Part Three

AN IDENTITY EMERGES (1942–1963)

The Brettauer Bungalows, the fifties. Maynard L. Parker, photographer. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Albert Smith had the foresight to recognize that the growing community around Chateau Marmont would find more use for the building as a residential hotel than as an apartment house. And while he correctly predicted the rise of West Hollywood and the Sunset Strip at the foot of the place, he had neither the business acumen nor the physical stamina to make a long-term success of it.

The Chateau’s next owner, on the other hand, had both. A mystery man from overseas, he approached the hotel as a garden that had been allowed to grow impractically wild, trimming away at some plants that had become ungainly and gradually adding crucial elements that filled out the design, function, and appeal of the whole. He wasn’t necessarily an easy man, but he knew what he was doing.

And under his reign, throughout the years of war and the recovery and boom that followed, as the Sunset Strip darkened for fear of air raids and then lit up more brightly than it ever had with the vitality and spark of youth and even rebellion, Chateau Marmont blossomed with business and energy and a growing reputation as one of the centers of Hollywood’s offscreen life. At the head of what was becoming one of the most famous stretches of road in the world, it was a reliable haven, open to all and, more important, safe, welcoming, and secure.