Misplaced in LA
When I was eleven years old, I was misplaced in LA. Twice, in the same day.
I knew where I was supposed to be both times. The second time, I just had to convince the grownups.
My mother and I were in Los Angeles for a few days so she could attend a ‘gift show’ for her job. It was summer, so I wasn’t in school. We flew to LA from San Francisco, rented a car and drove to the celebrated Beverly Hills Hotel. Somehow my mother had been able to convince her New York editors that she needed to stay at this particular rather posh hotel. As far as I could tell, she didn’t need to stay there. However, if you want to spot famous people, it is a really good place to start.
When my mother was my age, she had lived with her mother for a year in Hollywood, and I think she wanted to visit some of her old haunts. And how much fun to spend a few days in LA at the Beverly Hills hotel, with her daughter on someone else’s expense account! The hotel is very, well, Beverly Hills, and is located on the famous Sunset Boulevard. This is how the Dorchester Hotel group currently introduces the hotel on it’s web pages1:
This is the legendary LA hideaway, famous for playing host and friend to Hollywood royalty for over a century. From the deals made in the Polo Lounge to the romances lived out in the secluded bungalows, this has been Tinsel Town’s playground since Beverly Hills was born.
I had been hearing about this hotel for awhile, once my mother made it clear to me that this is where we would be staying. Not a Hilton or a Sheraton, or any of the other big name chain hotels. No, it was only the Beverly Hills Hotel for us.
Honestly, it couldn’t have been farther from the way we lived our lives. We were not fashionable people, not wealthy, not showy. We didn’t have a second home, or even go on holidays to Hawaii like many of my friends. But my goodness, we were going to stay at this very posh hotel.
Our room seemed like a basic hotel room, nothing particularly exciting for this 11-year old to be impressed with. We did have a light breakfast every morning poolside, which was pretty fun and rather unusual since of course we didn’t have a pool, and only rarely ate outside. Everyone wore sunglasses so anyone sitting nearby could be famous.
Not that we spent much time in the hotel anyway. My mom was quite busy with work; she took me with her the first day to the trade show, located in another hotel with average rooms, not as big or as luxurious as ours were, now that I was paying attention (listen to me, already getting uppity!). Each company trying to pitch their products had their own room, and you walked from room to room to see what was on offer.
Peanuts comics were very popular that year, so I remember a lot of Snoopy-related gift items. I loved Snoopy! There were lots of fun giveaways, which obviously the still-girl child in me loved, and the grown-ups seemed to enjoy seeing a real kid respond as they handed us samples. My mother’s job was to see what the interior design trends and gifting products would be in the next year, so she could write about them for her magazine. Hard work indeed!
The second day my mom arranged for me to take an all-day escorted tour to Disneyland while she had meetings. Growing up without siblings, I am quite comfortable traveling on my own, and spending long periods of time by myself. I had already taken cross-country flights without my parents and spent long periods of time away from home during summers. A day on my own at Disneyland with a guided tour was not a scary prospect.
A big coach/bus picked me up from the hotel, also picking up others from several hotels between Beverly Hills and Orange County. Eventually we arrived at Disneyland: we parked in a huge car park/parking lot filled with a sea of buses. We were split into groups and assigned a tour guide in a happy Disney uniform, with an umbrella held high to help us find her. Ours was a group of mostly grown-ups, a few families, and one or two other individuals. Besides the families, I was the only child.
We started off, and our Cheerful Guide explained that she would take us to the different “Lands”, and escort us to selected rides in each area. After we finished each ride, we would find our guide, umbrella held high! and set off for the next place. This worked a treat for awhile. The best part was that we didn’t have to wait in any queues/lines: we were taken right to the front of the incredibly long mid-summertime lines and got right on the next available place.
After a few rides, my cheerful leader and my group weren’t around at the end of the ride. I waited awhile to see if I had gotten ahead somehow, but no one I recognised showed up and it was clear they had left without me. I had no idea where they might have gone. Still I waited. After a few more minutes, there was another group gathering around a copycat cheerful umbrella lady, so I guessed it was likely all the groups were probably doing the same tour. I scooted over and added myself to that group, and finished the day with them. At least getting lost at Disneyland isn’t that bad: it is the “happiest place on earth” after all.
At the end of this long day, Cheerful Guide 2 took us back to the sea of waiting coaches. I got on the one that had hotels listed where I remembered us stopping in the morning. I even asked the bus driver if he was going to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and he waved me to go ahead and get on. So I did.
Beverly Hills is a good long drive from Anaheim, home of Disneyland, and of course it is LA, so there was lots of commute traffic. But after dropping more and more people off at many different hotels, nothing was looking familiar to me. Eventually, after dropping off a big group at a hotel and seeing there were only a few people left, the driver came back to double-check where each of us was going. He checked off the others and when he got to me, I said, the ‘Beverly Hills Hotel’, and he said, you mean the Beverly Hilton, and I said, no the Beverly Hills Hotel. He’d never heard of it and thought I was making it up. I did very politely insist I was not mistaken.
He got on his radio back to his base and apparently my mother had by now been on the phone to them wondering where I was. However, nobody at the bus tour company seemed to believe either my mother OR me that there was a place called the Beverly Hills Hotel. No one seemed to know where it was.
Remember this was so very long before google and the internet. However! Even my rudimentary eleven-year brain knew this was a fixable problem. Someone had picked me up: that person knew where the hotel was. Why didn’t they look up the address in the Yellow Pages of the phone book (remember those?). At any rate, I was very clear with the bus driver: I was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel and it was on Sunset Boulevard. Of course I didn’t know exactly where on Sunset Boulevard.
In the end I don’t know what made the bus driver do it: I’m sure he was tired of driving and just wanted to get home, or maybe we were already in Santa Monica, but he drove north up the Pacific Coast Highway to the absolute western start of Sunset Boulevard (literally at the ocean) and he started driving his big tour bus east towards Beverly Hills. At that end, Sunset Boulevard winds like a serpent up and down hills for about 11 miles before it even gets to Beverly Hills.
After wandering through Pacific Palisades, it curves and winds through Brentwood, slides between Bel Air and the University of California Los Angeles campus (UCLA), eventually reaching Beverly Hills. We wound slowly through each rather posh foothill neighbourhood after another where there are large gates, enormous houses on secluded lots, and people do not expect to see tour buses (or at least they didn’t back then). We both looked eagerly anytime we saw a big driveway and/or bright lights.
Eventually we saw the Beverly Hills Hotel sign and he drove slowly, finally, into the grounds with his last, small passenger. I’m sure he was so relieved to be rid of me. And I was so relieved to see my mother standing by the hotel entrance. I can’t imagine how she was feeling, having her only daughter ‘lost’ for hours by the bus company. She didn’t even know I had also been ‘lost’ earlier in the day at Disneyland.
Not surprisingly, my mother was ready to go out to dinner at a spot nearby where it was known for celebrity-spotting, and she could have a well-needed drink. I was tired and would have preferred room service, but when you are eleven, you don’t get to make the rules. And I could tell she was pretty rattled. She was right, I realised later. It was a much more upbeat way to end the day for both of us to go out and have a little fun. I got to tell her about going on all the entertaining rides without waiting, and oh yeah, getting misplaced by the Disneyland Guides. And also importantly, she got to see several celebrities.
As always, thank you for showing up here week after week! I appreciate your company and your thoughts in hearts or comments!
I’d love to hear about your experiences! Did you ever get lost or misplaced as a child? Do you remember it? How did you handle it? How did your grown-ups manage?
Until next week,
xx Sabrina
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https://www.dorchestercollection.com/los-angeles/the-beverly-hills-hotel
For more information about the Beverly Hills Hotel’s ‘storied’ celebrity history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beverly_Hills_Hotel
Thanks for your comments Andrea. I remember your lovely Airedale! She was the first of her breed I had ever met and she was a charmer. I can imagine the dread you must have felt, and the HUGE relief to see her sitting there waiting patiently for her family to collect her. Whew!
Growing up one doesn't always understand how different one's own childhood is from any others. I knew not having siblings was different to many, but that I was independent and self-sufficient didn't seem notable, or thinking that unexpected events were something to be fearful of. My mother always called those events things that 'built our character'. It started as kind of as a joke, but I guess she was right in more ways than I could have imagined!
Another fabulous post. As others have said, you were so calm, smart, and savvy to figure out what to do. Independent, smart, and capable at a very early age.
It's also remarkable that your mother put you on a bus with strangers and without an adult to go far away to Disneyland. Of course that was totally reasonable then but I don't know any parents who would do such a thing now. Nonetheless, I'm very impresed with your skills.
I don't remember getting seriously lost. The closest memory that I have conjuring up the feeling is when by mistake we left our Airedale at Bolinas beach. Somehow we packed up and left without her. When we realized she wasn't with us, the feeling of dread and fear sent my parents racing back to the beach in the yellow Ford station wagon. And you know that cars don't race very fast in Bolinas. There she was sitting on the beach waiting for us. That's the parental relief that Martha mentioned. It was immense.