Part Two

A SECOND BIRTH (1932–1942)

The Chateau and the Players, early forties. Bison Archives

Fred Horowitz had worked out nearly everything about his dream castle, down to the last table lamp and water glass. But, like almost everyone else, he hadn’t seen the Great Depression coming, and he had to walk away from the building just as it was fulfilling his idea of what it would be like as a living thing.

Unluckily for him, the whole area around Chateau Marmont would soon come to life, with nightclubs, restaurants, shops, and a number of swank places to live popping up. Horowitz’s vision was becoming a reality, but not exactly as he had predicted. His castle would thrive—not as an apartment house for the upper classes of Southern California, but as a hotel catering to the movie trade. And a man who helped create the movies in the first place would be the one who led the transition.

Even as the Great Depression beleaguered the nation, Chateau Marmont stood solid, a safe harbor not only for vacationers and business travelers but for refugees from the gathering political storms in Europe. And the people who made their homes of it, albeit temporarily, whether in its most sun-dappled penthouses or its darkest nooks and corners, were more and more frequently the people who helped lighten the hearts and fuel the imaginations of a world teetering between economic wreckage and the impending darkness of war.