Following in Faye Dunaway’s footsteps

The picture of Faye Dunaway, taken after her Oscar win, has become the stuff of legend, and an opportunity to sit by the same poolside 35 years on was one I could not pass up, writes Stephen McGinty

THE pool was as silent as a long departed silver screen movie star when we arrived at a little after eight o’clock in the morning. The sun loungers sat shrouded in blue canvas covers, the morning sun danced across the azure blue water and a Hockney-esque canvas was set for a perfect day to restage the perfect Hollywood portrait.

When Terry O’Neill arrived at the Beverly Hills Hotel on the morning of Monday, 29 March, 1977, he didn’t know that within a few minutes he would capture an iconic image, one that, almost 30 years on, still speaks of the loneliness and want of success.

He had met Faye Dunaway the previous week and aware of her nomination for best actress in Network (the prophetic indictment of TV news as mass market entertainment, in which Peter Finch urged the public to raise their windows and scream: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”) asked if, in the event that she won, would she pose for him the morning after.

“I wanted to capture the look of dazed confusion, to capture the state of utter shock that Oscar winners enter, where they go to bed thrilled, then overnight, it dawns on them that they’ve changed, that they’ve just become a star. And not just a star, a millionaire.”

As Dunaway was staying in one of the bungalows at the hotel, they decided to meet by the pool. O’Neill carefully scattered on the concrete floor copies of the Los Angeles Times which reported not only Dunaway’s success but that of her co-star Peter Finch who had died of a heart attack a few hundred yards away in the hotel lobby on the 14 January and had now become the first posthumous Oscar winner. O’Neill positioned a breakfast tray with a green teapot on the edge of the table, and, at the centre, as if about to leap off the edge, stood her Oscar.

There is just something about the tilt of Dunaway’s head, and the weary expression on her face that conveys the confusion of a fatigued mountaineer who has finally reached the summit only to be disappointed by the view.

“She has reached the top of the tree,” explained O’Neill. “She isn’t quite sure who she is any more. I waited for her to look away from the camera and I got the shot.” He also got the woman, eventually. They married six years after the shutter closed, then divorced after three. (Was the view a disappointment?)

For many, the hidden power of the picture is in the setting, the Beverly Hills Hotel, which gave its name to the city that is now synonymous with luxury, wealth, stars and sunshine, and which, this weekend, celebrates its centenary. One hundred years ago today the great and the good of Los Angeles drove out to what the invitations described as “halfway between Los Angeles and the sea” where they were greeted by what would became known as the “pink palace” on account of the bright salmon exterior, painted on in 1948, that rises above the palm trees.

Built in 1912 on 12 acres of land once owned by the Mexican government, the Beverly Hills Hotel was the idea of Burton Green, a developer and president of the Rodeo Land and Water Company, who named the sprawling hotel with its terracotta-coloured roof tiles after his home in Massachusetts, Beverly Farms. The bill for the building was $500,000, an incredible sum back then, and an acre of land was set aside for long-staying guests to grow vegetables and flowers.

Within less than three years the hotel had drawn so many people to the surrounding land that Beverly Hills had enough residents to be incorporated as a city and soon pulled in the stars of the silent era, with Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Buster Keaton and Rudolph Valentino buying up the bean fields that surrounded the hotel and transforming them into Spanish style mansions. Since the beginning the hotel has been inextricably linked with the movies and was where the stars came to dine, relax, sunbathe and frolic with their co-stars.

As well as ordinary rooms and lavish suites, the Beverly Hills Hotel, from its inception, offered guests the option of 21 private bungalows, available by the night but often taken up for months, or even years. Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, movie director and aviator, took up residence in four different bungalows in 1942. There was one for him, one for wife Jean Peters and two that sat empty as decoys.

Number 4 was his favourite, to which he returned, on and off, over the next 30 years, ordering pineapple upside-down cake from his personal chef at 3am and having roast beef sandwiches delivered to the trunk of a tree in the garden, so that he could fetch them later without anyone seeing him. Elizabeth Taylor honeymooned with six of her eight husbands in the bungalows, while John Lennon and Yoko hid out in one for a week. Marilyn Monroe’s favourite was bungalow 1c, which is just a short walk from the lobby through a garden lush with the scent of hibiscus, bougainvillea and tropical palms, although she also romped in bungalows 20 and 21 in 1960 when she had an affair with Yves Montand, while filming Let’s Make Love.

Photography is officially banned by the pool, in case it upsets the actors, actresses and executives who still come for a dip or hang out, for $300 a day in the curtained candy-striped pool-side cabanas which are equipped with mini-fridges, flat-screen TVs and sprawling couches. It was here that Raquel Welch was “discovered” by the pool; The Beatles were snuck in through a back way for a swim; and Katharine Hepburn, on a particularly hot day, decided to dive in fully clothed.

Yet the hotel’s PR had found a short window of opportunity to allow me to emulate the classic shot. Last year, the Scots photographer Rankin made his own homage to O’Neill’s portrait, but relocated it to the oval pool of the Chateau Marmont, which sits a few miles up Sunset Boulevard.

He, fortunately, had a little more time, but we were on the clock. First we had to swiftly remove all the plastic covers from the sun loungers, then manoeuvre the glass table into the correct position. Sadly, I am, for the moment, Oscar-less and thought a silk robe unbecoming, but the hotel’s soft towelling robe made for a suitable substitute. After a quick change in the elegant pool-side changing rooms I was, at last, ready for my close up, Mr DeMille.

The photographer was checking the original on an iPad and trying to figure out the right angle when our deadline was suddenly brought forward from minutes to mere seconds by the arrival of a family of four, with eager children already attired in water wings. As I lacked either the movie-star clout to have them momentarily detained or wished to digitally remove a mob of splashing bathers from the background, it was either now, or perhaps, never. I rested my head on my hand and wondered what Faye was thinking 35 years ago.

“Action.”

“Cut.”

Then we faded away, not to black but to the blinding sunshine of southern California and the bright promise of a new day. But first it wouldn’t be right to leave the Pink Palace without a visit to the famous Fountain Coffee Room with its curved dark counter and distinctive green banana leaf wallpaper where even celebrities queue for a seat and the best eggs benedicts in southern California.

A century has brought a few changes to the hotel. There are no longer stables for the guests’ horses and the bowling alley and billiard room have long since been removed.

In 1977 the hotel’s silhouette appeared on the cover of The Eagle’s album, Hotel California. As the lyrics explain: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” Few guests would want to, a point made by Michael Douglas, who said in a new film about the hotel’s history: “I have been coming to the Beverly Hills hotel for over half of its life. You feel timeless.”

Maybe that’s what Faye Dunaway was thinking.