1.
In October 1932, Los Angeles newspapers carried accounts of the sale of Chateau Marmont for $750,000 cash*1 to Albert E. Smith, one of the men who had built from scratch the business that would help define Southern California for the world.
Smith was born in England in 1875 and moved with his family to New York as a child. He had a yen to be a stage performer, and following that dream in his teens, he was exposed to the new technology of motion pictures being created by Thomas Edison and his team of technicians in New Jersey. Being mechanically minded himself, Smith was drawn toward the machinery of moviemaking, and along with a partner, J. Stuart Blackton, another English expat, he acquired an Edison projector in 1897. Later that year, having figured out how to turn the projector into a camera, Smith began shooting motion pictures of his own, partnering with Blackton in a company they called Vitagraph.
These were the wildcatting days of cinema, and Smith and Blackton filmed everything they could in the hopes of finding the most appealing and lucrative content for the fledgling medium. They shot prizefights; they went to South Africa to film images of the Second Boer War; they were on hand at San Juan Hill when Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders made their famous charge up it; and they were in Buffalo when President William McKinley was assassinated (Smith claimed that they had captured footage of the murder itself but that the film was lost to chemical deterioration). They made what was believed to be the first-ever stop-motion animated film (The Humpty Dumpty Circus, 1897) and some of the earliest-ever Westerns—shot, oddly enough, in rural areas of southern New York state.
Throughout all this activity, Vitagraph was under constant threat of legal action by Edison, who sought to impose strict copyright protection over his equipment and even over the very notion of filming moving pictures. In 1910, in part to avoid Edison’s attempts to enforce his patents, Smith and Blackton moved their company to Southern California, which offered harbor from Edison’s lawyers as well as abundant sunshine in an era when all movies—even those set indoors—were shot outside using natural light. They first set up their studio in Santa Monica, only to abandon it because of the morning fogs that rolled in off the Pacific; the studio was housed permanently in Hollywood by 1911.
In the coming decade-plus, Vitagraph was one of the most successful movie companies in the world, producing comedies, biblical epics, literary adaptations, Westerns (including the first fictional film shot in the Grand Canyon), and action movies (including the first aviation film, The Military Air-Scout). The company introduced one of the very first movie stars whose name was known by the public (Florence Turner, a.k.a. the Vitagraph Girl) and, arguably, the first animal star, Jean (a female collie known as the Vitagraph Dog). Vitagraph helped launch the screen careers of the likes of Helen Hayes, Norma Talmadge, Rudolph Valentino, and Moe Howard (later of the Three Stooges). It even made several features starring that redoubtable leading man Percy Marmont.
In 1925, still fighting for the right to shoot and distribute films without interference from Edison and fending off the feverish competition of an increasing number of rival studios, Smith and Blackton gave up, selling Vitagraph and its New York and Hollywood studios to Warner Bros. for approximately $735,000.*2 Smith set about creating a new life for himself, spending money on yachts and yacht racing and investing in land, apartment houses, and other properties around Southern California. Among other splurges, he bought a massive tract of land outside Rancho Santa Fe, north of San Diego, and he purchased and renovated a forty-eight-unit apartment building in Hollywood. On the heels of that success, he took a flier and bought Chateau Marmont.*3
Newspaper accounts of the transaction ranged from routine—“New Owners in Possession of Multiple Unit”—to gobsmacked: “Did anyone say ‘Depression’?” It was reported that Smith’s purchase included the parcel of land on which the building sat, partly accounting for a price that was more than double the construction budget for the building, which, after all, wasn’t yet three years old and was being sold because the owners were having trouble filling it.
That sizable sum didn’t include the improvements and alterations that Smith envisioned. For one thing, he was going to transition Chateau Marmont from a residential building into a hotel. Whereas Fred Horowitz had envisioned the property as a set of luxury apartments designed for people in Southern California society, including the burgeoning movie business, Smith had his eyes on a transient (but well-heeled) population of travelers to Los Angeles, some of whom, he anticipated, would want long-term but still-temporary housing as they made footfall in a place that he believed they would fall in love with and come to call home. In particular, he told the Los Angeles Times a few months after his purchase, he foresaw a swell in permanent migrants to the area after the 1932 Summer Olympics, which were to be held throughout the city.
During the past weeks, I have had almost daily telephone calls and letters from people all over the United States and even from foreign countries about apartment rentals in Los Angeles. They infer that they are coming for the Olympic Games. I am satisfied that many, many of those people will remain in Southern California after their summer visit, and that means that Los Angeles apartment house properties will soon command premium prices.
Initially, little changed under Smith’s management. It was still difficult to find renters—long or short term—for high-end housing in an economic depression, and the penthouse units proved particularly tough to fill: Throughout the first years Smith owned Chateau Marmont, the largest, highest-priced, and most opulent units in the building were still regularly announced as available in ads in Los Angeles newspapers. And the majority of tenants were still people from what might be called the Southern California Social Register class: old-money types from around the area who only occupied their apartments at the Chateau part-time, as pieds-à-terre between cruises, trips abroad, or long spells in their other, larger homes. Even though it had technically transformed into a hotel, Chateau Marmont wasn’t drawing the movie-land crowd that patronized other hotels: the rowdy Garden of Allah, the luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel or Beverly Wilshire.*4 Chateau Marmont wasn’t hurting, exactly; Smith was right in assuming that there would be an uptick in demand for quality housing as the Olympics helped lift some of the pall of the Depression in at least some parts of Southern California. But he hadn’t yet found the key to making his newly transformed hotel a success.
Albert Smith knew that as a hotel Chateau Marmont would have need of a new sort of person to run it. Apartment management required one set of skills: maintenance, troubleshooting, keeping squabbles between tenants to a minimum, and, perhaps above all, making yourself invisible and not needed. Hotel management required most of those plus stores of diplomacy and discretion and, most important, the ability to fix a fresh and happy countenance on the property and on one’s self every single day—since each day was, in effect, move-in day for someone. An apartment manager can have a sour moment or two; a hotel manager must always be sunny, hospitable, inviting. Smith didn’t only need brains and eyes to run the place; he needed a face.
Fortunately for him, his connections in Hollywood meant that he had access to a number of likely candidates for the job, and he hit on a fine one. Ann Little was a leading lady of the silent screen who had left the movies some years before and was supporting herself by building and then renting and selling units in bungalow courts, a revenue model that had thrived in the twenties but dried up during the early years of the Depression when Los Angeles housing stock was greater than the number of people who could afford to pay for it. She had a skill set that was rare even in Hollywood: a knowledge of dealing with tenants, familiarity with movie people and the press, a gracious and hospitable manner, a physical vitality, and a philosophical intellect. According to at least one of the people who would soon call Chateau Marmont home and make it famous, the screenwriter and director Billy Wilder, Little “was why the hotel became what it became.”
Little was born in 1891 in the Northern California mountain town of Sisson (later renamed Mount Shasta). She was raised on a ranch and was riding, shooting, swimming, and performing other feats of outdoorsmanship at an early age. Dazzled by the theatrical troupes that passed annually through town, she left home after high school and joined the ranks of the Ferris Hartman stock company, a musical comedy outfit that toured California, Washington, and Oregon. She quickly became one of the leading players, a position she held for nearly four years.
Among the traveling company were a few actresses who had good things to say about a new racket. “I heard the other girls talking about the ‘movies’ and how a person might make as high as ten dollars a day in them,” Little told a reporter, “and I began to take notice.” On tour in San Francisco, she was approached by Gilbert Anderson—the famous Broncho Billy of the big screen—who asked if she was any sort of horsewoman. When he learned what she could do, he told her of all the advantages of the movies, and she signed on, shooting a few short Westerns in the Bay Area starting in 1911. Soon after, she arrived in Hollywood proper.
Little had gifts as a dramatic emoter to go along with her physical abilities, and audiences and filmmakers liked her. In not quite eight years, she appeared in more than 125 short films, serial episodes, and full-length features for several different studios, almost always as the leading lady, almost always doing her own stunt work along with her more serious scenes, and frequently playing the part of a Native American.*5 The pictures she made were Westerns and thrillers—sneering villains, distressed (if sturdy) damsels, white-hatted heroes. And they were shot all over the still-undeveloped land surrounding what would become the site of Chateau Marmont. “I could find my way blindfolded over every inch of the Hollywood Hills and Cahuenga Pass,” she told a reporter. “Villains held me in shacks all over what is now West Hollywood.” In 1918, she graduated to slightly nobler fare when she signed a contract at Paramount and was cast opposite one of the age’s great romantic leading men, Wallace Reid, in a few straight dramas. Soon after, she played the Native American maiden Naturich in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1918 version of The Squaw Man (which he had first made in 1914 and would make yet again in 1931), the biggest feature in which she had yet been cast, and in a major role at that.
She was on the verge of real stardom, making regular appearances in Photoplay and other movie fan magazines. But she wasn’t doing work that she loved; she was, in effect, an action star who aspired to be a serious actress. “I enjoy feats of horsemanship,” she told a newspaper. “But I like most intense dramatic action. I am very fond of the drama and I hope before long to do some dramatic work on the stage.” In interview after interview she was posited as a serious young woman, a thinking person’s heroine. And the longer she tried to reconcile her ambitions and interests with the work she was being paid to do, the more she became disenchanted, maybe even exhausted by the movies. In the early twenties, she left Hollywood, deciding to try her hand on the legitimate stage in New York, where she worked to little acclaim and with little advancement. She was soon back in Hollywood, no longer willing to do stunt work, accepting only roles in dramas, making but one film per year, or even none at all. By 1925, she was out of movies altogether, appearing onstage in various productions of the Henry Duffy Players at the Hollywood Playhouse.
Little had been married once, for about two years, to Allan Forrest, one of her leading men. They divorced in 1918, after which she remained single, refusing interviews about her days in the movie business and taking care of her ailing mother, who, like her daughter, was a practitioner of Christian Science, the religious movement that, in part, believed in eschewing modern medicine in favor of prayer as a method of healing. The pair lived modestly and, like so many, were hobbled by the stock market crash of 1929. When Albert Smith came calling to ask her if she wanted to manage his new property, Little seized at the lifeline.
But she had conditions. She wanted a suite for herself and her mother in the hotel, which was readily granted. More important, she insisted that the place undergo a face-lift. As impressive as the Chateau was architecturally, she explained to Smith, its tacky furniture and decoration undermined its pretensions to grandeur; in an apartment house, people could bring their own furniture and art into their units, but hotel guests were stuck with what was there, and they wanted to feel as though they were living someplace more luxurious than (or, in the case of wealthy guests, equal to) their homes. The stuff with which Fred Horowitz had filled Chateau Marmont had absolutely no aura of class or elegance about it. At the very least, she told Smith, the furniture needed a complete upgrade.
She made a persuasive case. Smith began to acquire furnishings from various great homes and estates throughout Southern California whose owners were selling off everything in the wake of their losses in the Depression. The result was a potpourri of one-of-a-kind items—dressers, sofas, lamps, rugs, and so on—that, unlike the cookie-cutter pieces that Horowitz had been forced to settle for, bore no resemblance to one another. Thus began Chateau Marmont’s famed style of decor, in which no two rooms looked alike; this was absolutely charming—return guests could feel a sense of discovery as each new set of rooms revealed its contents. Over time, it could cause some problems: There were no standard pieces to swap in or out as maintenance or guests’ needs and tastes required. But as a management decision, it was a masterstroke: The hotel now had character.
Having put her stamp on the Chateau’s appearance, Little began to exert influence over its operation. Characteristically modest (“I do not like sentences beginning with ‘I,’ ” she said), she claimed to enjoy the challenge of facing up to the demands of finicky guests. “The tough tenants are the most fun,” she said. “I suppose it’s the same principle as the one sinner among the ninety and nine….The real thrill is to tackle the ‘sinner’ and wear him down with kindness.” At the same time, she had standards of decorum and behavior that she would not relax. “Everyone was high class,” she recalled of her reign. “Of course, they all knew we wouldn’t put up with nonsense. They didn’t stay if they caused trouble.”
Little also instituted a food service of a sort. It wasn’t exactly a restaurant, and there was no formally designated dining room, but Little persuaded Smith to upgrade Horowitz’s bare-bones kitchen so as to provide in-room catering to guests and to hire a chef with European experience, to run it. Guests could phone the desk in the morning, learn about the day’s offerings, and put in orders for dinner or lunch—$1.25 per plate. The chef would customize menus for dieters and others with special needs, and he made himself available to consult with guests who weren’t competent cooks but who wanted to prepare meals for themselves in their kitchens. It wasn’t proper room service; you couldn’t ring downstairs late at night for a hamburger. But it was an amenity that made each suite at Chateau Marmont feel well-appointed. And, if managed properly, which Little assuredly did, it created some revenue.
Little was still relatively new to her job on the evening of March 10, 1933, when a 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck just south of Long Beach, wreaking havoc throughout Southern California, killing as many as 120 people and causing $40 million in damage.*6 People fled into the streets from nearby buildings, but Little, ever the fearless cowgirl, rode out the tumult inside the impregnable Chateau Marmont as if nothing had happened. “I had just come downstairs,” she recalled,
when I felt the building starting to sway….Nothing was broken. Nothing had even moved. The swaying had been so gentle. The most frightening thing was seeing the trees outside. They were shaking so wildly their leaves were falling like confetti. But inside we were just fine.
Fred Horowitz’s insistence that his castle be built to withstand any sort of tremor proved canny. The Chateau even took in a few new residents from among those who found their nerves rattled, along with their bookcases and dinnerware, in other nearby buildings.
In addition to her sangfroid in a natural disaster and her savvy in decorating, catering, and pleasing difficult personalities, Ann Little brought to the Chateau an energy and manner that everyone in the movie world—which would soon become the hotel’s lifeblood—could recognize and take comfort in. “My picture experience established wonderful contacts,” she explained, and time and again that proved to be the case. “What are you doing here?” asked one Hollywood notable when checking in at the front desk soon after Little was hired. “Oh, I’m just here!” she replied. She understood the mentality of creative artists, divas, and movie tycoons, and she found ways to accommodate them all. Years later, for instance, she shared a memory of the classical pianist and conductor José Iturbi, not yet the household name he would become, visiting in her early days as manager; he would stay up all night, she said, “fingering the keys so softly he would never disturb anyone. Then he would order breakfast. He always wanted his eggs cooked in olive oil.” Such was her genius for hospitality that she never dreamed of interrupting him at his practice and she made serving him his preferred meals a matter of invisible ease.
Not long after Ann Little started her reign at Chateau Marmont, the hotel received its first important visitor from the world of cinema—and it wasn’t, in retrospect, one to brag about. Martin Freudenthal was an emissary of the German Foreign Office in Berlin, entrusted with the task of taking the temperature of ordinary Americans on a variety of social and political subjects. In particular, he was to learn about the American movie studio system and, most precisely, to improve the images of Germany and the German people in Hollywood films. He spent almost an entire year in the United States, traveling, lecturing, taking notes, writing reports, and chatting with strangers on trains and in cafés and saloons. He made many visits to the executive suites of movie studios—he was particularly chummy with the folks who ran Universal Pictures—and he actually persuaded some of them to alter the content of films with German themes or settings to present a more positive impression of his homeland. (In one case, he was able to get a studio to scrap outright the production of a film about the German sinking of the Lusitania during World War I.)
Freudenthal sent regular reports back to Berlin detailing his impressions and his interactions with Hollywood studios (he was particularly vexed by the use of Erich von Stroheim—an Austrian who spoke Yiddish more fluently than German—as the archetypal German villain in so many films). He did all of this from a base at Chateau Marmont, where he was recognized as a gracious, charming, and welcome guest by members of the upper-class community that was then frequenting the place. When he left Los Angeles in late 1932, he threw a farewell tea for his friends that was reported on in a society column in the Los Angeles Times. Identifying Freudenthal as “that nice German counselor of legation,” Alma Whitaker reported that
the Blue Book flocked, lots of men, too. Saw several judges toting cups of tea around and balancing pretty sandwiches on saucers. The tall doctor [that is, Freudenthal] had an anxious time trying to be hostess and flitting from group to group—and remembering names. He said remembering names came easy to him. So I wouldn’t dream of protesting when he introduced me as Mrs. Bayley all the afternoon. I discovered the real Mrs. Bayley later. Such a handsome woman! Maybe that man was pretty subtle after all.
This sort of dull drawing room comedy was hardly the sort of sinful movie-land gathering that had become a staple of gossip writers in the previous decade. And, truly, little going on at Chateau Marmont in these early days rose to the level of sensationalism. For that, one had to cross Sunset Boulevard to a place that earned its reputation for sin and bacchanalia when the Chateau was still a fancy in Fred Horowitz’s mind.
2.
Havenhurst, the plush two-and-a-half-acre estate that sat on the south side of Sunset Boulevard just opposite Marmont Lane, was the home of the celebrated Russian actress Alla Nazimova. The great diva had purchased the property in 1919, the centerpiece being the twelve-room main house and the adjacent swimming pool, built in the shape of the Black Sea, the site of the actress’s childhood in the Crimea. Curiously, not only the estate but the house straddled the line between the city of Los Angeles and unincorporated Los Angeles County; when property taxes were calculated, Nazimova moved her most valuable possessions—including a grand piano—into the county portion of the house, where the levies on such items were lower.
The mixture of opulence and cunning in that money-saving gesture was absolutely typical of Nazimova, who was a living embodiment of the spirit of artistic libertinism and abandonment. A celebrated interpreter of Chekhov, Ibsen, and Turgenev, she had been a marquee name in Europe and New York since the turn of the century and had come to Hollywood to chase the huge sums offered to Broadway stars willing to appear on-screen. A pioneer of self-empowerment, she was as out of the closet as it was possible for a lesbian to be at the time and still keep getting jobs, and she routinely hosted salons and other gatherings where gay women met and mingled without fear of censure or consequences. She produced her own plays and films, including a 1922 movie of Oscar Wilde’s Salome in which only queer men and women were cast. She made fortune after fortune and squandered each of them on unimaginably high living, much of which involved her “lavender marriage” to actor Charles Bryant, who had even more extravagant tastes (and brought in far less income) than his wife. Nazimova orchestrated the affairs—professional and romantic—of many of her acolytes, the most famous being Rudolph Valentino, for whom she chose not one but two wives, first Jean Acker and then Natacha Rambova.*7 She was, in form and deed, the very picture of the grande dame.
In the late twenties, when her free-spending ways threatened her solvency, Nazimova entered into a business partnership that resulted in her mansion becoming the centerpiece of a residential hotel. For an annual fee of $14,500*8—plus 50 percent of all profits—Nazimova leased her property for ninety-nine years to a builder who dotted the estate with two dozen bungalows. A bar and a darkroom were built on the grounds, and the various guest units were furnished with frills that had once been Nazimova’s: that tax-evading piano, a purple commode, a black marble bathtub, and so on.
Named punningly for its famous owner, the development would be known as the Garden of Allah, and it would be the site of the Sunset Strip’s first famous bacchanals. The Garden of Allah offered an amazing blend of rusticity and exotica, fame and privacy, gilded revelry and bleary-eyed mornings after. All of the clichés attached to Chateau Marmont about celebrities boozing, drugging, sexing, indulging, flaunting, and otherwise not giving a rip about propriety were true of the Garden of Allah before ground was even broken on the Chateau.
The Garden bore not only Nazimova’s name but her spirit as well. From the very earliest days, it was among the most debauched hostelries in all of Southern California. Playboys, liberated women, visiting libertines, soon-to-be divorcées, confirmed singles, and an array of artists, bohemians, schemers, and drug and booze hounds were among its habitués, and the hotel’s instant notoriety only drew more of their type to stay or drop in for a visit. The swimming pool alone—into which just about everybody in Hollywood who enjoyed his or her tipple would someday be said to have fallen or leaped—was legendary.
The early guests—a mix of out-of-towners and locals who were between living arrangements—constituted a pantheon of silent movie icons and titans: Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Clara Bow, Buster Keaton, Marlene Dietrich, director Ernst Lubitsch, producers Jed Harris and Alexander Korda. Later, even with rival hotels offering more luxurious accommodations in Beverly Hills or elsewhere in Hollywood, the Garden became a popular spot for the incoming tide of actors, writers, and directors from Broadway and Europe who were lured west when movies began to talk. And it was absolutely the favored place for the famed Round Table of writers and performers who gathered at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel. Writer and comic actor Robert Benchley was their ringleader, a famous thrower of spontaneous parties and introducer of various men and women to romantic partners and artistic collaborators. Over the years he was followed west by his friends and peers Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, John O’Hara, and Marc Connelly among them, turning the Garden into a Hollywood annex of one of Manhattan’s most elite and storied gathering spots.
Presently, other out-of-town intellectuals made their Southern California homes at the Garden of Allah, including S. J. Perelman, William Faulkner, and, most famously, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was in residence long enough to have received a letter from Thomas Wolfe reading, in part, “I’ll be damned if I’ll believe anyone lives in a place called The Garden of Allah.” Fitzgerald stayed at the Garden for less than a year, during the slow decline of his career and his health. But his legend attached to the place, as did those of a variety of other residents of short tenure but long redolence: Errol Flynn, W. C. Fields, Harpo Marx, Dashiell Hammett, and Humphrey Bogart, who lived there with his third wife, Mayo Methot, the pair known as the Battling Bogarts for their drunken, plate-flinging spats. In a letter to a New York acquaintance, Woollcott described that era at the Garden of Allah as a fantastical mélange: “Rachmaninoff has the next [suite] to mine and begins practice every morning at dawn. Beyond him are the Charles Laughtons. Beyond them, Robert Benchley. Beyond him is Dorothy Parker. It’s the kind of village you might look for down the rabbit hole.”
For all the famed debauchees who made the place home, though, it was Benchley, even more than Nazimova, who was the presiding genius of the Garden. He was resident for years while writing and appearing in Hollywood films, organizing impromptu revels and cocktail binges and late-night carouses, knocking on doors to round up companions for dinner parties at Sunset Strip restaurants, keeping the bellboys running off to the liquor store at all hours for more of the hair of the dog that always had its jaws firmly clamped on his leg. He might or might not have once or twice fallen into the famed swimming pool in full evening dress, but he was credited, after one such apocryphal mishap, with coining the immortal quip “I have to get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.” (The line was actually uttered by his chum, actor Charles Butterworth, during some wild scene at which Benchley was, inevitably, present. Benchley dined out on the line—he even gave it to himself as dialogue in the hit comedy film The Major and the Minor—but he was an honest thief, and he always credited Butterworth for it.)
Also legendary—but in this case true—was Benchley’s fear not only of driving in or around Los Angeles but even of walking in it. When invited to meet friends at Chateau Marmont—literally just across Sunset Boulevard—he would call for a taxi, then have the driver take him on a winding ramble through some nearby roads, hoping to disguise the fact that he was merely crossing the street. Only after what seemed to him a decent interval would he ask to be dropped off at his actual destination. It was no good offering to help walk him across the road; he was terrified of the cars whizzing by. And rightly so: There was no traffic light at the intersection, and the sudden curve in Sunset just west of Marmont Lane meant that eastbound cars would come blindly upon any pedestrians attempting the crossing. More than one person known to Benchley was injured—even killed—trying to cross the busy boulevard at that juncture. And so for the many years he was resident at the one hotel, he would take cabs to the other and back again—a perfect emblem of the New York dude trying to cope with the wide-open West.
By the time Robert Benchley figured out a way to deal with his fear of getting across the West Hollywood portion of Sunset Boulevard, there was plenty of good reason to wander up and down the street. It was earning an international reputation as a lawless stretch where the authorities were seemingly indifferent to gambling, prostitution, and, especially, the sale and consumption of alcohol, which had been illegal in the United States for more than a decade.
The notoriety of the Strip began in the late twenties, when the Russian Eagle and La Boheme, the jewels of the infant Sunset Plaza, had both been celebrated—albeit quietly—for their stores of illegal booze, the latter boasting an especially notable wine cellar. Farther west, near the Beverly Hills city limits, a less swank operation called Maxine’s took few pains to hide the fact that it was a saloon. Other entrepreneurs, noting the laxity of law enforcement in the area, soon opened nightspots that fronted for casinos; brothels popped up in private homes not far off Sunset Boulevard; and a handful of cafés and clubs where men and women could consort with romantic partners of the same gender appeared. By the thirties, a pair of gambling joints—the Clover Club and the Colony—did business on Sunset Boulevard almost without bothering to hide what they were. Similarly, the famed madams Lee Francis and Brenda Allen managed strings of prostitutes so brazenly either on or very near the street that they became demi-celebrities in the Los Angeles media. And such establishments as the Café Gala were known by everyone who knew such things as safe places for gay men and women to meet one another or simply be themselves in public without fear of exposure, harassment, or arrest. The nondescript stretch of road, convenient to almost everywhere, had become a midway of vice.
This activity was abided by the L.A. County sheriff’s office, which had nominal jurisdiction over the area and which raked in payoffs from casino operators, madams, and speakeasy owners in exchange for laissez-faire oversight. Now and again, a surprise raid would be staged or a period of clampdown would be imposed. But these were shows. The business of sex and booze and games of chance profited everyone—except, inevitably, the customers, who were being fleeced of their own free will. Nobody wanted it snuffed.
At the same time, another breed of entrepreneur also found a home on this stretch of Sunset Boulevard: talent agents in the business of representing movie stars. Situating their offices between the mansions of Beverly Hills and the studios of Hollywood, they made it convenient for their clients to stop in to talk shop during a day’s commute. And they managed as well to avoid a steep tax levied on their profession in Los Angeles proper. For decades, talent agencies would be among the most common tenants of office space on the street (the kinship with speakeasies, casinos, or brothels a matter entirely of coincidence).
And there was one more novelty. A name had been coined for the stretch of road between Laurel Canyon and Doheny Drive, between the Los Angeles and the Beverly Hills city limits: the Sunset Strip. The phrase harked back to the well-established tradition of southern and western towns designating blue-light districts where a certain amount of late-night indulgence in vice was tolerated: strips, as they were often known. Some of the area’s more staid local landowners and businessmen balked at the name and its shady implications, and the Hollywood Citizen-News ran a contest for its readers to come up with a replacement. The winner was “the Sunset Eighties,” having to do with the fact that the Strip began in, more or less, the 8000 block of Sunset and ran to, more or less, the 9000. “It tells people where we are,” a representative of Chateau Marmont told the newspaper, “and it’s catchy.” But it caught on with nobody other than the contest judges, and Sunset Strip stuck.
And with its sleek, moderne tenor, the name seemed more and more apt all the time. At the dawn of the thirties, the whole of Sunset Boulevard was paved, finally completing the road connecting Los Angeles to Beverly Hills. (The project was undertaken to suit the needs of legitimate businesses and property owners, but the boon to the shadier operations wasn’t entirely coincidental.) During the years-long paving project, a second high-rise apartment building rose over the street to rival Chateau Marmont, both architecturally and as a business: the Sunset Tower, a fifteen-story Art Deco confection designed by the architect Leland Bryant. It opened in 1931 and boasted the highest residential penthouse in the entire region.
The whole Strip was starting to ignite. In 1934, the attention of the world’s consumers of popular entertainment began to turn regularly toward the low-slung building in Sunset Plaza that had originally housed the La Boheme restaurant. Billy Wilkerson, the rakish publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, one of the movie business’s powerful trade publications, had leased and renovated the space and renamed it the Trocadero. His showbiz connections guaranteed that the new club would attract boldfaced names to its gala opening, and the deluxe atmosphere, floor shows, European-influenced menu, and choice wine cellar induced them back for many, many nights to come. The Troc, as its habitués knew it, was the first truly swank nightclub on the Sunset Strip, serving as a handily located VIP room for Hollywood’s elite. The spot filled so regularly with high-wattage talent that management didn’t have to allow civilians entry; it was like a private club, a nighttime version of the studio commissary, a place where movie stars could behave like ordinary people and not pretend to be supernatural creatures.
Wilkerson, who had previously operated a restaurant near his newspaper offices, was a gracious host, whether his patrons were show folk or not. “The Trocadero was probably the best nightclub in this city in the ’30s,” recalled George Montgomery, who, as the son of the man who built Sunset Plaza, was the landlord of the joint. “Billy Wilkerson would give you an honest drink. You’d have your own little bottle so you knew you weren’t getting slop.” The success of the Troc encouraged others to open competing establishments, drawing their own share of celebrity clientele, and as news and photos of stars cavorting in one or another spot traveled the world, the Strip became synonymous with luxurious and sinful nightlife at such spots as Club Ballyhoo, the Centaur Club, Club Seville, and Club Madrid.
The Troc was a mere four blocks from Chateau Marmont, and proximity to its luster was no doubt a bonus for guests who wanted to party with, be seen among, or simply ogle Hollywood royalty. But a more useful novelty had popped up just across the street from the hotel not long before the Troc was christened, and its history would be closely knit with the Chateau’s for decades.
Schwab’s Pharmacy, a drugstore, luncheonette, soda fountain, and newsstand, opened in 1932, one of a string of such establishments owned and operated by the four Schwab brothers of East L.A. From the start, Schwab’s became an essential piece not only of Hollywood day-to-day living but of Hollywood lore. Open from early in the morning until past midnight, the place was a clubhouse, a headquarters, and a hearth for up-and-comers, never-quite-ever-beens, rubberneckers, and strivers and schemers trying to pry a way into (sometimes back into) the movie business. No matter whether it was breakfast or last call, a quick nosh or an all-day vigil, actors, agents, screenwriters, and other Hollywood types crowded the place, nursing cups of coffee or ice cream sodas, thumbing through the trade papers, waiting for phone calls that could herald life-changing opportunities. Such was the crush of idled movie people dawdling in the booths and at the lunch counter that Schwab’s installed dedicated telephone lines that took only incoming calls, presumably from agents and producers. But lest folks get too comfy, a minimum charge was imposed on diners, a practice unheard of in ordinary luncheonettes, and customers had to pay for magazines—and get them stamped to prove it—before taking them to their tables.
Schwab’s wasn’t only home to idlers and wannabes. Because of its location and hours, and because Chateau Marmont and the Garden of Allah were right on top of it, the clientele included real Hollywood royalty: Charlie Chaplin (who was fond of hopping behind the counter to make his own fountain treats), F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Marx Brothers, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo—everyone, truly. It was especially popular with displaced New Yorkers, who haunted similar places back home, and with screenwriters, many of whom were New Yorkers who had come west from Broadway.
Schwab’s drew a crowd that was the envy of the area’s restaurateurs and nightclub operators, and the golden circle of famous names who patronized it attracted lesser knowns with the passion of pilgrims. It was like a frat house that, for decades, served up coffee or a meal or simply gave people who were otherwise holed up in their hotel rooms working or waiting for phone calls a chance and a place to see other people. Even overrun as it often was by tourists keen to spy on movie stars in the flesh and blood, even as the vibes and trends of the Sunset Strip changed, Schwab’s would maintain a central role in the daily life of Hollywood for more than fifty years. “It was like a duty to go there, just to show people that you were still around,” recalled one regular customer. “It was open late, so there was more movie business done at Schwab’s than at any other place in Hollywood.”
Over the decades, Schwab’s would become famous, inaccurately, as the spot where Lana Turner was discovered sipping a soda on a stool, a thing that actually happened but at another lunch counter farther east on Sunset near Hollywood High School, where she was a student. And it would be celebrated as a kind of Shangri-La-with-bagels by gossip columnists, especially Sidney Skolsky, who kept an office upstairs and trumpeted the doings at Schwab’s in print and on radio; and by filmmakers, especially Billy Wilder, who set several crucial scenes of his classic film Sunset Boulevard at Schwab’s.*9
Wilder got to know Schwab’s when he was living at Chateau Marmont, it being the nearest thing in his new home to the coffeehouses of his hometown, Vienna. For anyone living at the Garden of Allah or Chateau Marmont, Schwab’s was like the restaurant/liquor store/gift shop/infirmary that neither hotel actually provided. Schwab’s allowed guests of the neighboring hotels to run tabs during the duration of their stays, whether for meals consumed on the premises or for deliveries of sandwiches, groceries, booze, medicine, notions, and more to their rooms. Delivery boys, including the future monster movie star Billy Phipps, would zip orders to the Chateau on motorbikes, even though the store was only two hundred yards or so from the hotel. “I’d take over mostly sandwiches and whiskey,” Phipps remembered. “Sometimes they’d call for a couple of aspirins only. Or a single Baby Ruth candy bar.”
Schwab’s offered hotel guests other small but necessary services. A doctor whose shingle hung upstairs from the pharmacy was renowned for his hangover cures and his treatments for social diseases. A night watchman would dole out bandages or over-the-counter medications after hours if asked nicely. And certain celebrities were extended the courtesy of being allowed inside for a snack after closing, or of having their names kept out of Sidney Skolsky’s column.
Elsewhere, the Strip continued to produce new places for movie people to recreate in one another’s company. Not long after opening the Trocadero, Billy Wilkerson sold it, leaving it to stagger along under a variety of unsuccessful owners for a couple of years before it succumbed to bankruptcy. But he was only off the scene for about eighteen months before opening another club, Ciro’s, two blocks closer to Chateau Marmont and the newest claimant to the title of the hottest spot for Hollywood stars to party. Ciro’s was a performance venue, and it was especially noted for the high quality of entertainers it booked: Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Al Jolson, and many others of similar stature. And Wilkerson followed that success with La Rue, the area’s most elegant French restaurant. While he was busily debuting novelties, others opened another topflight nightclub, Mocambo, a little farther west than its competitors but no less attractive to Hollywood’s elite. It was a boom time.
This flowering of hot spots provided great spectacle for the popular culture. The names of various Sunset Strip haunts were printed in newspapers all over the country, and the clubs themselves appeared in movies about Hollywood crime and nightlife. It got so that comic strips and Warner Bros. cartoons could lampoon the mere names Trocadero or Mocambo or Schwab’s or Garden of Allah and everyone in the country would get the joke.
But only the cognoscenti had by then ever heard of Chateau Marmont. Hidden in plain sight on a hill that caught folks’ eyes only once they’d driven past it, with neither a lobby nor a bar nor a restaurant in which to ogle famous faces, it seemed destined to be a secret, a sanctum for the knowledgeable few. And then, not long after Ann Little got control of the place, the sunshine of celebrity gossip began to shine on it.
3.
Despite being owned by the former head of a movie studio, despite having a former silent film star as its manager and public face, Chateau Marmont didn’t get nearly the attention from Hollywood as did other Los Angeles–area hotels. The Beverly Hills Hotel, the Beverly Wilshire, the Ambassador, and the Roosevelt all enjoyed more prominent names—not to mention offering more deluxe accommodations and amenities. And the Garden of Allah, just across the street, was far more famous as the site of Hollywood shenanigans and sinning.
At the start of Albert Smith’s reign, the Chateau was still chiefly a haven for Southern California aristocracy. Even the gossip coming out of the place had less to do with film people than with blue bloods. And that was largely because of one resident in particular, Nellita Choate Thomsen, wife of Carl H. Thomsen, a wealthy jeweler, architect, and amateur travel film director.
The Thomsens had taken an apartment at the Chateau as soon as it opened, and their dinner parties were among the earliest noteworthy social events held in the building. Nellita was particularly well liked, gracious, lively, and, at just over thirty years old when she moved in, relatively youthful. She was, acquaintances noted, a particularly keen conversationalist and a great listener, qualities that helped her achieve a bit of renown as the Chateau’s unofficial greeter and omnipresent gadabout.
There was nothing apparently unusual about her sociability or the fact that she was, in effect, a stay-at-home upper-class wife. She had been born to privilege as the daughter of a prominent Virginia family that could trace its roots to the Choates who landed in Massachusetts in 1642, a line that included, among other notables, Revolutionary War officers, U.S. senators, federal judges, and the founder of the famed Choate school. Nellita had been educated at Stanford, where she’d earned Phi Beta Kappa status and was active in a sorority, in student theatrics, and, especially, in student publications, where she advocated fearlessly for women’s issues.
It was that last bit of her schooling that might have alerted residents and staff of Chateau Marmont to a secret that lay behind Nellita’s gregarious and amiable manner. She wasn’t only making friends and rolling out the welcome mat for new arrivals: She was working. As a reporter. A gossip reporter.
Before she married, Nellita Choate worked at the Los Angeles Herald (later the Herald-Express), writing about sensational local criminal trials and light feature subjects. After her marriage, under the pseudonym Pauline Payne, she had an even more prominent byline, producing a regular column, “The Merry-Go-Round,” in which small bits of social news and Hollywood scuttlebutt would regularly appear, much of it originating in the hallways, suites, and public spaces of Chateau Marmont. Pauline Payne’s work was lively enough and, crucially, mild enough to circulate throughout the many newspapers of the Hearst syndicate, giving its author a potential audience in the millions.
Pauline Payne was not a Hollywood gossip columnist in the vein of, say, Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, Rona Barrett, or Liz Smith. She had no public image, she didn’t have enemies or favorites in the business, and the pseudonymous woman who wrote her columns didn’t seek to use her voice and platform as a means to elevate her status in the media world. For her, movie people were simply among the interesting people one could meet, and from her station in the Chateau she had occasion to meet a fair share of them, always with an eye for quirks, never with a sharp word or a strong opinion about their work or careers.
Payne popped any number of notes about Hollywood people into her column, none especially barbed. She was fond of women in distress. There was Jean Acker, the onetime silent film star who was better known as the first wife of Rudolph Valentino. There was Katharine Hepburn, who showed up in early 1932 to make her maiden film, A Bill of Divorcement, for RKO. She had planned to put up at the Chateau for a week while seeking more comfortable accommodations, and, as Pauline Payne noted, she arrived at the front desk with her luggage filled with men’s clothes and sporting an eye patch to cover an injury she sustained on the train ride west. There was Mary Astor, a more established Hollywood star, who was delivered to the hotel by ambulance from a film set in Lake Tahoe, where she’d been struck with pneumonia. In the midst of a marital crisis that would end in a sensational divorce trial, she checked into the hotel under duress and only briefly as she waited for her husband to vacate their home so that she could convalesce there. And there was Raquel Torres, a Mexican starlet whose short and spotty career as a movie sexpot ended with her marriage to a Wall Street tycoon.
It wasn’t all soap opera. Payne wrote about the Ritz brothers—Harry, Al, and Jimmy—a popular vaudeville act of comical-musical zanies, a bit like the Marx Brothers but without the fantastical personae. They came to Hollywood several times in the thirties to make movies and often stayed at the Chateau, behaving with perfect civility, per “The Merry-Go-Round,” save for their animated comings and goings through the lobby, when they seemed always to be excitedly concocting a new bit of business for their act.
Even more regularly than she shared stories about movie folk in her column, though, Payne wrote about people of wealth and social station whose names meant little to the public. She shared the story of Clara Clemens, the daughter of Mark Twain, who moved into the Chateau after the death of her concert pianist husband. She wrote about the wealthy eccentrics who occupied much of the second floor of the hotel, keeping rooms for their personal staff of maids, cook, and butler and setting aside an entire suite for their menagerie of pets, which included exotic birds and a long-haired monkey.
These sorts of tidbits—diverting little yarns that would be categorized as slice-of-life features rather than gossip—were Payne’s specialty. For all her affability and energy, Nellita Thomsen was a bit of a wallflower when it came to her own personal fame. She left Chateau Marmont under a cloud; in 1938, her husband abruptly announced that he wanted a divorce so that he could marry his secretary, and the shock resulted in Nellita being put under psychiatric care and giving up her column. But she never fully distanced herself from her happy days gadding about the place. In 1977, when management decided to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the breaking of ground for the hotel’s construction, she was one of the guests invited to recollect the early days. She shared some stories of the celebrities she’d known and, ever the reporter, deflected attention away from herself: When someone inquired if she was herself an actress, she laughed and said, “Oh heavens no!,” and when she was asked about her married life in the Chateau, she replied, again with a grin, “My husband was a businessman. But we’ve been divorced for ages, so please don’t mention him.”
The first truly famous celebrity to call Chateau Marmont home packed so much living into a short stay there that the hotel would have been worthy of Hollywood legend if no other movie people had ever stepped through its doors.
In September 1933, Jean Harlow and Harold Rosson drove up Marmont Lane in search of a place where they could live as newlyweds. Each already had a home in the area—hers a large custom-built mansion on an acre-plus site in nearby Bel Air. But although her place was big, it wasn’t big enough: Harlow’s mother, also a Jean and therefore known as Mother Jean, lived there with her second husband, and the older couple felt entitled to butt their noses into everything the young Jean, whom they called Baby, did, including her marriages.
The plural is no typo: At age twenty-two, Harlow had just taken husband number three, establishing beyond dispute her credentials as Hollywood’s premier vixen. In just a handful of years, she had gone from bored young society wife to movie extra to It Girl, style icon, and emblem of female sexual energy. She was famous for her platinum blonde hair; her plunging necklines; her tight-fitting wardrobe (made even snugger by her refusal to wear panties, which she felt disrupted the line of her dresses); her rumored habit of icing her nipples before each take so as to draw attention to her breasts; her love of Art Deco–style white clothes and furniture and cars; and, especially, her torrid chemistry with Clark Gable, frequently cast as her leading man. She had a sensational rise in the movies, from extra to bit player to the sort of star for whom movies are named—Platinum Blonde, Red-Headed Woman, Bombshell—in barely three years. She played chorus girls and cheating fiancées and seductresses and gangsters’ molls and feckless wives and women with sordid pasts and women who carried on with married men. And she lived a life to match: Just before wedding Rosson, she made headlines for being seen quite chummily in the company of Max Baer, the heavyweight boxing title contender and a married man. Such was her reputation, on-screen and off-, that when she met the English countess Margot Asquith at a dinner party and kept pronouncing her new acquaintance’s name with a final t sound—“MarGOT”—the older woman felt entitled to reply, “No, Jean, the ‘T’ is silent, like in Harlow.”
For all the sensational roles Harlow played in movies (and not always very well, at least not at the outset—“I was not born an actress,” she admitted), her real life was, arguably, just as dramatic. When she first set foot in Chateau Marmont, she was still being whispered about in connection with the death of her second husband, MGM production executive Paul Bern, who died mysteriously of a gunshot wound in their Beverly Hills home just a year prior, a mere two months into their marriage. Dark rumors about Bern—sexual dysfunction, adultery, perversity, even a murder-suicide pact involving another woman—swirled around Hollywood. Near his body, police had discovered a note to his wife, apparently in his hand, alluding to something that had occurred “last night [and was] only a comedy,” occasioning yet more wild speculation.
But the unvarnished truth would never be known, because MGM executives and fixers were at Bern’s house for several hours before the police arrived, staging the death scene so as to put their young star in the best possible light. Creating a domesticated public image of Harlow had been the principal reason MGM encouraged her to marry Bern, a confirmed bachelor more than twenty years her senior. And so, after an appropriate period of widowhood had passed, with Harlow wandering a little too close to the flame of bad publicity with Baer, MGM brass steered her toward Rosson, her frequent cinematographer who, like Bern, had never before wed. If the accounts of the Hollywood gossip press held any truth, they were deeply in love. “I know it’s trite,” the third-time bride said, “but I want to go on record that ours is one Hollywood marriage that will last!”
Harlow was born Harlean Harlow Carpenter in 1911 and was first married in 1927, at age sixteen, to Chuck McGrew, a son of Illinois society just twenty years old himself. The couple moved to Beverly Hills, living on the groom’s inheritance, and Mother Jean followed, marking her second trip to Hollywood, which she had visited a few years earlier in hopes, quickly dashed, of breaking into movies. On this occasion, though, she would play the role of live-in mother-in-law and play it to the hilt, moving herself and her own new husband in with the young couple, leeching off McGrew’s fortune, drinking heavily, shopping incessantly, insinuating herself into all of her daughter and son-in-law’s decisions, and generally behaving as if she were the owner of the house. It would be no wonder when Harlow and McGrew split barely two years after they wed.
By then, Harlow had transformed from society wife to movie star. The story was that she had given a ride to an actress friend who was working at 20th Century Fox, and a casting director noticed her sitting in her car. Still a teen, she was a great natural beauty, with sun-bleached hair, a Kewpie doll pout, a bold, inviting gaze, a curvy figure, and an air of worldliness beyond her age. The fellow asked if she wanted to submit to an audition, and she brushed him off but took his card. A few days later, goaded by her actress friend, who suggested that she lacked the moxie to try out for the movies, she drove to central casting and enrolled under a stage name she invented on the spot—Jean Harlow. She soon found herself getting steady work, first as an unbilled extra, then in small feature parts, and then, starting in 1928, as a contract player at Hal Roach Studios, where she was immediately cast in feature roles in a couple of Laurel and Hardy films. The following year she left Roach, claiming that her acting work was wrecking her marriage, but she never completely quit the movies.
She was “discovered” again, almost immediately, this time by someone who knew just what to do with a girl with her looks: Howard Hughes. Four years into his Hollywood career, Hughes was in production on Hell’s Angels, a silent epic about aerial warfare, when sound was introduced into movies and turned the business upside down. Hughes had to reshoot his not-yet-finished picture with spoken dialogue, and he had to replace leading lady Greta Nissen, whose thick Norwegian accent was unacceptable. One of the actors in Hughes’s cast caught sight of Harlow in a talkie and commended her to his boss. Hughes met her, put her under contract, and cast her as the lead in Hell’s Angels, calculating that the combination of aeronautic thrills and Harlow’s sex appeal would mean big box-office returns.
It did. Hughes cast Harlow in a few more pictures, pushing her into sensual roles in which her finite acting skills weren’t a liability, and she became such a draw that when he wasn’t using her himself, he could lease her out to other studios for fees far beyond what he was paying her in salary. At around this time, Paul Bern noticed Harlow and suggested to his colleagues at MGM that they could use a star with her qualities. When the more prudish voices among his colleagues groused that her image would besmirch the studio’s wholesome name, he promised to keep her reputation clean. They accepted both his recommendation and his word, and they hired her away from Hughes.
At MGM, Harlow became one of the top attractions of her time, and in a series of films with Gable she became one of the movies’ greatest sex symbols. She might not have been an actress-actress, but she could light the screen on fire. MGM had gotten hold of a force of nature, which left them pleased with their business acumen but anxious, especially after Bern’s death and the Max Baer affair, about the sorts of problems Harlow might present them with next. Hence the marriage to Rosson, seen by all as a reliable and stabilizing force.
The Rossons’ marriage had been sprung on the world (and, perhaps, on the principals) suddenly—a quickie elopement by airplane to Yuma, Arizona—and plans for the new couple’s married life were improvised. It became readily apparent that living under the same roof as the overweening Mother Jean was no option, and so the Rossons sought sanctuary at Chateau Marmont, still largely undiscovered by Hollywood.
Harlow sniffed at the place at first, refusing even to go inside and inspect the suite that Rosson had chosen for them. But after another uncomfortable day in the company of her mother and stepfather, the actress agreed to move into the Chateau—provided that the apartment that Rosson had put on retainer, at $250 a month,*10 undergo extensive remodeling. The unit that Harlow and Rosson would move into was actually two suites connected by an interior corridor, and the bedroom most suited to serve as the master was equipped with twin beds. That was quickly rectified, and a layer of “Harlow white” was laid on top of the suites’ low-key blue-and-beige décor. “She was like a little white rose,” recalled a hotel employee. “Her apartment was all white. The carpets, the draperies, the furniture. Even the fireplace.” It was a quick makeover: A week or so after their first visit, the Rossons moved in.
It was to be a working honeymoon for Rosson, who had just begun shooting a new film, meaning he had to be at the studio in Culver City early every morning and wouldn’t return to the Chateau until dinnertime. Harlow was between pictures, doing publicity for Bombshell, the film that she and Rosson had most recently made together, so she was on hand to supervise the work on the apartment. Moreover, because she was in a tussle with the studio over a new contract, she was content to linger over her personal business—her beauty regimen, her interior decorating, even some cooking and reading—while her representatives dickered with Louis Mayer.
But when Rosson came home, it wasn’t to a domestic Eden. Moving away from Mother Jean didn’t mean escaping her altogether; she and her husband were constant presences at the Chateau, showing up to boss the workers, oversee Harlow’s diet, and, as in Bel Air, comport themselves as if they—and not Rosson—were paying the bills. On top of that, a steady stream of friends, reporters, photographers, manicurists, hairdressers, masseuses, and businesspeople came and went throughout Harlow’s idle days. The newlyweds might as well have been living in an aquarium. Everything the star did was big, excessive, and, with some sanitizing, reported for public consumption.
Well, almost everything. There were other visitors, ones who appeared only at night and whose names were never in the fan magazines. Because of the way the Rossons’ two suites had been connected into one large apartment, the master bedroom had a dedicated entrance, and hotel staff began to note that Harlow received visitors—male visitors—at that door at odd hours, invariably when Rosson wasn’t on-site. Additionally, the staff had noticed that Harlow’s improvements included a security chain on the door connecting the two suites—one intended to keep the door locked from the master bedroom side. And then there was the damning evidence discovered by housekeepers almost from the start of the Rossons’ residency: Maids would make the big bed in the master bedroom every day, but they also had to make the Murphy bed in the living room on the other side of the unit. And that bed, ostensibly for guests, was the only one that would need making on the nights when Rosson slept at the Marmont alone and, as he explained to switchboard operators trying to put calls through to her, Harlow was with Mother Jean in Bel Air.
The Rossons’ marital merry-go-round continued thus for several weeks, the couple rarely in residence in their suite at the same time and comporting themselves more in the manner of colleagues than newlyweds when they were seen together. Mother Jean continued to insinuate herself into their lives, finding an ally in, of all people, Ann Little, the Chateau’s general manager and, like Mother Jean, a practitioner of Christian Science.
This latter alliance would be tested in October, when the Rossons went out to watch a football game, only to return to the hotel before long with Harlow in very delicate shape. Rosson suggested that his wife had enjoyed herself overly during their outing, but her extremely weak state suggested something more than an excess of drink. Harlow lingered in a feverish delirium through the night, Rosson increasingly worried at her condition. In the morning he made up his mind to call for a doctor, even though he knew that doing so would incense his mother-in-law, whose belief in Christian Science demanded that she forsake medical science in favor of faith-based healing. Rosson phoned Mother Jean to tell her of his plans, and he followed that with a call to Louis B. Mayer, who said he would send a doctor of his own straightaway. The hotel switchboard operator, instructed by Ann Little to listen in on Rosson’s calls and inform her if a physician was summoned, heard what was afoot and ratted Rosson and Mayer out to her boss. But before Little could intercede, a doctor managed to make his way to Harlow’s bedside, where he diagnosed her with acute appendicitis, sending for an ambulance to take her to Good Samaritan Hospital and the rescue of surgeons.
The episode saved Harlow’s life, but it would be at the expense of her marriage. Upon release from the hospital, she returned not to her husband and their suite at Chateau Marmont but to Bel Air and Mother Jean. She didn’t come back to the Chateau until New Year’s Eve, when she reappeared, in something less than a celebratory mood, beside Rosson. A few more days passed before Rosson, carrying a suitcase, stopped by the front desk to let them know that he could be reached at the studio. Word of his absence from his wife’s side made its way into newspapers, the first time that the name of Chateau Marmont would appear alongside the name of a movie star in print.
In the coming weeks, Harlow’s mood lifted. Absent the excess baggage of her studio-appointed husband, she was free to entertain guests, and one in particular: Clark Gable. On-screen, Gable and Harlow were absolute dynamite: the hunkiest man alive and the movies’ reigning sexpot, connected by a chemistry that you could practically sink your hands into from your movie-house seat. In total they would make six films together, including the hit potboilers Red Dust, Hold Your Man, and China Seas. He played gangsters, sea captains, plantation owners; she was a prostitute, a B-girl, a moll. He was muscular and rough-hewn and dashing and macho; she was brassy and sensual and liberated and nubile. When their characters met, when they had romantic scenes together, even when they ran screwball comedy lines off each other, they were mesmerizing, arousing, hot. There was often another woman in the story with whom Gable’s characters had a more traditionally noble-hearted connection, played by the likes of Mary Astor, Rosalind Russell, or Myrna Loy. But he and Harlow projected top-shelf, unashamed sex, and they did so at a time when movies, still not censored or rated for content, were as racy and frank as they would be for decades.
He was about thirty and she was about twenty, and the world was theirs to beckon, and what with both of them seemingly always either marrying or divorcing, it was almost inevitable that they would become lovers—more so that they would take few pains to hide it. Technically, they were both married (he to the second of an eventual five wives), but only technically. Gable was a regular at the Chateau throughout January, arriving in the evening, sometimes after a night out with Harlow, sometimes on his own, and then leaving for the studio in the morning. Rosson never came around.
At the end of January, Harlow and Rosson formally vacated Chateau Marmont, she returning home to Bel Air, he to a room at the Hollywood Athletic Club, about two miles east on Sunset. Accounts in the gossip press reported that the flame between them had burned too brightly to last; by May, they were officially divorced.
Rosson would go on to marry again and divorce again—this time after nine years, not nine months—and to enjoy a distinguished career as a cinematographer, shooting such films as Singin’ in the Rain, Duel in the Sun, El Dorado, and On the Town, and dying in 1988 at age ninety-three.
Harlow would continue to be a major star and enjoy a long romance with William Powell, to whom she was engaged, at least according to the press, for two years without marrying.
In truth, there wouldn’t be time for it. In June 1937, barely twenty-six years old, after a lifetime of fighting the likes of scarlet fever, appendicitis, septicemia, and various flus and infections, often without the aid of medical intervention, in accord with Mother Jean’s religious beliefs, Harlow died of kidney failure in the same hospital where Rosson had sent her, against her mother’s wishes, not four years prior. She was buried in the Great Mausoleum of Forest Lawn Memorial Park under a tombstone that read “Our Baby.”
4.
Jean Harlow wasn’t the only Hollywood notable who found sanctuary at Chateau Marmont in those early days. Movie people slowly discovered the place in a way that might best be described as subterranean, or else through the back door.
Everyone at the studios knew of the area’s more luxurious and fabled hotels—the Beverly Hills, the Beverly Wilshire, the Ambassador—and they would steer the out-of-towners whom they wished to impress or pamper toward them. The Chateau, on the other hand, was where they went when they weren’t putting on airs—or hoping to be seen in the act of whatever it was they were getting up to.
The difference was right there upon first impression. Arriving at the Beverly Hills Hotel, you rode up the curved drive, between the palm trees and flower beds, to a grand porte cochere where you were met by a valet or bellman and led through an ornate lobby. Pulling in to the Ambassador brought you along massive lawns and gardens, and the Beverly Wilshire’s front door was right out on the street, at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive, as near as you could get in Beverly Hills to the feeling of pulling up to a luxury hotel in New York, London, or Paris.
Chateau Marmont was something else entirely. The entry was off a side street and belowground, in a garage where you were welcome to park your own car—if you dared risk the paint job to the threading-the-needle path you needed to navigate between the structural pillars. The lobby was smaller than many of the suites—an open space with a tiny front desk and a handsome but not exactly homey sitting area that didn’t invite much loitering. The Chateau was more intimate in scale than the area’s other hotels, and its lack of a public gathering space like a pool or restaurant or bar made it feel discreet and clubby. Perhaps this was why it became popular with visitors who preferred to feel that they were in an apartment building rather than a semipublic resort. These included Europeans fleeing the tensing political and cultural atmosphere at home and New Yorkers who didn’t care for the sybaritic atmosphere of the more posh hotels, which they deemed a little too “Hollywood,” or for the raucous carrying-on at the Garden of Allah, which seemed a little too Fraternity Row.
Harlow aside, though, the movie people who lived at the Chateau for any length of time in the thirties were either not the sort whom the gossip press would want to print news of or folks who were actively trying not to be noticed. Among them was Lloyd Bacon, who had begun in movies in front of the camera in 1915 and, when acting didn’t pan out for him, had become a director, starting in silent movies with short comedies and action pictures and gradually working his way up to features starring Al Jolson (The Singing Fool, Wonder Bar) and John Barrymore (Moby Dick), as well as the immortal musicals 42nd Street and Footlight Parade.
Bacon would eventually accrue 125 directorial credits, but his prolificacy away from the back lot was perhaps even more notable. Between 1921 and 1941, he was wed no fewer than four times, and he enjoyed himself thoroughly when between marriages. In 1935, his separation and divorce from his second wife, Rubey, played out sensationally in the papers—he said that she had carried on a love affair in Los Angeles and San Francisco and, further, was guilty of mental cruelty in the form of “call[ing] him harsh names…[being] rude to his guests…depriv[ing] him of peace and quiet…and hamper[ing] his directorial career.” She claimed he deprived her of basic household expenses and threatened to “break every bone in [her] body” and, on another occasion, “break her into so many pieces that they would have to carry her out of the house in a sheet.” The two sparred over possession of their seventeen-room Van Nuys estate—where, among other amenities, Bacon kept an elaborate model train set—and Bacon moved into Chateau Marmont while he tried to unseat her from their connubial home.
Ensconced in the hotel’s biggest penthouse, Bacon didn’t have toy trains, but he did throw an open house nearly every weekend that became more and more sensational with each iteration. The setting and amenities were ideal: a hosted bar, expansive views, lots of famous and attractive faces, and, thanks to the eccentric architecture, a number of little nooks for extra privacy should any of his guests require it. The parties began as a way for Bacon and his fellow Warner Bros. employees to blow off some steam together, but word of the revelries soon spread around town and up and down the corridors of the Chateau, and they became a bona fide scene, only coming to an end in 1938, when Bacon finally pried his by-then ex-wife out of their mansion and was able to move back in with his trains.
Less sensational was the longtime residency of cinematographer Gregg Toland, one of the great innovators in his field, the man who helped create the photorealistic “deep focus” filming technique that came to dominate movies and who would eventually be credited for the look of such classics as Stagecoach, Dead End, The Grapes of Wrath, The Best Years of Our Lives, Citizen Kane, and the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights, for which he won his only Oscar (he died of a heart attack in 1948 at age forty-four). Throughout their residency of several years in the mid-thirties, Toland and his first wife, Helen Barclay, frequently hosted dinner parties at their home at Chateau Marmont, quiet affairs that never got more raucous than the occasional need to refill the punch bowl and thus, ironically, more apt to be noted in gossip columns than Bacon’s comparatively orgiastic wingdings.
The ability to keep the lid on wild goings-on at the Chateau was quickly deemed part of the hotel’s allure for the movie crowd. The Garden of Allah and the Beverly Hills Hotel had become must-see sights for tourists to Hollywood, and between the professional gossipmongers and the amateur rubberneckers their public spaces could feel exposed and compromised. But the Chateau, which offered few places for the public or the press to lie in ambush or ogle celebrities, was, almost accidentally, the perfect blind. Just a few years into its life as a hotel, the Chateau was being spoken of knowingly by the film world as a place where the most outré behaviors could go unnoted by outsiders. According to one famed endorsement, “If you want to be seen, go to the Beverly Hills Hotel; if you don’t want to be seen, go to Chateau Marmont.”
That—as well as cost—was no doubt why Harry Cohn, the notorious penny-pinching boss of Columbia Pictures, kept a suite on retainer at the hotel. Although he was an infamous libertine in his own right, the apartment wasn’t for his use but for that of his stars. Other studios were known to rent out whole apartment buildings around town so that their famous employees could indulge in whatever behavior they wished without turning up in gossip pages. For the relatively small Columbia, a single set of rooms at the Chateau would have to do: suite 54, to be precise.
That was where, in the late thirties, two of Cohn’s promising discoveries, Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford and William Franklin Beedle Jr., both still in their early twenties, would be introduced to the ways of Hollywood. Each would eventually settle down with a wife and kids and a career and even a new, marquee-friendly name—Glenn Ford and William Holden, respectively. But first they’d sow some wild oats, on Harry Cohn’s dime, at the Chateau.
“Harry really worried about Bill and me,” Ford remembered decades later. “We were constantly getting into trouble….One day he sent for us and said, ‘If you must get into trouble, go to the Marmont.’ He made it clear that he had rented the small penthouse there just for us, to protect us….He told us we could stay as long as we were under contract.”
The two moved into the suite and immediately made the most of this swell setup, entertaining female companions and playing host to their acting chums and even some of their idols, who would now and again run into marital or logistical problems of their own and require a safe harbor. “It was so very private,” Ford said. “You would drive into the garage, get in the elevator, go upstairs, and nobody would see you. People would come and go, in and out, and no questions were asked.” David Niven came around a fair bit, because he was then sharing a place with Errol Flynn that had only one bedroom and was often left in the lurch while Flynn entertained guests. According to Ford, Niven was incredulous that two up-and-comers should find themselves the beneficiaries of such a plush living situation, and he frequently rang them up asking if the suite was available for him to do some entertaining of his own. At other times, he’d drop in to have a drink, prepare a meal, or simply hang out with his chums. John Barrymore, his marriage to wife number four, Elaine Barrie, coming to an end, learned about the open-door policy of the suite and would show up at odd hours, strip down to socks and bathrobe, and sit out on the terrace with what he called his “only two friends in this goddamn town…Haig and Haig.” And Humphrey Bogart, seemingly always engaged in a scrap with his third wife, Mayo Methot, would often come down from his house on Horn Avenue, about a mile west on the Sunset Strip, and drink and chat with the boys until things cooled off back home.
Bogart had another reason for visiting, though. In 1938, soon after he married Methot, he moved his widowed mother, Maud Humphrey Bogart, from Manhattan to live near him in a suite at the Chateau. In her day, Maud Humphrey, as she was known, was a formidable and striking figure: tall, pretty, well dressed, a celebrated artist, an outspoken suffragette, the mistress of a four-story town house on the Upper West Side and a four-acre estate in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Her husband, Belmont DeForest Bogart, was a successful surgeon, and she herself was an artist widely known for her commercial illustrations, especially those of angelic children in advertisements and magazines. Her most famous work was the image of a cherub-cheeked infant that for years graced the label on jars of Gerber baby food and that was based, at least partly, on her own son. Such was her renown that in 1895 she earned an income of $50,000—nearly $1.4 million in 2019 terms.
When she moved into Chateau Marmont, though, her career was well behind her. In her early seventies, she still put on imperious airs, but she could be dotty and erratic, acting aloof at social functions and falling into a terrified heap if a flying insect, even a butterfly, flitted anywhere near her. She kept a small, tidy art studio in her Marmont suite, drawing and painting for the pleasure of it. Almost daily, she would wander Sunset Boulevard, perfectly attired, approaching passersby to tell them, “I’m Humphrey Bogart’s mother, you know.” She loved going into Schwab’s, where she chatted with the clerks in her regal manner. “She was Lady Maud with a vengeance,” her son recalled. “She made little purchases and then strolled grandly home again.” In the summer of 1940, she took ill, but she told no one about her discomfort until, in November, she collapsed in her suite and was found struggling and in agony by a hotel maid. Rushed to a hospital, she was almost immediately diagnosed with cancer and fell into a coma; she passed away on November 22 without regaining consciousness. “She died as she had lived,” her son said. “With guts.”
That Bogart should have chosen Chateau Marmont for his mother and not, say, the Garden of Allah, where he often lived while between homes or wives, spoke to the sort of reputation the place had accrued in the years that Albert Smith had operated it as a hotel: genteel, staid, quiet, courtly, just as Lady Maud would have selected for herself. These qualities were surely amplified by the sound of British accents in the lobby and corridors of the hotel. From very early on, performers from the U.K. were fond of the place. “They were such nice people, so refined and elegant,” Ann Little recalled. “Everyone was a little envious of the way they spoke.” Stan Laurel, born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Lancashire, lived there between marriages in the thirties and was known to keep to himself save for opening the door to his suite to accept orders of liquor from delivery boys or, occasionally, to wander into one of Lloyd Bacon’s open houses to help himself to the director’s booze. The elegant character actor Alan Napier (who would gain his greatest fame decades later as the butler Alfred on TV’s Batman) frequented the hotel regularly when he was filming in Hollywood, as did the actress/singer/comedian Gracie Fields and John Houseman, the British actor/producer who hired Orson Welles for his first paid job as a stage director in New York and would eventually introduce his flamboyant young discovery to the hotel. And when Laurence Olivier came to Hollywood in 1933 for a visit that resulted in no film or stage appearances, he had a note waiting for him at the front desk of the Chateau indicating that the British old boy network had anticipated his arrival. “There will be nets tomorrow at 9 a.m.,” it read. “I trust I shall see you there.” The note was signed by C. Aubrey Smith, the dean of the British colony in Hollywood and the founder of the Hollywood Cricket Club, the local home of the sport for which Olivier was being summoned for a practice session. Being that Olivier was English, Smith apparently took it for granted that he was (1) a cricketer and (2) likely staying at the Chateau.
Continental Europeans were also finding their way to the corner of Sunset and Marmont, some on their own, some under the guiding hand of their American employers. Among the latter was a gorgeous and sharply intelligent young woman from Austria named Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, who had gained a reputation by appearing nude in an arty film shot in Prague in 1933. Known as “the Ecstasy girl,” after the title of the scandalous movie, she was living in Paris in 1937, divorced, and looking for work, when she was introduced to Louis B. Mayer, who was overcome by her beauty and immediately offered her a job in Hollywood—under the condition that she change her name. And so, when she arrived at Chateau Marmont, where she would spend her first few nights in town before moving out to share a home with the actress Ilona Massey, she signed herself in at the front desk under her newly contrived moniker, which she promptly misspelled. “Hedy Lamar,” she wrote, forgetting that Mayer had added a second r to her new surname to give it an exotic air.
Hedy Lamarr had but a brief dalliance with the Chateau. But another Viennese expatriate would dance with the hotel several times in those first years of its operation, and some of his tales of what he did there would have the virtue of almost being true.
The thing about Billy Wilder was that he told stories. Some of them he would craft into scripts and direct in one of the greatest résumés the cinema ever produced: The Apartment, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, The Lost Weekend, Double Indemnity, The Seven Year Itch, Stalag 17, and Sabrina, among many others. But he probably told fibs as a child, he admitted to being “creative” with details when he was a newspaperman, and he was writing flat-out made-up tales for the movies as early as his early twenties. Such was the rush of stories out of him that he was credited with twenty-one screenplays in his first five years working in movies—nine of them in 1932 alone.
So it’s not surprising that his account of his time at Chateau Marmont is…unverifiable. In large part that’s because Wilder told it so many different ways over the years, depending, probably, on which way he thought made for a better story.
Some aspects of it are indisputable. By the time he was twenty-three, Wilder was a successful screenwriter in Berlin, enjoying a posh apartment, a handsome car, a collection of Impressionist art, and the company of glamorous women. In 1933, he read the future in the rise of Adolf Hitler—as a Jew from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Wilder saw that both of those details in his biography would count against him—and he fled to Paris. There, he very quickly resumed his writing career, and within a year he climbed into the director’s chair. But even before his debut in that capacity, 1934’s Mauvaise graine, had its premiere, he fled once again, this time to Hollywood, where his ambitions to reach the top of the movie world would have the best chance of being realized.
Wilder came to the United States on a six-month visa, meaning he had to exit and then reapply for admission not long after he arrived. So even though he had been making small inroads into American movies, he was forced to leave the country, this time to Mexico, before he could return, for good, in August 1934. When he did, he had no place to stay, and a friend recommended a newish hotel where you could cook your own meals and live cheap: Chateau Marmont.
And this was where the stories start to become “Wildered”—that is to say, told differently at different times, with different chronologies, different casts of characters, and different punch lines, as if the teller were working it all out in his head for maximum entertainment value (which, given Wilder’s genius and productivity as a screenwriter, might very well have been what was going on).
The best surmise would be this: Between 1934 and 1937, Wilder stayed at Chateau Marmont three times. On the first visit, in the summer and early autumn of 1934, he was put up in the smallest, least expensive room in the hotel: a windowless cubicle, furnished with a desk and chair and Murphy bed and equipped with an electric hot plate on which he could cook. He didn’t look down on this lodging; he embraced it. Instead of a view, Wilder installed some of the paintings he managed to bring with him from Europe.*11 He dined mainly on coffee and canned soup, which meant his tiny tabletop burner was kitchen enough for him. Crucially, he had what he really needed—a place to write, which he did like a demon, around the clock. “He stayed in his room and worked till all hours of the night,” Ann Little remembered years later. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t see a light coming from beneath his door as I would make my evening rounds.”
Wilder was a workhorse, no doubt, but he did enjoy a social life. He was still fond of the ladies. He became friendly with other European expats who were struggling to remake their film careers in Hollywood. He spent time idling at Schwab’s, practicing his English by reading magazines and chatting with other hopefuls. And he visited the beach at Santa Monica, often by himself, just to listen to voices, ogle swimmers, and breathe the fresh air.
For a while he even had a roommate at the Chateau, or at least he said he did: Peter Lorre, the great actor whom Wilder knew from Berlin and Paris and who had also fled to America with hopes of safety and success. If it happened at all, it didn’t last long. Wilder claimed that he quickly discovered that Lorre was a drug addict, which was true and might explain the brevity of their cohabitation. But Lorre was a married man when he came to America, and he arrived with his wife and a job at a movie studio, neither of which Wilder had and both of which make the idea of the Lorres’ moving in with Wilder seem unlikely. (Lorre and Wilder had lived at the same hotel during their time in Paris as they passed from Germany to the United States, though, and it’s entirely possible that Wilder confused one tiny rented room, and one episode of debauchery, for another.)
By late 1934, Wilder was finding an intermittent market for his story ideas, for reworkings of his German and French screenplays, and for his services as a script doctor. He was getting somewhere, in short, becoming a known commodity. At that time, he put his belongings in the hotel basement and left on a quick trip back home, designed in part to see if he could get his widowed mother, then living in Vienna, to leave an increasingly unsettled Europe and live in the sun in California. She refused, and he returned to Hollywood—and to an increasing demand for his writing. He headed straight to Chateau Marmont, where his second stay would produce even more stories than his first—some of them probably even true.
When Wilder presented himself at the front desk this time, looking forward to moving back into his little bachelor’s cell, he was met with disappointing, even shocking news: Not only was his old room not available, but there was no room for him. “I forgot to notify Miss Little,” he confessed later. “The hotel was absolutely booked up.” Wilder was exhausted from travel, haunted by the specter of increasing Nazi influence over his homeland, worried for his mother.*12 All he wanted was a can of soup and his small room with its familiar Murphy bed, and here was Ann Little in front of him telling him that he couldn’t have even that tiny bit of succor.
At first he was furious, reminding the hotel manager that he had announced upon his departure in November that he would return. She remembered that, she explained, but there was a crucial omission in his statement: “You didn’t say when.”
She could see what a blow this news was, and she was racking her brain to determine if there was anything she could do for him, when he made a startling declaration: “I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel!”
With that, a light went off in Little’s head. Off the main lobby, there was a women’s restroom, and in the corridor leading to that facility there was a bit of an antechamber, little more than a closet. It wasn’t a room, per se, but it did have a door, and if Wilder would promise to keep it locked so that no one would accidentally walk into it while searching for the bathroom…
He took it.
And thus, during Christmas 1934, Billy Wilder lived next to—or, as he sometimes told it, inside—the ladies’ room in the lobby of Chateau Marmont.
The arrangement only lasted for a couple of days; soon enough, a room that Wilder could afford was vacant, and he moved into more suitable accommodations, resuming what would eventually become one of Hollywood’s greatest writing and directing careers. But no matter the glory that ensued—including three Oscars for screenwriting (out of twelve nominations), two for directing (out of eight nominations), and two for Best Picture (The Lost Weekend and The Apartment) out of four nominations—Wilder would dine out for the rest of his life on tales of the time he lived in a bathroom at Chateau Marmont.
“It was a small room,” he would explain, “but it had six toilets.” Or he would talk about women wandering into his tiny lodgings and starting to undress before they realized their mistake. Or he’d say that his sleep was interrupted every night by the constant flushing. Sometimes he would get morose: “I could not sleep…when women were coming in to pee and looking at me funny, when I was worried about the knowledge that my mother was in danger….I wasn’t sure if I fitted in around here in Hollywood. I had the feeling I was not in the right country and I didn’t know if there was a right country for me. Right here was the low point of my life.” The anxiety and depression were no doubt real, but the setup was all malarkey—or at the very least it contained mere nuggets of truth exaggerated for comic effect. He never tired of the telling.
Wilder left the Chateau in early 1935 and found a proper place to live. He also found time for love: In late 1936, he eloped in Arizona with the artist Judith Coppicus, a tall, pretty New Yorker with connections to European painters and American show business. For a while, when the marriage, which would last a decade, was new, the couple lived in a suite at Chateau Marmont, this time with a view, but they left after a few weeks, moving in with her mother not far away in West Hollywood.
And that was the end of Wilder’s connection to the hotel—in real life, that is. In his art, Chateau Marmont would still find resonance. In his 1944 film noir, Double Indemnity, the first movie for which he’d be nominated for Oscars as writer and director, the protagonist, a lust-mad insurance salesman played by Fred MacMurray, lives in a bachelor apartment, complete with cramped underground garage and drugstore on the corner that serves meals, designed along the lines of Wilder’s first lodgings at the Chateau. Six years later, Wilder created a dark, sardonic tale about a failing Hollywood writer who hangs around Schwab’s and dodges creditors until the day he accidentally falls in with a silent screen star who uses him for his body and his craft until…well, it is told from the point of view of a corpse. That film, Sunset Boulevard, was, Wilder often said, based on an idea that originally came to him when he was living at Chateau Marmont, where the ghosts of Hollywood’s past seemed as real to him as the hopes and dreams of its present day.
5.
Billy Wilder wasn’t the only genius hanging around the corner of Sunset and Marmont at the time. On July 4, 1940, just outside the front door of the Chateau, one of Hollywood’s most gifted writers and directors opened a place the likes of which the area—indeed, the world—had never seen.
Preston Sturges was a bona fide one and only. An inventor, entrepreneur, yachtsman, playwright, and boulevardier, the son of cosmetics magnate Mary Desti and sometime husband to daughters of East Coast society, he had come to Hollywood on the strength of his almost accidental success on Broadway and made a significant enough name as a screenwriter as to be allowed the very rare privilege of ascending to the director’s chair, from which, starting in mid-1940, he delivered four critical and commercial successes in less than eighteen months: The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, and Sullivan’s Travels.
Rolling in money and convinced that such would always be the case, he had opened, four years prior, a French restaurant named Snyder’s near the Beverly Hills end of the Strip. Snyder’s foundered, but it had ignited in Sturges a dream of building a nightspot in Hollywood that would rival the ones he favored in New York and Paris. And so he acquired a worn-down bungalow a few steps to the west of the Chateau and set about creating a fantasia. It was a dilapidated Spanish-style building serving, when Sturges bought it, as a cash-on-the-barrelhead wedding chapel. Rather than raze the place and start from scratch, the mechanically inclined Sturges built a larger edifice beneath it, lifting the tiny cottage up onto the roof. The result was a boxy, rectangular two-story building with a small hacienda house on top of one side of it, like a crown worn cockeyed. Sturges named it the Players, after the famed actors club in New York, and it would consume his time, money, and dream life for a solid dozen years.
When the Players opened, the ground floor was a drive-in family-style restaurant, the second floor was a more formal dining room with live entertainment, and the top floor, the former bungalow, was a fine dining establishment (jacket and tie required, gentlemen) serving classic French cuisine. But all of that was provisional. For one thing, Sturges felt entitled to shut the place down on a moment’s notice if he wanted to turn the evening into a private party; the top floor in particular would sometimes be accessible only to the owner’s chums, particularly Howard Hughes, Sturges’s fellow gearhead and eccentric and eventual business partner, who used to bring dates there, especially when he was encamped at Chateau Marmont, and who insisted that no other patrons use the dining room when he did.
Then there was Sturges’s inveterate tinkering. He put a barbershop in a small mezzanine level that his oddball architecture had created. He built a revolving bandstand so that two ensembles could be seated at the same time and spun back and forth, with no break between acts. He built false walls so as to alter the size of rooms as the need arose. He concocted a gizmo that lifted the tables in the booths so it would be easier for diners to slip in and out of them. He kept adding onto the structure, eventually clearing space for a larger dance floor and a cocktail bar, known as Club Sinister for its dim lighting. After a while, he turned the top level into a dinner theater, mounting productions of new plays, including some of his own that were sketches for movies. He even applied for a permit to build a helipad on the roof, in the area not occupied by the bungalow, an audacity that L.A. County officials wisely denied (to what would have been the grateful relief of Chateau Marmont management and patrons if they’d had the first clue about the bullet they’d dodged).
The Players was a hit with celebrities, and Chateau Marmont guests regularly dined there when they were looking for something more refined than Schwab’s BLTs and milk shakes. There was plain American fare on the first and second floors—steaks and chops and chicken and hamburgers. But the head chef upstairs was French and specialized in the likes of bouillabaisse and tripe à la mode de Caen. Perhaps not surprisingly, a number of French cineastes were among the Players’ most dedicated patrons: René Clair, Max Ophüls, Marcel Pagnol, who called the restaurant “une idée poetique,” and Jean Renoir, who pronounced the place “the center of the Hollywood Resistance Movement.”
Yet even though it was regularly busy and grossed upwards of $300,000 in some years,*13 the Players hemorrhaged money. Sturges would let friends run large tabs and then forgive the debts in moments of emotional generosity, and he would be similarly flighty in turning away cash-paying customers if he didn’t like the looks of them. He’d blithely begin a new round of renovation and construction in the midst of what ought to have been the restaurant’s busy season. And he paid almost no attention to inventory control or other formal business matters; the Players was notably porous, with exits everywhere, which too many staff members took advantage of to make off brazenly with food and liquor stocks, especially during the rationing years of World War II.
It couldn’t last. Though the Players was reliably filled with notable names, though it had a steady stream of customers from Chateau Marmont, the Garden of Allah, and Sunset Tower, though Sturges kept innovating so as to keep his customers intrigued and delighted, creditors kept after him for years, until, at decade’s end, he finally saw the truth. “I am very much afraid The Players is past helping at this point,” he told a reporter. “The bulk of its customers has formed the habit of going elsewhere, and nothing in the world is so difficult to change as a habit.” Not long after, the place was sold for a sum that put only a modest dent in the debts it had accrued.
When he’d bought Chateau Marmont for three-quarters of a million dollars in 1932, Albert Smith provoked skepticism and jeers. But his surmise that demand for quality short-term residential units in Los Angeles would rise turned out to be right. Starting with the 1932 Olympic Games, and carrying on through the decade, the population of the area grew steadily—half a million newcomers moved into the city in the thirties alone—and the area around the hotel continued to be developed and filled in. His decision to turn Fred Horowitz’s apartment house into a hotel proved canny, with a steady stream of guests from the entertainment world and the worlds of advertising, publishing, and fashion finding the Chateau a perfect not-too-Hollywood nest from which to do business with Hollywood studios.
In the winter of 1936–37, Smith increased his investment, buying the parcel of land immediately to the east of the hotel, where a series of two-story rental homes were strung together in a line. He had some renovation and decoration work done on these units and turned them into a unique feature of the hotel—stand-alone dwellings, separated from the main building by a lawn and a copse of trees, that included all the conveniences of hotel living: maid service, valet parking, day-and-night switchboard operators, a front desk where packages or mail could be accepted.
Now Marmont guests could opt for a layer of privacy beyond that afforded by the unusually private setup of the hotel. They could stay in isolated buildings on the hotel grounds; eventually, the fencing around the enlarged property was reconfigured so that guests staying in these stand-alone units could exit and enter through a gateway on Monteel Road and needn’t pass through the main building at all.
There were other such accommodations nearby. The Garden of Allah was comprised entirely of such “bungalows,” but they were actually multi-residential units more like garden apartments, and they were right on top of each other; guests famously complained about the lack of soundproofing and the ability to hear conversation—and more—from adjoining suites. Smith’s inspiration was more likely the Beverly Hills Hotel, where twenty-odd bungalows, many with multiple bedrooms and bathrooms, stood on secluded acreage away from the main hotel. Those bungalows, which would become famous in Hollywood lore, were part of a larger hotel that offered many of the amenities denied Chateau Marmont residents. But what Smith’s new facilities lacked in access to, say, a restaurant or twenty-four-hour dog-walking services, they made up for in atmosphere. Compared with the Chateau, the Beverly Hills Hotel was like a train station, with people bustling in and out every day. Smith’s hotel was quieter, more out of the way, and his bungalows were like a den inside an already secret world.
In April 1937 the bungalows debuted in display ads in Los Angeles newspapers:
Chateau Marmont
Announces
CHATEAU MARMONT
BUNGALOWS
Charming secluded hillside homes, with the complete 24-hour hotel service which has always been an outstanding feature of Chateau Marmont…exquisitely decorated…quiet sunny patios and gardens. Now open for inspection.
They were a hit. Unlike the penthouses, which management continued to advertise as available for rent, the bungalows were occupied regularly, their desirability as super-private units evident from the start. Smith could see the advantage of configuring the grounds to add additional bungalows, but he was increasingly reluctant to invest more resources in the hotel. The flow of traffic, the support of movie studios, the growth in population in the area, the success of Hollywood during the Depression—all of these factors should have made the Chateau a financial windfall. But in striking a balance between keeping the hotel full and keeping it profitable, he was continually landing on the wrong side. He was in fact losing money.
Part of it was still to do with the Chateau’s low profile, with its being smaller than rival hotels, with its being relatively anonymous, even to locals, and, ironically, with its catering so specifically to long-term residents that it was often understood to be an apartment house rather than a hotel (the rare interviews that Ann Little granted almost always said that she operated an apartment building). Even though it stood right out in plain sight at the eastern end of Sunset Strip, it felt obscure and anonymous, and its bottom line suffered as a result. The novelties of the area continued to draw attention, customers, tourists. Chateau Marmont was, somehow, outside the flow of things—an awful predicament for the owner earnestly trying to make a go of it.
In 1942, a decade into his ownership, Albert Smith, in his late sixties, began to tire of the effort of running a hotel. In the spring of that year, he put the Chateau on the market, and in July newspapers carried word that it had been sold to “an out-of-town buyer” for $350,000.*14 Not only was this less than half of what Smith had paid for the main building and the original parcel of land in 1931, but it included the expanded parcel to the east, the bungalows that sat on it, and a “fully improved estate” of twenty acres in Montecito, a suburb of Santa Barbara.
Smith had correctly predicted that the population of and tourism to Southern California would thrive after the 1932 Olympics. And he had successfully converted Fred Horowitz’s luxury apartment house into an apartment hotel. What he hadn’t figured on, apparently, was the sheer expense and aggravation of running such a business. Like Horowitz, he would walk away from the Chateau gratified by being proven right, but he would be financially wounded for all his faith and prescience. It would take a new owner with a harder eye for the bottom line to finally put the hotel on steady footing.