Richard Turen
As Florida has, once again, been identified as the state with the fastest new Covid case rate in the nation, I decided it was time to get away, to leave my office and to go off to write about a safer place.
So last week my family and I headed out to Southern California so we could get a sense of what was happening in the state with what was then the second-highest number of new Covid cases. For the impatient among you, I'll save you the trouble of reading this entire piece -- we had a wonderful experience.
My daughter found our driver at the airport before she spotted any movie stars. As we walked out into the LA sunshine, that got me thinking -- and a little depressed. "How," I wondered, "would we ever be able to actually spot a current TV or film star if our 15-year-old, digitally adept daughter wasn't with us?"
I extended this depressing thought to music: How many of us could name the top three songs on what, a very long time ago, was called the hit parade?
We stayed at the new Pendry West Hollywood. I was particularly interested in this property because it is owned by my favorite independent luxury brand, Montage Hotels and Resorts. On a not altogether unrelated topic, I thought about how the CEO of Montage, Alan Fuerstman, was blessed with a son, Michael, who also loves and works in the business and has an understanding of the younger guest demographic. Michael was the one who said "instead of trying to change Montage, why not start a new brand with a younger vibe?"
It happened, and that's why I was eager to check it out. You arrive there after a sharp turn off Sunset into a circular drive. Off to the right are the lines of new Pendry residences, affording awesome city views off the veranda.
As you complete the circle, you pull up in front of the hotel's main lobby and see artist Anthony James' huge geometric globe occupying center stage. It is the most memorable sculpture I have ever seen in a hotel; it was impossible to pass it without peering inside it, seemingly into infinity.
The hotel has a Gibson guitar on premises that guests can borrow, and every guest gets a new Cadillac to use for four hours each day of their stay.
On our second night at the hotel, we ate at its ultrachic restaurant, just beside the glam rooftop pool. The place was packed.
We took our Cadillac and scouted the city. We toured UCLA, which is a public school but managed to be located near Beverly Hills. No wonder out-of-state tuition hovers around $43,000 per year.
Hollywood itself was sad -- but it always was. Fewer people walking around these days, and some of the homeless tents were touching some of the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I wanted to see who was sleeping on which star so I could share some snarky comments with you, but I couldn't bring myself to get out of the car to look.
On a tip, I drove up into the hills for a look at Ariana Grande's new home, and we managed to snag reservations at Nobu, which did actually exceed the hype but was much less formal than I would have imagined.
The hills surrounding the city are filled with beautiful homes, seemingly carved out of their environment and perched atop mounds of sloping earth. But even those lofty residents of LA must pass the homeless encampments in the underpasses as they drive along one of the city's misnamed "expressways."