Polo Lounge

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Restaurant and bar at the Beverly Hills Hotel

title: "Polo Lounge" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["restaurants-in-beverly-hills,-california", "restaurants-established-in-1941", "1941-establishments-in-california"] description: "Restaurant and bar at the Beverly Hills Hotel" topic_path: "technology/web" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polo_Lounge" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Restaurant and bar at the Beverly Hills Hotel ::

The Polo Lounge is a storied restaurant and bar located inside the Beverly Hills Hotel at 9641 Sunset Boulevard, Beverly Hills, California.

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Bartender_at_Polo_Lounge.jpg" caption="Bartender at Polo Lounge"] ::

Overview

The lounge has been described as "done up in peachy pink (as you might expect), with deep carpets and dark green booths, each booth featuring a plug-in phone. Legend has it that Mia Farrow (and maybe even Marlene Dietrich) was banned from the Polo Lounge for wearing pants."

Hernando Courtright, who ran The Beverly Hills Hotel in the 1930s and '40s, had a friend named Charles Wrightsman, who led a national champion polo team. Wrightsman felt it unseemly to keep the team trophy, a silver bowl, in his own home. Courtright, on hearing of his friend's dilemma, offered to display the bowl in the hotel's bar, which was being redecorated at the time. The name for the bar and its lounge sprang from that favor.

The Polo Lounge was seen as the premier power dining spot in all of Los Angeles. There are three dining areas complete with the signature pink and green motif. The photograph behind the bar depicts Will Rogers and Darryl F. Zanuck, two lounge regulars, playing polo. The menu "still offers a classic Neil McCarthy salad, named after the polo-playing millionaire."

Historical impact

Both the lounge and the hotel play a small yet significant role in the history of the Watergate political affair in 1972. The high command of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (Richard Nixon) in 1972 was staying at the hotel during a West Coast fundraising trip, and having a breakfast meeting in the Polo Lounge when Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy placed his fateful call to Committee Deputy Director, Jeb Stuart Magruder at about 12:30 pm on June 17, 1972.

In the event, McGruder merely left the lounge and went to one of the hotel’s pay phone stations and called Liddy back. Once fully briefed, Magruder went to one of the hotel’s famous suites and participated in a meeting with Committee Director and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, his special assistant Fred LaRue, and Committee Deputy Robert Mardian.

The hotel's logged and charged long-distance-call records of the calls made from that suite, on the morning after the burglary, formed the basis of the evidence which convicted each of the participants of conspiracy and obstruction of justice in January 1975.

Movies filmed at the Polo Lounge

Notes

References

Wayne, Gary. "The Beverly Hills Hotel.".
''The Pink Palace Revisited'' by Sandra Lee Stuart and Jon Prince (1993) {{ISBN. 0-942637-84-4
"Rachel Weisz joins 'Dream House'".
Van Meter, Larry A.. (June 1, 2007). "United States v. Nixon: The Question of Executive Privilege (Great Supreme Court Decisions)". [[Infobase.
(1991). "Silent Coup: The Removal of a President".

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