you grow used to when you live in a hotel. “One thing that is kind of nice is that I can ask one of the guys [bellmen] here to take my dog for a walk, and he happily does it. I’m not using the guy as a slave. It’s like he’s a pal doing another pal a favour. You can always count on that pal to do you that favour when needed. I bought the main guy a very nice set of golf clubs as a way of thanking him for always being there when I need him.”
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Other than my beloved Royal York in Toronto, perhaps my favourite hotel in the world is Chateau Marmont, located in the eight thousand block of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. That venerable place is as much a part of Hollywood as the Academy Awards and is one of the few hotels in the world that wears its notoriety like a badge of honour. Construction on Chateau Marmont began in 1927, and it opened for business two years later. California attorney Fred Horowitz built the hotel after being inspired by the Château d’Amboise in the Loire Valley in France. The hotel is tucked away off Sunset Boulevard and is accessible only by a steep, winding driveway. (Celebrity photographer Helmut Newton died when he lost control of his car on this serpentine driveway and crashed into the high wall beside it.) Horowitz made sure, to his brilliant foresight, that the hotel was erected well above the contemporary standards for earthquake-proofing, and because of that the hotel survived major earthquakes in 1933, 1953, 1971, 1987, and 1994. (I was actually in Chateau Marmont during the 1994 tremors, my first such experience with an earthquake. As instructed, I stood in the doorframe until the swaying and rumbling stopped, then West Hollywood went immediately back to being cool and laid-back.)
Chateau Marmont consists of a main building with standard rooms, larger suites, and penthouse suites with big terraces that overlook Sunset Boulevard and Beverly Hills. There are also four bungalows in the garden by the swimming pool. Strangely, to the discerning hotel person, Chateau Marmont is actually quite grungy on the surface, but that’s also a major part of its charm and a chief reason why Hollywood actors and musicians are drawn to the place. In 1990, when the high-flying New York hotelier André Balazs bought Chateau Marmont, he announced he was going to upgrade the establishment but quickly reversed himself when many of the better-known patrons of the hotel objected. They told him that if he messed with the hotel and diminished its charm and atmosphere, they would find a new spot to play in. Balazs did do some minor work and upgrades on the hotel, but they were done so that most people hardly noticed them.
Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood is one of the most famous celebrity hotels, having been the site of Marilyn Monroe’s suicide and John Belushi’s drug overdose death.
Movie mogul Harry Cohn once said to his new star actors William Holden and Glenn Ford, “If you’re going to get caught doing something indiscreet, make sure you get caught doing it at Chateau Marmont.” Before taking up residence in the Beverly Hills Hotel, Howard Hughes moved into the attic at Chateau Marmont because it overlooked the swimming pool. He would survey the pool with powerful binoculars, searching for beautiful starlets whom he would then have an assistant summon for him.
When F. Scott Fitzgerald had pretty much come to the end of his productive years as a novelist, he went to Hollywood to accept lucrative writing gigs from the studios and chose to live at Chateau Marmont where he suffered a massive heart attack. Judy Garland was fond of sitting in the lounge off the reception area where there was a grand piano. She would play the piano and sing at the top of her lungs while the hotel staff went about their business around her.
Vivien Leigh resided in the hotel’s suite 5D (at Chateau Marmont suites are assigned letters and numbers, the number indicating the floor, the letter the suite) after breaking up with her husband, Laurence Olivier. She was so traumatized by her estrangement that she had the entire living room area wallpapered top to bottom with photographs of the Shakespearean actor. However, in the bedroom of the suite there was just one picture of the two of them together that rested on the pillow beside where she slept.
In the 1950s, when bad-boy director Nicholas Ray lived in one of the bungalows at Chateau Marmont during the casting of his movie Rebel Without a Cause, a new young hothead actor named James Dean wanted to meet with him and talk about the film. Ray struck an intimidating figure — tall, black eye patch over one eye, gruff-voiced. He said he would meet Dean when he was good and ready. One night, while Ray was auditioning three actors — Natalie Wood, Dennis Hopper, and Sal Mineo — who made it into the legendary film, they were all startled by the commotion of the screen on one of the windows being ripped open. To their astonishment, Dean was crawling in through the window, demanding that he be allowed to audition for the role that eventually made him a celluloid icon. He fell into the bungalow onto a table that collapsed under him. Then he got to his feet and said that Ray had two choices: let him read or call the cops. Ray let him read.
A few years later, in 1956, another major heartthrob actor, Montgomery Clift, was in Los Angeles shooting a film called Raintree County with Elizabeth Taylor. One night, halfway through filming, Clift left a party at the home of Taylor and her then husband, Michael Wilding. His friend actor Kevin McCarthy was in another car ahead of Clift. The intoxicated Clift slammed his car into a telephone pole and was severely injured. His once-beautiful face was broken and mangled when it smashed against the steering wheel. McCarthy returned to Taylor’s house to get help. When Taylor heard about the accident, she rushed to the scene, cradled Clift in his wrecked vehicle, and stopped him from choking on his broken teeth. The stricken actor was minutes away from dying when help arrived. After Clift was released from the hospital, Taylor arranged for him to move into Chateau Marmont for as long as he needed to recuperate.
In the 1960s, West Hollywood was abuzz with the changing music scene. Just down from Chateau Marmont is the legendary nightclub Whisky a Go-Go. It was in that club that Jim Morrison and The Doors broke out. And it was in Chateau Marmont where Jim Morrison claimed he had used up “eight of my nine lives.” One of his most famous used-up lives occurred one evening when he was as high as a weather balloon and decided to take a shortcut from a rooftop terrace to his suite by leaping for a drainpipe and trying to swing into the window of his room. He barely made it and injured his back painfully in the process. Morrison used up life number nine in a hotel in Paris on July 3, 1971.
Chateau Marmont has seen tragedy as well as typical Hollywood antics. In 1982 comic actor John Belushi was living in one of the bungalows flush with the success of Saturday Night Live and his transition to movies, but he had also given in to the more self-indulgent aspects of Hollywood celebrity. Belushi was a well-known drug user and boozer whose intake of both grew daily. One warm night Belushi took his drug habit up a notch and injected himself with a lethal combination of heroin and cocaine that finally killed him. Another resident of the hotel and friend of Belushi, Robert De Niro, was so shocked by the comedian’s death that it caused him to re-evaluate his own life and career. De Niro lived in one of Chateau Marmont’s penthouse suites for two years.
Today Chateau Marmont is still a gathering place for hip Hollywood. The troubled actress Lindsay Lohan stayed there for a few years (2006 through 2008), and it was her preferred sanctuary after her drunk-driving arrest. One of Lohan’s friends, Britney Spears, has the rare distinction of being barred a few times from Chateau Marmont for being unruly. When you’re barred from Chateau Marmont for unruliness then it’s a certainty you were being truly unruly.
The hotel continues to be featured in movies. Sofia Coppola, the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, sets her 2010 film Somewhere in Chateau Marmont. In the movie Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a newly famous film star doing publicity for his latest flick while living in the hotel. Like many of his real-life counterparts, Johnny behaves badly in the hotel, drinking, drugging, and fornicating between bouts of driving around in his Ferrari and reacquainting himself with his preteen daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning).
Actor Keanu Reeves, who doesn’t own a home in Los Angeles, has lived in Chateau Marmont for years. He was photographed as late as February 2010 strolling
