1.
On Oscar night 2018, the most influential couple in the entertainment world, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, hosted an after-after party, an ultrasecret little wingding for 150 or so of their dearest chums on Hollywood’s night of nights.
How secret?
“They wanted to mind-fuck everyone,” said an insider.
And they succeeded.
Guests not only needed invitations to get in; they were asked to keep from sharing even a hint about the party’s very existence, and they didn’t learn the location until the day of the event; workers at the site were told only that the party was being thrown by a “host and hostess”; the paparazzi, who knew that the shindig was happening, never conned to the when-and-where; and the people who’d paid thousands of dollars that day to use the host building for its ordinary functions were told by letters slipped under their doors that the front entrance and the driveway would be closed as of 3:00 p.m. and were given instructions on alternative routes in and out of the place—and, of course, apologies for the inconvenience.
Word that the party was happening at all started to spread at other post-Oscar galas (keeping a secret in Hollywood is like keeping one in a high school).
But by then, if you weren’t on the list, well…
Those blessed with golden tickets were instructed to drive past the venue’s front door and parking valets and go to the service entrance around the back, where no photographers or journalists or red carpets awaited them. (Partiers who showed up with bodyguards were barred from bringing them in; some actually left rather than take any chances.) From there, they were guided through a kitchen to an elevator that took them not up to one of the building’s famed penthouses, with their incomparable views, but, rather, down a flight, where an unlikely space—low ceilinged, windowless, with a number of bulky structural columns and a slightly mechanical aroma—had been turned into a pop-up nightclub with a Monte Carlo casino theme: red and gold drapes, crystal chandeliers, potted palms, roulette wheels, an ornate bar.
Guests drank champagne and ate pizza and danced to the music of the host and hostess—the invitations expressly stated, “No sitting, only dancing”—and gossiped and joked and took selfies well into the predawn hours.
The gala brought together a number of stars from across the arts and even the generations: the party’s honoree, Mary J. Blige, who’d been nominated that night as Best Supporting Actress and as writer of Best Original Song (she’d won neither); Stevie Wonder; Chadwick Boseman; Whoopi Goldberg; Best Actor nominee Daniel Kaluuya; Jamie Foxx; Rihanna; Drake; Shonda Rhimes; Anthony Anderson; Tiffany Haddish; Angela Bassett; Dave Chappelle; Mindy Kaling; and two freshly minted Oscar winners, screenwriter Jordan Peele and animated short producer (and basketball star) Kobe Bryant.
“It was all of black Hollywood,” said a guest.
(Plus Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, because it was a party on the Sunset Strip and those two were apparently obliged by law to attend such things.)
And the venue for this über-exclusive party, the year’s most enviable ticket, the biggest conclave of the hottest personalities on the starriest night of Hollywood’s calendar year was…the garage of Chateau Marmont.
Beyoncé and Jay-Z had invited the biggest names in show business to party in a place where they normally parked their cars (or, more likely, had them parked for them).
That was odd enough. But even more curious was the question of how it came to be that anyone would want to throw a gala in a place so deservedly renowned for its gloomy, airless, labyrinthine atmosphere. There wasn’t a hotel or restaurant in Hollywood (nay, the world) that wouldn’t have wanted to host this party. But never mind the garage: How in the world did this deal wind up at Chateau Marmont at all, a place that had managed to sit in the middle of Hollywood for nearly ninety years without ever being the hottest destination on even its own street?
The answer lay in the transformation wrought on the Chateau by the man who bought it from Ray Sarlot and Karl Kantarjian in 1990 and turned it into one of the most exclusive, chic, and famous of all Hollywood hangouts.
André Balazs was his name, and as proven by his tenure as owner of the Marmont, he was as much a magician as he was a hotelier.
Among the owners through whose hands Chateau Marmont would pass, few would leave much trace on the world outside the grounds of the hotel. Fred Horowitz had his legal career, which had some headline-worthy highlights. Albert Smith had his legacy as a cinematic pioneer, which included an honorary Oscar and the publication of a 1952 autobiography, Two Reels and a Crank (which, by the way, didn’t mention his tenure as owner of the Chateau). Erwin Brettauer vanished into the fog of history, his name misspelled, the stories about him and his family half-true. And Ray Sarlot was well liked but little noted outside Los Angeles building circles and the pages of a history of the hotel that he himself co-authored. The others were all businessmen, more or less, often running the hotel through a series of corporate screens, never making names for themselves save for their roles in acquiring and then passing on a singular possession.
That changed with André Balazs, the New York investor, club owner, hotelier, and squire of famous beauties who remade the hotel into something it had never been before: a glamorous hot spot known for fine dining, a buzzy bar scene, swank showbiz parties, and a global reputation for exclusivity, naughtiness, and scandal—the sort of place that turned people away at first glance if they were deemed to have fallen short of its aesthetic ideals. Balazs rebuilt the Chateau both as a building and as an idea, renovating and redecorating the rooms, expanding the facilities available to guests, and creating an aura around the hotel partly built of a new level of luxury and service and partly of a fantasy of a swank heyday that, truly, the place had never enjoyed. Under Balazs’s reign, the longest of any of its owners, the Chateau became more fashionable, stylish, and upscale than it had ever been. And, ironically, the most infamous behavior associated with it turned out to be not that of a celebrity guest but that of the owner himself, who was accused of sexual misconduct in the storm of the Time’s Up and Me Too movements of the late years of the second decade of the twenty-first century.
At the time of those accusations, Balazs’s name was already familiar to consumers of gossip news. His hotel empire included Chateau Marmont, the Mercer in New York, the Sunset Beach on New York’s Shelter Island, and the Chiltern Firehouse in London, and he owned major pieces of real estate in New York City. He had been a founder of the Standard hotel chain, which began on the Sunset Strip, just down the road from the Chateau, and eventually expanded to downtown Los Angeles, Miami Beach, and Manhattan.*1 He had been married for almost twenty years to an important fashion world figure with whom he had two children. After that union dissolved, he spent more than a decade being serially attached to such celebrated partners as Chelsea Handler, Courtney Love, Cameron Diaz, and, especially, Uma Thurman, to whom he was engaged for a time and then, after a hiatus, for a second go-round. He served on the boards of directors of major cultural institutions, including the New York Public Theater, and was known equally well in Hollywood, New York, Miami, and London for his slender, tanned form, his flirtatious manner, his affection for the limelight, his instincts for trends and innovations, and his demanding—sometimes tyrannical—stewardship of his properties. In 2017, at age sixty, in the wake of a waterskiing accident, he was slowing down in some ways but not in others. That year, when he became a father for the third time, he told newspapers that he would help raise the baby, though he was “not attached” to the mother, Cosima Vesey, daughter of an Irish peer, the Viscount de Vesci and, at age twenty-nine, three decades Balazs’s junior.
This quasi-public figure—among the best-known hoteliers in the business—seemed perfectly suited to Chateau Marmont. He was finicky about details; solicitous of the custom and company of celebrities and in maintaining their privacy; discerning in aesthetic choices; forgiving of the excesses of famous guests; and equally unforgiving of staff members and noncelebrities who failed to live up to the standards to which he dedicated his establishments. He went so far as to institute a coded system for his most famous guests, who were dubbed not VIPs but PPs—for personne privée—with a ranking system: PPX1, PPX2, and so on. But, as it turned out, he himself would shine a darker light on his empire than any wayward guest or employee ever did.
Balazs became owner-operator of Chateau Marmont because he was interested in entering the world of hotel hospitality at more or less the same time that Ray Sarlot and Karl Kantarjian were interested in exiting it. Sarlot and Kantarjian had come into possession of the Chateau in 1975 strictly with the intention of making money on their investment—even if only as a tax write-off. The two of them—especially Sarlot—began to feel a bond with the place that went beyond sheer financial opportunity. They were custodians of a trust, keepers of a flame, guardians of a treasure; their hotel was unique in all the world, and the affection that its most loyal guests harbored for it became theirs as well.
Over the years, various suitors sought to buy the Chateau from them and forge their own bonds, economic and otherwise, with it. In the mid-seventies, Francis Ford Coppola, seeking to expand his Zoetrope empire of filmmaking, publishing, and artistic patronage, was said to be considering buying the hotel and turning it into an artist colony of some sort—a kind of Yaddo or MacDowell on the Sunset Strip. But his financial managers, accustomed to putting out fires that their profligate client started without much in the way of analysis or forethought, dissuaded him from pursuing the purchase in earnest. And Sarlot and Kantarjian weren’t thinking of selling.
By 1990, though, that had changed. For one thing, it had been some fifteen years since the pair had acquired the hotel—longer, perhaps, than they had intended to hold on to it. For another, relations between the partners had taken a downward turn, with rumors circulating among hotel staffers of unfriendly interpersonal encounters between the two. And perhaps most important, one of their initial intentions—to turn a profit on their investment—was being realized. A buyer emerged who was prepared to pay them $12 million for Chateau Marmont,*2 a massive sum that more than tripled what Sarlot and Kantarjian paid, even with their 1975 dollars adjusted for inflation.
That buyer was Balazs, a New Yorker who, like Sarlot and Kantarjian, had never owned a hotel before. Hardly anyone had ever heard of him in New York, much less L.A., and little in his background indicated that he would reinvent the Chateau or launch a string of similarly successful hotels on the strength of that feat.
André Tomes Balazs was born in Massachusetts in 1957 to Eva and Endre Balazs, Hungarian immigrants who had left their homeland after World War II for Sweden, where Endre, a biomedical researcher, worked at finding applications for hyaluronic acid, a collagen-like lubricant that occurs naturally in the eyes of cows and the combs of roosters and was proving useful in combating such ailments in humans as burns, arthritis, and cataracts. The couple moved to the United States in the early fifties, when Endre was asked to establish Harvard Medical School’s Retina Foundation. Soon, Eva received a Ph.D. in psychology and began teaching and practicing family therapy.
They raised their children, André and Marianne, in the Spy Pond neighborhood of Arlington, Massachusetts, just west of Cambridge, where the kids learned to swim, boat, water-ski, ice-skate, cross-country ski, forage for mushrooms and crab apples, and tap maple trees for syrup. Eva became involved in community activities such as land conservation, wrote columns for a local newspaper (later collecting them in a book), and learned how to play jazz piano, which became a lifetime pursuit. In the late sixties, Endre founded a company named Biotrics and sought patents on some of the medical applications of his work. A few years later, when his marriage dissolved, he moved to New York to take a post at Columbia University and the Columbia-Presbyterian College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Despite having a passion for outdoor sports, André didn’t care much for life in the suburbs of Boston. “It’s surprisingly close-minded,” he recalled. “It’s scared. There’s a fearfulness there.” He attended the elite, all-male Browne & Nichols School*3 in Cambridge, then Cornell University, where he majored in English, memorably enrolling in a short fiction writing class taught by the author Harold Brodkey, who remained a long-term friend and mentor. He also worked on the college newspaper and started a for-profit magazine that listed local events of interest to young people such as rock concerts. Upon graduating, he moved to New York to attend Columbia University’s School of Journalism, studying for a degree in journalism and business. “For my thesis,” he remembered, “I checked into the Bowery Mission. I lived there for a week, as though I were homeless.” He got his master’s, but he never worked in journalism. “I couldn’t write fast enough,” he admitted. Instead, he took a job with political consultant David Garth and worked as a press aide to Bess Myerson, the former Miss America and New York City commissioner of consumer affairs who took a run at a U.S. Senate seat in 1980. Myerson lost, but Balazs derived an interesting lesson from the experience, namely “how much control one had—you can almost force-feed stories to political journalists.”
In 1981, after his foray into politics, André joined his father in a new business venture—Biomatrix, a pharmaceutical firm that Endre was launching with his second wife. (Previously, André had spent time away from college helping Endre with his research, including one summer vacation during which he was assigned to acquire umbilical cords.) This new company turned out to be a spectacular success, with significant patents on products that became therapeutic standards throughout the world, earning it many millions. The young Balazs began to look for new opportunities and horizons. “There was a big dichotomy between the life I was leading in New Jersey and everything I was interested in,” he later said. “I had a desire to merge the work and the private life.” And when Biomatrix proved such a huge moneymaker (it sold to a larger competitor in 2000 for $738 million*4), he would have his chance.
Compact, fit, active, with chiseled good looks, dark wavy hair, and Continental fashion sense, Balazs became a man-about-town in New York’s go-go eighties, moving into the up-and-coming SoHo neighborhood, where he began purchasing and developing real estate. In 1985, he married Mary Katherine Ford (known as Katie), the daughter of Eileen and Jerry Ford, founders of the famed Ford Modeling Agency, which Katie had joined as an executive in 1980. The two had met as graduate students at Columbia, and they suited each other—both comely, educated, and rich. But in the opinion of observers, he had made the better match. “The fact he is Hungarian is the only exotic thing about him,” a socially conscious English friend of Balazs’s told a journalist. “His family are middle-class academics.”
Balazs and Ford were an It Couple of the moment, seen at the best restaurants, clubs, and parties of the late eighties (their children wouldn’t be born until 1991 and 1994). Balazs spent some of his Biomatrix money on successful real estate investments in Manhattan. His ability to sense the energy and vibe of the era extended into businesses that had nothing to do with the sources of his fortune. In the late eighties, he took note of the frenzy of the international art market and mounted a show in Tokyo that consisted entirely of avowedly fake works in the styles of such masters as Miró, van Gogh, Mondrian, and Schiele; touted by a manifesto claiming that the show was a critique of commercialism, the paintings—priced between $5,000 and $10,000—sold out quickly.
A few years later, Balazs’s friend Eric Goode enticed him into putting money into MK, a new downtown supper club he was developing along with the designer and impresario Serge Becker, whose wild artistic inspirations helped turn the Tribeca nightclub Area into a legend. MK had a golden reputation, but it lasted only two years, and its demise left some tension in the air, as evidenced by Becker’s insistence that Balazs, whom Becker claimed as a friend, was a “master of taking credit for M.K….He said he was an owner, but he wasn’t. He was an investor, and his wife was an investor. There were about 10 investors in M.K.”
Whatever his actual role in MK, Balazs had acquired a taste for the club business. In 1989, he and Goode went west with some other investors to open b.c., a semiprivate supper club along a nondescript stretch of Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. It was a hit from the start; Madonna and George Michael were there on opening night, and other scene makers started showing up in droves, choking a previously quiet neighborhood with parking problems and late-night noise. Almost inadvertently, what was meant to be a dining club had become a chic dancing spot. “We never really wanted to be a discotheque,” Balazs said. “It just sort of happened, and it became so popular so fast that things got out of control.” Fracases with Los Angeles authorities ensued, with the club’s owners eventually being cited for operating a dance hall illegally. Those infractions hobbled their ability to acquire a liquor license, and what with legal pressures and neighborhood protest looming constantly, the club didn’t last even a year.
That brief foray into managing high-wattage nightlife would serve Balazs well in the new line of business he was stepping into back east. In his own SoHo neighborhood, he was working to transform an abandoned six-story building into an eighty-one-room hotel with a restaurant and retail spaces on the ground floor. On the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets, it would be known as the Mercer, and it would cost $33 million,*5 which Balazs and a partner, the designer and architect Campion Platt, had on hand. As it turned out, it would take the better part of a decade for the Mercer to pass through all of the hurdles that Manhattan real estate development poses. But the project got Balazs interested in the hotel business, and in 1990 he assembled a team of investors to buy Chateau Marmont.
On the first day that he visited the Chateau as its owner, André Balazs drove up to his new property and felt a rush of horror: A large crane was removing a chunk of the hotel roof. It turned out that it wasn’t the actual roof being removed but rather a prop version of it that was built by Oliver Stone and the production crew of The Doors so that they could re-create Jim Morrison’s famed antics on the site (more or less) where they’d occurred. For Balazs, the scare turned out to be a good story about his especially apt welcome to the make-believe kingdom of Hollywood, but it was a joke that included a great deal of uncomfortable truth. Ray Sarlot and his team had worked hard to keep Chateau Marmont hale and vital, but the place was nonetheless always in a state of near dilapidation. “It felt like a very neglected, abandoned soul,” Balazs said. The state of the place was depressing business, he acknowledged: “A lot of people hated having insulating tape on the carpet. Occupancies were down.” If he was truly going to turn Chateau Marmont into something elegant and chic, he had a lot of work to do.
And it would be very particular work. Balazs might have been a newcomer to Hollywood and the hospitality business, but he recognized that he had a delicate job on his hands if he was going to renovate a classic cult hotel in a way that retained its traditional identity. “The full weight of what I had inherited came upon me when people suddenly discovered that I had bought it,” he said. “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. I decided they meant ‘Don’t violate the spirit of the place.’ ”
But what was that spirit? The hotel had been built in the twenties, flourished in the forties and fifties, gone to seed in the sixties and seventies, and only became truly famous and iconic in the eighties when John Belushi died there. If you were going to give the place a face-lift, which of its faces would you choose to restore? And how could you do that without alienating longtime guests such as Helmut Newton, John Waters, and Wallace Shawn, among many others, whose love for the hotel had kept it afloat and given it its enviable cultural currency?
Balazs understood the problem and took it to heart. “It was not initially clear to anyone how you could upgrade the place and bring it into the modern world without losing its sense of history,” he said several years after buying the hotel. “I now realize that the key is to match the reality of what we are doing with the fantasy that people have had in their minds. The old Chateau had a lot of problems that nobody liked, but they were willing to overlook them as they walked around with an image of what the hotel should have been. For me, it has become a matter of bringing the reality up to the point where it matches the fantasy.”
The renovation would take years, and it involved a lot of conceptualizing and a lot of trial and error. The hotel that Balazs acquired was a hodgepodge both visually and functionally. “Things from different eras had been mixed together, and there was no sense of cohesive style, no sense of magic,” he said. “The de facto main entrance was down by the garage, yet there was no sense that you had arrived at a hotel. The grounds reflected what they had been—a series of acquisitions—and were unlandscaped. The main lobby was not properly thought out as a real living room. You had a vast hall with only one seating area. That meant that if two parties of people sat down, they would have to sit next to each other.”
Slowly, he began to change all of that, first by finding the right look and feel for the place. “We scoured archives,” he said. “We wanted to stay away from ‘design.’ ” He was very clear on that last idea, that a powerful “design,” such as he had seen imposed on other trendy hotels, would suffocate what was best about Chateau Marmont. “It was important not to be that monolithic,” he explained. “I felt the guests here are very sophisticated people, they know their own style, they might want to experience that design intensity once but they are hardly likely to come back….They don’t want to check their personalities at the door and buy into someone else’s fantasy.”
And so the process began, with a number of decorators and designers—some, naturally, from the worlds of film and theater—taking a crack at renovating a room to see if they could realize Balazs’s admittedly inchoate vision. Some rooms were redone multiple times, because Balazs kept insisting that the designers had gotten it wrong. Predictably, some of the designers he commissioned felt that their work wasn’t properly appreciated. “I don’t think he has a particularly strong vision himself,” said Alison Spear, one of those whose proposed rooms were rejected. “He gets his taste from everywhere.” But Balazs did have an idea, as he told an interviewer. “We put ourselves into the minds of designers from the ’20s through the ’50s,” Balazs said. “For the lobby, we went with the ’20s, but for the suites we went with the ’40s and ’50s—the height, I think, of what people perceive as Hollywood’s glamorous heyday.” As he later explained, “It’s not a real past….The past is really not that interesting.”
Eventually, the job of restoring the place went to Fernando Santangelo, an Uruguayan designer who had created some memorable installations at the New York nightclubs that Balazs frequented and had invested in, and Shawn Hausman, another designer associated with the New York nightclub scene (and, incidentally, the son of actress Diane Varsi and producer Michael Hausman). Gradually, a new version of the old hotel began to emerge. The dining area was at once expanded and made more secluded, with an eye toward someday turning it into a restaurant; a gym was installed in an attic space where there used to be offices; proper outdoor seating areas were designed; the landscaping was coherently unified. And rooms were remade one by one, in such a slow and deliberate and careful way that it wasn’t obvious, even to old Chateau Marmont hands, that the place had changed.
“To me, the greatest sign of our success was when Helmut Newton came back and stayed in one of the new rooms,” Balazs said. “He liked it so much that now he wants to stay only in the new rooms. Helmut’s response was a validation that we had done something right.” It wasn’t only Newton. “So little has been changed that even Wally Shawn didn’t know the hotel had been sold,” Balazs bragged, “and he, you know, is the type to worry.” Another longtime guest, director John Waters, agreed. “I can’t tell you what is and isn’t fixed up,” he admitted.
Even Eve Babitz, who relished the Chateau’s decrepitude, came around. “If the romantic depressiveness of the hotel is lost, I have to rise above my nostalgic despair and be glad,” she said. “Except for not wanting to kill myself when I walk into the room, the Chateau feeling is the same as ever. Only cleaner. It’s as though the Chateau had died and gone to heaven.”*6 Learning of Babitz’s joke that she could no longer imagine wanting to commit suicide in one of his hotel’s rooms, Balazs replied, in mock horror, “Oh no! I’ve lost a major market!” But, in truth, he was sensitive to the longtime clientele who preferred things as they were, at least superficially, and the hotel kept a supply of the old furniture to move into suites when one of the veteran guests who liked the aura of decay was in residence; when the room was vacated once again, the new pieces would be moved back in.
Along with the decor of the hotel, Balazs and his staff went about redefining its image, its use, and even its physical structure.
They began advertising the hotel in a way that seemed to sell not specific rooms or amenities but a state of mind. In glossy East Coast magazines like Spy and Interview, full-page images began to appear: black-and-white or sepia-toned shots of nude or barely dressed women cavorting or performing gymnastics in some unidentifiable Arcadian idyll with only three words—and a phone number—accompanying them:
CHATEAU MARMONT
hollywood [sic]
(213) 656–1010
Balazs was delighted with the sparse, allusive, provocative feeling the ads created. “When they first ran four years ago in Spy magazine,” he said, “the editor received a letter from a reader who wanted to know what the hell was being advertised. Was it a woman? Was it a brothel?”
Balazs also began to think of new ways to draw Hollywood into the hotel if not for overnight stays, then for notable events. The first years of his ownership coincided with a fascination among movie people with literary and spoken word events—poetry readings, staged readings of plays, book launch parties. Various venues throughout Los Angeles held regular nights dedicated to this brand of cultural enrichment. Balazs, the former short story writer, immediately saw the charm of these sorts of events (“He admires artists,” a friend said. “He loves the idea that creativity is happening under his auspices”), and Chateau Marmont became one of the premier destinations for them. For several years, the Poetry Society of America curated a series of readings at the hotel where some of the nation’s best-known poets—James Merrill, Carol Muske, Mark Strand, Tess Gallagher, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and James Tate among them—shared their work alongside well-known actors (including Tim Curry, Alfre Woodard, Helen Shaver, John Lithgow, Ally Sheedy, and Michael Ontkean), who recited work by still other noted poets. It was an unlikely marriage of verse and screen, and it was very successful. The poets, naturally, knew that the crowds that turned out to see them were drawn more by the movie stars than by the words, but they were appreciative of the opportunity to reach new audiences, and they were admiring of the venue, both for its intrepid choice of programming and for its physical grandeur. “I think a lot of people will be curious about the setting,” said poet Amy Gerstler. “It’s very highbrow.”
In addition to the many poetry readings, Balazs’s Chateau began to host a variety of events that were facilitated by Balazs’s connections in the worlds of fashion, hospitality, and show business: wine tastings (some of Southern California’s first unbottlings of Francis Coppola’s Napa Valley wines were held there), fashion shows (featuring models from the Ford Agency), art shows and sales, and, as the hotel became trendier and trendier, parties marking film premieres, awards shows, and other staples of the publicity side of the movie industry. These events drew photographers and reporters, limousines and sports cars, and, increasingly, a youthful segment of Hollywood that came to see the Chateau as one of its principal hangouts and oases.
2.
One day not long after André Balazs purchased the Chateau, the journalist and bon vivant Anthony Haden-Guest was returning to his room at the hotel, only to find the place evacuated, the residents out in the street. Haden-Guest suspected an earthquake might have struck, but he was set straight by a staff member who told him that there had been a bomb threat. Broadway composer Jerry Herman, among the displaced guests milling about, overheard the explanation and responded, “Ridiculous! People come here to write bombs, or direct them, or act in them, not plant them!”
A joke, yes, but not without truth. Without a doubt, there were masterpieces imagined, written, and created by artists who were resident at the Chateau at the time and, at least in part, influenced by their surroundings: Rebel Without a Cause chief among them, but also Sunset Boulevard, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” and works by such writers as Ben Hecht, Lillian Hellman, S. J. Perelman, Elaine Dundy, Carole Eastman, and Menno Meyjes. Curiously, a number of screen adaptations could claim to have been born at the Chateau, including Meredith Willson’s of his stage musical The Music Man, Leonard Gardner’s of his novel Fat City, Robert Stone’s of his novel A Hall of Mirrors (retitled WUSA for the screen), Waldo Salt’s of Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust, and Gore Vidal’s of Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur. And then there was the sort of creation that actress-director Lee Grant reveled in when she spoke of the hotel: “I lived, worked, and conceived a daughter in this baroque shelter. I love it here.”
In the early nineties, novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner became another of those who tried to create something great during a stay at the hotel. Wagner had grown up in Los Angeles and knew the Chateau, if only vaguely, as a landmark glimpsed from the backseat on family drives. “The grand, mysterious house on the hill,” he recalled. “For a long while, I didn’t know what it was (an apartment house?) but it soothed me. I suppose what I’m saying is that it always had a dreamy quality for me.”
When he became a limousine driver based at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he entered the Chateau for the first time and was gripped by the experience. “The high ceilings and cool, sepulchral quiet reminded of a monastery” humbled him. “It had an otherworldly vibe, and my conventional head struggled to fill in the blanks. I grew up surrounded by great wealth and the clichéd venues that money could buy; knowing those with money might choose to stay in that place opened my eyes. The cognitive dissonance was way sexy.”
A few years later, commissioned to adapt his own magazine comic series, Wild Palms, into a script for a TV miniseries, “[I] mentioned to my agent that I needed an office. I may have suggested the Chateau in jest, but he jumped on it. I moved right in. I don’t think I’d actually ever been inside one of the larger rooms and it was essentially an apartment. There was a kitchen and that fairly shocked me. I rarely left the room; why would I?” The show, produced by Oliver Stone and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Keith Gordon, and Phil Joanou, aired in 1993, an acid, dystopian, and visionary take on Hollywood, power, cult religions, and technology run amok. It was a TV event of the sort that would likely have been received with more fanfare in the era of binge watching, which it all but predicted, and it remained one of the finer projects that could truly trace its genesis to the Chateau.*7
A year or two after Wagner’s stay, Balazs saw fit to allow a feature film to shoot extensively at the hotel, and while there were no negative episodes associated with the production, the movie that resulted didn’t make anyone particularly glad they’d made it. Dangerous Game (which shot under the title Snake Eyes) was written and directed by the New York indie filmmaker Abel Ferrara, whose three previous movies—Bad Lieutenant, King of New York, and Body Snatchers—had created enthusiasm among critics and garnered some decent box-office receipts. On the strength of that string, Ferrara had a $10 million budget for his new picture, the story of a New York director (Harvey Keitel) living at Chateau Marmont while making a movie with an actress (Madonna) whom he is falling for, even as she is involved with the leading man (James Russo). There is a strong connection between the manipulation of the actress by the director and the film they are shooting (which is titled, in case you didn’t otherwise get what was going on, Mother of Mirrors). And, for that matter, we are asked to at least consider that there’s a connection between Keitel’s character and Ferrara himself, because the actress playing the former’s wife is, in real life, the latter’s wife, among other such “coincidences.”
A good portion of Dangerous Game is set inside the filmmaker’s suite in the main building of the Chateau—as well as the lead actor’s bedroom in one of the Chateau’s bungalows. Neither room had yet enjoyed the upgrades in decor, furnishing, and amenities that would characterize Balazs’s ownership of the place. As a result, the atmosphere was heavy, cramped, tacky, and decidedly not chic or glamorous. (A few years later, writer-director Paul Schrader was staying at the hotel when he came across the film on TV, and he had a startling experience: “Harvey was in bed with Madonna in the very room I was in, and the camera was exactly where the TV was. So it was like a reflection. I was looking at the room in the reflection, only I wasn’t in it; they were in it. And I thought, ‘Wow, they haven’t even changed the decor. The only thing that’s changed are the people in the bed.’ ”) As in Blume in Love and a few other films in which the Chateau played itself, the specific name of the place was never given; you had to know what you were looking at to know how apt a choice it was.
Not that anyone saw the thing. Dangerous Game, which was the first film released by Madonna’s briefly lived Maverick Picture Company, premiered at the Venice Film Festival to wildly mixed reviews, then played one week each in New York and Los Angeles, grossing a paltry $23,671 before finding its almost inevitable home on late-night cable. From the point of view of the Chateau, unless a guest happened to catch it (and him- or herself) on TV while channel surfing, it was like it never happened.
The Chateau of the thirties, a place where high society held its teas and Hollywood types kept very quietly to themselves, had its ideal chronicler in Pauline Payne, who never had anything scandalous or off-putting to say about any of her neighbors.
The Chateau of André Balazs called for a different sort of scribe—garrulous, gimlet-eyed, partisan, arch, and bitchy. And that voice belonged to a man who had first glimpsed the hotel as a nine-year-old boy from Connecticut touring Hollywood with his aunt, a former nun, and was dazzled by the castle across the street from the soda fountain at Schwab’s.
Dominick Dunne had long connections to the Chateau’s history; he regularly visited his friends Camilla and Earl McGrath there during the sixties, when he was a successful television producer. But he was most intimate with the place in the nineties and the first decade of the twenty-first century, when he spent months at a time living at the hotel and filing stories for Vanity Fair and other publications about the trials of O. J. Simpson, Phil Spector, Robert Blake, and Erik and Lyle Menendez. He might have first become aware of the hotel as a starstruck lad, but the Dunne of those later years was another species of creature altogether: an avenger bent on blaring out injustice, a jaded elder unwilling to let crimes and horrors pass unremarked, an acid gossip keen to spill all the beans if doing so could help bring criminals to heel.
He had begun writing about crime in the most painful way possible: recounting the experience of losing his daughter, Dominique, to murder, and then watching helplessly as the justice system seemed to demonstrate more sympathy for the killer than for the victim. Outrage built in him, and he channeled it into writing. He wrote about the ordeal for Vanity Fair, which then assigned him to cover the trials of Claus von Bülow and William Kennedy Smith and, finally, that string of sensational murder cases in Los Angeles. Just as his juicy novels about the moral lapses of the rich and famous became international best sellers, his fierce magazine journalism helped shine a harsh spotlight on criminals whom he feared would be exonerated because of their wealth and their connections.
During those latter trials, which kept him in Hollywood for years, Dunne preferred to occupy a suite on a lower floor of Chateau Marmont, with windows facing west or south, which, he felt, was the quieter side of the place. He particularly relished the spectacle, out his window, of a nearby mansion, a pink neo-Georgian monstrosity built on spec in the eighties and never sold but still carefully maintained, with the sprinklers going on each night and lights inside and out turning on and off “as if a wonderful party was going on.”
But fond as he was of his quiet, Dunne was hardly monkish or isolate. He was one of the hotel’s presiding spirits, seemingly always on hand, taking gossipy lunches, chatting with hotel staff, and mixing incongruously among the other famous guests, his Savile Row suits and Turnbull & Asser ties contrasting with their more bohemian appearances. “One of my earliest memories of the hotel,” recalled Philip Pavel, who managed the Chateau through several of Dunne’s stays, “was seeing Iggy Pop walking around the lobby with no shirt, barefoot, with leather pants…and Dominick Dunne walking around in the middle of that.” (Dunne wasn’t overly fond of that lobby, though, comparing it to “Norma Desmond’s living room”—a reference to the sepulchral mansion in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, which wasn’t meant as a compliment.) He was such a fixture of the hotel that the painter Sacha Newley (son of Joan Collins and Anthony Newley) had him sit for a formal portrait there, scribbling away in a green notebook, an image that was unveiled to acclaim in 1997 at a cocktail reception and art show held—where else?—at Chateau Marmont.
It was a chance meeting with André Balazs that drew Dunne to the hotel for his first extended stay, to cover the Menendez trial. They were both at a party in New York when Balazs introduced himself, saying that he adored Dunne’s novel An Inconvenient Woman and adding, “If you ever come to Los Angeles again, please stay with us.” Dunne obliged. He took the suite that he eventually came to think of as his and turned it into a press room, with files and papers piled on the floor and in cupboards, notes to himself taped to walls and mirrors, and photographs, videocassettes, and envelopes stuffed with research strewn about willy-nilly. “It was just overwhelmed by books,” recalled a visitor, “snowdrifts of papers going up the walls, the fax was spewing new information.” Dunne was absolutely at home amid the clutter. He woke daily before sunrise, read the Los Angeles newspapers and stories from the New York press that had been faxed to him, tuned in to the morning talk shows, and made his way to the courthouse. In the afternoon, he repaired to his suite to write, filing a story to his editor, Tina Brown, every four weeks.
That visit, which ended when the Menendez jury couldn’t reach a verdict, lasted seven months. Dunne was, once again, infuriated that justice had failed to triumph, but his mood changed when he showed up at the front desk to check out of the hotel and return to New York. “I was spirited into a back office where Philip Truelove, the manager, had assembled all of the employees whom I had come to know,” he said, “and they toasted me with orange juice in champagne glasses, in honor, I suppose, of my long years of sobriety. I was so touched, I cried.”
That wasn’t the only time he was moved during his stay. A few weeks prior at 4:30 in the morning of January 17, 1994, the Northridge earthquake struck, a massive 6.7 tremor that killed fifty-seven people, collapsed freeways and apartment buildings, and caused widespread devastation around Southern California. Almost predictably, the jolt left Chateau Marmont merely shaken and stirred, just as Fred Horowitz and his architects had planned, with no structural damage. Even still, like almost everyone else in the region, Dunne was asleep when the earth rumbled, and he was just as fearful and rattled and unable to think clearly as millions of others:
I did not do that smart thing that you are supposed to do—hop up and get under a table. I just lay there and thought, “Well, this is the end of the line.” I collected myself, said my little prayer and watched my television set fly out onto the floor. I was extremely calm. When it stopped, I began to think of what I wanted to have with me, and I began to collect my things—my glasses, my wallet, my watch. It was pitch dark. And I took the latest draft of my article and stuck it in my back pocket, and made my way down the stairwells. All the guests gathered out on the lawn in front of the hotel, and then we realized there was a surreal light above us. It was coming from the huge Marlboro sign in front of the hotel, there on Sunset Boulevard. Somehow, the Marlboro man was the only thing left shining in the whole city. That was truly strange—something I will never forget. Finally, the sun came up, I returned to my room, and I started working.*8
Dunne’s next visit, to cover the O. J. Simpson murder case, ended in another episode of outrage at justice avoided and another episode—seriocomic this time—of being caught unprepared. He had taken the same suite as previously, this time for more than a year, and had once again become part of the hotel family. Again a rat’s nest of papers and materials grew in his suite; again he observed a daily routine of taking in the morning news and then showing up immaculately attired at court. By then, Dunne was part of the show; Judge Lance Ito gave him a choice seat in the front row of the spectators’ section (to the consternation of professional court reporters who called him “Judith Krantz in pants”). This time Dunne was, in his own estimation, “the toast of the town. I went out every night.” He loved the fact that everyone he met knew who he was and what he was up to. “I was walking out of my room to go to dinner,” he said of one such encounter at the Chateau, “and Keanu [Reeves] came out at the same time. We each headed for the elevator, and after the door closed, he said to me, ‘How’s the trial?’ ” He even wrote an entire novel featuring a semiautobiographical character—Gus Bailey, who had appeared in an earlier novel, People Like Us—who lived in New York and stayed at Chateau Marmont while he covered the Simpson trial. But no matter how much he enjoyed his fame, he always made time to fully digest the daily happenings in the case and get home early enough to be well rested before another day in court.
It was during this period that Dunne agreed to sit for his portrait by Sacha Newley, who recalled the fraught circumstances of the day, which was, propitiously, the day of the Simpson verdict. “Dominick was very appalled and angry,” he said. “He was an absolute sweetheart most of the time, but when you got him on a subject he felt passionately about, the animus would kick in, and he’d flame. That day at the front desk at the Chateau, I think he received death threats.”
In the wake of Simpson’s acquittal—Dunne’s slack-jawed reaction to the verdict from his front-row perch was one of the most memorable images that the courtroom cameras broadcast on that surreal day—the writer was flying back to New York when he realized, to his horror, that he had left something behind in his suite. He phoned the hotel as soon as his plane landed and spoke with an assistant manager. “Something terribly embarrassing has happened, and I need your help,” Dunne told him. “I’m afraid I’ve left a pornographic video of a very low-rent nature in the VCR. Do you think you could remove it before Maria the maid finds it? We’ve become very good friends in the last two years, and I don’t want to go down in her estimation.” Fortunately, he noted, “nothing shocks at the Chateau.” Not only did the manager volunteer to fetch the incriminating item immediately; he offered to send it to New York. “Good God, no!” Dunne replied.
There would follow other trials—Blake and Spector—and other visits to Chateau Marmont. And then Dunne laid down his pen and stopped covering crime stories and stayed back east, in his homes in Manhattan and Connecticut, until his death in August 2009. A memorial was held at the Chateau a couple of months later, the sort of party that he would have loved as much as any thrown by his old friends the McGraths: Movie people, entertainment journalists, crime reporters, and even courtroom personnel mingled with his son Griffin, former Los Angeles district attorney Ira Reiner, and others from the varied circles of his life. They gathered in one of the hotel’s penthouses—Griffin reminisced about his firecracker tossing during the Sunset Strip “riots”—and toasted and eulogized him in a town that, the title of his 1997 novel, Another City, Not My Own, notwithstanding, was truly one of his homes. He loved the setting, the people, the hotel, and he would’ve been warmed to realize all that love was returned.
3.
More than even the owner of the Chateau, André Balazs was its glossy-magazine face, a status he seemed to strive for, accommodating requests for photo shoots and lengthy profiles filled with casually dropped boldfaced names.
But he wasn’t an Angelino. He was a jet-setter with an increasingly large collection of hotels in his portfolio, and he made his home principally in New York, where his wife ran her business, his children went to school, and the family maintained homes in Manhattan and on Long Island. So, perhaps even more than any of the hotel’s previous owners, he needed someone on the grounds and behind the desk to serve as the day-to-day face of the hotel—as well as its eyes, ears, and operational brain.
In 1996, he found just the fellow, someone who would stay with the Chateau for more than twenty years, longer than any other general manager in the hotel’s history. Philip Pavel was born in 1969 in an outlying neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, where his dad was a gas meter reader. Or, rather, Philip Pawelczyk was born then and there. Philip—sometimes Philippe—Pavel was born in 1991, when Pawelczyk, a theater major fresh out of Northwestern University, came to Los Angeles to find his fortune in acting. Without any experience, he sought table-waiting jobs and found himself hired—“cast,” as he put it—as maître d’ at a high-scale restaurant in Century City; with his dark hair and eyes and trim six-foot-two frame, management thought he looked French, and so he took on the part, as it were, of a French waiter. But a French waiter, he insisted, with midwestern scruples: “If you made a reservation, and you were nice to me at the maître d’ stand, you got a better table than the TV actor who would actually yell, ‘I’m famous, doesn’t that mean anything?’ I kind of saw myself as Robin Hood.”
He spent a few years at La Chaumiere in Century City and then a few more at Barney Greengrass in Beverly Hills, where he continued to parry off the tempers of Hollywoodians who thought that their time and status excused them from simple human decency (“agents were the worst”). When the folks who’d hired him left the restaurant business and moved into the Chateau, where they were advising Balazs on starting up a new food-and-beverage service, they rang him up and asked him to join them and run the room service operation. “It’s only sixty-three rooms, they have a new no-party policy,…and there’s about five tables in the lobby,” they assured him.
Ha.
Pavel discovered chaos, even if only on a relatively small scale, when he took the job. The small room service menu basically amounted to home cooking by whichever waiter happened to be on duty when a guest rang down for food. There were no set menus or recipes, no strictly kept hours for service (this indifference toward food service was long-standing: Twenty years earlier, a journalist writing about the hotel claimed that he learned about the Continental breakfast that his room entitled him to only when he was checking out; when he asked about the oversight, a desk clerk replied, “Oh, we don’t tell anybody anything unless they ask”). Pavel imposed some order on the mess, and Balazs, impressed with his initiative and vision, promoted him to general manager.
As ringmaster at one of the greatest shows on earth, Pavel was utterly in his element. “As a child,” he recalled, “I would fantasize about being at a glamorous party. I envisioned my adult life to be something like the party scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” His new job gave him the opportunity to live that life, every day, in a fabulous setting, on someone else’s dime, with a full-time staff of house cleaners, bellmen, and, in time, cooks and waitstaff to make it happen.
He was truly born to the job. He had a fantastic memory for guests’ habits, tastes, and needs: which rooms they liked, which magazines, which chocolates. He understood creative people; even with a full-time job, he continued to go out on auditions as an actor, and occasionally got parts, as in such films as Scream 2, The Wedding Planner, and 13 Going on 30 (he even sometimes played himself, or someone very like himself, in films with scenes shot at the hotel or, in inside jokes, he might appear as a room service waiter or bartender). He schmoozed with visitors who seemed to want somebody to talk to. But mainly he ran things: He hired employees (he favored candidates, he said, “who are unfazed by certain behavior”);*9 he greeted residents, famous or not, upon their arrival; he solved crises; he made the place feel like a harbor. Sometimes this meant adding little personal touches to their rooms or services to their stays to make them comfortable. Sometimes it meant doing homework. “I work hard to keep up on the art world and the London social scene,” he said, “because those things are important to André Balazs. Since the hotel has this bohemian vibe, I have to cast my net a bit wider than just old-school Hollywood.” And sometimes it meant dealing with heavier issues. “Let’s just say,” he once revealed, “when I studied Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Shaw I never thought I’d become so good at transitioning people into rehab.”
After he’d been at the job for a while, Pavel came to embody the hotel’s demeanor toward its guests and their quirks. “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,” he said. “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. Oh, that sounds bad.”
He was one of those people whose love for his work translated into a feeling of goodwill and ease on the part of the folks with whom he interacted. Staff and guests responded with affection to him. (He was thanked in the acknowledgments of Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which the author said was inspired in part by his stay at the hotel; the hat tip, Pavel said, “was like winning an Academy Award.”) And even more than Balazs, whose high-veneer life might feel alien to even some of the Hollywood crowd, he seemed to embody the traditional spirit of the hotel.
Perhaps literally. Pavel had an interest in spirituality and mysticism, and he was delighted when “three different psychics” revealed that the Chateau “was built on an energy vortex.” That, he said, helped him to understand why he felt so immediately comfortable in the hotel as soon as he arrived. He might even, he half joked, have been drawn to the place by unseen forces. “The first manager, Ann Little, was this old character actress,” he said. “I wonder if I’m Ann Little reincarnated!” Little, of course, had been the quintessential manager of the hotel, and she had been succeeded by the likes of Meemi Ferguson in the fifties, Tor Olsen in the sixties, Urs Schwank in the seventies, Suzanne Jierjian in the late seventies and early eighties, and Philip Truelove in the eighties and early nineties, all of whom steered the Chateau through any number of obstacles and episodes. But Pavel, who was fortunate enough to preside over the hotel during the historic height of its fame, luxury, and cachet, had, it could be argued, the greatest job of all of them.
The Marlboro Man stood in front of Chateau Marmont for almost twenty-four years—not the same man for all that time, but whatever the Marlboro Man of the moment looked like. By the mid-nineties, having him on that highly visible spot cost Philip Morris $25,000 a month,*10 and they seemed perfectly happy to keep paying it.
But a few years later, the Food and Drug Administration declared war on outdoor advertising for cigarettes, and the Marlboro Man’s doom was writ. He came down in March 1999, unceremoniously. Within weeks he was replaced by an imitation—another gigantic cowboy, looking very nearly like his predecessor, holding a cigarette that dangled flaccidly from his hand above a warning that read, “Smoking causes impotence.”
Almost predictably, it was this cowboy, not the one with the cigarettes, who ruffled feathers at Chateau Marmont.
“The old Marlboro Man was a symbol of the Marmont’s way of life,” said Michael Banks, then working as reservations manager. “The new sign is in bad taste. We have an awful lot of people who smoke here.” A visiting photographer complained, “He’s gone from being a doorman to a policeman.” But André Balazs took the change in stride. “The message is appropriately perverted, given its proximity to the hotel,” he said. Then, apparently remembering that Philip Morris owned Kraft Foods, he saw a glimmer of light: “I mean, what if it had been a cream cheese ad instead?”
Balazs had a right to laugh about the changes on the Strip. They had been favorable, by and large, in his years of ownership, and his concept for the hotel bled out into other establishments along the street, in spirit if not always in aesthetics. He both sparked changes and watched them happen with a canny eye.
At the start of his tenure, the Strip didn’t carry the glamorous aura it had once enjoyed. “When I bought the Chateau in 1990,” he recalled some years after the fact, “I couldn’t walk down Sunset. I have a friend who is a designer from New York. Back then she decided to walk from the Chateau to Sunset Plaza, and two times during her walk, drivers pulled up to proposition her. Their attitude was, Why the hell are you walking if you’re not a prostitute?”
That might have sounded like a jaded New Yorker’s joke about car-crazy Los Angeles, but it was built on an undeniable truth: The Sunset Strip outside the Chateau Marmont had been in steady decline for many years. Locals saw it just as they saw Hollywood Boulevard: a tourist trap and a mart for the sex and drug trades with nothing like its former cachet. And neither local business interests nor West Hollywood city officials had any idea how to turn it around.
Balazs had a vision for his hotel that would restore (or, indeed, instill) some glory to it, but his plan, like the Chateau, stood apart from the Strip, above it but not quite of it. He was engaged in a project to transform a hotel, not a street. Any renaissance that Chateau Marmont would enjoy would be its own business. But the investment he and his partners made was inevitably noticed by others. The Sunset Strip of the early nineties might have been, like Times Square, better appreciated for the glitter of the past than the grime of the present, but it was still one of the most famous stretches of road in the world, and a few of its clubs and restaurants still imparted a legitimate glow. The physical thing might have been in disrepair, but the legend—the really valuable thing—needed no burnishing.
In fact, to some eyes the decay of the Strip imparted a certain allure. In 1993, Chateau Marmont regular Johnny Depp and a group of partners took over the lease of a failing nightclub called the Central and renamed it the Viper Room, attracting a young Hollywood crowd from the get-go. The following year, a coalition of investors including comedian Dan Aykroyd and a co-founder of the Hard Rock Cafe chain opened the House of Blues, the biggest live performance space the Sunset Strip had ever seen. In 1996, Ian Schrager, André Balazs’s rival in the boutique hotel game, bought and remodeled the old Le Mondrian hotel at Sunset and Olive, gussying it up and rechristening it the Mondrian, complete with a nightclub space called Skybar. A new vibe started to be felt up and down the Strip—bohemian chic, sometimes sleek, sometimes grungy, but always with a lot of money to throw around. Chateau Marmont was in the midst of it.
In late 1995, Balazs and Sean MacPherson, who operated several high-end bars and clubs around Los Angeles, capitalized on the growing cult of the Chateau to open a new business, Bar Marmont, the first watering hole officially associated with the hotel (whose guests had always been reckoned to be half in the bag even without a bar on the premises). Bar Marmont stood on Sunset Boulevard proper, just downhill and to the east from the Chateau. For a few years it had been the French restaurant La Toque; back in the sixties, it was a nightclub called the Scene. Balazs and MacPherson hired Shawn Hausman, who had taken part in the redesign of the hotel, to create the look and feel of the place, and he concocted a vaguely noirish tropical cave, decorated with bamboo, artificial butterflies and peacocks, and a live parrot.
The very idea that Chateau Marmont—which hadn’t even had a full liquor license until 1992—would open its own almost-on-premises bar was news. When Balazs and MacPherson held auditions—there was no other word for their hiring process—for new staff, The New Yorker covered it in a “Talk of the Town” piece. Bar Marmont opened in November 1995, with a stunning coup: Leonardo DiCaprio’s twenty-first birthday party, which the Los Angeles Times remembered as “the night even movie stars got turned away.” The turning away was done by Connie, a.k.a. Constance, a bald-headed drag queen who came from New York at Balazs’s behest to serve as hostess and held sway for the better part of a decade, negotiating pushy patrons, famous faces, and barroom randomnesses with aplomb.
Bar Marmont, Skybar, and the Viper Room transformed the Sunset Strip. What had been a dingy thoroughfare, roamed by drug dealers and prostitutes, blossomed once again into a center of nightlife, chic and flashy and laced with a naughty air that was a considerable part of its charm. “I would be embarrassed if the Body Shop closed down,” Balazs said of the strip joint across Sunset from Chateau Marmont. “With those nude figures outside, it has become Sunset Boulevard’s Statue of Liberty.”
Conversations about the future of the Sunset Strip had once borne the tone of a planning session for a funeral. Now, with nightclubs so hot that even celebrities could be denied admission, the Strip was experiencing another golden age.
In the midst of this ascent, West Hollywood authorities got busy branding their stretch of Sunset, deciding which businesses could legitimately say they were on Sunset Strip and which were not (controversially, Chateau Marmont did not make the cut because part of it sat on a lot that was, technically, outside West Hollywood city limits). They had big plans to turn the Strip into an even bigger tourist mecca, with perhaps a Disney facility of some sort to draw families and a coherent overall plan to integrate all the new development under a single vision.
Balazs, who was remodeling a second Sunset Strip building, the Golden Crest retirement home, into what would open in 1999 as the first of his chain of Standard hotels, was hopeful but dubious about the effort. Rhapsodizing about “this organic chaos that is the Sunset Strip,” he opined, “A place’s sense of past, its quirkiness and history, is what makes a place rich.”
Pavel was fully in charge of things when, in 2003, Balazs launched the final—and in some ways most important—addition he would make to the hotel. For the first time in its history, Chateau Marmont would have a restaurant. Ray Sarlot had been against the idea. “I don’t want to have people sitting around staring at the guests,” he explained. But André Balazs understood that there were advantages in that very thing. And so he found a way to make it happen.
The restaurant, which didn’t, technically, have a name, wasn’t a big, stand-alone place, and it lacked a lot of the conveniences that would have made it more of a destination: You still had to find a way to park your car, and there was no place to wait around for your table. There were two dining spaces—a dark, delicately moody interior that, per the Los Angeles Times, recalled “one of the little rooms at Caffe Florian in Venice” and an outdoor garden area, which was where the action was, especially during the many months when it was comfortable enough to dine outside. The first chef, Mohammad Islam, most recently of the Mercer Kitchen in New York (the restaurant was Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s, but the hotel in which it sat belonged to André Balazs), was noted for simple, elegant, fresh cooking that suited the atmosphere, making diners feel, per the Times, more like they were dining “at a rather grand country house than at a proper restaurant.”
The restaurant was immediately a hit, and not only with Chateau guests, who could order off the menu, which was available in the restaurant or in their rooms 24/7 and ranged from breakfast to late-night dining. The real innovation was that there was now a destination inside the hotel—a gathering spot for locals or out-of-towners staying elsewhere. Almost immediately, Hollywood, especially young Hollywood, began to gravitate toward the place, and the Chateau became a true hot spot in a way it never had before. Which led to a new kind of problem. In more than seventy years of operation, there had almost never been cause for hotel management to deal with the sort of social geography common to Hollywood restaurants: which were the most desirable tables; who preferred to be seen (or not); which boldfaced names were feuding and needed to be seated as far apart as possible. Now, with the scene-making likes of Paris Hilton and the Kardashian clan starting to turn up regularly, as well as legitimate stars and paying hotel guests, the Chateau had call for a maître d’ and general manager well versed in the art of juggling personalities and egos. Hell, they even felt comfortable turning people away: a situation previous iterations of management never imagined.
Fortunately, Philip Pavel was born to the hospitality business and had been battle tested in Beverly Hills restaurants, so he knew very well how to do the job facing him. But there were limits, even at Chateau Marmont. One night in 2007, pop star Britney Spears, in the throes of a prolonged and public episode of substance dependency and apparent mental breakdown, made a spectacle of smearing food across her face in the restaurant. Other diners present, among them fellow pop diva Victoria Beckham, mentioned to the staff that Spears was “acting weird.” When she started to play dress up with her dinner, she was escorted from her table and informed that she was no longer welcome on the hotel grounds. The restriction was lifted after Spears cleaned herself up, and she was back in the restaurant two years later celebrating her twenty-eighth birthday.
Her sin wasn’t the behavior itself, not entirely, but rather the public and, worse, unapologetic nature of it. The secret, apparently, to not only indulging in eyebrow-raising doings at Chateau Marmont but getting away with them was to keep mum about your antics entirely and then, if caught, be playfully vague or obviously exaggerate your account of whatever it was you were supposed to have done. Johnny Depp, who was introduced to the Chateau by his friend and mentor Hunter S. Thompson and who was fond of spending nights there, even though he owned a home nearby, epitomized the attitude perfectly: He liked to brag that he and his onetime girlfriend model Kate Moss made love in every room in the hotel—presumably not all in one stay but over the four years of their relationship. Whatever Depp did there, and whomever with, was hidden behind the smoke screen of a titillating—if dubious—tall tale.
That sort of thing burnished the hotel’s reputation, as did the story that circulated around Hollywood and beyond late on Oscar night 2004. That evening, Benicio Del Toro was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for 21 Grams, just three years after winning the same prize, on his first nomination, for Traffic. Among the award presenters on the show was Scarlett Johansson. Somewhere amid the after parties, the two stars cozied up together, and she invited him back to the Chateau, where she had been renting a suite since selling her nearby house, which she had found too big and lonely to live in by herself. Johansson made a home at the Chateau, moving in with her Chihuahua, Maggie, a Japanese fighting fish named Cassius (dead, alas, and buried by her in the hotel garden surreptitiously under cover of night), and her own furniture, including a red coffee table designed by Diana Vreeland. No doubt the chance to see that Vreeland was what enticed Del Toro to accept the invitation to her suite.
Whatever happened between them happened fast. On the way up to Johansson’s place, they might have kissed. And however the rest of the evening went, that bit of it—the two stars enmeshed in the elevator—became famous. In part, Johansson joked to a magazine, that was because they weren’t alone: “Apparently there was somebody with us in an elevator, and we were making out or having sex or something—which I think is very unsanitary.” So, for the record: no actual sex. Probably. At least not in the lift.
Once word of their tryst got out, the pair did nothing to deny or explain it. Del Toro (then thirty-seven years old, some eighteen years her senior) even encouraged the possibility that the rumors were true. “Did I ever have sex in an elevator with Scarlett Johansson after an awards show,” he was quoted as asking rhetorically in 2005. “I kind of like…you know…I…well…I don’t know. Let’s leave that to somebody’s imagination. Let’s not promote it. I’m sure it has happened before. It might not be the last time, either.” Thinking about the logistics a little further, he continued, “But the Chateau Marmont only has eight floors. I would still be struggling out of my leather jacket by the second floor and wouldn’t have my shirt off by the seventh.”*11
As a privately owned business, Chateau Marmont was always able to keep details of its finances out of the public record. But in 2003, at least a glimpse of the hotel’s financial state was revealed in the course of a federal legal proceeding against the hotel’s onetime controller, who was prosecuted on two counts of felony wire fraud having to do with his embezzlement of nearly $14 million from the Chateau and its sister hotel, the Hollywood Standard.
Kelly Timothy Ebert had been hired to run the accounting at the Marmont in 1993 and had been put in charge of the books at the Standard when it opened five years later, earning a salary, at its maximum, of $113,000 per year. He didn’t live as if that were his only source of income, though. He owned a $2-million-plus home in Sherman Oaks, belonged to an exclusive country club, drove a Toyota Land Cruiser SUV and a Mercedes sedan, and collected high-end memorabilia to do with Elvis Presley and Lucille Ball.
He accumulated the means to acquire all of that by, it would seem, stealing from the hotels. His scheme involved siphoning credit card payments from the hotels’ legitimate accounts into an account that he could make withdrawals from without anyone else’s countersignature. He kept the ruse afloat by ordering his subordinates to watch the mail for certain bank statements and then take them to his car on a route that wouldn’t be seen by the hotel’s surveillance cameras. (Fearing detection, he also destroyed so many incriminating documents that he broke his paper-shredding machine.)
Ebert’s theft lasted six years and was first noticed in late 2001, when he failed to make a payment on the Hollywood Standard’s mortgage. He missed another payment the following spring for the Chateau’s mortgage, causing management to incur a $100,000 penalty fee. At that time he was fired, and his successors discovered irregularities in the hotel’s books, eventually calling in authorities. Caught dead to rights, Ebert entered a guilty plea in June 2003 and was sentenced later that year to fifty-one months in a federal penitentiary—the maximum sentence allowed—and ordered to make financial restitution for what he’d stolen.
In the entire colorful history of Chateau Marmont, Ebert’s would be the only criminal conviction associated with the hotel on the public record. For all the scandalous behavior that had gone on inside its walls, Chateau Marmont had always managed to keep misdeeds out of the newspapers, save, notably, John Belushi’s death. That, in fact, was one of its most important guarantees as a hotel for celebrities: What happens here stays here. You literally had to either rob the place blind or die there for word to get out.
The aura of naughtiness associated with the Chateau never dissipated, even if it was given a veneer of exclusivity and luster during the Balazs era. During Sarlot’s reign, the bad boy (and girl) -ism at the hotel was the stuff of whispered legend, making it out into the world sometimes years after the fact, often in gilded form to make it more enticing and scandalous. Balazs, on the other hand, owned the hotel in the age of TMZ, smart phones, and social media, when everyone was a paparazzo and plenty of the hotel’s guests didn’t care what sort of impression they made on the larger world and even courted it.
For some guests, this wasn’t value added but value lost. The fashion designer and photographer Hedi Slimane, who was a regular before acquiring a permanent home in Los Angeles, spoke for those who found the hotel less inviting than it had once been. “I used to stay for months at the Chateau Marmont, which typically was a really different place then, very private, filled with young actors or directors living there all year long. No social media at the time—it was private and had the authentic feel and dusty glamour of old Hollywood.”
For others, the new vibe of the hotel made it homier than ever. Take Courtney Love, the unfiltered rock star and sometime actress who had an on-again, off-again relationship with the hotel (and, it was said, Balazs himself) that resulted, at least for a time, in her being labeled persona non grata. She managed to get her ban reversed and continued to frequent the place on and off for years. Director Gus Van Sant, who knew her during their days as unknowns in Portland, ran into her there one morning. “I was meeting with my DP, Harris Savides, and Courtney just flopped at our table and started to monopolize the conversation,” he recalled. “She had been at the first screening of my first film, and she was carrying on about that. And they used to serve cappuccino in those big bowls, like in France, and she made the wrong move with it, and it wound up in her lap, all over her dress, and she just kept talking.”
Other celebrities loved to push the edge at the Chateau: Alan Cumming bragged about having sex on the piano in his suite and delighting when, the following day, he could see smears on the shiny black surface of the instrument while receiving business guests; Michael Madsen, who lived in a bungalow for a few years with a pair of Rottweilers, liked to hang around the pool in biker’s leathers—jacket and pants—even in midday, the better to creep out the gawpers; James Franco wrote and published poems, likely tongue in cheek, about over-the-top sexual antics at the hotel; old goat Jack Nicholson chased the young supermodel Bridget Hall around the pool, only half in jest; and Hunter S. Thompson, in some ways the spiritual goddaddy of hedonistic young Hollywood, continued to visit the hotel almost until his death in 2005, throwing around $100 tips and screaming out of the parking garage in his rented convertibles with a cocktail balanced in one hand.
These sorts of escapades added to the Chateau’s image as a noirish playground for the naughtiest of celebrities—an enclave for debauchery and hedonism. Anthony Bourdain, the chef, TV travel show host, and boulevardier, rather epitomized this aspect of the Marmont’s image. “I stay on campus at the Chateau a lot, you know, that way I don’t have to stumble far,” he explained. “I love driving here. The fact is, if I get overserved, now I’ve got a car problem. If I’m getting seriously in the alcohol, chances are I’m staying on campus.”
On the other hand, some people still tried to keep their doings out of the limelight, such as actor Josh Hartnett, who called EMTs to his Marmont suite in 2009 because he was severely stricken by a gastrointestinal ailment that he’d picked up while doing humanitarian work in a Third World country and needed to be taken to a hospital by ambulance; such were the times that a recording of his call for emergency help for an episode of diarrhea and vomiting was available online within days. For years afterward, he was taunted by paparazzi about the phone call whenever he showed his face near the hotel.
But some of what was gotten up to was actually rather sweet. Actor Sam Rockwell, who would one day meet his future life partner, Leslie Bibb, at the Chateau, once spent an awards season giving away everything that had shown up in his swag bags to hotel staffers and anyone who came to visit him in his suite. French director Luc Besson met his future wife (his third, actually) and star Milla Jovovich at the pool when he was casting The Fifth Element, in which she played her breakout role. Actor Ben Mendelsohn married writer Emma Forrest there in 2012 (it didn’t last). And Jeff Goldblum, notorious for his tomcat-about-town lifestyle, married his third wife, Emilie Livingston, at the hotel in November 2014; the couple went on to have two children, making Goldblum a father for the first time in his life at age sixty-two.
4.
As might be surmised from acquaintance with his work, the man knew how to make an entrance.
“There was this very recalcitrant elevator,” remembered a Chateau regular, screenwriter and director Menno Meyjes. “One day it broke down. We were all standing there going, ‘There’s someone in the elevator!’…[T]hey had to open the door with a crowbar and the doors just sort of fell away, and [he] was leaning against the elevator wall with a lit cigarette in his mouth and a leather jacket slung over his shoulder—the very picture of insouciance. He barely glanced down at the people who had freed him, walked on to his convertible, and drove out.”
And he also made a sensational exit.
At about noon on January 23, 2004, a silver Cadillac SRX came careering out of the garage of Chateau Marmont and, instead of turning left and downhill toward Sunset Boulevard or right and uphill toward Monteel Road, gunned straight across Marmont Lane. There were some people walking along the street, one of whom, a photographer named Ann Johansson, was brushed by the speeding SUV. Before she could holler at the driver, the car smashed into a retaining wall and some shrubs across the narrow street, crushing the entire front end. Johansson and other passersby rushed to the vehicle and found a white-haired, stylishly dressed man slumped over the wheel. The air bags hadn’t deployed, and the passenger compartment of the car was intact, the engine area having absorbed the brunt of the collision. But the driver was clearly in peril. An ambulance was summoned, and the driver was extricated from the car and taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he was soon declared dead, not from injuries resulting from the crash, but from a heart attack, which was apparently what caused him to lose control of the car.
The next day, headlines around the world announced the death of Helmut Newton, the eighty-three-year-old enfant terrible of fashion photography. The so-called King of Kink, who infused his work with an erotic daring and who had spent winters at Chateau Marmont for nearly a quarter century, had died in an accident as attention grabbing as any of his photo shoots.
Since the early eighties, Newton and his wife, June (who was a photographer in her own right under the nom de caméra Alice Springs), would arrive at the Chateau during Christmas week and stay until March or so, at which point they would decamp to their permanent residence in Monte Carlo. In the fall, they’d leave the Riviera for Paris, and then start the cycle all over again as the Yuletide approached. “I have this fascination for familiar surroundings,” Newton once said. “My favorite photos are often those which evoke a strong feeling of ‘I have been here before.’ ”
It was an ironically homey sentiment from a man known for the iconoclastic sexuality of his work, which agitated the world of fashion photography with graphic and, to some eyes, exploitative and degrading imagery. In Newton’s work, designer clothing, the ostensible reason for the photos in the first place, was less emphasized than the highly erotic and fantastical atmospheres in which Newton displayed it. His work was haunting, electrifying, polarizing, and deeply influential. There was the famous image of a model shoving another girl’s head into a toilet; a billboard in Times Square showing a woman lying facedown wearing only stockings; a series depicting nudes in orthopedic body braces; images of two women kissing, one of them in handcuffs; naked women, often accompanied by vaguely sinister men, in laundromats, limousines, stately homes, often shot in and around Chateau Marmont.
“His photographs had more of a signature than any photographer I can think of,” said his longtime Vogue editor Anna Wintour. “Fashion would change, but Helmut’s vision didn’t.” He delighted in provocation and the fallout from it: He bragged about the time that more than a thousand Vogue readers canceled their subscriptions after the magazine ran an image he’d shot of two women, a man, and two dogs in a suggestive pose. According to Wintour, he relished the furious responses of those whom he’d agitated: “Helmut would say, ‘Send me the letters.’ If there were none he’d be terribly disappointed.”
Newton wasn’t the only photographer who made a studio out of the Chateau—Annie Leibovitz’s sensational 1992 image of Demi Moore with a man’s suit painted, trompe l’oeil–style, on her naked body was one of many famous photos taken in the hotel, and such photographers as George Hurrell, Herb Ritts, Mario Testino, and Bruce Weber often rented suites for photo shoots. But Newton returned to the Chateau again and again and shot scores of photos there over his many years of residency. There were images of nude women in the hotel laundry room, of Dennis Hopper (his head shaved bald) and Christopher Walken sitting side by side and staring with gazes of indeterminate menace, of Hurrell himself setting up Michelle Pfeiffer for a portrait session in an unmade hotel bed. In a sense, Newton was the hotel’s ideal guest, availing himself of its singular identity as long-term residence and bohemian escape while at the same time helping to shape its identity as a sinful but discreet adult playground, and becoming a fixture of the place in life and in death.
Newton’s very arrival at the Chateau each winter seemed to alter the place. Rupert Everett remembered feeling miserably alone in his very first stay at the hotel, which coincided with the Christmas holidays. And then, a miracle. “One afternoon,” he recalled, “Helmut and his wife, June, surged into the hotel surrounded by luggage” and an entourage that included fashion editor Michael Roberts, a friend of Everett’s. The young actor was able to attach himself to the group, joining them in their freewheeling days: lunches, cocktail parties, and the ritual of dining out. “Most nights our group met in the hotel foyer and clattered down to the basement parking lot, where we bundled into Helmut’s car….I sat in the back with Michael, giggling and nudging (la vie en Newton was eccentric, to say the least) while Helmut—shrieking at the wheel—negotiated the blind corner from the car park onto the street. He was driving over his own grave.”
Newton was born in Berlin in 1920 as Helmut Neustädter, the son of a prosperous button manufacturer. Raised in bourgeois comfort, he attended private schools and enjoyed family vacations at spa hotels where he preciously noticed that “a gigolo and a gigolette sat at separate tables away from the customers.” His sharp eye drew him to photography at an early age; he acquired his first camera at age twelve and at sixteen started work as an assistant to the celebrated photographer Yva, a Berliner who specialized in both fashion shoots and experimental images.
In 1938, just after Kristallnacht, the Neustädters fled Germany. “It was very sad for my father,” Newton recalled. “He believed nothing would happen to him because he was a German.” While his parents went off to South America, Newton made his way to Trieste and boarded a boat headed to China with a special passport issued by the Nazi government. “My Jew passport,” he called it, “stamped with a J on every page!” He got as far as Singapore, where he fell in with an older French woman who kept him as her boy toy, dressing him in fine clothes and paying his way at the best restaurants and hotels.
When Germany invaded France in 1940, Newton’s German citizenship made him an “enemy alien,” and he was sent to an internment camp in Australia. In 1942, he was allowed to leave and enlisted in the Australian military, for which he drove trucks. At war’s end, he became a British subject, set up shop in Melbourne, and changed his name formally to Newton. “It was like having a new identity,” he said. In 1946, an actress named June Browne came in for head shots. They married two years later and remained together for more than fifty years.
Newton steadily built his client list and reputation as both a commercial photographer and a fine artist, and he was offered a yearlong contract by the British edition of Vogue in 1956. He traveled between Europe and Australia, finally settling in Paris in 1961. Two years later, he joined the staff of French Vogue and began to make an even bigger name for himself.
Not everyone was enamored of Newton’s work. Diana Vreeland, the famed editor of the American Vogue, was among those unimpressed, and as a result he didn’t get his foot in the door of that publication until she left in 1971. At around that time, Newton suffered a heart attack, and the combination of a new platform and his health scare changed the man and his work. As his wife said, the moment “opened up something in him. He started doing work that was tremendously influenced by his bourgeois background.” He put it more bluntly: “I wasn’t so interested any more in making money. I wanted to do exactly what I wanted to do.” Specifically, that meant images of models lounging nude or nearly so in opulent environments, often spiced with elements of S&M or mystery: dark alleys, shadowy lurkers, hints of a story that the viewer could only surmise. He was a provocateur, but, he insisted, he was showing exactly how people lived in the rarefied corners of Berlin, Singapore, Paris, and the French Riviera that he knew so well. He staged these images, yes, but he took them, he claimed, from reality. “I’m a frustrated paparazzi,” he liked to joke.
In 1981, the Newtons bought an apartment in Monte Carlo that became their permanent home base, and they started frequenting Chateau Marmont regularly, allowing Helmut to work with American clients and movie people and chum around with such Hollywood pals as Billy Wilder, Robert Evans, and Jack Nicholson, as well as other Angelinos such as Tina and Michael Chow and Timothy and Barbara Leary. He was fond of the American West, frequenting roadside diners and shopping for clothes at Nudie’s, the famed North Hollywood shop that outfitted so many rhinestone cowboys. “He was used to much darker European cities,” recalled photographer Mark Arbeit, one of his Los Angeles assistants, “and he really loved the light here.”
As evinced by Rupert Everett’s recollection of the Newtons’ arrival at the Chateau, the couple were a movable feast. According to Joan Juliet Buck, a Vogue editor who worked with him and partied with him at the hotel, the Newtons “taught everyone how to live. [They] were gregarious and had a large group of friends. Their enthusiasm and social life didn’t diminish with age.” Another friend, producer Jan Sharp, remembered that the arrival of the Newtons at the Chateau each winter was a festive event in and of itself: “Every year [they] would come and throw a party. We used to call it The Feast of Helmut and June. Men wore black tie, and we all got dressed up as if it were a Paris party.”
Even at an advanced age, Newton was able to keep up a vigorous professional and social schedule through a dedicated exercise regimen. While staying at the Chateau, he swam or went to the gym most days; the addition of an exercise room was a boon to him. (About other updates that André Balazs made to the hotel, Newton was agnostic but generally accepting.) Another secret of his vitality, Newton explained, was that he and June lived sparsely and freely—even from one another. He would occasionally travel to Berlin for extended trips without her, she would go off on photo shoots without him, and they kept no office staff or studios in any of the cities they called home. Even their immediate surroundings were minimalist; as Newton explained in 1987, “I don’t want to own anything anymore. I just want to take photographs.”
Up to his final days, Newton exuded energy, positivity, magnetism. Novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner remembered sharing a milestone meal with him:
I have the feeling there are lots of people who lay claim to having had dinner with Helmut Newton on his last night on earth, and I’m one of them. André Balazs invited me and my wife, so we joined him and Uma Thurman, and Helmut and his wife, June….Helmut liked my wife because she looked like June when she was young. I told Helmut one of my favorite jokes, that goes something like, “I want to die in my sleep like my father did; not screaming, like everyone else in the car.”
On the following, fatal morning, in the elevator, Newton ran into Sofia Coppola, another Chateau regular and one who would draw inspiration as a filmmaker from Newton’s work. “He was coming home from the gym in his sweatsuit,” she remembered, “and I thanked him for a photo that he had given me. A few hours later I came back and his car had crashed. There was the car with flowers all around it.” The image would stick with her.
The gloss with which André Balazs managed to paint the Chateau meant that it became a mainstay of popular culture. Consumers of gossip news—in print, on TV, on the internet, or in social media—knew of the hotel not as a repository of old Hollywood or the place where John Belushi died but as a swank hot spot where young actors, musicians, and media personalities mingled and got up to naughtiness.
In part this was because the hotel truly filled that role—in 2006, Heath Ledger was famously filmed there on somebody’s cell-phone camera indulging in what looked a lot like cocaine, and the carryings-on of such stars as Lindsay Lohan, James Franco, Britney Spears, Keanu Reeves, Colin Farrell, Taylor Swift, and many others of their generation, if not their accomplishment or standing (Paris Hilton and various Kardashians), were religiously reported in gossip pages and websites even when there wasn’t photographic evidence of them.
In part, too, this was because under Balazs the hotel became a hot spot for movie premiere celebrations, luxury brand product launches, and, during the weeks running up to the Oscar, Grammy, and Emmy awards, parties in honor of various nominees or suites leased by fashion brands, hairstylists, and sundry image-enhancing services who needed a dedicated, centrally located space where they could dress, tweeze, trim, and otherwise perfect their clients for the red carpet.
As a result of all this high-wattage energy, not only were the hotel’s rooms almost always booked, often well in advance, but you couldn’t simply drop into the restaurant, the lobby, or the bar. After more than seven decades of being mysterious, secretive, hidden in plain sight, Chateau Marmont had become something more: an icon, a catchphrase, a signifier, a brand; it was hot.
Ironically, this meant that the long-term residences of writers, artists, composers, and other creative types, a hallmark of the hotel for decades, were less common than ever; to be blunt, the hotel was no longer a bargain. In fact, it was expensive: An overnight stay in 2019 could cost anywhere from $500 for the tiniest room in the main building to $2,000 and up for a penthouse or bungalow—way higher than past prices, even when adjusted for inflation. The hotel was once an enclave of bohemians; after Balazs sprinkled his gold dust on it, it was more likely to be filled with a wealthy mix of celebrities, showbiz and fashion executives, and a jet-setting international crowd seeking to rub up against some old-fashioned Hollywood sinfulness. As Eve Babitz put it in 2018, “It’s another fancy L.A. hotel; it’s great, but it’s not mine anymore!”
This trendy new version of the Chateau began to show up in popular culture in telling ways. In 1996, Balazs himself published a limited-edition volume, Chateau Marmont Hollywood Handbook, a scrapbook, to be exact, comprising a variety of previously published reminiscences of the Chateau and a lot of photos and writings about Hollywood history. There were two coffee-table-type photo books to do with the place: About Glamour (1997) by Len Prince and Asleep at the Chateau (2012) by photographer Jork Weismann. In the graphic novel The Private Eye by Brian K. Vaughan, Marcos Martín, and Muntsa Vicente, set in the not-too-distant future, the title character has his office in the Chateau, which is no longer a hotel but a commercial building and which gets destroyed in a bombing intended to kill him. In novels by Lauren Weisberger (Last Night at Chateau Marmont, 2010), Michael Connelly (The Drop, 2011), and Aris Janigian (Waiting for Lipchitz at Chateau Marmont, 2016), the hotel is an emblem of Hollywood opulence, indulgence, and cupidity. In films about the music world such as Rock Star (2001), Laurel Canyon (2002), and Danny Collins (2015), it simply appears, its very presence meant to tell us something about the characters and the events. The singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey, who had the words “Chateau Marmont” tattooed on her left forearm, shot a video on the grounds for one of her songs, and the singer-songwriter Jarvis Cocker, along with his collaborator Chilly Gonzales, released an entire album, Room 29, inspired by the vibe and legend of the hotel.*12 And in the Hollywood satire BoJack Horseman, the Chateau achieved something even rarer: It looks just like itself, but its famous neon shield sign reads Chateau Marmoset, entering the surreal world of the animated series as a parody of itself, much in the way the Warner Bros. cartoons of the forties once winkingly referenced such old-time Hollywood haunts as the Brown Derby, the Trocadero, and Mocambo.
The epitome of all this attention came in the spring of 2009, when the entire fifth floor of the Chateau was rented out for three weeks by a single person—not a reclusive billionaire or a Saudi prince or a hedonistic superstar musician or a world-famous actor but rather Sofia Coppola, a daughter of Hollywood who had a personal history with the hotel, yes, but for the purposes of this unusual arrangement an Oscar-winning filmmaker at work on a new movie.
Somewhere, as the film was known, centers on a bad boy actor named Johnny Marco who passes time listlessly in a suite at Chateau Marmont until his routine is turned upside down by the arrival of his eleven-year-old daughter, Cleo. The girl normally lives with her mother, but Mom needs some me-time and Johnny, nursing a broken arm, is between pictures, so it’s an opportune moment for some father-daughter bonding—or it would be if Johnny weren’t in such a drifting fog.
Coppola wrote the script in France, where she had made her previous feature, Marie Antoinette, and shared a home with the musician Thomas Mars, the father of her two daughters. “I was living in Paris, and I was homesick,” she remembered. She began to think about modern Los Angeles and noted that there wasn’t a film that showed the city’s current way of life. All there was, she recalled, was the cartoon version of the city she saw on television. “This fun, party lifestyle….But what would that really be like? What’s it like the next morning? It’s like the flip side of Entourage.”
As she began visualizing her protagonist and his way of life, she knew one thing for dead certain about him: He would make his home not at the beach or in the hills but at the Chateau. “That’s where that kind of guy would live,” she said. “It’s sort of a rite of passage for an actor to live at the Chateau Marmont. It means you’ve made it, but you’re still ‘down-to-earth.’ ”
Coppola and the Chateau went way back. When she was just a kid, her father, Francis Ford Coppola, toyed with the idea of buying the place and turning it into a kind of artist colony. Her family stayed in the hotel occasionally, and she remembered Romulo Laki, the famed singing waiter, serenading her in the lobby on his guitar with Elvis Presley’s “Teddy Bear.” When she was a student at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, not far north of L.A., the Chateau was one of the regular stops she and her squad made on their circuit of partying. “Me and my friends would go there to hang out. The parking guy, who’s been there for 20 years, would open the gates so we could use the swimming pool.”
In 1993, she celebrated her twenty-second birthday there—a bash covered by newspapers and populated with the likes of Coppola’s then beau, Donovan Leitch (son of the music star Donovan), actors Peter Gallagher and Ethan Hawke, members of the Beastie Boys and Red Hot Chili Peppers, restaurateur/club owner Brian McNally, Vogue editor Marina Rust, and a contingent of young New York fashionistas including Kelly Klein, Tatiana von Fürstenberg, and a clutch of Ford Agency models.
The bohemian vibe of the Chateau suited Coppola in those days, she later admitted—“There was a year I did nothing but go out. I was pretty flaky.” But when she came back to the hotel in 2009, she was neither a child who would swoon to a song about a teddy bear nor a party kid looking for distraction. She had transformed herself into a bona fide auteur, having written and directed three feature films—The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), and Marie Antoinette (2006)—the second of which saw her awarded the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. That film, like Somewhere, was set in a hotel (as, in a sense, was Marie Antoinette, with its opulent Versailles, and, for that matter, “Life Without Zoe,” a short film Coppola wrote with her father and that he directed as part of 1989’s New York Stories anthology). The idea of living in in-between places was a core part of her life story and her artist-mind, and it ran richly through her new screenplay, which followed its protagonist to such make-believe places as an auto race track, an ice rink, a special effects studio, a hotel hosting a junket in Beverly Hills, a hotel in Milan with an in-suite swimming pool, and a hotel-casino in Las Vegas. The archetypal New Hollywood actor, Johnny Marco was almost too rootless even to inhabit a hotel room. But in her vision, that room, if it existed at all, would, for sure, be at Chateau Marmont.
Which presented her with a number of problems, starting with access. “The Chateau doesn’t allow a lot of filming,” said Coppola’s producer G. Mac Brown. “If and when they do, they can charge a very high location fee, and it probably has to be done in the middle of the night.” Philip Pavel concurred. “People ask all the time,” he said, indicating the fruitlessness of those requests. But Coppola had advantages that other filmmakers couldn’t match, and she made a personal appeal to management. “She’s been a member of the Chateau family as long as I’ve been here,” Pavel explained. “When she approached André Balazs, the owner, there was an innate sense of trust that the project would have integrity and reflect the true nature of the hotel.”
Given Balazs’s blessing, Coppola’s production was granted permissions beyond those ever before afforded a filmmaker working at the hotel: the right to rent and use an entire floor-plus of rooms; the ability to shoot at all hours; access to all public areas, including the lobby, the pool, the restaurant, the elevators, the corridors, and the garage; and even certain members of the hotel staff appearing as themselves, including Pavel, Romulo Laki, and various waiters and parking valets. On the fifth floor, the crew set up separate rooms and suites to house various departments—camera, grip/electric, production offices, art and decor, hair and makeup—and they established the principal set for Johnny Marco’s apartment: room 59.
The aesthetic of the film—both in its narrative and in its look and feel—was meant to be minimalistic and almost documentarian, revealing Marco’s days as if silently spying on them, anatomizing his behavior and habits. But production designer Anne Ross realized that she would, ironically, have to tinker with the suite and other locations to make them look as if they weren’t tinkered with.
“The goal,” she explained, “was to maintain the iconic feeling of the Chateau, so that no one would know that we did anything [in the way of adjustments to the interiors], they would say, ‘They just went in and shot.’ ” Marco’s suite was, she continued, where most of these subtle changes had to be made:
When you’re in a hotel room, you want a big TV, but on film, you need something a little smaller or it will eat up the frame. We had to change all of the art in Johnny’s suite because none [of the existing pieces] is cleared. We picked ones that were in the spirit of the artwork. We also reupholstered some of the furniture with fabric that’s reminiscent of the lobby. We wanted to bring some of the beautiful, lush look of the lobby in there because the rooms at the Chateau are often stark and sparse; they’re painted all white, and I love that, but that can be too harsh for filming in such an intimate space.
On the other hand, she said, the public spaces used by the film were perfect as she found them: “We didn’t change a thing in the lobby.”
Just as Balazs and Pavel worried that a film production might inconvenience their guests, Coppola and her crew worried that the ordinary ruckus of a functioning hotel might make filming more difficult—the noise of elevators, doors opening and closing, carousers in other suites, and Sunset Boulevard and its traffic just below. But, said location manager Stephenson Crossley, Chateau Marmont lived up to its reputation as serene and isolated, even in the midst of chaos. “It’s amazingly quiet for being so close to the Sunset Strip,” he said. “Even room to room, it’s quiet; with the thick floors and ceilings, we wouldn’t hear each other. It’s a little island unto itself. We always felt protected.”
For the role of Marco, Coppola and company pulled off a similar trick of transforming a found object into the fictional one they required with minimal adjustments. Stephen Dorff was thirty-five during the production, and he had already established himself as a bit of a Hollywood bad boy: scruffy, never married, with a reputation for indulgence. A native of Georgia, he’d been working in film and television since his teens, with a résumé that included as many misses as hits: from the vampire movie Blade and the Beatles biopic Backbeat to films by the likes of Michael Mann and John Waters to direct-to-disc and direct-to-cable pictures and a fair bit of work in videogame voice-overs, commercials, and forgotten TV series. During his nearly twenty years in Hollywood, he’d enjoyed wild days and nights at Chateau Marmont, celebrating his twenty-first birthday there and attending many functions, from Ford Modeling Agency galas to the premiere parties for his own films. He even lived in the hotel for a spell. As he recalled, “I had some money, and I didn’t have a place to live. So I said, ‘You know what? I’m checking into the Chateau.’ It got to the point where my business manager called and said, ‘Stephen, you need to take a movie or get a job, ’cause you’re out of money.’ And I said, ‘O.K., I guess I’m moving out.’ ”
Cast as Johnny Marco, he found himself living in the hotel once again—in suite 69, right upstairs from his character’s room, meaning that the floor plans of his real-life and fictional abodes were almost identical. He found the experience both nostalgic and strange. “It was kind of a trip to be back staying at the Chateau, not going back to my own home every night,” he said. “I experienced a lot of what Johnny would have. Every night I would wonder, ‘Do I go out to dinner, should I play piano, should I go downstairs, go out to a movie?’ Many times I would think, ‘Oh, I don’t want to see anybody; I’m going to order room service.’ ” He availed himself of his unique position to help Coppola shape some scenes: “I was able to give some gossip to Sofia in the mornings. She always wanted to know what happened that night after we shot, and I would give her some stories and sometimes she’d really like them and we’d include some stuff.” And he used one of the hotel’s traditional amenities—personalized stationery for guests—to stay immersed in his role. “I got my own Johnny Marco/Chateau Marmont stationery, since Johnny is in residence there,” he said. “So I started sending notes to people and I got mail at the hotel—as Johnny.”
Cinematographer Harris Savides took advantage of the relatively close quarters and tiny crew to use natural light whenever possible, giving a subdued and intimate feel to the palette of the film. The crew was kept deliberately small, explained Roman Coppola, the director’s brother and a producer on the film: “The vibe of Sofia’s movie was one of being really intimate, and so we didn’t want all that stuff, all the extra people and all the extra tools. If a guy had to ash his cigarette, he would just use the ashtray that was there, and if not he would just use the glass from the kitchen cupboard, and if not he’d just ash out the window. That was the attitude: Naturalistic, authentic to that place.”
Somewhere debuted at the Venice Film Festival in late summer 2010, and it took the Golden Lion, the top prize, amid some grumbling that Coppola had an advantage in that she had once dated the president of the festival jury, Quentin Tarantino (a fact that she said, only partly joking, felt to her more like a handicap than an asset). It was released in December of that year in the United States, where its moody, plain aesthetic was appreciated, if not overly enthusiastically, by critics, and its depiction of a father-daughter relationship was deemed notable, particularly for Elle Fanning’s performance as Cleo. But the audience was limited: The film grossed under $2 million domestically against its $7 million budget.
Those viewers who knew Chateau Marmont were no doubt amused by the inclusion of little details of life there, such as the old sinks and blue tiles in Marco’s kitchen, the push-button light switches in the walls, the casual nudity on the terraces, the hidden outdoor Ping-Pong table, the spontaneous parties and sexual encounters, the piano in the lobby, the room service that will fetch groceries.
There were coy nods to some of the hotel’s most infamous incidents: At one point, Marco boards an elevator to find himself standing with Benicio Del Toro, who, of course, was rumored to have hooked up with Scarlett Johansson in that very conveyance. (“What room you in?” Del Toro asks him. “Fifty-nine,” Marco answers. To which, after a pause, Del Toro responds, “I met Bono in 59.” “Cool,” Marco replies.) In another scene, Marco exits the garage in his sports car and encounters an accident out on Marmont Lane, where a car has crashed into a retaining wall just as Helmut Newton’s had in 2004, not long after Sofia Coppola herself had bumped into him in the lobby.
Perhaps most intimately, the film revealed just how fluid a relationship so many of its famous guests have with the Chateau. In the final moments, with Cleo off to summer camp and no work in sight, Marco decides to leave the hotel and fetches his car one last time from Ray Garcia, one of the hotel’s actual parking valets, playing himself. As the movie star prepares to light out for an unknown destination, Garcia asks him, “Shall we put your things in storage?” For Johnny Marco, as for so many of its residents, Chateau Marmont is a home that one never truly leaves, even after one has checked out and paid the bill.
5.
On July 4, 2012, Lindsay Lohan threw a little birthday-slash–Independence Day party at the Chateau, where she had been living on and off for several months. The revelers spent several hours in the garden restaurant ordering food and drinks, and several more hours in Lohan’s suite—number 33—calling room service to send up yet more goodies. Not content with the fireworks they could see from Lohan’s perch, they ordered up a pay-per-view movie and lit one of those candles with which posh hotels decorate rooms on a you-light-it-you-pay-for-it basis.
After the last guest departed, the bills for all that Lohan and company had consumed added up to $2,649.60. Throw in another $710.33 for rental of the suite (the corporate rate, by the way) and $75.00 for rental of a laptop from the hotel, and taxes and whatnot, and the actress’s total bill came to $3,563.67.
For one day.
That wasn’t a lot in Hollywood money. Lohan was staying at the Chateau while she was playing the role of Elizabeth Taylor in the TV movie Liz & Dick, for which she was being paid a minimum of $300,000. And as far as she was concerned, her hotel bill didn’t matter, because, as she believed, the producers of her film, or the network that would air it, would be paying it.
Except they wouldn’t be.
Lohan had a history at the Chateau. The garden restaurant was one of her favorite places to party, but that didn’t always mean happy times. In the spring of 2010, she got into a shouting match there with singer Avril Lavigne that ended when Lohan, rebuffed by security guards in her pleas to get Lavigne ejected, stormed out of the place. This time around, Lohan had arrived at the hotel in February, when she gave up a town house in the bohemian beachside community of Venice and moved into a suite that a friend had been renting but not living in. She only began running her own tab on June 5, living at first in a small suite and then a bigger one, and living in it fully.
Over the next fifty-seven days, during which time she wasn’t always actually at the hotel but merely renting a room there, she spent $3,000-plus each on room service, hotel restaurant bills, and minibar charges, in addition to more than $700 on cigarettes, $600-plus on laundry, nearly $400 on pay-per-view movies, and more than $100 on magazines and iPhone chargers from the hotel gift shop—plus, the room rate and the taxes and the parking charges and other miscellaneous fees.
In all, she accumulated a bill of $46,350.04 in less than two months, and she kept insisting to hotel management, which was understandably inquiring after payment, that she wasn’t responsible for it—which was true on many levels.
On July 31, general manager Philip Pavel presented Lohan with a sixteen-page itemized bill for her stay, along with a note basically ordering her to vacate the premises as of noon the next day. “I regret to inform you,” he wrote, “that we will no longer be able to extend any further credit for you to remain in the hotel.” The letter didn’t say so, but the word was that she was effectively banned from the premises—hotel, restaurant, bar: all of it.
It was only the latest misadventure of an actress who had only a few years earlier seemed destined for real superstardom. In 2005, on the strength of such hit films as The Parent Trap, Freaky Friday, and Mean Girls, she was one of the top stars in Hollywood, commanding a salary of $7.5 million for such films as Just My Luck, Georgia Rule, and Herbie Fully Loaded, all made before she turned twenty. She had hit records and a clothing line and was a massive presence in print, electronic, and digital media. She was also deeply troubled, having been raised in a turbulent household and been thrust into the limelight since she was barely twelve years old. In the years before her spree at Chateau Marmont, she had been cited twice for driving under the influence and for violating the terms of the probation stemming from those charges. She was in and out of rehab. The studio boss financing one of her highest-paying jobs wrote her an angry letter about how her lifestyle was detrimental to the production, calling her “discourteous, irresponsible, and unprofessional…a spoiled child [who has] alienated many of your co-workers and endangered the quality of this picture.” Like so many of her poor choices, the diatribe went public.
There was always hope she could rebound; her exorbitant birthday party at the Chateau was only her twenty-sixth. But even as she was celebrating it, she was under a particularly sordid cloud, being named as a person of interest by the Los Angeles County district attorney in the alleged theft of $100,000 in designer watches and sunglasses from the home of an acquaintance, a suspicion of which she was eventually cleared. And as her hotel bills showed, she was still living at a torrid pace and burning bridges in the process.
The news of Lohan’s staggering debt to Chateau Marmont surfaced about a month after she received her notice of eviction, when the entire hotel bill and Pavel’s letter were published on the TMZ gossip website. For Lohan, this was yet another awkward bit of negative publicity, but for Chateau Marmont it was a potential disaster. Fearful of scaring away other celebrity guests who might avoid the place if they thought that details of their activity at the hotel would emerge, the Chateau immediately issued an exculpatory statement: “Chateau Marmont places guest privacy as a core value and upholds this privacy with paramount importance. After investigation, it appears that a private correspondence between Chateau Marmont’s general manager and Miss Lohan was leaked by a member of her entourage. We are as horrified, disappointed and troubled by this occurrence as Miss Lohan surely is.” Lohan’s publicist was mum: “We are not commenting on anything to do with Chateau Marmont.” The Lifetime network, which would air Liz & Dick, washed its hands of the whole situation, offering no comment other than to tell journalists that it wasn’t responsible for Lohan’s bills.
From the hotel’s vantage, the situation called for a fine hand—and so, in stepped the owner himself. André Balazs was said to have relationships with both Lohan and her mother, Dina, and working with them, he managed to find a way to settle the actress’s debt. Before very long, she was seen at Chateau Marmont again as well as at other of Balazs’s hotel properties in the United States and London, though never for so long a stay again, and probably not throwing herself any parties. (In an amusing coda, Lohan would go on to sue the makers of the Grand Theft Auto video games because the fifth edition of their franchise included a character that she claimed was based on her, down to the fact that the fictitious movie star once had a scandalous stay at Chateau Marmont.)
Lohan was famous, and it was almost a positive thing for the hotel if word got around that there was some celebrity naughtiness afoot under its roof. But there were limits to that sort of notoriety as well. It was one thing for the staff to have to see after big stars who were clearly out of order; it was another if those same famous people had news of their activities leak out into the world. Management, especially under Balazs, was extremely strict in ensuring the security of its guests. “We’ve brought criminal charges against employees who have in any way violated the privacy of the guests,” he assured the press. Employment contracts included nondisclosure clauses limiting hirees from sharing stories or images of goings-on at the hotel, the restaurant, or Bar Marmont in either print or digital media, even after they no longer worked there. Guests, too, were monitored for any leaks of information, especially during the age of social media. The response to any trespass on this secrecy policy was usually swift and often severe.
In 2011, reality TV personality Jenn Hoffman found herself banned from the hotel for a year for sending out a single tweet that made mention of the eccentric behavior of a supermodel who was carrying on in plain view of everyone at the restaurant. When a journalist from Adweek inquired about the ban, Philip Pavel wrote back to explain that it wasn’t the use of social media per se that offended but the content of the tweet: “The Chateau Marmont has built its success on creating an environment where the privacy of our guests is paramount….[T]he decision to not allow certain guests in our hotel is based solely on this concept, and has nothing to do with whether one uses Twitter.”
In 2013, journalist A. J. Daulerio wrote a blog post about a bird invading his Chateau bungalow, and in the course of it he mentioned that he was planning to live blog his dinner at the restaurant that night. That afternoon, he received a letter from Pavel apologizing for the avian intrusion, explaining that the hotel had left a complimentary bottle of vintage wine in the bungalow to make up for the ruckus, and informing him, gently, that the hotel’s policies forbade his intended social media event. “Our hotel’s success has been about doing everything we can to protect the privacy of our guests,” the letter read, “so we ask that you please respect our rule forbidding unauthorized photography, video, or internet posts about our guests while in house. The best part about my job is that this hotel attracts clever and fun people like yourself—I would hate to have to ask you to leave as a result of this policy being crossed.”
The irony of this was that the hotel was forced to insist on strict measures to guard guests and patrons because Balazs had succeeded too well in turning it into a magnet for celebrities. As Jay McInerney once put it, “André tends to know the kind of people in New York and L.A. who make for a happening scene. Certainly any of the beautiful people who weren’t already staying at the Chateau have probably switched allegiance.” With the cachet of all those famous faces, with all those red-carpet parties and swaggy award-season suites, came a plague that had previously been unknown at the hotel—paparazzi—and then, in the age of the smart phone, the stolen-moment photo or video of a celebrity that could seep out into the world before the subject captured in it even knew it had been taken. For decades, Chateau Marmont was a sanctum sanctorum; in the twenty-first century, it was a place to be seen, to dress up for, to queue to get into, to share images of with absent chums to make them feel jealous they weren’t there. It had once been a hideaway; it had become center stage.
The question of privacy became extremely acute on Thursday, November 9, 2017, when the New York Times Style section featured a story about Balazs on its front page. This wasn’t the first time he had been seen and name-dropped prominently in that outlet; his 1985 wedding to Katie Ford was announced in its pages, and he’d been profiled and promoted in several front-page Style features during his rise as a hotelier and man-about-town. But in this instance he, his family, his publicist, his lawyer, and his business partners were likely not sharing the article with any glee or relish. In the rising tide of the Me Too and Time’s Up movements—sex abuse allegations against politicians, publishers, and, especially, show business figures, including the Times’s own exposé of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein—Balazs was accused of four acts of sexual assault, one against the actress Amanda Anka,*13 one against an unnamed Manhattan media executive, one against a former Chateau Marmont front desk employee identified only as “Sarah,” and one against another former Chateau employee, who was unnamed.
The act against Anka was the most specifically described. In November 2014, the actress was in London with her husband, actor Jason Bateman, to attend the premiere of his film Horrible Bosses 2. A party was held after the screening at Balazs’s Chiltern Firehouse hotel, and Balazs offered to give the guests a tour. He invited the partiers to climb a ladder to a spot that afforded a notable view of central London. Anka, who was wearing a short leather skirt, suggested that it would be risky to do so given the way she was attired. Balazs encouraged her and, as she climbed, according to several witnesses, “slipped a hand under her skirt and grabbed her crotch.” Anka immediately told all present what happened and a fracas ensued, with Bateman confronting Balazs so angrily that he spit a wad of chewing gum into the hotelier’s face. Bateman and Anka soon left the party, managing to put on happy—or at least blank—faces for the paparazzi outside the hotel. Actress Mary Elizabeth Ellis was among those on the scene, and she told the Times, “I witnessed behavior by André Balazs that was inappropriate and offensive.” A spokesman for Anka confirmed that “the account of André Balazs’s outrageous and vile behavior on that night in London is factual. His actions were dealt with at the time.”
The assault described by “Sarah” evinced a similar behavior: a quick, surprise move on an unsuspecting woman in a semipublic setting. In 1991, according to the Times, Balazs was in Los Angeles to oversee work at Chateau Marmont and asked her out to dinner. After a quick meal, they went to a mud-wrestling club where, she said, “he grabbed her arm, pinned her against a wall and covered her mouth with his mouth. He put his hand down the front of her pants and pushed his fingers in her vagina.” Her story was supported by a roommate with whom she shared it at the time. The Manhattan PR executive told yet another story of an attack with a similar modus operandi: A short while after being greeted by him at a New York Fashion Week party in 2013, the woman was walking to the bathroom when she “felt a presence behind her. She said she felt a hand reach between her legs from behind and grab her crotch….She turned and saw Mr. Balazs.” Again, her account was corroborated to the Times by a friend whom she told about the incident on the day it happened. Only one of the four stories in the article concerned a woman who escaped Balazs’s touch, a former Chateau Marmont employee who said that her boss one time pinned her against an elevator wall and tried to kiss her but that she evaded him.
The Times reached out to Balazs and his publicist Pierre Rougier to no avail. But the revelations were damaging. The story was repeated in the pages and on the websites of newspapers and magazines in New York, London, and Los Angeles, as well as in Hollywood trade publications, and it spread throughout social media. From Miami, a reporter put out a query asking people to contact him if they had similar stories about Balazs’s behavior in that city, and the model and actress Carolina Parsons claimed publicly that Balazs had grabbed her “by the waist very tight” when she was an eighteen-year-old guest of the hotelier and his then wife at a ballet performance. Calls started for boycotts of the properties that Balazs still owned, including Chateau Marmont, and for several days every innocuous story about some innocuous red-carpet event or celebrity sighting at the hotel made mention of the allegations against its owner.
It was a very delicate moment for Balazs and his empire. Chateau Marmont might not have been the largest or even the most profitable of his properties, but it was universally recognized as the most important. “He needs that hotel,” said one observer. “Not because of the income but because of the cachet. It allows him to do good hotels elsewhere.”
For a while, it seemed as though the storm would pass; official denials were issued, no further stories emerged, and Balazs was invisible to the press. And then, in January 2018, the hotel was explicitly cited in another Times story about sexual assault, this time involving the celebrated fashion photographer Mario Testino, one of the many famous photographers who regularly used Chateau Marmont as a setting for shoots or for socializing with clients and models. In a carefully documented story, the Times reported that Testino forced himself on many of the young men whom he photographed in ad campaigns for Gucci, Vogue, and other world-renowned brands and media outlets. “If you wanted to work with Mario,” said the former model Jason Fedele, “you needed to do a nude shoot at the Chateau Marmont. All the agents knew that this was the thing to excel or advance your career.” Fedele went on to describe Testino’s clumsy efforts to grope him or pull off his towel during a photo session, and his story matched those of other models and assistants who claimed that Testino behaved in a similarly predatory manner with them in hotel rooms. The charges—a rarer case of sexual assault against men to surface during the Me Too movement—led to Vogue and other magazines published by Condé Nast announcing they would no longer be commissioning work from Testino or photographer Bruce Weber, whose predatory behavior was also cited at length in the Times article.
In March 2017, after more than twenty swanky, celebrity-kissed years, Bar Marmont shut its doors, a sign of yet another turn of the page in the history of the Sunset Strip. Two years earlier, the House of Blues had closed, bulldozed to make way for a high-rise hotel, condos, and shopping space. Other Strip lots were similarly being bought up and transformed, with tall, opulent, pricey new buildings planned for their locations. The renaissance of the street, heralded in no small part by André Balazs’s purchase and rejuvenation of Chateau Marmont, was entering a big-buildings, big-money, big-ballyhoo phase notable even among the most gilded eras of the Strip’s brazen history.
Across Sunset Boulevard from the Chateau, where the Garden of Allah once stood, developers were proposing a five-building, 330,000-square-foot complex designed by architect Frank Gehry in his signature wavy-metal style that would include approximately 250 units of housing and 60,000 square feet of retail space. In April 2017, their plans were put on hold, however, for the most ironic of reasons: The previous year, the Lytton Savings building, which stood on the grounds that had once housed the Garden of Allah, was declared a Historic-Cultural Monument by the Los Angeles Office of Historic Resources. A building that had itself wiped away a significant slice of Hollywood history without so much as a by-your-leave was declared a work of art, “constructed in a distinctive Mid-Century Modern style that melds Googie and New Formalist stylistic influences.” The builders would have to find a way to incorporate the Lytton building into their design or reconfigure the project altogether. A year later, the decree preserving the bank was reversed by courts, and demolition was once again likely.
Balazs, for his part, had no intention of razing Bar Marmont. Plans were made to introduce a new food-and-drink concept in the building it occupied.*14 In the meantime it continued to serve as a party space for occasional special events. And, as the use of its garage for an Oscar after party hosted by Beyoncé and Jay-Z in 2018 showed, there was no lack of interest, among the highest-flying names in showbiz, in gathering in and around Chateau Marmont. The Strip might continue to evolve, to the sound of bulldozers, pile drivers, and cement mixers, but the Chateau would stay, more than ever, an oasis of tradition, gentility, and calm.
6.
It was ironic. When Fred Horowitz first drove out of Los Angeles proper to the wilderness of West Hollywood, there was virtually nothing standing between him and the Beverly Hills city line, where the resumption of the paved road was declared with the city’s familiar coat of arms, a brown-and-gold shield. Staking an audacious claim to the eastern end of the dirt road connecting the two cities, he saw a day when the rutted thoroughfare would be paved, populated, maybe even celebrated. He had envisioned his castle, his Xanadu, as if in a dream, and unlike Kublai Khan and Charles Foster Kane he actually saw it through to completion, even if he didn’t, finally, oversee its fullest fruition.
It was left to his successors Albert Smith and Erwin Brettauer to convert the building into its optimal function—as a hotel—and to deck it out with bungalows, a swimming pool, and a shield of its own: a red, blue, and yellow neon sign modestly identifying it as a hotel. During their thirty-plus combined years of ownership, the Chateau took on the identity it maintains today: a haven for celebrities, a lockbox of secrets, a place where people whose lives are lived outside the ordinary lines of propriety or the dominant culture can be safe, welcome, and, yes, pampered.
A series of indifferent owners threatened that status; the Chateau became “funky” if not a downright dive. But Ray Sarlot and Karl Kantarjian rescued it from potential wreckage, and Sarlot, especially, kept it vital with the builder’s equivalent of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. And then André Balazs came in, polishing what Sarlot had salvaged and sprinkling it so thoroughly with stardust that not even an appalling scandal involving its owner could threaten its station in the Hollywood firmament.
At age ninety, the Chateau is more youthful, polished, famous, and chic than it has ever been. It has credibly been cast by its current keepers into a repository of a past that didn’t seem so grand when it was happening but has taken on the sheen and glow of gold through the remove of time. And it presides over the Sunset Strip with a stateliness that has always seemed slightly incongruous and now, in the age of social media and instantly self-destructing cultural moments, seems positively medieval.
But then, that was what Fred Horowitz was hoping to build: a castle, a fortress, a keep, a place that would at once suggest an enduring history while looking forward to a buzzing future that he couldn’t have imagined.
In an onion field on a dirt road, he envisioned something grand and permanent and alluring—and, though he might not have seen it that way, completely incongruous.
And he built it, and it all happened more or less as he imagined, not under his aegis, not right away, not without hiccups and diversions, but ultimately and surely.
In its way, Chateau Marmont has been essential and inevitable, its impact on its neighborhood and the business of show inestimable, its legend both unlikely and undeniable.
You can’t fully tell the history of Hollywood movies or the Sunset Strip without making reference to it; it sits inside a pair of stories in which, technically, as an inanimate edifice of concrete, steel, wood, and glass, it has taken no part. Stately, steady, solid, redoubtable, it presides over its setting—literal and figurative—with an air of patient boredom. All the sensations that have transpired within and without it, all the zealots and visionaries and schemers and charlatans who’ve inhabited it, all the deals—of all sorts—that have been sparked or completed or scuttled within its confines: It’s a saga of weight and drama and impact befitting an entity of far longer and more storied history.
Chateau Marmont isn’t as old as Hollywood or as large or as influential. It doesn’t define the Sunset Strip or symbolize it or embody its greatest legends. But it is intrinsic to the stories of both those institutions.
It is the castle that Hollywood and the Sunset Strip have always needed, a place outside time, indifferent, dependable, immutable, permanent, a man-made thing that couldn’t be more ordinary and, at the same time, a thing of dreams and ambitions and aspirations that couldn’t possibly be real, providing a grounding materiality to a business and a street that often seem apt to waft off into the ether out of sheer weightlessness and evanescence. It anchors Hollywood, figuratively, just as it anchors the Strip, literally, and it gives visible shape and tactile permanence to both.
It hasn’t always been there, the castle on the Strip, and yet it has.