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There once was a palace of movie stars and swimming pools, painted in shades of pink and green. A benevolent sultan with unfathomable riches from a faraway land bought it and lorded over its storied domain, while his managers and staff ensured that all within its doors were treated as royalty.
For 102 years, the Beverly Hills Hotel existed in a storybook space. The city of Beverly Hills literally grew up around it, and the stars and power brokers of the city made it their second home. Then “a grenade,” in the words of one of the hotel’s principals, was hurled into the hotel. Not an actual grenade, but a weapon of words and ideology.
The Sultan of Brunei, who since 1992 has owned the Beverly Hills as part of his Dorchester Collection, which includes nine other luxury hotels, announced in October 2013 that he was adopting the harsh and ancient Islamic penal code called Sharia in his country. Sharia calls for, among other punishments, public flogging of women who have abortions and amputation of limbs and death by stoning of homosexuals, adulterers, and thieves. The United Nations Human Rights Council urged the sultan and his ministers to reconsider, but thus far he has refused to back down.
Six months after the sultan’s announcement, the sleeping dragon of Hollywood awakened in a wave of activism seldom seen before. First came protests, then boycotts of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Stars, agents, and deal-makers who once packed the Polo Lounge, the hotel’s famed restaurant and bar, went instead to the Peninsula Hotel and Four Seasons. Tweets, Instagram messages, and opinion pieces by Ellen DeGeneres and Elton John, among others, ensured that the boycott went viral. “If we lived in Brunei, as of next year, we wouldn’t be getting married in front of our sons,” Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, wrote on the Huffington Post. “We’d be getting beaten to death, with objects, by a mob arranged and authorized by the government.”
By late May, the hotel had lost $2 million in cancellations, and the damage had radiated to the sultan’s other Dorchester Collection hotels, including the Dorchester, in London, and Le Meurice, in Paris, where the fashion industry, led by Anna Wintour, of Vogue, Hedi Slimane, of Yves Saint Laurent, and billionaire businessman François-Henri Pinault, as well as Virgin-airlines founder Richard Branson, vowed not to step inside a Dorchester Collection hotel. Mark Fabiani, a public-relations crisis manager, whose clients include Bill Clinton and Lance Armstrong, was hired by the hotel company to do damage control. And saying he was “devastated” and “surprised” that the Beverly Hills Hotel and the other Dorchester Collection properties would be boycotted, Christopher Cowdray, C.E.O. of the hotel group, flew in from London in an attempt to stanch the bleeding.
When I checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel in late May, the protesters were gone, but the boycott had taken its toll. The hotel wasn’t empty, but it was devoid of those who count in Hollywood.
Read the full story: www.vanityfair.com
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