For example, on one street there’s an avocado toast bar next to a hole- in-the-wall cupcake dispenser, next to a psychic’s parlour next to an eyelash-extension “studio”. Walking around Beverly Hills, it feels as though this wonderfully silly city is sometimes laughing at itself too. I also find myself on the street where, 18 months earlier, I’d interviewed Paris Hilton then suddenly needed a pee after leaving her home too embarrassed to go back, I crouched behind a palm tree as a Ferrari whizzed past. Elsewhere a dog-grooming van is moving between the mansions’ driveways. On Roxbury Drive, one of the swankiest addresses, there’s a woman dressed as Jessica Rabbit who is posing for photographers and has a large lizard on a lead. “If I repeated some of the things I saw then I’d get fired on the spot,” says our waiter, delivering a flight of whiskies - I’m losing track, but one is Irish, one is Scottish, one was kept in champagne barrels and one is, er, Californian?įar more interesting than Rodeo Drive are the nearby residential streets, which have a wonderful mishmash of architecture - Spanish colonial, modernist, art deco and faux Tudor - and impressive front gardens full of roses, cacti or bougainvillea (or all three). Curtains divide each of the seating areas - all the better for bad behaviour. I’m with two expat friends at the table where Kenneth Branagh celebrated winning his first Oscar - best original screenplay for Belfast - a few weeks earlier. The whiskey bar is secreted away within the Maybourne Beverly Hills hotel, one of only a handful of places in Beverly Hills where you’re allowed to light up. (My brother is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department and argues that everyone in its Beverly Hills counterpart is a pretender, but that’s another story.) It’s easy to play make-believe in this city within a city the perfectly landscaped streets are film-ready and even the police look like actors. Sunday May 08 2022, 12.01am, The Sunday Timesįor someone who never normally smokes or drinks whiskey, I’m doing well to pretend to be a Cuban cigarillo connoisseur at a Beverly Hills speakeasy on a balmy Friday night.
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