She is an attractive woman in her early fifties, dark-haired, with a svelte figure, of whom a friend has said, “What’s on Muriel’s mind is on her tongue.” “I was not my father’s favorite, as people say, but my father approved of my husband and despised Ivan. “My father was always disappointed with my sister’s choice of husband,” Muriel told me when I first contacted her. As for Ivan Boesky, anyone who knows the family will tell you-and none more graphically than Muriel-that Ben Silberstein considered him a bum and a ne’er-do-well, destined to amount to nothing.
Burt Slatkin quickly became the son Ben Silberstein had never had, and went to work for his father-in-law at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Their father was delighted with Muriel’s choice, Burton Slatkin, whose family ran a jewelry store, but not remotely pleased with Seema’s choice, Ivan Boesky, whose family owned a couple of Brass Rail restaurants. There had always been a degree of friction between the sisters, possibly even fostered by their father, who was said to favor Muriel, and their marriages brought this friction to the surface. In the meantime, the Silberstein sisters, Muriel and Seema, both married Detroit boys. “I’m thinking of charging more for people who stay here too long a time,” replied Silberstein. One morning at breakfast in the coffee shop, General David Sarnoff, president and chairman of the board of RCA, said to Silberstein, “I spend so much time here, you should give me a discount.” To the surprise of all, he never accepted large groups or conventions, as the other big hotels did, and he was dedicated to preserving the country-club atmosphere that made the Beverly Hills such a famed gathering place for film stars, visiting royalty, and the power elite of Hollywood. by the staff so that guests would not realize he was the owner. Silberstein was always referred to as Mr. The marriage of Ben and Bonnie endured, and they resided most of each year in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Bonnie Silberstein became much loved by the staff and the community. In Palm Beach, following his divorce from Rosalind, Silberstein met and eventually married a beautiful former show girl-turned-socialite named Bonnie Edwards, whose numerous husbands had included playboy Tommy Manville, the asbestos heir and tabloid darling of the period. In anticipation of its collapse, he moved his official residence to Florida in order to avoid California’s community-property laws, which would have allotted half of his earnings during the period of the marriage to his wife. Silberstein’s marriage to Rosalind Courtright was short-lived. Courtright went on to buy the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, which he proceeded to turn into a first-class rival to the Beverly Hills Hotel. The relationship between the cigar-chomping Ben Silberstein, who dressed in knit shirts and slacks, and the elegant Hernando Courtright, who sometimes wore serapes and sombreros, was strained from the start, and their distaste for each other turned to downright hatred when Silberstein, after divorcing his wife, fell in love with Courtright’s wife, Rosalind, a nightclub chanteuse, and later married her. The plan was for Courtright, who knew everyone, to stay on for five years as president and general manager. He bought it from Hernando Courtright, the colorful owner, a bona fide member of Los Angeles society, whose financial backers included such prominent figures of the film world as Loretta Young and Irene Dunne. She is reputed to have said to her father, “Daddy, if you want me to be interested in your business, why don’t you buy this hotel?” And Ben Silberstein, who doted on Muriel, did just that, for the then outrageous price of $5.5 million. The opulent structure, which had been built in 1912 and long referred to affectionately as the Pink Palace, dazzled young Muriel, representing glamour and beauty to her in a way that Detroit never had. In the early 1950s, the tale goes, when the girls were teenagers, their father took them and their mother to the hotel for the first time.
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