THE SUNSET STRIP: The very name hints of color, ease, spectacle, titillation, destiny, speed, a narrow specificity, a transition, an in-between, a climax, a rending, the end.
For more than eighty years, the phrase “Sunset Strip” has been a global shorthand for a certain blend of decadence, fashion, music, sex, secrecy, and freedom. The swank supper clubs of the thirties and forties; the coffeehouses and drive-ins of the fifties; the overheated discotheques of the sixties; the hedonistic VIP rooms of the eighties, nineties, and first two decades of the twenty-first century: Our popular ideals of courtship, indulgence, glamour, and cool have been informed, in no small part, by the way people have comported themselves in the hotels, nightspots, eateries, boutiques, and showbiz offices lining those famed not-quite-two sinuous miles of West Hollywood.
At times, the Strip has been the bull’s-eye dead center of the pop world; at others, it’s been a minor but unignorable element of the cultural conversation. And always, just when it seems to have fallen off the map altogether, when it has been declared dead and abandoned for newer, shinier locales, some novelty emerges—folk rock, or hair metal, or a hot restaurant, or a revitalized hotel, or a tabloid-fueling tragedy—and the Sunset Strip is back on everyone’s radar.
But before it was the center of the world, it seemed more like the end of it.
You didn’t always need a satellite to see the edges of Los Angeles. In the mid-twenties, you could get in a car downtown and within half an hour find yourself at a spot where the paved road ended and bridle trails began.
Such a place was the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and the road that led north into Laurel Canyon. At that corner, Los Angeles’s bus and trolley lines made their last stops before turning back toward town. To the west, a cow path led through farmland—onion fields, poinsettia farms, and avocado groves—to the suburban city of Beverly Hills, some two miles farther along on the way to the sea.
At the time, L.A. was beginning the upsurge that would eventually make it a world-class metropolis. Between 1920 and 1930, the city would more than double in population; new houses were being built so rapidly that as many as seventy-five ships a day from Oregon and Washington arrived in port with loads of lumber for home building. But looking past where Sunset Boulevard ended, there was little sign of a land rush.
The road between Los Angeles and Beverly Hills was unimproved because it belonged to neither city. It lay in an unincorporated chunk of Los Angeles County known originally as Sherman or Shermantown, named for the railroad baron General Moses Sherman, who had helped create the Los Angeles trolley car system and built a massive rail yard outside the city limits. In the previous year, local business interests had christened their little patch “West Hollywood,” hoping to accrue some of the stardust associated with the name of the Los Angeles neighborhood nearest to them, which had become world famous as the home of the movies.*1
In the fall of 1926, Fred Horowitz, a downtown Los Angeles lawyer who had begun to speculate in property and construction, came to visit a hillside west of the Laurel Canyon road. Eastward lay the burgeoning movie town, Hollywood, where the twelve-story Roosevelt Hotel, still under construction, stood out boldly, and, beyond that, the skyline of downtown L.A., where a majestic new thirty-two-floor city hall was rising. To the west were Beverly Hills and Westwood, where a new campus for the University of California was being built, and beyond that the blue surge of the Pacific and, like dark clouds on its surface, the Channel Islands. To the south spread the chessboard of small communities that would eventually make up greater Los Angeles: Culver City, Venice, Inglewood, Crenshaw, Compton, dotted with cottages, businesses, and farms, crisscrossed by Wilshire, Olympic, Beverly, Pico, and Santa Monica Boulevards. It was, as Horowitz had hoped, a stupendous panorama.
And visible only to him was a castle, a French château of classic stature, elegance, and nobility, a monumental edifice designed to import some savor of the very old world into this very, very new one. He planned to build the most luxurious apartment house in all of Southern California on the spot where he stood: in a pitch of scrub alongside an unpaved road.
The Sunset Boulevard upon which Horowitz gazed wasn’t entirely bare. There were a few farmhouses, not on the road, but visible from it, some of which had been occupied by the same families for nearly seventy years. Just below him stood a general store that sold groceries and gasoline and whatnot. A bit west, an enterprising family had recently opened a clutch of commercial buildings they were calling, with great optimism, Sunset Plaza; a pair of restaurants, the Russian Eagle and La Boheme, had opened there, and movie stars had started to pop in for meals. Another group of investors were building the Hacienda Arms, an imposing five-story apartment building with a Mediterranean facade. And there were—again, set back from the road—a handful of mansions built by members of the nouveau riche movie crowd, which had practically minted its own money in the past few years and had splashed it on absurdly oversized and architecturally fanciful homes.
But none of those would remotely rival what Horowitz had in mind. Horowitz was scouting locations for an audacious folly he had conceived while traveling in the Loire valley of France. There he came upon the Château d’Amboise, a Gothic castle that had dominated the landscape in ever-grander form dating back to when a stronghold was first built on the site in the eleventh century. The massive building had significant claims to history: Starting in the fifteenth century, it was one of the favored homes of the kings of France, including Charles VIII, who died there after hitting his head on a door lintel; Henry II, who, along with his wife, Catherine de’ Medici, raised his family on the grounds, including his ward, Mary Stuart of Scotland; and Francis I, who invited the great artists and architects of his time to live and work there, including Leonardo da Vinci, who died during his stay and was buried in a chapel on the château grounds.
Horowitz was less taken with the history of the château than with the imposing spectacle of it: a formidable stone fortress capped with conical towers perched on a bluff overlooking the river Loire. He had a mind to build a fortress of his own, and he envisioned it as inhabiting its own commanding vista, not of the Loire and the great vineyards and orchards that lined it, but of the burgeoning communities of Los Angeles. Like the Château d’Amboise, it would be built of pale stone, slate-gray gables, balconies, Gothic archways, and turrets. It would be solid—earthquake proof, even. And it would be not a castle but a luxury apartment building, and—at seven stories high—the tallest and most impressive edifice for miles and perhaps, given its elevated setting, in the whole area.
Los Angeles in the mid- to late twenties was a kind of haven for such audacious conceits. Not far from where Horowitz envisioned his demi-castle, other landmark apartment houses stood or were being planned along French lines, such as the La Fontaine (built in 1928), the Granville Towers (1930), and the Voltaire (1930), or with Spanish-Mexican influences, such as the Andalusia (1926), the Villa Carlotta (1926), and the El Mirador (1929), or in the Italianate style, such as the Villa d’Este (1927). Just as Hollywood had made a specialty of imitating the whole world in its film studios, so the community around it seemed eager to imitate the whole world’s architecture in its homes and offices, generally with no expense or gaucherie spared. The city was like a movie set and its architects and builders production designers.
But even in an environment where excess was a minimal standard, Horowitz’s plan seemed, to put it politely, daft. A man who had been gaining a reputation as a fierce defense attorney and was said to have eyes on public office, he had never built or even managed an apartment house, much less a grand tower like the one he had in mind. What’s more, he didn’t have enough money for both the land and the construction project. And the site he had chosen was absurdly remote and desolate.
Actually, that latter might well have been a selling point. Land in undeveloped locations was generally cheaper than that in the heart of a bustling metropolis after all. Additionally, by crossing the line out of Los Angeles into West Hollywood, which hadn’t yet been incorporated as a city, Horowitz was standing in a portion of Los Angeles County that wasn’t subject to municipal taxes or building codes or other forms of regulation. If he were to build on the land that he was examining that day, he could legitimately claim his apartment house was within walking distance of the trolley line—not to mention a drive of approximately equal duration to downtown, the ocean, the San Fernando Valley, and the movie studios of Hollywood and the surrounding areas. “Fifteen minutes to everywhere,” as he liked to say. It might have been along a stretch of dirt road and the edge of the city, but it was a spot that he believed would be the center of the region: a canny discovery.
The parcel of land that Horowitz was scouting was part of a large tract owned by Florence E. Dean, a San Francisco heiress who would, if he proceeded, be a partner with him in the building, with the land providing her share of the stake. Horowitz had identified another investing angel, Inez Fredericks of San Francisco and New York, a socialite who was considering making a cash investment in the project. A third party to Horowitz’s scheme, his law partner and former law school classmate Mabel Walker Willebrandt, was another matter: Of them all, she was the least convinced that Horowitz had the savvy to build and manage an apartment house as a viable business.
Willebrandt was a formidable and pioneering figure in regional and national legal circles. She had attended law school at the University of Southern California after working for several years as an elementary school teacher and principal. After serving without pay as the first public defender of women in Los Angeles, she was named assistant attorney general of the United States by President Warren Harding and given the responsibility of enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment, the law against the sale and consumption of alcohol—a task she undertook with such zeal and success that she became known, not with much fondness, as “Deborah of the Drys” and “Prohibition Portia.” In the mid-twenties, she was the highest-ranking woman in the federal government, and it was said that during her nearly eight years in her post she argued more cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court than any attorney except the solicitor general. After leaving government, she had considered a career in politics but was discouraged when, while campaigning for Herbert Hoover in the 1928 presidential race, her 1924 divorce became a talking point against her. When Horowitz approached her to consider investment in his apartment building project, Willebrandt was one of the best-known women in American life.
Horowitz didn’t have Willebrandt’s renown, but he must have shared some of her persuasive ability, because once he determined that the site on Sunset Boulevard was suited to the building he envisioned, he managed to get her, along with Dean and Fredericks, to sign contracts and fund the scheme. In total, he would have $350,000 as a construction budget.*2 In early 1927, armed with photos of the Château d’Amboise, which he hoped to imitate down to the fanciful masonry ornamentation, he enlisted another close ally, the architect Arnold A. Weitzman—who happened to be his brother-in-law—to draw up plans.
Weitzman dutifully gave shape to Horowitz’s dream: an L-shaped edifice with a turreted tower rising at the point where its two wings met; steeply pitched slate roofs; as many balconies and outdoor terraces as possible so as to maximize the number of so-called penthouses and to take advantage of those remarkable vistas; diversity in the floor plan of each of the forty-three apartments; an underground garage with room for forty-six cars; an outdoor garden with a fountain; a modest lobby, lounge, and communal kitchen for tenants who wished to entertain guests in grander style than their apartments might accommodate. The building would have a modern ventilation system that would help diffuse smoke and odors from residents’ kitchens; the bathrooms would feature high-grade tiling; the living rooms would be decorated with cornices and steel sashes; the decoration throughout, echoing the Gothic theme of the exterior, would feature wrought iron, mosaics, hand-painted murals, and stained glass. And the whole thing would be built of reinforced steel and concrete, meaning not only that it would be earthquake proof but that there would be excellent soundproofing between the units.
Best known for the elegant Beth Israel synagogue in downtown Los Angeles, Weitzman didn’t have a lot of experience in tall buildings like the one Horowitz had in mind. While he was at work on the West Hollywood project, he was working on a twelve-story office tower, his first, the Trades Building, also downtown and also owned, in part, by Horowitz. After Weitzman had rendered some of his designs for the apartment building, a second architect was called in: William Douglas Lee (sometimes known as W. Douglas Lee or W. D. Lee), who had built several high-rises of ten and more stories in the previous decade, including the impressive El Royale apartment building in Hancock Park. Lee would not only help perfect Weitzman’s plans; he would personally design the concrete shell of the building, and he would supervise construction.*3 By February 1928, Horowitz was happy with the plans, and Los Angeles County issued all the requisite building permits the following month.*4 In April, ground was broken.
Horowitz might have appeared to be setting himself up for a new life as a builder of castles and towers, but he hadn’t forsaken his legal career. He was on a path to becoming a federal prosecutor and a special assistant attorney general. And his interest in the building game seemed to focus at least as much on show as on substance. Witness his request for a very specific piece of ornamentation on the exterior of the building: On the southern side of the central tower, the side facing Sunset Boulevard, he had Weitzman add a large masonry shield bearing a gigantic letter H in a Gothic font. It had nothing to do with the name of the building; the H stood, unironically, for “Horowitz.”
By January 1929, the building was mostly completed, and a name for it had been selected. Horowitz had always known that in honor of the castle that inspired it, his building would be called Chateau Something. But none of the ideas he initially entertained seemed to harmonize with that high-toned word. Chateau Hollywood, one of the candidates, sounded oxymoronic; the town and its principal business were anything but noble after all. Another choice, Chateau Sunset, seemed to grant excessively lofty status to the unpaved thoroughfare below. Horowitz finally decided to name the building for the street on which, at least nominally, it stood, Marmont Lane.*5 It even sounded somewhat French: Chateau Marmont.
In truth, the curved uphill path that Horowitz had chosen as the site for his building had been named for an Englishman—Percy Marmont, one of the great stars of Hollywood silent cinema, a British stage actor who appeared as leading man in dozens of Hollywood films between 1916 and 1928, opposite the likes of Clara Bow and Ethel Barrymore, before returning to England and becoming a prominent presence on the stage and a favorite on-screen performer of the young director Alfred Hitchcock. For obscure reasons, the tiny dirt road that curled up from Sunset Boulevard into an onion field was christened for the star, providing an ironically suitable connection to the movies for the building that would put it on the map.*6
In January 1929, Chateau Marmont was in its final stages of construction, and the maiden tenants hadn’t yet moved in, when it hosted its first gala party. Surprisingly, it was Mabel Walker Willebrandt and not Fred Horowitz who served as host. On January 8, Willebrandt welcomed more than three hundred guests to a fete celebrating the achievement of May D. Lahey, who just a few weeks earlier was appointed a judge of the Municipal Court of Los Angeles, making her the second woman to sit on the county bench. “Never before in the history of women’s public activities has a social affair of so much significance been given as the one today when a woman assistant United States Attorney General will give a function in honor of a woman municipal judge,” said the Los Angeles Times. Among the guests Willebrandt entertained that afternoon were the wives of Louis B. Mayer and Arnold Weitzman, as well as, according to society columnist Alma Whitaker, “gentlemen judges and their wives, women lawyers galore, college nabobs, club women, et al.” Throughout the course of the evening, Whitaker reported, “a stiff-backed flunky held the card tray at the door and looked like a frozen statue for four hours.” Party guests were given tours of the not-quite-finished building, meaning that Whitaker would go down as the first person to describe in print the layout and atmosphere of Chateau Marmont: “I know it was designed by a male architect—it is so stingy with the closets. But otherwise it is a most imposing structure.”
On February 1, three weeks after that party, Chateau Marmont opened to the public. Horowitz and his partners were on hand to greet visitors and point out the finer aspects of the grand new building. And it really was grand: the tallest structure for several miles, seeming even more so because of the perch on which it sat. With its imposing form and dominating location, it truly did appear to be a castle.
On the outside, anyhow.
Inside, though there were fine touches throughout, Chateau Marmont presented a somewhat less impressive face. For one thing, there was its eccentricity. By insisting that the layout of the apartments not be uniform, Horowitz had given his architects a task that might have been beyond them. True, there was charm to the singularity of each unit, but that charm came at the price of coherence. “The place had more doors than the fun house at Ocean Park pier,” said an early resident, not necessarily intending praise. “There were rooms, cubbyholes, and little niches at almost every turn.” Someday, the people for whom the Chateau’s curious form seemed an asset and not a liability would embrace such quirks, but at first blush the queerness of the architecture turned away some potential renters.
And then there was the matter of the furnishings: Whatever sum Horowitz and his partners had poured into the construction, landscaping, and decoration of their fabulous new building, they operated on a very slender margin when it came to actually filling the units with furniture. No expense had been spared in the design, the moldings, the roof, the ornamentation, and so on. But the builders found themselves strapped when it came to beds, chairs, sofas, lamps, and such. They contracted with a wholesale furniture outfit in the Midwest and equipped their costly flats with inexpensive, serviceable, deflatingly drab pieces, the exceptions being the rugs that graced the floors of some of the more expensive apartments—which were actually taken from the homes of Horowitz and his co-investor Inez Fredericks.
The nondescript furniture made for a discordant note, especially considering the rental prices at Chateau Marmont. The largest penthouses—clocking in at as much as thirty-eight hundred square feet and with truly spectacular views—rented for $750 per month.*7 At that rate very few people at all could afford to live there, and fewer of those would want to live in a spot that combined such high rents with cheap furniture and an unimproved road outside the front door.
Seeking tenants, Horowitz and company put a discreet display ad in the Los Angeles Times announcing that the building was officially ready for habitation:
NOW OPEN
CHATEAU MARMONT
8221 SUNSET BOULEVARD
(CORNER MARMONT)
INSPECTION INVITED
1 to 6 room furnished apartments including complete
24-hour service. Garage in basement. Large rooms
and private balconies. Distinctly furnished and
decorated. View of Mt. Baldy, Catalina Island and
the lights of the city from private balconies and patios.
Finest steel and concrete construction (class AA).
Fire and earthquake proof.
Management
Mrs. Blanche E. Bryson
Crestview 3171
That ad, or slight variations on it emphasizing the availability of the penthouses, would run for months. Chateau Marmont might have instantly become a physical landmark of Sunset Boulevard—the westernmost point of civilization before the bridle path to Beverly Hills began—but it would take some time for it to accrue cachet as an address.
Help came within a few weeks in the form of a puff piece in the popular newsweekly Saturday Night, which called it “Los Angeles’s newest, finest, and most exclusive apartment house.” Such an endorsement spurred word of mouth, which, coupled with the undeniable qualities of the building and its proximity to Hollywood and Beverly Hills, gave the building a little traction.
The first residents were largely people from Southern California high society—folks whose tea parties, bridge games, bon voyage suppers, and evenings dedicated to sharing tales of recent travels filled the spaces in newspapers dedicated to what was then considered women’s news. It was a highfalutin, exclusive crowd, and for a while, even with some of the apartments having never been let, prospective tenants needed to provide references to be considered for leases. It was slow going, but Horowitz’s unlikely scheme looked to be on a path toward profitability.
And then came October and the collapse of the stock market that had buoyed so many speculative projects just like Chateau Marmont. Horowitz and company had built and opened a luxury apartment house less than a year before the onset of the worst economic crisis in generations, and their investment looked utterly lost. Tenants whose fortunes had been gutted by the crash began to break their leases and move out; apartments that had yet to be leased at all seemed doomed to stay empty; and the shining success that looked possible in the summer appeared to fade and die as autumn turned to winter and the Great Depression took hold. The smell of fresh paint had barely left the corridors, and the very solvency of the building was legitimately in question.
Even before the crash, there were signs that Chateau Marmont was ill-omened. While many of those big, pricey penthouses Horowitz insisted on building were vacant, at least one was occupied right from the start, by Hollywood demi-royalty of the moment: director George W. Hill and his wife, famed journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and film director Frances Marion. The two had met in the late twenties, when he was married and she was a recent widow, her third husband, actor Fred Thomson, having died from an infection after sustaining a leg injury. Marion was immensely talented and respected—she would become the first person to win two Academy Awards for screenwriting—and had directed three films during the silent era, a truly rare achievement for a woman in the Hollywood of the time. Hill, for his part, was among the most accomplished and commercially successful directors of his age and was, unusually, associated with a particular visual style, favoring deep shadows and intricate details. The couple collaborated on several films, including the 1930 prison drama The Big House (which won Marion the first of her Oscars). They married at the end of 1929 and immediately took up residence in one of the upper-floor units at Chateau Marmont, where they continued their professional alliance with 1930’s Min and Bill, a comic melodrama that won a Best Actress Oscar for its star, Marie Dressler.
It seemed a golden formula for both life and art, but it wasn’t long-lived. After a short stay at Chateau Marmont, the couple moved to an oceanfront home in Venice, where Hill fell prey to a latent alcoholism that he had managed to keep hidden from Marion during their working partnership and romantic courtship. In 1931, she left him and filed for divorce. Soon after, he was severely injured in a car accident when he swerved to avoid hitting some kids who ran into the street. He tried to recover through work, but his progress was hampered by his drinking; he literally staggered into production meetings and was unable to contribute a thing, until his bosses at MGM simply pulled him out of action, scuttling an adaptation of Pearl Buck’s Good Earth that he had gone to China to scout locations for. In August 1934, he attended funeral rites for Marie Dressler. It was his last public appearance. A week or so later, alone in that Venice Beach house, with neither work nor a wife to console him, he had a few drinks, got into bed with a pistol, fired a test shot into the ceiling, and then took his own life with a bullet to the brain.
Mabel Willebrandt always thought that Fred Horowitz was reaching beyond his grasp by building a luxury apartment tower on an unpaved road in an unincorporated community of Los Angeles County. But she had agreed to invest in the project that so captivated the imagination of her USC law classmate and legal partner and to support his ongoing effort to make a profit of the thing—up to a point.
After the calamitous crash of the stock market and the economic depression that subsequently gripped the nation, Willebrandt felt it was time to reckon with the financial drain that Chateau Marmont had become. In 1930, barely a year after the building had opened to tenants, she demanded that Horowitz face the reality of the situation and put the building up for sale. He was loath to give up so quickly, and the two negotiated a compromise: They would give the thing another year before declaring it a failure, and Horowitz would cede oversight of day-to-day operation of the building.
Luckily, the financial collapse had made some excellent candidates for such a role available. Ben Weingart was a land speculator and hotelier who had owned and operated more than a hundred properties under the umbrella of his Consolidated Hotels Inc., a business he had started soon after the end of World War I with a loan of $350.*8 He, too, was reeling from the effects of the stock market collapse, but he had found a way to turn the collective misfortune of the moment into an opportunity: He had converted his mid-range and low-rent hotels into rooming houses to create lodging for people who’d lost their homes or who had come to California to work when every chance to earn a nickel back home had dried up. That formula was proving moderately successful, and Weingart realized that his facility at running multi-unit buildings was the seed of a new revenue source: property management. Consolidated began to hire itself out as an operator of other people’s buildings just at a time when Horowitz and his partners were looking for a seasoned hand to run Chateau Marmont. A deal was quickly struck.
Weingart introduced a few changes to the operation of the place. For one, he removed the original manager, Blanche Bryson, and replaced her with Emma Lovell, who, it soon became clear, was on hand for more than just her ability to help residents with any problems or questions they might have. Among other things, Weingart was a ladies’ man, and when he would visit Chateau Marmont, as he was wont to do two or three times a week, he and Lovell would repair to her first-floor apartment for hours-long meetings that only ended around supper time, when he would head home to his wife and children, making him the first notable to use the Chateau as the sort of private playground it would become famous for being.
But even as he was able to juggle his personal dealings, Weingart could only do so much with the apartments that Horowitz was paying him to manage. He was known for having a meticulous eye and for being extremely careful with money, and he applied his skills fully to the task of running the building. For the better part of a year, he cut costs; staff was trimmed by about half, repairs were only performed when essential, and whole apartments were sealed off, the furnishings covered by bedsheets as if the occupants had gone away on extended vacations when, in fact, the units had never been rented at all.
After a year, though, he hadn’t pulled off a miracle. Chateau Marmont was still only partly occupied, and Fred Horowitz’s partners called in their markers: They wanted out of the apartment house business, and Horowitz had to either buy them out of their stakes or join them in selling the building. Reluctantly, a little more than two years after welcoming the first prospective tenants to the site, he agreed to put the place on the market. It gave rise to the inevitable question: Who was going to buy such an expensive item in such a dodgy economy? The obvious first choice would have been Ben Weingart, the property manager, but his finances had suffered just as badly as everyone else’s in the crash, and he had neither the means nor, perhaps, the appetite to acquire a pricey property at such a parlous moment. But before long, a white knight stepped in.