Polo Lounge

"[1] Hernando Courtright, who ran The Beverly Hills Hotel in the 1930s and 1940s, had a friend named Charles Wrightsman, who led a national champion polo team.

Courtright, on hearing his friend's dilemma, offered to display the bowl in the hotel's bar, which was being redecorated at the time.

The high command of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (Richard Nixon) in 1972 was staying at the hotel during a West Coast fundraising trip, and having a breakfast meeting in the Polo Lounge when Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy placed his fateful call to Committee Deputy Director, Jeb Stuart Magruder.

[4] In the event, McGruder merely left the lounge and went to one of the hotel’s pay phone stations and called Liddy back.

[4] The hotel’s logged and charged long-distance-call records of the calls made from that suite, on the morning after the burglary, formed the basis of the evidence which convicted each of the participants of conspiracy and obstruction of justice in January 1975.