Outside, wildfires burn and protests unfold. Inside the Pink Hotel, though, Los Angeles’ wealthiest residents and visitors indulge in luxurious spa days and lavish parties as the staff caters to their every whim.
In “The Pink Hotel,” Liska Jacobs’ latest novel that’s in stores this week, the L.A.-raised author explores the gap between LA’s very wealthy and everyone else through the eyes of a Northern California couple whose exorbitant honeymoon will test their very new marriage.
“I heard a story, which is true, that happened during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles,” says Jacobs by phone from Berlin, where she has been based since the beginning of this year. “Everybody in Beverly Hills was very terrified that it was going to turn into a French Revolutionary type of thing. So, they didn’t feel safe in their mansions. They gathered in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel for an evening and watched the events of the riots unfold on TV.”
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Jacobs heard that story back when she was working on her debut novel, “Catalina,” and it stuck with her as she wrote her follow-up, “The Worst Kind of Want.”
“I love to write books that take place in pressure cookers, and you can’t have anything better than riots and wildfires outside a very luxurious hotel,” she says.
So in February of 2020, just a few weeks before COVID-19 upended life across the world and, consequently, shined a light on inequities in the U.S. and elsewhere, Jacobs made a research trip to the famed Sunset Blvd. hotel that has provided lodgings for the rich and famous for over a century. It was a stay that hadn’t previously been on the author’s bucket list. “It feels like such a different planet, almost. It’s really intimidating just to walk through the lobby,” she says. “I had to force myself to fake that kind of confidence to pretend that I could stay there for a week.”
Jacobs was struck by the hotel’s design. “I think what’s interesting is that the grounds are made of a large amount of gardens and there’s no gate. There’s no walls. It’s not like at night the walls shut and you can’t get in,” she says. “It just puts off this sort of vibe that you don’t belong and that already pisses me off.”
She adds, “I should say that everyone that I met were lovely human beings. They take a lot of pride in their work, but that rarified air that comes with a place like that. It makes my teeth kind of grind.”
At a certain point during her research trip, she realized just how easy it was to get used to the posh surroundings. “I had expected that would happen, but I didn’t realize how quickly. You just acclimate,” she says. “It does feel like theater because everyone who works there is so nice and welcoming. You just start thinking, I can walk around in my pajamas because these people are very friendly and they don’t mind because you’ve been there for four days. It’s not a lot of time, but after just a couple days, when you stop looking, that $44 salad started sounding very reasonable, which is insane.”
Months later, after the pandemic hit, Jacobs’ experiences during the related lockdown would prompt her to reevaluate what she had written. During her stay at the hotel, Jacobs chose to stay put. “Usually, most people use the hotel as a base and they go explore, but the Beverly Hills Hotel isn’t like that. You go there and that is the destination. I made sure not to leave,” she explains. “That feeling of isolation is very different from when I was under lockdown.”
She recalls 2020 life at the point where wildfires added to the tumult of the year. “Under lockdown, I was taping my windows closed because smoke was getting in. It was incredibly toxic,” she says. “But isolated at the Beverly Hills Hotel, it was $44 salads and underwater music. It felt like a different world.”
All of this coalesces into a story filled with tension as Kit, the young bride who is keenly aware of the problems facing the metropolis surrounding the hotel, grows increasingly cynical of the hotel and its guests while her ambitious new husband Keith is blinded by extravagant lifestyles that grow increasingly hedonistic. But there’s more to the book than social commentary.
Love, Jacobs says, is also one of the book’s themes and it came into play as a result of the events of the summer of 2020. “I started thinking, what the hell are we doing here? What’s the point? Human beings are awful to each other,” she says. But she saw her husband and had a revelation that “we endure because we hope that there’s some human connection that we will make” and that we might have someone by our side in hard times.
The similarities between her fictional world and the real one proved to be a creative challenge for Jacobs. “I hit sensory overload at one point,” says Jacobs. So she accepted a residency in Mexico and finished writing “The Pink Hotel” there.
Another challenge was the location that serves as inspiration for “The Pink Hotel” and its connection to global human rights struggles. The Beverly Hills Hotel, along with other Dorchester Collection properties, has been the subject of boycotts due to the anti-LGBTQ policies of its owner, Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bolkiah.
“I was conflicted because I’m giving that hotel money and I’ve written a book that kind of makes people think, we should go to the Polo Lounge for a martini,” says Jacobs, adding that she’s had friends ask if they should meet up there when she’s back in L.A.
Then there’s also a fine line between glamorizing and satirizing the luxe life. “I have to struggle with myself because, although everyone who works there is nice, it is, on a surface level way, I think, reinforcing this idea that we can go there and play make-believe, even though it’s going to take me three months to pay the bill,” she says.
“I do feel bad about that part,” Jacobs adds. “Hopefully, the book is insane enough to make my larger point.”
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