Jul. 6--The limos pulled into the Rittenhouse Hotel's driveway Tuesday afternoon, passed knots of teenage girls, and stopped at the squirting fountain. Eager doormen swooped in. 

Each limo discharged a star: Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Whoopi Goldberg, Kevin Spacey, Kathy Bates. 

Hollywood had come to town for Wednesday's nationally televised reading of the Declaration of Independence at the Art Museum. The production meant good business -- for a few nights, anyway -- for Center City's luxury hotels, which hosted a dozen actors, producers, TV anchors, their families and entourages, and hundreds of technical staff. 

This week also provided a lesson in how luxury hotels court this lucrative trade, as Center City occupancy rates hover near 50 percent. 

The Four Seasons, which has a world-famous nameplate and reputation, hosted show producers Norman Lear and Rob Reiner, and ABC anchors Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer. President Bush stayed at the Warwick, one of the city's oldest names. Production workers stayed at the new Sofitel. ABC took 110 rooms, mostly at the Omni, for its crew. 

The star power -- most of the actors, as well as the Backstreet Boys, who had business of their own in Philadelphia (hence, the teenage girls out front) -- stayed at the Rittenhouse, an independent hotel that lately has become the darling of the celebrity circuit. 

A hotel's success boils down to how it handles details, said David G. Benton, general manager of the Rittenhouse, the jagged, trapezoid-shaped high-rise on the western edge of Rittenhouse Square. 

The details include security, of course, but also amenities: The West Coast clock in the Rittenhouse's oak-and-marble reception area, for example, this week was set to "Beverly Hills," thanks to a removable sign. The right brand of bottled water was available, in every room. The hotel's welcome notes bore an image of the Declaration's signing. Umbrellas were tucked into every outgoing limo. The actor who craved chicken wings at 1 a.m. (Del Toro, it is said) got them. 

The agents who book rooms are "a very small community, and they are incredibly protective of their people," Benton said. "If I'm doing something wrong, it gets around." 

Or if he is doing something right. 

Benton traces the rise of the Rittenhouse's star to a visit by rock performer Phil Collins shortly after the hotel's 1989 opening. 

Like Collins, Benton is an Englishman. One night, Benton sent up HP sauce -- Britain's answer to A-1 steak sauce -- with Collins' dinner. 

"On the way out, he said, `Thanks for the brown sauce, mate,' " Benton said. 

Collins told his star friends about this kind touch. Such word-of-mouth attracts the travel press, and in 1991, AAA gave the hotel its top rating, five diamonds. It is the only Pennsylvania hotel in America's Elite 1000, a coffee-table guide to la-di-da luxe living. 

It is almost amusing what the hotel will do for a guest, aside from the requisite restaurant table-booking, dog-walking and fan-shooing. 

When Bruce Willis was shooting Twelve Monkeys, he asked Benton on a Friday if the shower in his suite could be converted to a steam room. Willis left for a weekend in New York and returned Sunday night to find the job done. Willis now is a regular. The suite still has the steam shower. 

When Oprah Winfrey's people booked a suite, they told hotel staff that she diets and travels with dogs. Her refrigerator was kept filled with low-fat food, and her dogs got to drink from personalized bowls and eat personalized doggie biscuits. 

When Tom Hanks lived at the Rittenhouse during the shooting of Philadelphia, he had to lose weight to play a lawyer with AIDS. A nutritionist sent daily menus to Jim Coleman, the hotel executive chef. "He was on about 550 calories a day," Coleman said. "When the menu said `50-bean salad,' we literally had to count out 50 beans." After shooting, a concierge was sent to pick up what Hanks craved: a pizza from South Philadelphia. 

When Ricky Martin was in town, his chef said he wanted Latin ingredients in a jiffy. Front-office manager Lucia Pernot's husband, Guillermo, co-owns the nearby Pasion! restaurant and let the chef raid his pantry. Martin later asked for bicycles for himself and a companion. "In 10 minutes, they had bikes and maps," Benton said. 

When Mitsubishi recently took 30 rooms, with 16 occupied by Japanese visitors, the hotel had Comcast pipe in the Japanese TV network NHK. 

Of course, guests pay for this -- $410 a night for one of its 98 rooms, $525 to $1,800 a night for one of 27 suites. The Rittenhouse also has 160 condos, which sell for about $500 a square foot -- that is $1 million for a 2,000-square-foot apartment. The tenant list reads like a society column: a city councilman, the owner of two sports teams, the owners of a popular restaurant chain, an orchestra conductor, a fashion icon and her singer husband. 

Benton said the hotel guests' needs actually are modest. "They're tired. They basically would like to take a bath, have a burger or an omelet, and retire," he said. "We appreciate they're working people. Just as we do, they want to relax at the end of the day." 

Many guests seem to appreciate special treatment. Actor Morgan Freeman and his wife, Myrna, had dinner at the hotel's Treetops restaurant the other night. Freeman wanted "meat on the bone," said Coleman, the chef, who obtained a porterhouse steak from ,Smith & Wollensky, the steakhouse in the hotel. Coleman, summoned to the table, got a thank-you note. 

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(c) 2001, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.