The Chateau Marmont was a haven for Hollywood types from the beginning, so it makes sense that Nathanael West checked into the hotel to write The Day of the Locust, his novel about eccentric.
West Hollywood, Calif.
THE first question people always ask when you tell them you’ve visited the Chateau Marmont, the great gothic pile of a hotel on the Sunset Strip, is “Who did you see?”
For the record, during my sojourns there last month, I saw, in no particular order:
¶The stylist Rachel Zoe wearing fur, dining alfresco with a table of European fashionistas smoking cigarettes.
¶The musician Joel Madden, huddled on a lobby couch with his 2-year-old daughter, eating a grilled cheese and fries.
¶Amanda Seyfried, Keanu Reeves, Debra Messing and Carey Mulligan. Not together.
¶Joaquin Phoenix, coolly deflecting approaching strangers at a poolside bungalow party hosted by Flaunt Magazine.
¶The director rolling press interviews in the lobby while her publicists watched from a distance.
Continue reading the main storyAs for the rest — a motley assortment of writers typing away on laptops, Italian tourists in neon footwear, Hollywood moms toting babies, agent types buying meals for actor types, and fashion people eating on the patio — they pretended diligently that the celebrities were not there at all. As one diner, surveying the lunch crowd, whispered to a friend: “It’s always such good people-watching here. You just have to remember not to stare.”
It’s impossible to write about the Chateau Marmont without name-dropping. It is, after all, a hotel so dense with celebrity sightings that it probably should have a column devoted to it in Us Weekly. But for the hotel regulars — both its occupants and its local habitués — it is so much more than a star hangout. It’s a shadowy hideout amid the klieg lights of Hollywood, a meeting place for the high-profile in search of the low-key, and a place with a past in a city that fetishizes the new.
Its history has mirrored the last century of the entertainment industry, from Hollywood film colony to gritty rock ’n’ roll dive to pricey fashion hangout. But it has always been a beacon for Los Angeles’s artistically inclined.
“Sometimes I’m there every day of the week,” said Lisa Love, the West Coast editor for Vogue. “There’s nothing precious about it, it’s just a huge bohemian scene. It is like an extension of your living room.”
Nearly 20 years after being bought by the hotelier André Balazs and revived from near-dereliction, the Chateau (in local parlance) is enjoying the peak of its own celebrity. It is the undisputed star of Sofia Coppola’s new movie, “Somewhere.” Portrayed as the residence of Johnny Marco (played by Stephen Dorff), a dissolute movie star whose pill-fueled life is circling the drain, the Chateau Marmont has so much charisma that it occasionally outshines its human co-stars.
“There’s no other place like it,” Ms. Coppola said recently, as she sat on a couch in the lobby with her daughters playing nearby. Her own family history with the hotel goes deep (her father almost bought it at one point), and she recalls using the hotel as a party pad when she was a student at the California Institute of the Arts. The parking attendant, who still works there, would sneak them into the pool. “When I started writing my script I thought of this bad-boy character, and thought, ‘Of course he has to live at the Chateau.’ ”
THE Chateau Marmont may not be the Los Angeles area’s most expensive hotel, nor its most elegantly appointed. But it is its most storied, a hotel whose name is rarely seen in print without “legendary” tacked onto it. Tucked away just above Sunset Boulevard, the seven-story Chateau — designed after the Château d’Amboise in the Loire Valley — was built in 1929 as a deluxe apartment building, just in time for the Depression.
The apartments were swiftly made into hotel suites but retained their kitchens and living rooms, making them useful for long-term residency. Later, the 63 rooms were supplemented by 9 tiny Spanish cottages and 4 poolside bungalows — the latter built in part by the midcentury architect Craig Ellwood.
From inception, the Chateau was a hangout for Hollywood’s most glamorous. Harry Cohn, former head of Columbia Pictures, famously exhorted his actors, “If you are going to get in trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont.” Visitors included Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne. But by the time Mr. Balazs bought the hotel in 1990, the orange shag rugs were being held together by duct tape (thanks, perhaps, to Led Zeppelin’s motorcycle rides in the halls). “It felt like a very neglected, abandoned soul,” he recalled.
Taking care not to upset the regulars, he began a slow updating process — hiring set designers to replace the thrift-store furniture with antiques that only felt as if they might have come from a thrift store, installing an elegant restaurant in the courtyard, and making sure to retain the beloved staff (including memorable characters like the singing waiter Romulu Laki, who has a cameo in Ms. Coppola’s film). “It was about creating a design that felt like it had always been there, and to make everyone comfortable within it,” Mr. Balazs said.
The result is a grand lobby full of well-loved brocade couches and crooked sconces and murky paintings of reclining nudes; suites with recklessly mismatched furniture; bathrooms with chipped vintage tile and peeling paint; kitchens with unpredictable O’Keefe and Merritt stoves. “Shabby” is a frequently used descriptor; “homey,” another, which is perhaps why guests are willing to pay $500 a night and up to stay there — sometimes for years at a time.
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One result of so much comfort is that the hotel’s guests do make themselves exceedingly comfortable, and not just the free-spirited young families who frequently move in with their children.
The hotel has witnessed the misbehavior of generations of stars and would-be stars: Robert Mitchum (arrested for drug use), John Belushi (died of the same), Jim Morrison (who made a drug-fueled leap from a fourth-floor window) and Lindsay Lohan (who lived here before rehab).
In the film “Somewhere,” Ms. Coppola has Johnny Marco ordering twin pole dancers for room service, sleeping with other guests, breaking his arm in a drunken fall, and arriving at his hotel suite to discover a raging party already taking place — antics Ms. Coppola based, in part, on real-life stories.
“People do things here that they wouldn’t dare think of doing at the Peninsula or the Four Seasons, and we think that’s a good thing,” said the hotel manager, Philip Pavel, who said it is not unusual (or forbidden) for guests to invite 20 to 30 friends to hang out. “I’m like the parent: I am both facilitating the level of rambunctious fun but also policing it. It’s about allowing people to embrace it, but also making sure no one overdoses.” He winced: “Oh, that sounds bad.”
Though the shenanigans tend to get the press, the hotel’s more impressive legacy is its role as muse for generations of artists, photographers, novelists and screenwriters, of which Ms. Coppola is only the latest. Hunter S. Thompson, Annie Leibovitz, Dorothy Parker, Bruce Weber, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tim Burton, Jay McInerney — all have produced work from within the hotel’s walls. “The Day of the Locust” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” were written here; Helmut Newton, who lived here every winter until dying in a car accident in the hotel driveway, shot many of his photos in its rooms.
“Being at the Chateau is like being in a place that exists out of reality, a sacred place, like a church,” wrote the novelist A. M. Homes, who loves the hotel so much she wrote a book about it, “Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill.” “And it is like not just any church, not just another California mission, it is the church — Our Los Angeles Lady of Creativity.”
That cloistered atmosphere (what Mr. Pavel calls the energy vortex) explains why so many local writers, even if they don’t need (or can’t afford) a hotel room, spend their days loitering in the lobby’s dim, comfortable recesses.
Myself included: When I first moved to Los Angeles, I would park myself on a couch and write what became my first novel, nursing an overpriced orange juice as long as humanly possible, in hopes that the literary mojo of the place would rub off. Later, when writing my second novel, “This Is Where We Live,” about a Los Angeles musician and his wife, I set a scene of infidelity in a Chateau Marmont bathroom. In between, I conducted celebrity interviews in the lobby — the Chateau being perhaps the most popular spot in the city for such interviews — including, in 2003, with Ms. Coppola. (Some things haven’t changed.)
Memories are as varied as the occupants, though. On a recent Thursday night at the hotel, my three dinner companions all had their stories — the documentary producer who had a skinny-dipping tryst in the pool, the interior decorator who spent lunch eavesdropping on Sienna Miller, the screenwriter who hosted a dinner party for 20 in the courtyard.
At 11 p.m., all the lobby couches were occupied by the young, stylish or both, who barely blinked when a girl in a sequined mini-dress tripped on her stilettos and tumbled down the stairs. In the ancient elevator two disheveled middle-aged men, reeking of pot, giggled uncontrollably. By the time I rolled into bed at midnight, the hum of Sunset Strip traffic had been drowned out by the noise coming from a party by the pool. Fortunately, the walls are stone, thick and impenetrable.
After all, the ultimate purpose of any hotel — no matter how legendary or bohemian or inspirational — is sleep.
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A weekday afternoon, poolside at the Chateau Marmont, a Hollywood hotel in an ersatz Loire Valley chateau. A crush of several hundred at a birthday party and cookout for Sofia Coppola, daughter of the director.
The guest of honor and her consort, Donovan Leitch, fellow Ford model and son of 'the' Donovan, greet their guests. Never mind that they don't seem to know many of them. Never mind that it's not her actual birthdate. After all, this is the land of make-believe.
One thing is uncontestedly real: it's hard to imagine a more calculatedly hip scene. The bicoastal everybody-who-is-anybody set parades down the path to the pool -- a seemingly endless stream of actors and actresses, agents, directors, models, producers, rock stars, writers, their pets and their children. The New York contingent, in town for the California Fashion Industry Friends of AIDS benefit honoring Calvin Klein the next evening, includes Kelly Klein, Elizabeth Saltzman, Tatiana Von Furstenburg, Peter Gallagher, Ethan Hawke, Marina Rust and Brian McNally.
The Beastie Boys and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are among Ms. Coppola's additions to the guest list. A peek at the list -- the front desk clerk is hopelessly trying to keep up with his screening duties -- reveals the notation 'CM' by many of the names. That's short for Friends of the Chateau Marmont, and those names are from the hotel owner's Rolodex. There's quite a lot going on here besides Ms. Coppola's birthday.
Over by the grill, obscured by a cloud of veggie burger smoke, Andre Balazs, the 36-year-old hotelier and trend engineer, watched his experiment -- the rejiggering of the Chateau's sets and cast -- play out.
Cozily nestled in a hillside dotted with red-roofed Mediterranean-style houses, in a fragrant tangle of eucalyptus, honeysuckle, midnight jasmine and rosebushes, the turreted Chateau Marmont looms above Sunset Boulevard under the watchful eye of a Marlboro man billboard propped up where the Strip meets the city limits of West Hollywood and Marmont Lane.
Built in 1929 as an apartment hotel by Fred Horowitz, a Hollywood entertainment lawyer, the opening of what Mr. Balazs calls the 'Loire Valley folly in the onion fields' coincided almost exactly with the stock market crash. Rapidly recast as a hotel, it became a hit.
Its success among Hollywood residents and actors, writers and directors lured westward by the Hollywood machine is attributed largely to its noncommercial origins. Conceived as apartments, its so-called suites, equipped with kitchens, were large, homey and self-sufficient. The hotel became a quiet place to hide for those with work to do or those in the public eye, and because of the elevator in the basement garage, guests didn't even have to pass the front desk to get to the sanctuary of their rooms.
It was never the biggest, never the swankiest, but it was always the most private. 'If you must get into trouble, do it at the Marmont' was the directive given by Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Studios, to two of his young stars, William Holden and Glenn Ford.
Greta Garbo was alone here. Jean Harlow honeymooned here. 'Rebel Without a Cause' was cast here. 'Sunset Boulevard' was conceived here. In 1935, Billy Wilder found no room at the inn; he slept on a cot in a vestibule by the women's restroom, saying, 'I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.' 'The Day of the Locust' and 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' were written here. Howard Hughes holed up here. Grace Kelly trysted here. For 50 years, what seems like all of Hollywood constellated here.
And then John Belushi died here. The party, was over, or so it seemed. Like a silent-movie queen who outlived her era, the Marmont had become the hotel equivalent of Norma Desmond. The figurative vacancy light burning bright, occupancy hovered at 50 percent, the guest registry dwindled to the European regulars and to those for whom cheap rates (contextually, at least -- prices still range from $150 for a single room to $495 for a bungalow) would always overcome bad karma.
For the first time in the 11 years since Mr. Belushi overdosed in the Chateau's Bungalow 3, occupancy is at an all-time high, 94 percent, as is the star quotient. Details magazine is doing an underwater fashion shoot in the pool, and Helmut Newton just finished photographing nude models in his suite and Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of INXS, beside the pool. Madonna is shooting scenes for her next movie, 'Snake Eyes.' Interview magazine has just opened its West Coast office in a Marmont cottage.
Dominick Dunne, Brad Gooch and Gita Mehta are doing readings in the lobby. Francis Ford Coppola is holding tastings of the wines from his Napa Valley vineyards. Casting directors are holding auditions in their suites and hopeful young actresses waiting their turns are splayed on the lobby's oversize Spanish-style chairs murmuring their lines to no one in particular. Lucie de la Falaise and Dan Aykroyd are wandering through the lobby.
It's a good show, admittedly, but a different one. In years past, if the afternoon activity of choice had been nude football (Alice Cooper) or motorcycle races in the hallways (Led Zeppelin) or trashing one's room (Billy Idol) or leaping off one's balcony (Jim Morrison), these days it's attending a well-casted party like Ms. Coppola's or a poetry reading. What used to be the perfect place for a drug overdose has become the place to put your best foot forward.
'I couldn't imagine wanting to commit suicide here anymore,' said Eve Babitz, who writes of Mr. Balazs's ascension to the guardianship of the Marmont in 'Black Swans,' her collection of stories to be published by Knopf in the fall.
'Oh, no,' replied Mr. Balazs, with mock horror. 'I've lost a major market.'
If a board game were based on Mr. Balazs's career, it would be like Monopoly, but instead of houses and hotels, it would have nightclubs and hotels, and instead of Atlantic City, it would involve New York and Los Angeles. For advanced players, the board could be fitted with a second tier of clear plastic, so the two cities could be viewed from above. For those ready to play the game on two levels, the second tier would include assorted other cities.
The first objective would be to collect the places. That's where the game would end if it were based on the career of, say, Conrad Hilton. In the Balazs-based game, the players also collect people. This is done by having parties in the places. Once enough people are accumulated, a player can go anywhere in the world, acquiring places and filling them with people.
In 1988, Mr. Balazs and Eric Goode founded the Manhattan nightclub M.K., and the next year they made a West Coast move, opening b.c., a Los Angeles supper club. That same year, Mr. Balazs returned to the East, allied with Campion Platt, to buy a 100-year-old manufacturing loft building built by John Jacob Astor 2d and tranform it into the Mercer, SoHo's first hotel. The next year he again turned west to buy the faded Chateau Marmont for just over $12 million from its feuding owners, Raymond Sarlot and Karl Kantarjian
In the meantime, in 1989, Mr. Balazs went south -- as so many in this game have -- to buy and renovate a dilapidated Miami Beach hotel, the Royal. And last spring he went even farther south to buy 100 acres of Costa Rican beachfront from the Government. With his newest partner, Mario Sotela, Mr. Balazs plans to turn it into an environmentally correct resort and preserve.
In 1990, b.c. fell out of his game before it even got a liquor license, strangled by its own popularity and the protests of surrounding residents. Since then, Mr. Balazs has sold the Miami Beach property. The Mercer, which was scheduled to open last year, is ensnarled by contracting delays and fed-up financiers.
It's a difficult game. Places and people can be lost with alarming speed and for completely unexpected reasons.
Mr. Balazs, who is married to Katie Ford, a president of Ford Models, said he loves starting things. But even he can't get around the fact that trends almost always turn out to be as thin as his wife's models. It's a new twist for Mr. Balazs to ally himself with the past, with a situation that, however faltering, had 60 years of momentum in place.
' I T sounds pretentious to talk about imposing anything on this particular property because it has such a long history,' he said. 'It's a collection of little bits and pieces that all have come together over the years, and they give it its patina. At best, I can say one is a guardian angel, in a way, of preserving it. It is a cultural monument, and what happens with it is really a trust. This was always a cool hotel. It didn't become cool overnight because of my presence.'
'The only reason anything was off-white at the Chateau was because it had once been just plain white.' -- Eve Babitz, 'Black Swans'
Chateau Marmont has seven stories, divided into 50 rooms and suites that form the nucleus of the four-and-a-half-acre property. Nine neighboring cottages and four bungalows, acquired by various owners over the years, surround a lozenge-shaped pool.
Somehow the halls and lobby maintain an impressive hush. (Perhaps it's the thick, earthquake-proof walls.) It reminds Bruce Wagner, who checked out of his downtown Los Angeles loft for six months and into the Marmont to write the script for 'Wild Palms,' of 'a sunlit sanitorium, chalky and dusty and old Hollywood.'
'You feel slightly spectral while you're there,' he continued. 'If you see well-known people, it's at the front desk and it's like they're getting their medication. I needed that sanitorium vibe while I was working.'
Said John Waters: 'There's always something the matter with it. It's like Japanese fashion -- something doesn't work almost on purpose. I think that's part of the charm.'
Once Mr. Balazs had the cast in place, all he had to do was clean up the set -- but not too much. 'The full weight of what I had inherited came upon me when people suddenly discovered that I bought it, and longtime guests would come up to me and say, 'Please don't change it,' but in the same breath admitting the inconveniences of its decayed state -- missing shower heads, tattered curtains,' he said. 'I decided they meant 'Don't violate the spirit of the place,' and I remember having this conversation with Helmut Newton, who lives here four months a year. His mantra was 'This is perfect. I just love it the way it is.' Wally Shawn was another who said that.
'Given that they had been associated with this long before I had and given that they were thinking people who had a certain sensibility about it, I said, 'Oh, my God, whatever we do has to be right.' But it was also apparent that it needed serious work.'
MR. BALAZS went through two interior designers before he hired Shawn Hausman and Fernando Santangelo, both set designers, for the renovations. What they accomplished was not so much a renovation as a refurbishment. The only noticeable changes have to do with carpeting, paint and new lighting. Most of the new furniture is just a fresher version of the old.
'I can't tell what is and what isn't fixed up,' Mr. Waters said. To Mr. Balazs's relief, other Chateau habitues seem to agree with that assessment. 'The changes are very subtle,' said Helmut Newton's wife, June. 'Now I realize I wouldn't like to go to the old Chateau as I knew it.'
Gone are the days when the general manager went off to Las Vegas, Nev., for the weekend, lost all his money and didn't show up for work on Monday morning, or the front desk forgot to give the bill. There are computerized -- and closely guarded -- guest profiles: 'We should also arrange to have fresh flowers in the suite -- her preference is for large flowers, especially white lilies. Does prefer feather pillows and extra silk and wooden hangers.' 'He prefers to have his laundry hand-washed.'
Mr. Balazs describes and understands the lure to be his ability to hand out a lot more than just a bed and bath with the room key.
'One can try to lay out different scripts literally sorted by room number and provide a canvas or backdrop for their lives,' he said.
In this land of water bars and where signs advertise 'lo-cal lo-fat French non-fries' Mr. Balazs, who has obtained a liquor license for the first time in the hotel's history, has guests drinking red wine at poetry readings as though this were some Left Bank cafe or West Coast Algonquin.
The Chateau Marmont, with all its haute bohemian airs, isn't for everyone. Some call it the Chateau Varmit, suggesting some confusion about whether to commit it to the illness or the rodent category; Japanese tourists hate it (so do most other tourists), and Mike Medavoy, chairman of Tri-Star Pictures, recently said he doesn't get it.
'If someone spun you around in Manhattan and then dropped you down anywhere, you'd immediately know where you are,' said Ethan Hawke, who will make the Chateau home for two months while making his next film, 'Reality Bites,' with Winona Ryder. 'Los Angeles is not like that. I'm not a huge fan of it, but the Chateau makes me feel like I know where I am. It's a tad reminiscent of New York to me. There's so little history in L.A. and something so attractive about a place that has a past.'