling celebrities with bungalow privacy and rendezvous secrecy.
The City of Angels, with its abundance of starry-eyed ambition, shattered dreams, and scintillating scandals, also has a history of ghosts. The Beverly Hills Hotel is said to be haunted by several, including Sergei Rachmaninoff, Harpo Marx, and actor Peter Finch, who suffered a fatal heart attack in the lobby in 1977. John Lennon, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe were frequent guests of the Pink Palace, as the hotel became affectionately known, though Monroe’s ghost is said to visit the Roosevelt Hotel.
To mark its rich and glamorous—and supernatural—history, the Beverly Hills Hotel is offering 1912 menu prices once a week in each of its dining venues. Now that’s something to brave restless apparitions for.