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What? An American hotel without
room service or a bar? But this is Hollywood, and visitors to the Chateau Marmont are a far cry from the
vacationing. The hotel offers absolute discretion, good aftershock, and
the chance to mix with the ghosts of Howard Hughes, John Belushi and Leonardo da
Vinci. ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST reports on the heart of L.A.
The Chateau Marmont seemed, as usual,
pretty busy. A sulky cinematographer was talking to a local television
station on the front lawn of the hotel. The actor Elliot Gould and his
son, both wearing over-the-top dinner jackets, were being photographed beside
the bungalows. Among those leafing through scripts by the pool was the
French vedette Anne Parillaud, star of Nikita, wearing dark
glasses and a floppy hat to repel attention.
At the front desk I made a quick check on the rich inner life of Los Angeles’s
longest-running saga of a hotel. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the director,
announced the he was off to Mexico. Ingrid Sischy, editor of Interview,
the magazine Andy Warhol founded and whose local office is on the premises, was
on the point of winging back to New York. A drift of pretty people bore
portfolios through the lobby, there on go-sees for a commercial to be shot by
Bruce Weber. Things, clearly, were looking up for the old place. Bob
Smith, a photographer, mimed sticky feet. “Last time I was here there was
bubble gum on the floor,” he said.
The Chateau Marmont lours above
Sunset Boulevard shortly before West Hollywood turns into Beverly Hills.
It is melon-coloured, with steeply canting gables, and a tower, but looks less
like a castle than a huge and ancient villa, and it is famous both for the
guests it has and the conveniences it doesn’t. It stands, for instance, on
narrow Marmont Lane, a thoroughfare that would break into two the stretch limos
that some entertainment-industry prefer. There was no restaurant when I
began coming to the Marmont and room service was…well, actually, room service
wasn’t. In the late Eighties, the place seemed done for.
André Balazs, the man
responsible for the de-bubble-gumming of the Chateau, took over four years
ago. A candid-looking fellow in his late thirties and, I should ad, an
acquaintance of some years, he resolved to resolved to restore it to its former
offbeat splendor, not easy in a city so un-tender about its last. He and I
strolled down Marmont Lane and crossed Sunset. Schwab’s Drugstore, once a
favourite breakfast place of hotel guests, famous as the place where Lana Turner
was discovered (Lana who? A whole generation will ask), has now been replaced by
a Virgin Megastore. The Garden of Allah, a notorious writers’ colony, the
home-from-home for the like of Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Dorothy
Parker, used to be plumb opposite. A model of the place now sits like a
cake under a plastic cover in a bank. The only Los Angeles hotel older
than the Marmont, the Beverly
Hills, a few miles down Sunset, has been closed for two years, striped to its
armature, the broken toy of its former owner, the Sultan of Brunei. “Los
Angeles has no heart. The Chateau is one of the few places left,” Balazs
said, as we trudge back up the lane.
Balazs took control in May 1990, and was alarmed as he drove up to the hotel to
see a chunk of the roof apparently being removed. In fact, it was part of
a set. Oliver Stone was shooting a scene for his movie about the Doors at
the hotel – Jim Morrison lived there – and required a large chunk of
Gothic. Faux-faux.
Balazs set to work. “Our biggest challenge was how not to fuck it up,” he
said. “People like Helmut Newton and Wally Shawn insisted, ‘don’t touch
anything!’ But a lot of people hated having insulating tape on the
carpet. Occupancies were down.” A methodical rehabilitation
programme was put underway. “We scoured archives,” Balazs said. “We
wanted to stay away from design.”
It’s a slow, continuous process. There’s now room service and a small
restaurant on the ground floor. Should there he a bar, Balazs frets?
“I like the place because there isn’t a bar,” said Jim Sheridan, director of
In the Name if the Father. “If I want to go to a bar, I can go out
somewhere.” There are readings, though, given in the lobby, typically
pairing and writer and an actor. I missed Tess Gallagher and Andie
MacDowell, but I caught a senior American poet, Stanley Kunitz. The place
was packed.
It’s gone down well, though Eve Babitz, an LZ writer and Marmont habituee, looked at one
of the re-done suites and told Balazs, “I can’t imagine committing suicide
here.” “Well, we lost that market share,” Balazs said. Still, Ms.
Babitz did use the Chateau for an erotic scene in her new book. So it’s
Sex: 1, Death: 0.
A few days into my stay, the hotel moved me from a cozy bungalow into a grand
fifth-floor suite. There are just over a five dozen spaces available,
including bungalows and cottages, and the rooms and suites in the main building,
with prices rising from about $100 a day to several times that. I had
looked the room over and was on the telephone when it did a tiny jig. The
floor swayed like a wave and a hefty armchair did a fair imitation of a
pirouetting hippo in Fantasia. It stopped. On Sunset
Boulevard people were strolling past the Body Shop as though the earthquake
hadn’t happened.
I left and joined a gaggle to guests by the pool. “About five point one,”
a screenwriter said. Meaning the Righter Scale. He was close.
“It was five point three,” said Nadine, wife of Richard Johnson, New York’s
hardest nosed tabloid diarist. “They’re saying it’s just an
aftershock.” She made a moue of disbelief.
The Big One of 17 January, some months before, had been more dramatic because it
had taken place when it was still dark. The staff has been
unimpressed. “Your wake-up call, sir,” John, the sardonic night man,
had told a guest who has popped a startled head into the lobby. The guests
had padded outside, mostly in their pajamas, apart from a fully dressed Dominick
Dunne, who announced that he had been fast asleep at his typewriter. The
day’s copies of the New York Times has been delivered, but the
electricity has been cut so that the Los Angeleno, cityscape was lost in
unfamiliar darkness – with the lone exception of the colossal cut-out of the
Marlboro Man which had its own generator and was, as André Balazs put it, “bathed in
an eerie glimmer”. A truly appropriate California experience, in
fact.
Actually, one of the original sales pitches for the Chateau Marmont was its billing as the
city’s first earthquake-proof hotel, and it’s a billing that serves it well to
this day. “It’s built on rock,” says Bruce Wagner, who writes novels
(Force Majeure) and scripts, and who has his own house in Los Angeles,
but who tends to scuttle Chateau-wards when the place starts getting the
shakes. “The aftershock is very pleasant here,” Wagner said
airily.
This, and the sheer substantiality of the place, may well be because the Chateau Marmont wasn’t built to be a
hotel at all. An architect’s rendering, which appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, described it as an “apartment house…of French-Gothic
design.” But the real zinger is the date of the featurette: 1 April 1928;
to wit, the last April Fool’s day before the Slump of the Depression. Exit
a grand apartment house. Enter a hotel.
Hollywood has always had a penchant for Gothic castles, of course, but what the
Times neglected to note was the germinal idea for the castle, which was
the Chateau d’ Amboise, a splendid pile in the Loire valley, nowadays best known
perhaps as the place where Leonardo da Vinci arrived in 1516 and spent the last
three years of his life as the guest of the French monarch Francois I.
Contemporary artistes have, of course, stayed at the Marmont longer. And died
younger.
By 1931, the Chateau was a casualty of the slump, and was bought, as a hotel, by
a British-born former movie producer, Albert Smith, best-known as the creator of
the “Vitagraph Girl”. A fitting choice of manger was made. This was
Ann Little, once a silent movie actress, who had played the lead in various
Westerns, serials and so on, and is now most likely to be familiar to cineastes
as the Indian Maiden in an early Cecil B de Mille epic. The Squaw
Man. Little saw to it that the Chateau played the part in the life of
its guests which is so desirable in a hotel, but for which few are so superbly
fitted: the part of a discreet accomplice.
This discretion comes of course from the place’s abortive beginnings as a block
of posh flats. It is because of this that the place has privacy.
Guests can bypass the lobby and go directly to the garage. If they are
staying in one of the bungalows, they can use the side gate and bypass the hotel
altogether. It is also because they were designed as apartments that the
rooms mostly have generous proportions and thick, sound-absorbing walls.
That’s crucial.
Unsurprisingly, the Chateau Marmont
soon became a favourite with motion picture people. It was in the Chateau
that Billy Wilder wrote the first of his scripts, living for a while in a small
room on the ground floor next to the ladies’ lavatory. It was here that
Harry Cohn, the studio chieftain, shy of scandal, rented suite 54 for stars like
William Holden and Glenn Ford to see their paramours in private.
It was here that Jean Harlow had a stormy honeymoon, scandalously sharing some
of it with her non-husband, Clark Gable. It was here, even more
scandalously, that Greta Garbo was spotted smoking a cigarillo.
Name-dropping is mandatory at this point, of course, so amongst movie folk who
have frequented the Chateau – and I am just scratching the surface – are Sophia
Loren, Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Harry
Belafonte, Roman Polanski, Judy Garland, Warren Betty, Hedy Lamarr and, for five
years, the most courteous man in Hollywood, Boris Karloff. Actually, the
reader should feel free to imagine any grandee from the golden age of the big
studios around the Chateau, not forgetting of course, the figure without whom no
consideration of these mythic times seems complete: Howard Hughes.
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Howard Hughes was a feature at the Chateau during the Fifties. And if he
had not yet become the long-haired polyphobic recluse of legend, he as already
acquiring a reputation for weird behavior, specifically for an obsessive,
unromantic erotomania. Hughes first took the hotel’s sixth-floor penthouse
to put up the future starlet Mitzi Gaynor and her unprotective mother.
After he had dumped Gaynor – she was seeing a talent agent on the sly – a
multitude of hopefuls were brought up to the magnate and very occasional movie
producer for “auditions”, which in those more secretive times seldom yielded as
much as an item in the gossip columns. The Hughes suite was notorious none
the less, so it’s good news for those fond of the film noir aspect of Hollywood
history that its restoration is now a Go Project.
I was taken around by Phillip Truelove, the hotel’s English general manager, a
man who is at once gleeful and bashful, like a trimmer Benny Hill. Workmen
were hammering along to Death Metal on a throttle-toned transistor. We
walked out onto the long verandah.
A large jay studied us from the parapet. A hummingbird was a blur a foot
above it. Raw nature is generally closer than one thinks, in Los
Angeles. There was another reminder of this, some buildings across
Sunset. From here, as lore has it, Howard Hughes’s rivals, or maybe,
associates, kept his suite under watch. As Hughes probably would have
assumed. Philip Truelove walked me to the right of the verandah
“It’s from here that he used to spy on the swimming pool with his binoculars,”
he said. I looked down to the pool. Even without binoculars, the
view was pretty nifty.
Elaine Dundy, who is probably best known for he novel The Dud Avocado,
has vivid memories of the Chateau in the early-Sixties, when the studio
system was coming apart, and the future of an untrammeled culture seemed bright
with promise. “Rip Torn was here. It was in 1961,” she said.
“He was shooting Sweet Bird of Youth. He would go out in the hills
behind the hotel to shoot quail. Then he would bring them back, and cook
them, and there would be a party…Laurence Harvey would be there, and Hermione
Baddeley, Chita Rivera, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie…”
The hipsters may be long gone, but Dundy remains. She has, indeed, been
ensconced on the sixth floor for the past six years. “I travel a
lot. It means I don’t need a security system, or dogs,” she says.
“It’s great. You get clean sheets. Towels. Toilet paper. I can look out
and see those wonderful Cezanne hills…”
Cezanne? Not the view from my window, I said. “Or Pissarro.
It’s like being in a tree-top movie. I’m going to write Murder on the
Chateau Marmont. I got
the idea looking out into the hills.”
But there is something even more Gothic at the Marmont than a fictive murder, Dundy
said. A ghost. She hasn’t seen it herself, but she says it made its
presence felt during the shooting of a TV documentary there. “Film cans
would get squashed. Things wouldn’t work,” she claimed, adding that she had a
pretty good idea who the visitant is, o was, namely the most famous former
resident of the Chateau d’Amboise. “It’s Leonardo da Vinci,” she
said. “His host would go West. His host would want to go where the
action was. Wouldn’t he?”
That wasn’t quite the end of it though, so far as my own researches went.
“There’s several ghosts at the Chateau,” Kit Carson, the screenwriter, roundly
asserted. His first experience came when he was working on the script for
the American version of Breathless. He was in suite 23. “The
ghost would come at 3.33 in the morning,” he said. “Regularly. It
would wake me up and make me go to work. It was a writing
ghost.
Did I see it? I saw nothing near the window that looked like a curtain.
But there was no curtain. All I know is that there is this writer’s ghost
in suite 23. Or somebody who likes to bug writers. Maybe it’s an
agent. Maybe it’s a producer. Maybe it’s an actress.”
He added, helpfully, that “It was a rosy presence.” I asked him what his
current writing project was. “A Gothic Western,” he said,
drily.
Elaine Dundy first came to the Chateau at the beginning of the Sixties.
Kit Carson thinks he first stayed there in about 1980. I first became a
habitué at the end of the Sixties. This was, as my older readers may
remember, the age of the hippy, the freak, and it was an ethos, if that’s the
word I’m looking for, to which the Chateau subscribed totally.
Older-fashioned movie stars abandoned the place, and it became the haunt of
actors, writers and movie-makers who made a point of the fact that they were
just birds of passage in California, and that where they really lived was New
York, or London, or Rome. Or wherever. Given the times and
particularly given the nearness of the hotel to a gaggle of successful clubs –
the Whiskey A Gogo and he Troubadour, to name two – what it had been in the
movie business it now became in rock’n’roll.
Here, yet again, the sheer massiveness of the place was important, that and the
splendid opportunities it offers for private, not to say furtive,
behaviour. I once stayed next door to the country rock star Gram Parsons,
a man whose consumption of drink, drugs, and women was legendary, as were his
good manners. Indeed, he was very pleasant in the corridor, and for all
the sounds I heard from his rooms he might as well have been at his
prayers. A friend has recently been staying at the Chateau, a few doors
from Axl Rose, the manic lead singer of Guns’n’Roses. “I’ve never heard or
seen a thing,” she said. “Except his bodyguard.”
None the less, things could sometimes get a little strange. Denizens of
the Strip – groupies, runaways, with blurry faces, gentry wearing Indian
necklaces and leather cowboy hats, and vendors of illegal narcotic baggies –
could be spotted gliding through nooks and crannies. The fabric began to
degrade way beyond funky. And there was all the Gothic stuff.
California Gothic, not French.
There was Jim Morrison, living in the Chateau as 1970 turned to 1971, drunk,
coked up, tumbling from the roof of his cottage and bouncing from a shed
attached to the rear, it was, said one of his friends, “outta sight”.
There was the black female diva who took a flyer from an upstairs window.
(She flew straight into obscurity. I couldn’t find anyone who remembered
her name.) There was the drug-induced death of my neighbour, Gram
Parsons. He didn’t actually die on the premises, but it was treated as
something of a family affair.
And on the morning of 5 March 1982, Derek Power, who managed the Police, then a
toweringly successful group, banged on the bungalow door of Miles
Copeland. “Then I realized I had the wrong door,” he told me. Later,
he read the papers, and realized he had been banging on the door of John
Belushi, a hugely popular comedian whose death via overdose spawned a slew of
books and lurid magazine articles. “I worked it out later that he wasn’t
dead yet, but he was in a coma,” said Power, a pernickety man with facts.
“All great hotels have a great range of scandal,” André Balazs said,
tranquilly.
A couple of days after the “aftershock”, I returned from lunch to find three
police cars outside the Chateau and a small crowd. Another movie was being
shot, I thought. Wrong. There had been a bomb threat. Jerry
Herman, the producer, said that was ridiculous. People went to the Chateau
to write bombs, or direct them, or act in them, not plant them.
I went in by the garden gate. The evacuees were around the pool.
Speculation was rampant about just whom the bombers might be after. But,
of course, there were no bombs. We returned to our quarters. By
evening, there was a new theory, which was that some tabloid columnist might
have been trying to flush out whatever famous faces were lurking unseen in the
bungalows and suites.
Life resumed. Jim Jarmusch, director of Down by Law, drifted
through. Peter Medak, director of The Krays, sat by the pool and
reminisced about casting calls in the hotel. An orange Corvette roared out
of the garage as I crossed the main hotel. “That was the tough guy in
Reservoir Dogs,” said the receptionist. I said, What? “Yeah,” she
conceded. “I guess they were all tough guys.” The next poetry
reading was to be by the maestro of doggerel. Calvin Trillin. Romulo, the
legendary Singing Waiter, was doing his haunting a cappella version of
“Moon River” in the lobby. Perhaps André Balazs has
something. Perhaps Los Angeles does have a centre. Of a
sort.
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