By the time the Beverly Hills Hotel closed, in 1992, Irving V. Link had spent 42 years playing gin rummy and sun-bathing by the side of its pool. From the time he discovered the hotel, in 1950, Irving’s days had been well ordered and as predictable.

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By the time the Beverly Hills Hotel closed, in 1992, Irving V. Link had spent 42 years playing gin rummy and sun-bathing by the side of its pool. From the time he discovered the hotel, in 1950, Irving’s days had been well ordered and as predictable. At seven o’clock every morning, he would stroll over from his house, in the lower reaches of Beverly Hills; enter the hotel under to the main entrance; turn right in the lobby; and arrive at the Polo Lounge. Often he and the hostess, Bernice Philbin, would be the first two people there, and they would have a polite conversation before Irving took his place in his booth and ordered breakfast. 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, before walking through the glass door at the end of the hallway that led to the pool. There Irving passed time sunbathing, changing in his cabana, and playing games of gin with hotel guests and friends.
Except for a brief period in the early 1960s—when Irving was in effect banished from the Polo Lounge by Bobby Kennedy—one day of Irving’s has been almost exactly like the next. By the end of 1992, he had spent approximately 15,000 days by the side of the pool, having never learned how to swim. “I guess I’m a creature of habit,” he told Adam Gopnik. But then one day the newest owner decided to close it for renovations and Irving was forced to ask himself—and Gopnik—a new question: Where to go next?
Read the full story, from 1993, about the life of the Beverly Hills Hotel regular.

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