If luxury has a lap, Beverly Hills sits square upon it.
The city, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, reeks of opulence: a two-car family might as well be on relief. But the shape of the place and the nature of its glamour have changed since the golden years, when Hollywood's pioneer stars came to the five-square-mile tract of beanfields, carved castles out of the surrounding canyons, and turned a wasteland into myth, when
Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford built their fabled 14-acre "Pickfair" and proposed that the community be walled off from the...