The Beverly Hills Hotel Celebrity Boycott—Who Is It Really Hurting? (2024)

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 hom*osexuals, 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.

Like countless others, I have many happy memories of the hotel and its Polo Lounge, losing myself in its pink-and-green splendor. It afforded its guests the fantasy of California: perfumed, grand, haunted by history, legend, and lore. The ghosts of its regulars—Bogart, Hepburn, Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, and many others—swirled through its hallways, wallpapered in a signature banana-leaf pattern, and living legends were regularly sighted in its public spaces and on its lushly landscaped grounds. For the price of a co*cktail, a meal, or a room, you could become part of Hollywood, if only for a night.

I went down to the pool, where Esther Williams, Joan Crawford, and the Beatles famously swam and George Hamilton perfected his tan. Now, with the mass exodus of regulars, tips had drastically diminished, idle banquet waiters had been reassigned as pool boys, and most of the cabanas stood empty. But the sun was still hot and the drinks were still cold, so I sank into the gigantic, palm-festooned Jacuzzi. I was deep into a shallow conversation with a sales rep from Hoboken when a blonde goddess with waist-long hair and a painted-on, leopard-print bikini appeared.

She told me she was from “Miami,” but her heavy Eastern European accent hinted of more exotic origins.“Latvia,” she finally confessed.

“Have you heard about Sharia law and the Sultan of Brunei?” I wondered.

“Who’s he?” she asked.

Kingdom Come##

He is Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, 67, almighty and absolute ruler of Brunei, a Delaware-size nation of 416,000 subjects on the island of Borneo. No one paid much attention to the place until 1926, when oil came bubbling up from the ground. When Brunei won its independence from Great Britain, in 1984, the current sultan, 29th in a line of sultans subservient to the Crown, became the richest man in the world, worth $40 billion.

Salesmen, con men, and fortune hunters flocked to Brunei, and the sultan seemingly bought whatever was placed in front of him: 17 private jets, thousands of exotic cars (half the total production of Rolls-Royce at one point), troves of diamonds, and uncountable pieces of art. He erected a 1,788-room palace on 49 acres, where he and his younger brother, Prince Jefri, indulged in almost everything forbidden in the Muslim religion, including gambling and alcohol, not to mention adultery, as Jefri imported scores of international beauties, paying them fees up to $1 million, to be part of one of the largest harems the world had ever seen.

The brothers sailed on fleets of yachts (Jefri named one of his tit*, its tenders Nipple 1 and Nipple 2), hired stars, such as Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, for astronomical fees to entertain, and imported Boeing 747s full of polo ponies to play with a host of hired Argentinean champions, as well as with Prince Charles. In 1985, due in part to concern that his favorite duplex suite in the Dorchester, the venerable London hotel overlooking Hyde Park since 1931, might be unavailable, the sultan bought the hotel and then began snapping up others, including Le Meurice, the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, in Paris, the Hotel Principe di Savoia, in Milan, the New York Palace, and the Hotel Bel-Air and the Beverly Hills Hotel, both in Los Angeles.

At home, in 1992, to celebrate his 25th year on the throne, the sultan rode in a golden chariot pulled by 40 men. A few years later, the party was over: $40 billion was missing from the accounts of the sultan’s sovereign-wealth fund, the B.I.A. (Brunei Investment Agency), which manages Brunei’s oil reserves. The sultan laid the blame on Prince Jefri after discovering that during the years that Jefri had been the B.I.A.’s director he had transferred or spent $14.8 billion ($8 billion had gone to the sultan). Jefri claimed that the sultan had authorized all withdrawals, but the sultan charged him with embezzling.

When the brothers settled their differences, the sultan was still worth $20 billion, while Jefri reportedly returned to a relatively sedate life back in Brunei. Then, in October 2013, shortly before his country would be reviewed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, the sultan announced that he would institute the strictest form of Sharia law, calling the code, which existed in Brunei in the 14th century, “part of the great history of our nation” and “special guidance” from God. Many believe it was a move to attract investors from fellow Islamic countries as Brunei’s oil production has begun to slow (estimated by some to be depleted in 20 to 25 years) and the country seeks to diversify. But there were deeper motivations. “Everyone inside tells us, ‘He’s getting old and he’s thinking about the afterlife,’ ” says Sam Zarifi, regional director, Asia and the Pacific, of the International Commission of Jurists, which originally sounded the alarm of the sultan’s Sharia law to the U.N. “He’s made no statements about why it was necessary. But afterwards he was very grumpy about anybody criticizing the edict.” At first, nobody, outside of the United Nations, seemed to notice or care. Not in Brunei, where His Majesty the sultan is beyond reproach, all-knowing, all-seeing, officially unassailable by his own law. And not in America, where, with the approval of President Barack Obama, Brunei will most likely join the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, affording Brunei and several other Southeast Asian nations free-trade privileges with other countries, including the U.S.

It took a bunch of hotel guests to take a stand against the sultan, while the politicians, businessmen, and oil executives who do business in Brunei remained silent. “Why didn’t they speak up?” one insider asks. “Money. That’s what rules.”

‘Is it the labor unions again?” Chris Dunn remembers asking when he first heard about the protests. Dunn has worked at the hotel since he was 17, and now runs the valet-parking concession, having welcomed guests ranging from Sophia Loren to the Rolling Stones to Robert Kennedy on the day of his assassination. “Yeah, I think it’s the labor unions, but they’re talking about Sharia law in Brunei,” he says one of the parking attendants answered.

The sultan’s two iconic Los Angeles properties had long infuriated the local labor union, called Unite Here, which represents hotel and food-service workers in Los Angeles, where the average hotel-worker wage, citywide, is $10.55 per hour, among the lowest of any trade, in a city where hotel occupancy and earnings—on track for $1 billion in 2014—are at an all-time high. After both hotels closed down for massive renovations—the Beverly Hills received a $140 million face-lift, completed in 1995, and Hotel Bel-Air a $100 million renovation, completed in 2011—they reopened with non-union workers. The union leaders charged the sultan and his managers with “busting the union” and began years of demonstrations. Union workers protested before their jobs disappeared when the Beverly Hills Hotel was shut down for renovations in 1992, and the union bused in picketers for the reopening of Hotel Bel-Air. “We had someone dressed as the sultan, and people dressed as beat-up swans,” recalls the union’s spokesperson, Leigh Shelton, referring to Hotel Bel-Air’s trademark swans, which glide through its picturesque Swan Lake. The sultan costume was modeled after one in the 1992 Disney film Aladdin.

The protests were not terribly effective. Longtime Hotel Bel-Air guests were outraged more by the hotel’s renovation, which most felt was too slick and modern, than by any labor issues. The union was stymied and may not have known that, after Kerman Beriker, general manager of the Beverly Hills Hotel during its early 1990s renovation, was fired, he filed a lawsuit claiming, among other things, that agents from the sultan’s Brunei Investment Agency “demanded that Beriker permit the B.I.A. agents to implement an unlawful scheme to stop the Hotel Restaurant and Employees Service Union—which had represented the interests of the BH HOTEL employees for decades—from representing the hotel employees when the BH HOTEL reopened in June, 1995.” (The lawsuit was later settled.)

But the sultan seemed invincible, so close and yet so far away. In the winters of 2012 and 2013 he flew into Los Angeles to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a 100-person entourage. His family proved to be a brigade of extreme super-shoppers, with Secret Service protection and police escorts. Their gold-plated 747 departed with five panel trucks filled with their purchases. One employee tells me they left behind gifts of envelopes stuffed with between $1,000 and $1,500 in cash to drivers and hotel staff.

“Most people have never even heard of the nation of Brunei,” says Shelton. To provoke the public into standing up against the sultan, the union needed what Shelton called “a clearer picture of the kind of enemy that we’re dealing with.

“And that’s when our researchers looked into who the Sultan of Brunei is.”

Charles Carnow, 26, is an unlikely face of the revolution. Pale and thin, he has the ashen complexion of someone who has worked far too many graveyard shifts. “Injustice keeps me up at night,” says Carnow, who was tasked by the union in 2012 with investigating the sultan. At home one night at one A.M., he logged on to his laptop. “I searched ‘Brunei’ on WikiLeaks and found a document about them not responding to U.S. pressure not to attend an event in Iran that would inaugurate Iran’s nuclear program. I then went to the Brunei attorney general’s Web site and found that hom*osexuality in Brunei is punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment and that marital rape was legal.“I started bringing it to the attention of the labor union, because it’s just horrifying,” Carnow continues. “It’s also terribly hypocritical. Because they [the sultan’s hotels] take money from the most creative, open-minded, tolerant, liberal folks in the world, the people in this city.”In February 2013, the union began a campaign that included a YouTube video and leaflets, with a condom attached, which demanded, “BOYCOTT THE BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL,” adding, “The Beverly Hills Hotel is owned by the nation of Brunei, where it’s illegal to be gay.”The campaign soon caught the attention of Cleve Jones, a prominent gay-rights activist and labor-union leader in San Francisco. Mentored by Harvey Milk, the first openly gay individual to be elected to public office in California, Jones consulted on the 2008 biographical film Milk, for which Sean Penn won the best-actor Oscar. “People from the entertainment industry, fashion, the L.G.B.T. [Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender] community, women’s groups, Jewish groups. . . . They are enriching this very wealthy dictator of this tiny country on the island of Borneo,” says Jones. “We tried to point this irony out to folks. But nothing really stuck.”

Until April 11, 2014, when the United Nations human-rights office “voiced deep concern about the revised penal code in Brunei Darussalam,” according to a U.N. news release of that day. “This new version of the law that the sultan was proposing was even more Draconian and included the flogging of women in public and death by stoning for people convicted of hom*osexuality,” says Jones. “Well. That got my attention, and I thought—immediately—This is going to blow up. People will be appalled.

“And nothing happened!” he continues. “Three, four, five days, nobody seemed to notice it.”

On April 16, Jones posted a link on his Facebook page to the United Nations report condemning the sultan and urging him to desist: “ ‘To all my friends in Los Angeles: the Sultan of Brunei, owner of the Beverly Hills Hotel, has signed legislation calling for gay people to be stoned to death.’ And then I posted again an hour later, and I noticed that the first post had already been shared with several hundred people.”

The news eventually reached Tim Gill, the powerful gay-rights activist, who had sold his half of the desktop-publishing company Quark for a reported $500 million in 2000 to focus on the Gill Action Fund, an L.G.B.T. advocacy group. Gill was to hold his fund’s donor conference at the Beverly Hills Hotel from May 1 through May 4. He immediately moved the event to another hotel, at which point Christopher Cowdray, C.E.O. of the Dorchester Collection, flew in from London. “I met with Tim Gill himself,” says Cowdray. “But the decision had been made. That was the start of it.”

“I won’t be visiting the Hotel Bel-Air or the Beverly Hills Hotel until this is resolved,” Ellen DeGeneres tweeted on April 22, 2014.Ellen’s tweet went around the world. Cameron Silver, a Los Angeles-based fashion leader who founded Decades, a vintage-clothing store, had already heard about the sultan’s law from a New York friend, who sent him an Instagram message: “They are going to stone gays and adulterers to death!” Silver began sounding urgent warnings online. The London designers Brian Atwood and Peter Som joined the Instagram and Twitter chorus, as did Silver’s friend Jennifer Howell, who runs the Art of Elysium, a charity organization benefiting critically ill children. Very quickly, they decided: Let’s stage a protest. “People took my Instagram and re-grammed it, and within five days this very casual, peaceful protest was executed,” said Silver.

Jennifer Howell made a trunkful of protest signs, complete with a quote from Mother Teresa. And at nine A.M. on April 26, Cameron Silver, wearing a symbolic jacket made of vintage gloves designed by a United Arab Emirates designer “inspired by what people wear when they go to Mecca,” stood in front of the hotel with his sign. “[Actress] Debi Mazar sent a million text messages, worried that I’d get assassinated,” he remembers. Silver was joined by Jennifer Howell and her friend Rain Phoenix, sister of the actor Joaquin Phoenix, as well as other friends from Facebook and the fashion industry. The number of protesters swelled to 20, then 30. Hotel security was summoned. Beverly Hills Police officers showed up to keep the peace. The catering department sent down bottled water and cookies. The war was on.

Two days after the protest, on April 28, Sharon Osbourne tweeted, “Please join me in BOYCOTTING @BevHillsHotel, @HotelBelAir and all @DC_LuxuryHotels.”

Then came the fury, directed first at the hotel operators. “We had a surge of calls coming in,” said Kayal Moore, director of the Beverly Hills call center of 17 operators and a gay African-American who supports L.G.B.T. causes, except for the boycott of the hotel. “It was a personal attack. They’d say, ‘How can you still be working with an ownership that has those beliefs?’ ”

Bigger than a Salad##

The protest shifted to the banquet department. Among the first to cancel was Barbara Davis, who, with her late husband, oilman Marvin Davis, had honeymooned at the hotel in 1951. After Davis purchased Twentieth Century Fox, in 1981, he and Barbara lived in the hotel’s famous Bungalow No. 1. In 1986, Davis bought the hotel for $135 million, only to flip it eight months later, selling it to the Sultan of Brunei for a $65 million profit. “The Beverly Hills Hotel is the best place in the entire world, a home away from home,” Barbara Davis says. “As much as we adore the hotel, while the sultan owns it, I can’t go there. Which is a heartbreak. I had my kickoff lunch for the Carousel of Hope Ball [her longtime annual event to fund research for juvenile diabetes] scheduled at the Beverly Hills Hotel on May 20, and I changed it. We had it at the Peninsula. Everybody in the entertainment industry canceled their events and moved them. Babyface had a beautiful wedding at the Four Seasons. And they only had a week to change.

“Clive came to town that following week,” Davis continues, meaning her close friend the music impresario Clive Davis. “He always stays at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He said he was going to the Peninsula. Everybody’s outraged. And at the same token, everyone has such mixed emotions because we love the help there. It’s a second home to all of us. But we all have principles, and that principle is we can’t go to a hotel or to anything that benefits somebody who will kill human beings and stone them to death because of their beliefs.”

“I had just come back from Europe, and Jay and I went to a party for Billy Crystal, for the debut of his HBO film 700 Sundays,” says Mavis Leno, wife of former Tonight Show host Jay Leno. “And I ran into Rob Reiner. And he asked me if I’d heard about what had happened at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I said ‘No.’ And he told me what the Sultan of Brunei was doing and that people were starting to pull their affairs from the hotel. So I said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ and I wandered off.

“Then, about two or three minutes later, I suddenly realized, Oh, my God! The Feminist Majority Foundation, which I sit on the board of, we have our big fund-raising event at the Beverly Hills Hotel every year, and it was due to take place in nine days.”

They canceled their event at the hotel, which refunded their $66,000 deposit, and they were able to transfer it to the Hammer Museum. They also decided to hold a protest rally in Will Rogers park, across the street from the hotel, where the Lenos, the actress Frances Fisher, Feminist Majority leaders, and many others denounced the sultan. “These aren’t crazy feminist wackos!” Jay Leno said that day. “These are women who are trying to protect other women. And gay people protecting other gay people.”

Finally, the anger emptied locals from the hotel’s 208 guest rooms and suites and 23 bungalows. “ ‘What have we done? We have done nothing wrong,’ the girls were asking,” says one staff supervisor. “ ‘Where’s so-and-so? We haven’t seen him in weeks.’ A celebrity or movie producer or writer or entertainer. Big names!”

Among them is Irena Medavoy, who, with her husband, film producer and former Tri-Star Pictures chieftain Mike Medavoy, had been a longtime and loyal guest of the hotel. Irena, who urged her friends through Facebook to boycott the hotel, mentions the name of a prominent Beverly Hills-based star who “was saying, ‘Oh, but I love the McCarthy Salad and we are going for that,’ ” referring to the hotel’s famed $33 chopped salad, named for the 1940s entertainment attorney Neil McCarthy. “And I told her, ‘Listen, this is bigger than the McCarthy!’“I had already sent out invitations for two birthday lunches, one for Cheryl Saban [wife of the billionaire entertainment-industry leader Haim Saban] and another for Lyn Lear, the wife of Norman Lear, and both were going to be held at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Medavoy says. “I immediately changed the venue for both. There was a lot of negotiating. At first, somebody started to joke around: ‘Let’s boycott to 78 degrees and under. But if it’s 80 degrees, we’re going. Because the patio’s the most delicious place in town.’ I said, ‘No! We’ve got to be strong!’ The sultan created this situation, not the other way around.”

Bob Beitcher, C.E.O. of the Motion Picture and Television Fund (M.P.T.F.), which provides housing and services for retired entertainment-industry veterans, recalls that on May 5 the foundation’s chairman, Jeffrey Katzenberg, C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation and a breakfast regular in the Polo Lounge, joined the board in announcing that next year’s “The Night Before,” the charity event he had created for the fund 12 years ago, would not be at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Held there each year on the night before the Academy Awards, the event has raised $60 million.

The action ratcheted up even higher on the evening of May 6, when the Beverly Hills City Council held a special meeting to consider a resolution “condemning” the government of Brunei’s laws. The hotel’s management bused in 150 Beverly Hills Hotel employees wearing their housekeeper, waiter, and maintenance-man uniforms. “It was like something out of a movie,” remembers call-center director Kayal Moore, who, amid the hot lights of the international media, urged the council to take their issues against the sultan to the political powers in Washington, D.C., and not to inflict pain and suffering upon the hotel and its employees. The applause, cheers, and tears among the staff became so loud that Mayor Lili Bosse had to call for order.

Mayor Bosse’s speech was probably the most passionate of them all. While not calling for a city-sanctioned boycott of the hotel, and saying that she was heartbroken that the employees in the council chambers had become “the damage of the innocent,” she said, “Personally and sadly, I will not be attending any events at the hotel until this is resolved.” Then she led the charge against the sultan and his “horrific” law. “I am an only child of Holocaust survivors,” she said that night in the crowded council chamber. “Years ago, when my family was in Nazi Germany, there was nobody there to speak up for them and to make a difference. Often we do live in a world of apathy. We have lived in a world where people have remained silent. . . . Our community has asked us to stand up and speak for justice, and speak for the humanity of who we are.”

The resolution, condemning the government of Brunei for Sharia law and urging the sultan and his government to sell their hotels and other Beverly Hills properties they might own, was unanimously passed.

Employees Only##

Ironically, the boycott has victimized the very people that the union has been trying to protect: the hotel’s 650 employees. They met me in various parts of the hotel, venting their anger, rage, frustration, and sorrow. Valet-concession head Chris Dunn insists that the boycott is the height of hypocrisy, not by the sultan but by the stars speaking out, whom he’s coddled like family and guarded from paparazzi for years. “I don’t see anybody in the community saying, ‘We will not accept any more sponsorship from Citigroup.’ Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, of Saudi Arabia, is one of the largest shareholders of that. There’s very serious Sharia law in Saudi Arabia. How about the billions the United Arab Emirates gave to the Hollywood studios?” (The Alwaleed analogy is not quite fair. Prince Alwaleed is Saudi Arabia’s face of liberalism; he supports women’s rights and encourages Western dress for his female employees.)

“So we feel very let down,” Dunn continues, mentioning the tweet by Sharon Osbourne. “I’ve known chief boycotter Sharon Osbourne since she was a teenage girl and used to come to the hotel with her mother and father every winter from London. After she married Ozzy, they lived a few blocks from here, and we delivered things to her. Protected her from paparazzi. She and Ozzy stayed at the hotel for years, in between buying and selling houses, and the staff treated them like family. So when I heard she was one of the ones talking about not going to any Dorchester properties, I was shocked. Because, coming from London, she knows most of the Muslim countries have Sharia law. And she just came back from Abu Dhabi, a Sharia-law country, where her husband’s band, Black Sabbath, played. As far as the sultan goes, we’re the highest-paid workers, with the best benefits package, of any hotel in the city.”

“They betrayed us,” says Noriam Recinos, a Salvadoran housekeeping supervisor who has worked at the hotel for 19 years. She loved her guests and believed they loved her. Now she feels stabbed in the back. She and her husband, Jose Escobar, a longtime room-service waiter, go home each day to four kids and an uncertain future. She doesn’t know the intricacies of Sharia law, only the outcome: “Four arrivals today,” she said of her guest rooms. “Before? Not less than 15.” (The Dorchester Collection’s C.E.O. insists that all of the hotel’s staff will receive the same salary, including tips, that they received in the year before the boycotts.)

“Everybody, from Catherine Zeta-Jones to Nicole Kidman, they come and look for me because I know exactly what they will have,” says Ruth Cortez, who has been the lead server at the downstairs Fountain Coffee Shop for 19 years. “All the regulars were calling up, saying, ‘I’m sorry, Ruth. We have to boycott.’ I started serving them when they were boyfriend and girlfriend. And then they have children and I waited on them. So it’s hurtful.”

“You feel like you’ve been shut out,” says Anna Romer, an eloquent Polo Lounge server, in her neat white waiter’s jacket, black tie, and silver Dorchester Collection lapel pin. “You’d think that after all these years of service more people would come in and say, ‘Hey, how are you? How do you feel about the sultan? The boycott?’ And very, very few people have come in.”

Romer is haunted by an image of a 60-year-old housekeeper in the staff locker room at the end of a working day. “She was sitting on the bench and she was crying,” she says. “Because she was scared. That is someone’s mother, grandmother. She’s done nothing wrong, and she’s worried about her job, about what people think of her. She was sitting in the corner, just bawling.”

She pauses. “I’m sorry—I’m just very emotional,” she says. “We’re collateral damage.”

By early June, some signs of life were returning to the hotel. Film producer Lili Zanuck had become a vocal supporter of the employees, saying the boycott was misinformed, misdirected, and hypocritical. “Have you not done your homework?” she asks of the boycotters. “Do you not know that Sharia law is older than Christianity? This is an old problem! When you go to any human-rights site, Brunei doesn’t even make the cut! . . . Boycott oil instead,” she continues, from the petrochemical nations that have Sharia law, adding, “Jay Leno is more than happy to boycott tortilla soup in the Polo Lounge, but is he going to go without driving all of his [800] cars?” But most of Zanuck’s friends declined to join her for lunch at the hotel, and one who did “came incognito with the hat and glasses.”

The actress Rose McGowan hosted the first of several Wednesday-night “Gay Ins,” in which 50 of her friends, many of them gay, attended a party in the hotel’s Bar Nineteen12, which had been decorated with gay-rights flags, for what McGowan tells me represents “an alternate way of protesting. I wanted the sultan to see photos of the kind of love he’s outlawed.”

The next afternoon, in a vacant suite in the hotel, I meet Christopher Cowdray, C.E.O. of the Dorchester Collection, who maintains his cool British hotelier composure despite having just flown 11 hours from London to Los Angeles to deal with what he calls “the crisis.”“Does the sultan know—or care—about the protest over the Beverly Hills Hotel?” I ask.

“He is aware of the situation,” he says.

But awareness will not trigger change.

“By putting pressure on the staff, they’re never going to change the way the sultan thinks,” says Cowdray. “You’ve made your protest, but don’t continue to destroy the jewels of your community. Gather that momentum and take it to Washington and put pressure there.”As for the constant barrage of business leaders eager to buy the iconic hotel, Cowdray says the answer is “No.” “We will weather the storm and we’ll come out on the other side even stronger,” he says.