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The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

From 1993: Nearly every day for decades, Irving V. Link tanned by the luxury pool, Adam Gopnik writes. Then his idyllic life style came under threat from the hotel’s owner, the Sultan of Brunei.

Then, at around nine, he would stroll back through the lobby and follow the curving, carpeted stairs down to the lower hallway, where he would stop to say good morning to all the people in the downstairs shops: to Tony, the barber, for instance, who would just be laying out his razors and scissors, and Amir, the haberdasher, who specialized in cashmere coats with chinchilla linings, and who would often be at work on a new suit for Irving. I run the figures through my head very often, and the project doesn’t cost out in terms of what he paid, what he’ll have to invest, and how hard it will be to reassemble this—this magnificent cast of characters and memories and associations.” He stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the peppertree, dominating the abandoned Polo Lounge patio. Irony—even the kind of simple, nostalgic irony that involves appreciating the dated, period look of a slightly passé swimming pool—is a disruptive, cosmopolitan virtue, favored in cultures, like New York’s, in which the primary social skill is not obtaining a fixed place within a hierarchy but being able to enter as many circles as you possibly can.

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