Hillcrest Country Club is a private country club located on the west side of Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1920, it is a historically Jewish country club and was established at a time when Jewish members were excluded from other elite social clubs in the city.
History
Located in Los Angeles's Cheviot Hills neighborhood, Hillcrest founded by Samuel Newmark, Louis Issacs, Karl Triest, and Joseph Y. Baruh, and opened in 1920 as the first country club for the city's Jewish community.[1]
In 1972, the Los Angeles Times referred to Hillcrest as "the leading Jewish country club in Southern California."[2] The property includes tennis courts, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and an 18-hole golf course, as well as a clubhouse with dining and meeting facilities for its members and their guests. The golf course, originally designed by Willie Watson, was redesigned and renovated by renowned architect Kyle Phillips in 2019.
In the 1950s, oil was discovered on Hillcrest's land, and the club decided to permit drilling.[3][4] Members who had shares in the club collect tax-sheltered dividends on their original initiation fees, and "B.O." (for "before oil") memberships became so valuable that they were willed from father to son.[5]
Hillcrest was established in the early days of the movie industry in Hollywood, when Jews were not permitted to join non-Jewish country clubs. In An Empire of Their Own, Neal Gabler described charity dinners of the 1930s at the all-Jewish club, where movie moguls would gather and outbid one-another with gifts to the United Jewish Welfare Fund and other Jewish causes.[8][9]
In his 1995 book on the William Morris Agency, author Frank Rose described Hillcrest as being:
...as close to invisible as 142 acres (0.57 km2) on the south side of Beverly Hills could be. No sign, just a number on the stone entrance gates...Ever since the Depression, this had been the preserve of Hollywood's elite. All the great moguls had belonged to Hillcrest—Louis B. Mayer and the Warner brothers and Harry Cohn of Columbia and Adolph Zukor of Paramount.[12]
Comedian David Steinberg noted that Hillcrest "is a little like an inverted New York Athletic Club: there is no discrimination, but it sure helps if you're Jewish and a comedian."[16] Milton Berle, a long-time member, described Hillcrest—known for its food—as "a dining club with golf."[16]
In December 1963, Los Angeles Dodgers star pitcher Sandy Koufax, himself a member of the club, was roasted at Hillcrest by the Round Table comedians, along with guest roasters Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. In what the Los Angeles Times called just about the only printable comment of the evening, George Jessel called Koufax, "without question, the most important Hebrew athlete since Samson."[17][18]
Groucho Marx was a member of Hillcrest, even though he once famously proclaimed that he would not want to be a member of any club willing to have him as a member.[16] He once noted: "As you may recall, the Hillcrest is the only country club in all of Greater Los Angeles that will accept Talmudic scholars such as myself as members."[19] Ultimately, Groucho considered his Hillcrest membership precious enough to pass on to his son in his will.[20]
Hillcrest was George Burns' home away from home, as he regularly held court there with his fellow comedians and friends. Unless he was out of town, he showed up every day from noon to 3 p.m. for his bridge game.[21] At the time of his death in 1996, one of Burns' friends recalled: "The last time I saw George was two days before his death, when he arrived in a wheelchair for his bridge game."[21]
When he died in 2002, Milton Berle had been a Hillcrest member for 70 years. In a 1994 interview with Cigar Aficionado, Berle recalled joining Hillcrest in 1932: "It cost me $275 to join in those days. Now the initiation fee is $150,000, if they'll accept you, which all depends on how much money you've given to the United Jewish Appeal."[22]
Admission of non-Jews
When Hillcrest membership opened to non-Jews, their first choice for a new member was Danny Thomas, a Lebanese Catholic. At the time, Jack Benny quipped to Thomas that the least the club could have done was to admit a member who looked like a gentile.[2][11][23]
