The Man Who Spent Forty-Two Years at the Beverly Hills Hotel Pool (1993)
51 comments
·February 26, 2025bryanlarsen
(1993). The hotel reopened in 1996 but Irving never returned.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-s...
NathanKP
If, like me, you were curious about the visuals to go with this piece, it appears that this is the pool today: https://www.dorchestercollection.com/los-angeles/the-beverly...
brink
That's lovely
jpmattia
I can't be the only person curious about his Fortunescope: https://www.etsy.com/listing/719052863/antique-1935-fortunes...
profsummergig
I was thinking: "an entire article about a guy who used to tan at a hotel pool... when we start focusing on such trifles, it's usually a foreshadowing of some major upheaval coming."
Then I saw the year of publication: 1993.
tolerance
I’d reckon that the trifles got to getting truffled around 20 years prior.
1024core
I wonder how much of the HN readership was not even born then....?
codetrotter
Probably a decent number. I first heard of HN around 2010 when I was in university.
I assume that plenty of university students find their way to HN still. And that many of them will have been born around the mid-2000’s.
I only barely make the cut myself to having been born a few years before 1993.
blakesterz
I don't know why I found this so interesting to read. After the first few paragraphs I wondered why this was in The New Yorker, afterall, this is about a place in CA. The answer did appear, eventually...
“My story begins on the Lower East Side of New York,” he said...tmiku
The NY specificity implied by the publication name is archaic. Apart from the event listings or performance/exhibit reviews, The New Yorker's long form coverage has been nationally (sometimes globally) focused for decades, albeit through the lens of what America's coastal elites find interesting.
dhosek
There’s a great scene in the movie World’s Greatest Dad where Robin Williams plays a frustrated writer. Another teacher at the school where he teaches gets a story in The New Yorker¹ and Robin Williams’s character tells him something along the lines of “how nice, I hope your next one gets published somewhere that isn’t regional.”²
⸻
1. This is generally considered the pinnacle of literary short fiction publishing.
2. He was, of course, being ironic (and bitterly jealous). As an aside, the movie is a brilliant dark comedy, written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait who’s come a long way from his Police Academy days.
TeaBrain
This is like being confused if The Atlantic had an article about the west coast, only to believe the question of topicality for the publication's article was resolved when the article mentioned the east coast.
fxtentacle
I find it wonderfully clichee that the guy who's job was linking vendors and customers was called Mr. Link.
dmayle
It's called nominative determinism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
tolerance
There is a strange sort of cerebral experience that elicits a visceral response about glimpses into ordinary life through plain black ink…err…fonts.
hengheng
This is completely all over the place, like it would be to listen to an 87yo, but I'm not too sure about the author or editor.
trhway
a white guy in a nice suit spending his days by the pool side. Actors, actresses, businessmen. No mentioning of poor families with a lot of children who i'm sure would have liked to use the pool too. Was there a pool fee or some form of "face control"?
trial3
you're earnestly wondering if there might have been discrimination of some kind at one of the most legendary Los Angeles celebrity institutions between between the 1950s and the 1990s?
trhway
i'm wondering how it works - does security simply kicks you out ? And i think today similar places are also not filled with poor people, and not for their lack of interest i'd guess.
If you enjoyed this consider William Least Heat Moon's "Blue Highways". He is a quiet unassuming guy, or at least I assume he is unassuming, because he presents a human edifice that strangers open up to.
As opposed to this monster of minutia that is one life, Moon traveled the back roads and collectively met hundreds of people and made conversation, gathered famous and obscure lore of the places he visited. He encountered them on their own turf and elsewhere. Even a chance meeting by a lake with a mosquito-bitten teenage runaway girl who opened up to him about the awful life from which she had just fled, and he made the 'courageous' decision to drive her across Wisconsin and deliver her safely to her grandmother's house in Green Bay.
He is essentially a documentarian, and delivers the plain truth of the tales told to him. It is a transformative read.