Coming home that night, I find the night watchman standing in the hall, staring at my door—my room key is dangling from the lock.
“Thank God you’re here,” he says, “I wasn’t quite sure what had happened.”
I assume that when I went out I simply forgot to take the key with me.
“Do you want me to go in with you and make sure everything is okay?” he asks.
“Okay, sure,” I say, although I am not the least bit afraid. Together we open the door to make sure that no one has taken the key in the door as an invitation to enter. All is calm, quiet.
“Looks good,” I say to the man, “thank you.”
“You’re that super-cool writer girl,” he says to me.
Validation.
“Thank you again,” I say. “And good night.”
The night before I leave Los Angeles, I call downstairs and ask the clerk at the front desk to buzz me if Romulo, the overnight waiter, begins to sing. For years I’ve been hearing about Romulo’s impromptu late-night performances but had never managed to stay up late enough to see one.
At 2:30 in the morning the phone rings, yanking me from a dream.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” the fellow at the desk says. “I figured you’d be up late, writing.”
I assure him that despite the fact that I was sound asleep, it’s fine.
“Romulo’s singing,” he says.
“I’ll be right down.”
Romulo Laki is the night waiter, working the 10:30 P.M.–6:30 A.M. shift. He’s been at the Chateau for fifteen years. Usually I see him only in passing, he comes on as I’m going off to dinner and then off to bed. They say he’s the one with all the stories, he’s the one who’s up all night, who sees everything, who knows exactly what’s going on where—after all, he delivers the snacks. And when it gets late, and things are slow, he brings out his guitar and begins to sing. I find him in the lobby, surrounded by a group of slightly drunk young people. He’s singing John Denver’s “Country Road,” followed by the Rolling Stones’ “As Tears Go By,” a song Mick Jagger wrote long ago for Marianne Faithfull—which I find extremely poignant since I’ve seen her here at the hotel on occasion. There is about Romulo a kind of steadiness—there’s also much talk about his black hair, whether it’s really his or in some way sprayed on to fill in what’s disappeared with age. He segues into a nice Elvis medley and then asks if I’d like to hear a song he’s written himself, a Spanish love song. It is as if he’s singing the guests to sleep, offering them a lullaby which they take as a cue to wind down, to call it a night; they sign their checks and stumble off to bed.
My time in Los Angeles is over. And while I’ve come to know the city in a purely navigational and geographic sense, I still don’t have a clue as to the truth or the heart of Los Angeles. I can drive the city from end to end. I know the order of the boulevards descending down from Sunset. I know where to get on and off the freeways, but I can’t begin to say that I know Los Angeles. What becomes apparent is that there is no one center, in all the sprawl there are thousands of wholly complete worlds, unique, disparate, enormously diverse. It reminds me of Washington, D.C., in that the divides between race and class are extreme. One can easily exist in a Los Angeles that is entirely white, or black, or hispanic, and unless one makes an effort to bridge the gap between cultures, the gap will continue to grow. It is dangerously easy to pretend that there is no world outside one’s own. In this city, it is every man for himself; each person makes his own reality. There are very few collective experiences—the weather, the traffic, the Earth itself.
And although I still may not know Los Angeles well, I have come to know the Chateau Marmont intimately. Around the world there are great hotels, legendary hotels, grand hotels, hotels known for their architecture, for their service, for the history of who has stayed there before. There are rarified boutique hotels, luxury getaways, hotels in places where man has barely trod, hotels where there used to be hotels. And then there is the Chateau Marmont.
It is a place where not just anything goes, but everything goes. There is always someone being photographed for a magazine in the lobby, a fashion shoot by the pool, or even in the pool. There are readings, wine tastings, musical performances, casting directors holding auditions in their suites. Writers who aren’t even staying here bring their computers to the lobby and sit down to work and absolutely everyone has their meetings here. As Billy Wilder famously once said about the Chateau, “I’d rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.”