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Who says no one lunches in Hollywood anymore?
Yesterday at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge, former Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel, current WME co-chairman Richard Weitz, CAA principal Bryan Lourd and UTA CEO David Kramer were all dining simultaneously — at separate tables.
It was the kind of Hollywood power tableau you see less these days. (Even the Vanity Fair Oscars party is downsizing this year.) But one Polo Lounge lunch can save VIP diners from others during the week, it turns out.
“You go for lunch because you know you’re going to be seen,” a top industry player told us. “And then you don’t have to have lunch with everybody. You use it as an office, not for the expensive burger [that goes for $60]. Mike Cavanagh, Bobby Kotick, Bob Iger, Josh D’Amaro — you’ll see them all from a front booth, and they have to say hello to you. It’s the status of those booths. Everyone loves going there, it’s like the commissary.”
And like a modern-day Dickens scene, “Then you’ve got losers like [redacted!] at an inside booth who never get an outdoor booth,” the VIP said.
CAA co-chairs Kevin Huvane, Bryan Lourd and Richard Lovett. Variety via Getty ImagesThe Polo Lounge is celebrating its 85th anniversary, but some aspects of the Grand Dame of industry eateries remain as relevant to the town’s sociology today as they were when Howard Hughes was a resident of the hotel.
The other night, I stumbled upon a mysterious status symbol that separates the gods of the industry from its mere mortals.
“They still won’t give me a pink card,” said an exec I met for a drink who shared this indignation while paying his tab. The Hollywood vet had earlier been ushered to one of the famed resto’s 12 primo outdoor booths that’s reserved for names like Iger, Katzenberg and Zaslav. But ultra-exclusive seating isn’t enough.
The “pink card,” I learned, allows notable patrons to have house accounts at the Polo Lounge, a simple enough concept until you learn that even some powerful poobahs have a hard time wrangling one. If they even exist at all anymore.
It’s just one of the hush-hush perks and quirks of the place that extends to seating, parking, paying and more.
A top PR pro tells us, “I lived at the hotel and had a pink card…. But you can’t get the pink card anymore, it’s from, like, 20 years ago. Maybe Kevin Huvane still has one.”
Another pink card holder tells us: “It doesn’t exist anymore… You’d also get a gift every year. It used to be a very exclusive group of people, they used to actually have the card and you would show it. Now I have no idea.”
A veteran agent who has the pink card told us it became a curse. “My wife got a hold of it. Then my kids,” he groaned. “I was getting $10K per month charges, and I’m going, ‘What the f–k is going on here?'”
The daughter of a late William Morris agent wrote in a defunct LA social diary called “The Daily Truffle” in 2010 that her dad, Norman Brokaw, was a pink card holder who received BHH towels every summer, plus bowls of the Polo Lounge’s famed McCarthy Salad, as gifts from the hotel.
There are enough unwritten rules, rituals and rites to fill an Evelyn Waugh novel. Regular inhabitants of the BHH bungalows have included Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe and Edward VIII, but it was a more under-the-radar resident who invented the coveted “pink card,” we’re told.
“The pink card was created years ago when a guy named George Novogroder, who lived at the hotel wanted them for his friends,” explained a Polo Lounge regular. “It was just the status of, ‘Oh I have a pink card.'”
Meryl Streep and CAA’s Kevin Huvane. Getty Images for The Weinstein CNovogroder is a Chicago investor with one acting credit on IMDB — in the 1988 Sally Field–Tom Hanks film, “Punchline” in the role of “Audience Participants and Hecklers.”
But perhaps the very low-key mogul’s most public claim to fame is having the eponymous “Novogroder Turkey Burger” on the menu at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Fountain Coffee Room, (where Guns ‘N’ Roses was reportedly signed).
Sofia Coppola has named the Novogroder burger as one of her fave LA meals, and former Warner Bros. studio boss Toby Emmerich told the New York Times in 2006 of the dish: “They have an item on the menu called the Novogroder burger, which is basically a souped-up turkey burger named for a guy who’s lived at the hotel for about 10 years, paying some sort of residence rate. That’s one of my ambitions in life: Before I’m out of the movie business, I will have a sandwich named after me at the Fountain coffee shop at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
We called Novogroder at his Chicago office on Wednesday and were initially told he was on a call, but then were put right through when we said we were calling about the Beverly Hills Hotel. Alas the exec had left for the day. Will keep you posted when we hear back.
The hotel, meanwhile, would not comment on the pink card at all, saying, “Due to guest privacy and security, we are unable to confirm or share any details regarding past or present guests.”
But while VIPs may splurge on their pink cards, they’re frugal when it comes to parking, it turns out.
A top agent told us that the power players, regardless of net worth, use street parking beside the hotel, as well as a side entrance to access the Polo Lounge.
The curbside spots seems to have a storied tradition: Long-time hotel resident Howard Hughes kept a Cadillac parked on North Crescent Drive for two years without ever using it, and Beverly Hills cops turned a blind eye though “greenery sprouted from it and the tires were flat,” we hear.
Another regular tells us of the power street parkers, “Oh, those are the cheap asses on Crescent! All these people do not valet… they walk through the bungalows. They want to save $25.” (Either way, the hotel has 21 “instant-access” parking spots near the entrance that are reserved for top names.)
One high society fixture who lived at the hotel tells us: “The garage at the Beverly Hills Hotel is the secret garage where everyone keeps their cars… Steve McQueen kept cars there. Prince kept all his cars there.” (There have anecdotally been tales, and YouTube videos, that some LA hotels have hidden levels of classic car stashes. Again, the hotel did not comment.)
Of course the Polo Lounge is also known for its “smart” dress code, which has spawned all sorts of tales. We’d heard (unfounded) rumors among habitués that “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels is the only regular allowed to wear a ball cap in the dining room. We also know of one A-list star who showed up in ripped denim only to be offered a pair of untorn jeans by the maître d’.
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