1.
After its sale by Erwin Brettauer in 1963, Chateau Marmont began to show the toll of the benign neglect practiced by a succession of owners. The last of these—the trio of attorneys who’d established Chateau Marmont Ltd.—had acquired the property at a bargain price and managed it for more than seven years without putting much more than the bare minimum into running and maintaining it (although they did once insinuate to The New York Times that they would be building an annex—a “twin…right next door”). But in many ways, they had succeeded in keeping the hotel occupied not because of its location, its history, or its respect for guests’ privacy but because they kept it cheap. And that cheapness came at a price.
The photographer Dewey Nicks, who would one day conduct commercial shoots at the Chateau, remembered visiting it during these years with his father, a St. Louis advertising executive, and making note, even at a young age, of the state of disrepair. “One day I was in the elevator with my sister, and Keith Richards’s son got on,” he recalled, “and he carved a gash into the woodwork with this knife he had in his pocket. And we came back like a year later and that mark was still there.”
Actress Carol Lynley lived at the Chateau with her daughter in the early seventies, and she remembered it during that era as a place “run by eccentrics for eccentrics….It’s the kind of place where something gets broken and stays broken for 40 years. The one nice thing about it is that you never have to worry about damaging anything….There’s nothing to intimidate you because you can’t ruin something that’s already ruined.”
If she was exaggerating for effect, she wasn’t exaggerating much. The place was, to put it kindly, run-down. Carpeting that had torn was repaired with black electrical tape; in some places, especially around elevators, where people tended to idle and congregate, it was worn down to the lining and left that way. Cheap light fixtures replaced any wall sconces or chandeliers that had broken. Ripped wallpaper was left in place, often sutured with adhesive tape. Plaster would sift down from ceilings, sometimes right on top of sleeping guests, and furniture broke, sometimes right out from under guests, as happened one regrettable afternoon to, of all people, Myrna Loy. The decay was everywhere. “The shower knob came off in my hand,” David Mamet remembered, “and the shower bar fell down.”
Writer Eve Babitz, so sharp in describing the hotel as it was in the sixties and seventies, quipped, “The only reason anything was off-white at the Chateau was because it had once been just plain white.” That was meant as a note of affection; she felt comfortable in a place where she was among “the kind of people who like to spill things, things like wine, blood, whiskey, cocaine, ashes, and bodily fluids.” But she recognized, too, that the condition of the place had become a flaw, not an amenity: “So little care had gone into maintaining it that even people who liked seedy hotels thought it was too much. Even people who wanted to feel depressed started staying away.”
And the stuff that didn’t break was, amazingly, stolen. Carmel Volti, the switchboard operator, recalled that “people would come in off the street at night in their stocking feet and steal things—antiques, pictures off the walls, whatever they could get their hands on.” Lynley recalled a few years later that management had “started to chain the furniture to the floor,” but even that wasn’t enough: “One morning, we found the furniture gone, chains and all.” And when it wasn’t neighborhood junkies looking for something they could sell, it was staff members: One former employee helped himself to some of the best pieces in the building, decorating his home with his prizes until it looked like a copy of the hotel—or, rather, what the hotel had once been. (At around this time, Susan Sarandon, then shooting The Front Page for director Billy Wilder, had her luggage and personal belongings stolen from her suite while she slept.)
In 1973, the owners under which this decay had become chronic decided they’d had enough. They thought about razing the building—the site was valuable, even if the building, however sturdy in its bones, was decrepit. The state of the place was summed up in a New York Times travel story titled “It’s Shabby-Genteel but the Stars Love It,” in which a longtime resident was quoted as saying, “You start at the Montecito, then you move to the Marmont, the Sunset Towers, the Beverly Wilshire, and finally, if you really make it, you have a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel….I’m on my way down. Next week I’m moving into my tennis club.”*1 The owners might’ve been justified in treating the place as a teardown, but they opted instead to seek a buyer. And in the spring of 1975, they found one.
Sarlot-Kantarjian was a construction and development firm co-owned by builder Raymond Sarlot and attorney Karl Kantarjian, and active in a number of high-end projects in the Los Angeles area, including, at the time it purchased Chateau Marmont, a multimillion-dollar condominium project in Bel Air. In 1973 and 1974, the firm sold an estimated $1.5 million and $4.5 million in new homes and condominiums, respectively, making it cash rich.*2 It acquired the Chateau for approximately $1 million in March 1975,*3 and thought of it, at least partly, as a potential tax write-off. “The bank was ready to foreclose,” remembered Sarlot. “Bills hadn’t been paid in months, and the building was in total disrepair….The place looked like a dungeon. Or worse. It was so bad I wouldn’t have stayed free for a one-nighter.” And in addition to its state of disrepair, its finances were being managed with indifference. “Occupancy had never been a problem,” Sarlot said, but “it was losing some $2,000 a month. Rates were as low as $12 for a single room and $26 for a two-bedroom suite. Those were the publicized rates. From there, deals were made.”*4
But a funny thing happened to Ray Sarlot as he evaluated the property he had acquired. Wandering the halls and rooms in a state of worry and despair, according to his second wife and widow, Sally Rae Sarlot, “He fell in love with the place. It became almost like a mistress.”
That was only a slight exaggeration. Sarlot was a big, bearish, affable man given to enthusiasms. He was a butcher’s son from Chicago, born in 1924 and intent on studying engineering when World War II interfered and he found himself in the army serving as a mapmaker. After his discharge, he moved to Southern California and became a contractor, working his way up to a position from which he could build homes and, later, apartment complexes. When he bought the Chateau, Sarlot was heading toward divorce from the mother of his three children, and the hotel provided him with a place to live—a case not of bringing one’s work home but of bringing one’s home to work. He would live there for the next five years, during which time he not only stopped the flow of damage in the hotel but reversed it—enhancing what he found and expanding the property, inside and out, in something of a return to better days.
“When I came in here,” Sarlot told the Los Angeles Times, “I was what you call shocked.” The effort that went into restoring the place was immense. There were physical changes to virtually every room and public space: carpeting, baseboards, lighting fixtures, wallpaper. There were structural changes: A sprinkler system was installed for fire safety; a breakfast nook was built off the main lobby; the pool was drained and restored with a new lining; the exterior of the main building was repainted; the grounds were torn up and replanted. Throughout, as well, there was a new emphasis on decor. Sarlot’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Regina Bernstein, oversaw the purchase and placement of new furniture throughout the hotel—one-of-a-kind antiques and quality everyday pieces, much in the spirit of the “Marmont look” that Albert Smith and Ann Little had instituted more than forty years prior. The murals, woodwork, and windows in the lobby and lounge were restored by craftsmen. “We ended the reign of plastic garbage,” Sarlot declared.
Not everyone appreciated the work. Tuesday Weld had lived at the hotel on and off through the late sixties and the seventies, going as far as renting multiple suites at a time when the 1970 fires in Malibu destroyed her beachside home. Wandering into the hotel after Sarlot’s renovations, she groused to a reporter, “Well, they repainted this place. I liked it better the old way. It smelled homier then.”
Her complaint aside, most guests appreciated the upgrades, and Sarlot recognized that he was uniquely suited to the job of reviving the Chateau. “Probably the only reason we could do what we did,” Sarlot explained to a reporter, “is because I am a builder. I knew what I didn’t have to do—I didn’t waste money doing things different. It’s an old hotel, and we kept it an old hotel.” But he also confessed that he was in love with the place, and he doted on it accordingly. “I don’t think it’ll ever go into the black because it’s kinda like a toy,” he said, chuckling at himself. “You never stop. Craziness.”
And Sarlot didn’t stop. Within a few months of acquiring the hotel, he purchased the property immediately to the east at 8171 Sunset Boulevard, where a string of cottage apartments climbed the hill in a line behind a restaurant. Initially, he planned to raze those units and build an annex to the hotel, with plans calling for twenty luxury suites, a rooftop pool, a cocktail lounge, office space for hotel management, and eighty-five underground parking spaces. An architect was retained, and the cost of the expansion was reckoned to be in the neighborhood of $1.5 million.*5 But the renovations required in the main building were so extensive and costly, in both time and money, that Sarlot and Kantarjian scaled back their ambitions. Instead, as Albert Smith had with the units he added to the hotel nearly forty years earlier, they converted these newly acquired cottages into yet more bungalows, giving the hotel three distinct areas outside the main building: the poolside bungalows (the Smith units, which had been built before the pool), the modern bungalows built by Erwin Brettauer in the far northeast corner of the property, and these new units, referred to as the garden bungalows. With their purchase, the physical plan of Chateau Marmont reached completion, almost exactly fifty years after Fred Horowitz first beheld the site where he would build his castle.
Ray Sarlot had other enthusiasms—he was an avid booster of the Los Angeles Marathon (ironic since, according to his widow, her burly husband was “forever popping a button on his shirt”), and he served on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles, a position that nicely dovetailed with the circle of painters who had become regular guests of his hotel, such as David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Eduardo Paolozzi. But whatever else commanded his attention, the Chateau was his great love.
In a great coup to signal to the world that they had acquired a gem, Sarlot and Kantarjian managed in March 1976 to get the hotel declared a Historic-Cultural Monument (number 151, to be exact) by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage board. This meant that their renovations and improvements would be subject to supervision and approval by a landmarks board, but it also gave their new acquisition some well-deserved cachet. They just missed out on placing an even bigger feather in their caps. At around the time the hotel became theirs, Sarlot and Kantarjian became aware of a new film that Warner Bros. was producing titled Bogart Slept Here. Written for the screen by Neil Simon, then arguably the most popular working playwright in the world, it was going to be directed by Mike Nichols, also a very big deal, and star Robert De Niro, who had won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar just that spring for The Godfather: Part II. De Niro was to play a New York Method actor who comes to Hollywood on the strength of an unexpected hit film and finds himself flailing against the trappings of good fortune as he makes his next picture. The title comes from the fact that the lead character is put up by the studio at Chateau Marmont in a suite that he is told was once occupied by famed tough-guy actor Humphrey Bogart (who, of course, never lived at the Chateau).*6
De Niro had his own history with the hotel. The first time he visited, a few months earlier, he was literally snubbed and made to feel unwelcome. Approaching the front desk, he asked to see the penthouse, only to be shooed back into the night by the manager on duty. Another hotel employee, shocked to see a movie star rebuffed in such a way, asked, “Do you know who that is?” “A bum!” the manager replied. The owners called De Niro’s agent the next day to apologize.
Now, making a film set at the hotel, De Niro no doubt felt as if his Method training demanded that he live in a suite there. He took one on the fourth floor, and he made himself at home, almost immediately beginning an affair with a woman he met in the elevator—Carole Mallory, a New York model, teacher, writer, and socialite who at the moment was engaged to the son of Pablo Picasso and would soon have a nine-year affair with Norman Mailer. (To even the score, De Niro was, himself, also engaged, technically, to the woman he would soon marry, actress and singer Diahnne Abbott.) Their connection barely lasted a week, but not necessarily because of their other relationships.
De Niro’s stay in Hollywood was unexpectedly brief. He had arrived in Hollywood to work on Bogart only three days after completing shooting on Taxi Driver, a complex physical and emotional performance that clung to his body and nervous system for a considerable while. Finding himself in a fake hotel suite on a soundstage in Burbank, he strained to connect with the broad comic contours of Simon’s script. De Niro’s fanatical attention to detail had already been a matter of frustration and concern for the filmmakers; he had determined that his character should wear an earring, and he spent an entire day obsessively choosing just the right piece of jewelry from among hundreds provided by the prop master. When he got in front of the cameras, working opposite Simon’s wife, Marsha Mason (who had performed at the actual Chateau Marmont in Blume in Love a few years earlier), De Niro was unable to bring Simon’s bouncy, jokey dialogue to life. Simon’s script, as Nichols and the Warner Bros. brass saw it, required verve and panache and a broad brush, and not only did De Niro seem incapable of providing it, but he actively argued against it, challenging Nichols repeatedly on their divergent approaches to his scenes.
After a week or so of torturous effort, Simon, Nichols, and the producers did the unthinkable: They decided to shut the film down, relieve De Niro of the role, recast the lead, and start up again. Parts one and two were swiftly—if not painlessly—accomplished. But they were unable to find the right actor to replace De Niro, and the production fell apart. Nichols went back to New York—he wouldn’t direct another picture for eight years—and Simon continued his string of successful plays and scripts. He didn’t give up on Bogart Slept Here, though. He liked one of the actors who auditioned to replace De Niro and rewrote the script to suit him. That new version, directed by longtime Simon collaborator Herbert Ross, was released in 1977 as The Goodbye Girl and won an Oscar for Richard Dreyfuss, a far more elastic comic actor than De Niro. And, alas, it was set in New York, without any mention at all of Chateau Marmont.
2.
The Sunset Strip continued to draw nightclubbing crowds into the early seventies, but there was a different tenor to the scene. The street felt more like a thoroughfare than a destination. You didn’t hang out there; you drove through it. In large part that was because the sense that it was where the newest music was happening had evaporated. The vital new acts of the era weren’t gigging six nights a week down the block from one another; they were ensconced in their homes in Laurel Canyon or Malibu, and they played in arenas, not discotheques; you didn’t go club hopping to see the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac or Jackson Browne, to name just some of the big local acts of the day.
Yet oddly, just when pop musicians were becoming less physically present on the Strip, they were dominating it more than ever before with their images. The Strip of the day was lined with giant billboards advertising new albums and concert tours, an outdoor art gallery celebrating hit-making bands and giving the big PR push to up-and-comers. You could truly spend an evening driving back and forth on the Strip just appreciating the pictures.
Yet even with those riches right there, just as in the days of the Sahara showgirl, the billboard at the foot of Chateau Marmont was arguably the most memorable of them all. In 1976, ten years after the Sahara showgirl was taken down, the Philip Morris agency placed a new billboard at the corner of Sunset and Marmont, a depiction of a different Wild West icon that would occupy the space longer even than his pirouetting predecessor had. He was fifty feet tall, form cut, two-dimensional, a cowboy, complete with Stetson hat and duster overcoat, lighting up a smoke, with a single word emblazoned across his hips: “Marlboro.”
The Marlboro Man stood long enough on the gateway to the Sunset Strip that he became a landmark. In 1991, an architecture critic in the Los Angeles Times declared him “a more enduring urban monument than almost any other building in Los Angeles.” And just like the Sahara showgirl, he both upstaged and complemented Chateau Marmont. In a way that only made sense in Hollywood, the cowboy and the castle went together.
Roman Polanski had been avoiding Chateau Marmont for years. Ever since he had moved out of the hotel in 1969 with his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, mere months before she was slaughtered by Charles Manson’s lunatic disciples, the place held nothing but painful memories for him. He mainly lived and worked in Europe, keeping his visits to Hollywood to a minimum until 1973, when he made a triumphant return to American filmmaking with the brilliant drama Chinatown. In the spring of 1977, he was back in Los Angeles to prepare work on a new film when another sensational incident buffeted his life, this one of his own devising.
In March of that year, while staying at the Beverly Wilshire, Polanski was arrested for the sexual assault of a thirteen-year-old girl at the home of Jack Nicholson, where he had taken the child to photograph her for a layout in Vogue magazine. He was released on bail, pending trial, and he moved into a friend’s house in Coldwater Canyon. He was quickly discovered by the media there and unsparingly pursued. “My world was in ruins,” he later complained. “I couldn’t even go jogging any more for fear of being recognized and accosted.” Besieged, he moved into Chateau Marmont, where he knew he could keep to himself, hopeful, perhaps, to recapture some of the warmth he remembered from his earlier days in the hotel.
He arrived in April, and he would stay there on and off as his case made its way through the legal system. He didn’t like to use the grounds, even though he trusted the place. He would receive visitors in his suite, where guests would find him up late into the night “listen[ing] to some doleful jazz,” sitting in a large chair that looked ready to “swallow him up,” going on for hours-long monologues about the ins and outs of his case, about the American legal system, about “the people who won’t rest until they get me.” Staffers recalled that Polanski kept to himself, sneaking out after dark to get in a workout at a friend’s ballet school on Melrose Avenue or to have a meal at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard. Eventually, he became friendly with the parking valets in the Marmont garage, often coming downstairs to sit and chat with them, snacks and sodas in hand. Elsewhere in town he was a pariah, scratched off guest lists, spoken of in terms of villainy. “I’d crossed the fine line between decent folks and scum,” he moaned.
Months of investigation, deposition, grand jury testimony, and legal maneuvers followed. Polanski was allowed to leave the country for brief visits to Europe. He even found a producer, Dino De Laurentiis, willing to hire him to direct a film, a remake of the 1937 disaster movie Hurricane to be shot on location in the South Pacific, and the court allowed Polanski to travel there to scout locations. He moved in and out of Chateau Marmont to make these trips, always with a sense of trepidation.
His lawyers arranged a deal in which Polanski would plead guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and be remanded to a psychiatric evaluation at a prison in Chino, California. If the doctors there deemed him fit to return to society, he would be released after no more than ninety days and serve probation thereafter. Polanski reported to Chino, complied with the court orders that he submit to examination, and, after forty-two days, was released, just before Christmas, returning to Chateau Marmont and resuming work on Hurricane.
He was supposed to report to court for final sentencing in early 1978, expecting to be given probation as had been agreed to by his attorneys, attorneys for his victim, the district attorney, and the judge. But word began to get around that the judge was going to scuttle the deal for something more substantial; the press was publishing too many pictures of Polanski at liberty, and there were grumblings that the director had gotten preferential treatment because the judge was starstruck. The judge told the attorneys that he was unilaterally altering the terms of the plea agreement, planning to send Polanski back to prison for the remainder of the ninety-day period and then to give him a sentence of indeterminate length, perhaps in probation, perhaps also including a stipulation that he voluntarily deport himself from the United States. Polanski learned that the judge had put on an even tougher face in private, telling acquaintances over dinner at a country club that he was going to sentence the director to fifty years in prison. “I’ll see this man never gets out of jail,” he was heard saying.
Learning of this change in climate, Polanski felt cornered. He had escaped the Holocaust as a child by roaming the Polish countryside, pretending to be Catholic. He had avoided slaughter at the hands of the Manson family by sheer happenstance and paid the price of having his wife and unborn child murdered. Now, facing punishment for a crime of his own making, his instinct for survival kicked in. “The judge seemed determined to prevent me from ever again living and working in the United States,” he remembered. “What had I to gain by staying?” In his suite at the Chateau, he packed a bag, then drove to De Laurentiis’s offices. “I’ve made up my mind,” he declared, “I’m getting out of here.” With $1,000 cash that the producer thrust on him, he went to LAX, parked his car, and bought a ticket on the first flight to London, where he had an apartment. The following day, he went to France, where extradition regulations protected him from deportation back to the United States. He would never see Hollywood, or Chateau Marmont, again.
Even though Ray Sarlot was struggling mightily to infuse the hotel with a veneer of respectability, there was a patina of old-time naughtiness to the place that couldn’t easily be shaken off. The actress Faith Dane, best known for her portrayal of the burlesque artist known as Miss Mazeppa in the play and film Gypsy, was a regular, as was, fittingly enough, the drag queen known as Gypsy (born James Haake) and, for that matter, an actor and musician who became famous in drag, Tim Curry, who stayed at the Chateau while performing in the original Los Angeles production of The Rocky Horror Show, which was staged at the Roxy nightclub on the Sunset Strip and lasted a full nine months.
And the world of music could always be counted on to provide some hair-raising incidents. The soul-funk singer Rick James frequented the Chateau Marmont when his star was rising in the late seventies. “I moved into a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont,” he remembered in his autobiography, “the hippest scene in decadent, dope-crazed Hollywood.” Ensconced in his hideaway, James partied prodigiously and with a gallery of famous names. “Rod Stewart became my best friend,” he said. “Timothy Hutton became my best friend. Robin Williams became my best friend. Elisabeth Shue became my girlfriend.” That James would remember his days at the hotel at all was impressive, because members of his entourage would occasionally find him blue-skinned and nearly lifeless from all the drugs he had consumed and would have to revive him with cold showers and, sometimes, medical intervention. (Years after James’s death, an associate claimed that this sort of near catastrophe happened not only at the Chateau but at the Sunset Marquis down the Strip, L’Ermitage in Beverly Hills, and the Plaza in New York.)
One of the people whom James saw frequently when he was staying at Chateau Marmont was Jan Gaye, the ex-wife of singer Marvin Gaye, with whom James was having an affair that, he said, made him think of marriage despite all the other women he was dallying with while dating her. Jan knew the hotel well, because her former husband used to stay there occasionally when he was seeking a place away from home to indulge in sex-and-drug escapades, which sometimes included his wife. Gaye was enough of a regular that he had run up a tab of $14,000 by the time of his death in 1984.*7 Ray Sarlot claimed that the hotel tried to collect before the singer was killed, but to no avail. “He stiffed us for thousands in unpaid room rent,” he said. “We billed him but nothing happened. Later, we submitted a bill to his estate, but discovered there was nothing there. After that, what were we to do? Say we sued Marvin Gaye?”
If Sarlot was ambivalent about using the courts, not all of his guests were. In 1977, when her marriage to Rolling Stone Mick Jagger was sputtering toward divorce, Bianca Jagger, the Nicaragua-born socialite and activist, decided to have a go at a career in acting. She moved to Los Angeles and, as she said, “I stayed at the Chateau Marmont Hotel rather than one of the more fashionable places because I wanted people to realize that I was there looking for work.” Such was the repute of the hotel that her posh friends were horrified to learn that she was there. “Ryan O’Neal was appalled when he found out,” Jagger remembered. “ ‘How can you stay in a place like that?’ he said.”
Just two years later, Jagger was back at the Chateau in a different frame of mind. This time, she was trying to establish residency in California to take advantage of the divorce laws there. During her stay, she was injured in a roller-skating accident and sued her estranged husband for $2,500 in medical bills, $35,000 in legal fees, and, what the hell, $5,000 for her tab at the hotel. The judge was good with the first two claims, but he balked at the hotel bill.
Given all of this, it was no wonder that Sarlot and his staff thought so highly of one of their regular guests, a fellow who had been patronizing the hotel since he first started coming regularly to Hollywood to shoot a TV series in 1970. Tony Randall first checked into the Chateau when he began work on The Odd Couple, which ran for 114 episodes between 1970 and 1975, and he returned when he was in town to shoot The Tony Randall Show (1976–78) and Love, Sidney (1981–83). Randall and his wife, Florence, preferred the bungalows to the suites, partly because they liked the size of the kitchens. “We don’t want to go out to dinner every night, or send down for dinner,” he told a reporter. “We want to cook our dinners like Ma and Pa back home. Like Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch.” But unlike that imaginary rustic couple, the Randalls also liked to sunbathe au naturel, and the extra privacy afforded by being well outside the main building and even the pool area made that luxury possible. Even when the unit next to theirs was engulfed in tempest, as happened during their final extended stay, they were isolated from the commotion.
But for all that comfort, Randall was never fully satisfied with his accommodations, not because of anything to do with the hotel, but, rather, because of the setting. Los Angeles, he complained to a friend in the press, wasn’t a good town for pedestrians: “They don’t walk out here. There’s not one decent place to walk.” When his schedule permitted, Randall would fly back to his Central Park West home just so he could enjoy a day or so of walking around Manhattan, his absolute favorite pastime. His newsman chum tried to get him to walk along the Sunset Strip, through Beverly Hills, or up and down the row of art galleries on La Cienega. A good sport, Randall tried them all but found them wanting. “I’m a New Yorker,” he said finally, as if that were the only explanation that anyone would require.
It was another New Yorker, with another set of habits, who would make a more permanent mark on the Chateau.
3.
When he checked in at the front desk on the night of February 28, 1982, John Belushi was a time bomb, a waste site, a mess.
Sweaty, flabby, edgy, pale, disheveled, worn to a stump at the age of thirty-three, he had called ahead to reserve his favorite bungalow, number 3, one of the ones Al Smith had purchased that stood close to the private entrance on Monteel Road. Like other members of the extended Saturday Night Live family, Belushi had been introduced to Chateau Marmont by the show’s producer, Lorne Michaels, who stayed there when he was a comedy writer for a variety of TV shows and who liked to joke that he moved around the place as his fortunes in the business ebbed and flowed: “I lived all around in the hotel, moving from room to room. If I had the money, I moved to a larger suite. If not, I took a smaller one.”
Belushi had been in residence at the hotel for more than a month earlier that winter, at first in a suite in the upper floors, number 69, only to abandon it when he and his neighbors found one another noisy: them complaining about Belushi’s music and carousing, him being woken by their crying baby. He moved to a penthouse, number 54, and then, after a visit from his wife, Judy, who found the setting depressing—“Are you sure you want to stay here?” she had asked him, after finding a Quaalude on the floor of his room—he moved into the bungalow, with his script drafts, his research materials, a new stereo system, and the rest of his belongings. He was going to get a movie written. He was going to create a hit.
The film he wanted to make was Noble Rot, a romantic comedy about a robbery scheme set in the early days of the California wine industry. And in the days after his frazzled arrival at the front desk, he would take meetings with writers and development executives and ask any number of friends in and out of the business to give their impressions of the script.
But the work wasn’t going well, and neither Belushi’s manager, Bernie Brillstein, nor executives at Paramount Pictures were happy with his work. The studio had run out of patience and was willing to cut its losses and start anew; Michael Eisner, Paramount’s production boss, even came around to the Chateau to pitch Belushi on a whole new idea, a spoofy adaptation of The Joy of Sex with Belushi playing a variety of characters representing the range of human sexual experience.
But it became clear to everyone dealing with the comedian that he was off, badly: His attention span was negligible; he took and made mysterious phone calls around the clock; he was frequently hours late or completely AWOL from meetings and appointments; his hotel room was a pigsty; his speech was scattershot and even incoherent; the clothes he wore were dirty and rumpled; he didn’t seem to be bathing or shaving regularly; he was barely sleeping. When the filmmaker Al Reinert came across Belushi waiting for his car in the hotel garage, he noted the star’s clearly disoriented manner: “He would pace around the valet area, muttering incomprehensible curses, his pupils as black and dilated as wide-open camera lenses.”
Everyone assumed Belushi was using drugs, and the suspicions were absolutely correct. He had long been known to be an all-in sort, devouring food and booze and controlled substances with the same impressive gusto with which he dove into physical comedy. His superhuman capacity had always been a point of amazement, and he wasn’t shy about boasting of it. Heedless hedonism was one of his great comic gifts, and he made great comedy of his appetites on-screen and off. But the state of him that winter wasn’t a piece of acting. He had been drinking and smoking pot and, especially, using cocaine all day, every day, for a long time, and he’d begun to dabble in heroin, partly, he would tell people, as research for a movie he wanted to make about the punk rock scene.
Given that it was Hollywood and the early eighties, this sort of behavior, while extreme, was often tolerated: You generate income for entertainment conglomerates, they don’t care too much what you do with your free time or to yourself. But Belushi was riding a poor streak. His two 1981 films, Continental Divide and Neighbors, were bombs, as was his 1979 film Steven Spielberg’s 1941. He had a modest success with 1980’s Blues Brothers, which had a cult following but hadn’t sold enough tickets to compensate for its out-of-control budget. His last true hit was Animal House, almost four years earlier, a lifetime in Hollywood. He was in danger of squandering his career, and his life choices were making that seem a likelier outcome than not, even to casual observers. During his stay at Chateau Marmont, he took a meeting at a Sunset Strip nightclub with a pair of studio executives who brought their wives along. After their parley, which was, as was becoming more common with Belushi, disjointed and unproductive, one of the women said to her husband that she was reminded of a classic Hollywood tale: Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. But that was a movie about a forgotten star, he replied; everyone knew Belushi. “Sunset Boulevard,” she repeated. “I’m telling you. We just saw it.”
While Belushi was trashing his bungalow and himself, people around him were scheming to get him back to New York, where his wife, Judy, and his partner and best friend, Dan Aykroyd, felt they could help him get clean from drugs and resume working productively. Aykroyd could always bring out the best in Belushi; when he visited the Chateau during Belushi’s previous stay, the pair were seen on a lark, staging a mock sword fight in the lobby lounge, using two-foot-long candles as weapons. He was busily working on a script, titled Ghostbusters, for the two of them to make together with another SNL alumnus, Bill Murray. But even tracking Belushi down to have a chat was becoming impossible. He darted around erratically from nightclubs to people’s homes to restaurants to guitar shops to his favorite bathhouse to assignations with drug dealers, sometimes abandoning limousines he hired and driving off with some new acquaintance. When he was in the bungalow, he was often too addled to talk or answer the phone, or he was surrounded by clutches of sycophants and drug world people and hangers-on and unable to have a serious conversation. He was a wreck, and he was spinning beyond the reach of anyone who could help him.
At Chateau Marmont, Belushi was occasionally seen in the company of Robert De Niro, who had returned to Los Angeles to look into some new film projects. The pair knew each other from lower Manhattan. De Niro had been a guest at Belushi’s home, where a basement rec room was the scene of some wild late-night parties (at one, De Niro cut his hand so deeply that he had to go to the hospital for stitches). Since he had last visited the hotel to make the aborted Bogart Slept Here, De Niro had acquired the habit of keeping more or less on retainer an upper-floor penthouse at the Chateau, preferring to stay in the hotel after having some bad experiences with rental houses during recent working trips to Hollywood. His laundry was done by the hotel staff; his car was kept under a dustcover in the hotel garage; and he came and went unnoticed: a New York apartment dweller utterly at home in a place that felt like a Manhattan high-rise.
On this visit, De Niro had been joined for a time by his young son and adolescent daughter. One afternoon, he took them to a party where they encountered Belushi snorting such quantities of cocaine and heroin that he had to excuse himself to go find a place to vomit. That sordid spectacle didn’t stop De Niro, who was using cocaine himself in those days, from seeking Belushi’s company regularly after the kids went back east. De Niro would occasionally come down from his suite to Belushi’s bungalow to hang around, laugh, and party, or the two would bump into each other in the VIP rooms of various Sunset Strip restaurants and nightclubs and set off together on some sort of spree.
On Thursday night, March 4, De Niro was bopping around town with actor Harry Dean Stanton, and the two kept phoning Belushi to get him to come out and join them, first at Dan Tana’s, an Italian restaurant favored by movie people, and then at On the Rox, the exclusive nightclub on the Sunset Strip where famous folks could get up to just about anything. Failing to raise him, they drove over to the Chateau to see if they could coax him into a bit of play. Instead, they found him—and his bungalow—in an awful state. The living room was a shambles—not sloppy, but actually trashed, as if in a rage. And worse, a flinty, hard-eyed woman named Cathy was lounging amid the discarded pizza boxes and wine bottles and dirty laundry as if she had some claim to the place and to Belushi himself. De Niro didn’t like the look of her at all—he called her “trashy” later—and he was happy to leave when Belushi suggested that he and Stanton go back to On the Rox and return to the bungalow after the club closed.
De Niro left, and when he returned to the Chateau a few hours later, it was to his own suite in the company of Stanton and a pair of women they’d met. There, he got a phone call from Robin Williams. The comedian had run into De Niro and Stanton at On the Rox, and they all agreed to meet up at Belushi’s after Williams performed an unscheduled set at the Comedy Store, also right on the Sunset Strip (and, formerly, Ciro’s). On the phone, De Niro told Williams that he was busy and that he should stop by Belushi’s on his own. Williams did and, like De Niro, was creeped out by the scene, leaving after a few words and a little coke. After he left, De Niro, too, stopped in at the bungalow, entering through the sliding glass patio door. He had a few words and a few lines and then took some of the cocaine that was piled on the living room table and went back to his suite. It was some time past 3:00 a.m.
At 8:00 a.m., a room service waiter delivered wheat toast, jam, and a pot of coffee to Belushi’s bungalow; Cathy Smith, the woman whom De Niro had shied away from, signed for the order, had her breakfast, cleaned up the room, especially the drug paraphernalia, checked in on Belushi, who was snoring loudly in bed, and left.
A little while later, the musical producer and manager Derek Power came knocking on the bungalow door while looking for Miles Copeland, manager of the rock trio the Police, who was himself staying in one of the hotel’s bungalows. Power knocked several times without getting a response before realizing he was at the wrong door and moving along.
At around noon, a taut, spry man walked through the grounds of the hotel, past the swimming pool, with a typewriter in his hand. The sky was clear, the air was warm, and the few sunbathers and lap swimmers who had come out to enjoy the weather took no notice of him: People were often passing through the pool area with musical instruments, wardrobe cases, cameras, easels—the clumsy stuff that creative folks use to make art.
Maybe twenty minutes later, a second man came by, in a suit, rushing, but, again, nothing terribly odd, and, again, nobody paid much mind.
But presently there were paramedics, moving with purpose, and then policemen, snooping about, and within an hour, outside the hotel grounds but creating an unignorable hum, television camera trucks and packets of paparazzi.
Finally, one of the sunbathers wandered into the lobby, which was unusually active, and asked a hotel employee what was going on. He was told, in the understatement for which the Chateau had long been known, “There has been a slight disturbance.” Presently, he learned that the truth was more than just “slight” and far bigger than a “disturbance.”
John Belushi had been discovered in a state of unconsciousness by the man with the typewriter, his personal trainer and bodyguard, Bill Wallace. Wallace had performed CPR on the comedian but wasn’t able to rouse him. Because it was Hollywood, and agents mattered more than cops, Wallace had phoned Bernie Brillstein, whose offices were just down Sunset Boulevard at 9200—ten blocks away.
“I’m having trouble waking John up,” Wallace said, clearly agitated. Brillstein thought Belushi might be playing possum to avoid a meeting he was to have that day with Paramount executives, and he told Wallace that he’d send someone over. Wallace called again a few minutes later, in an even more stressed voice: “There’s something really wrong with John!” Brillstein had his secretary call a doctor, who recommended calling for paramedics, which she did, and then he ordered his assistant, Joel Briskin, to get over to the hotel, and he was the second man on the scene, the man in the suit who’d rushed past the pool.
When he got inside the bungalow, Briskin found Wallace weeping, still trying to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Belushi. “Get out of here,” Wallace hollered at him. “John’s dead!” Almost immediately, an ambulance arrived and EMTs assessed the comedian’s state. They didn’t even try to defibrillate him; he was, as Wallace had declared, gone. They called for the medical examiner, but they saw the needle marks on Belushi’s arms: They knew he had died of an overdose.
Brillstein, for his part, had left his office and driven to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he assumed Belushi would be brought for treatment. He warned the staff that a major star had suffered an accident and was on his way and would require immediate care and, above all, privacy. And then he waited for news, which was painfully long in coming. He paced and smoked, his mind racing: He imagined that Belushi didn’t need to come to the ER at all, or that he was taken to another hospital, or that it was the worst case possible and time wasn’t of the essence, an outcome that he didn’t want to believe.
And then the call came from his office with the horrible news.
He felt his body react with sweat and hollowness and a shudder that was “like a little stuttered giggle.” He hung up and gathered himself sufficiently to act on next steps, a professional manager and problem solver in his bones. He called Dan Aykroyd and told him what had happened, point-blank, no sugar coating, instructing him to get to Belushi’s house and tell his wife before the media got the story. And then he returned to his offices to deal with the aftermath of an unimaginable tragedy that almost everybody had seen coming and no one knew how to prevent.
The hotel staff were busy improvising a response to an event that none of them had ever faced or prepared for. By chance, general manager Suzanne Jierjian wasn’t at her usual post when the news came from Belushi’s bungalow but at a medical appointment. When she returned, she was jolted by the spectacle of emergency vehicles on the street and a steady flow of reporters and cameras to the site. She was greeted by her assistant Tom Rafter, with word of what had happened, and even that was sketchy: Belushi had died, he told her, but nobody knew how or why. She was at a loss as to what to do when rescue came in the form of co-owner Ray Sarlot, who had been having lunch at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills when the news broke there. He had raced back to the hotel. “It was bedlam,” he remembered, “swarming with outsiders, the switchboard was lit up.”
Among the callers was Robert De Niro, who had been trying to reach Belushi throughout the late morning and wasn’t getting through. Perhaps noticing the commotion in the streets below his suite, he called the front desk directly, only to find his inquiries rebuffed. He demanded, finally, to speak to Jierjian, who reluctantly took his call.
“Where’s John?” he asked her.
“There is a problem,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s bad.”
“Is he sick?”
“It’s really bad.”
De Niro suddenly understood. He dropped the phone, crying.
Sarlot, meanwhile, leaped into action. He had every intention of cooperating with the authorities, whatever that meant in such a situation, but he didn’t care for the tumult being caused by the droves of newspeople and gawkers who were descending on Chateau Marmont. He had to protect his other guests, as well as the reputation of his business. He stationed guards at all the entrances to the hotel, directing anyone who wanted to come inside to the garage, which was the easiest point of entry to control. The police set up a barricade at the foot of Marmont Lane, allowing only hotel guests and residents of the streets above the hotel through. “It was the first time in all the years I’ve stayed there that I had to show my room key to get back into the hotel,” recalled a guest.
Some in the media breached the cordon. One camera crew made its way up to De Niro’s suite, hoping to get a response from the actor. They banged on his door repeatedly—on live TV—until they finally heard a voice from within hollering, “Go away!”*8 Another reporter found an uncharacteristically talkative subject in one of the hotel’s gardeners, who stated with great confidence that Belushi had died of a heart attack with his clothes neatly folded beside him, “as though he had gone to bed for the night….It looked like he choked on his tongue and the phlegm in his mouth.” (The next day, when his bosses saw his comments in the paper, the chatty greensman was sent away from the property and assigned to work on Sarlot’s San Fernando Valley home before returning a few days later to his regular post.)
Sarlot and his team managed to keep a lid on the situation so that other guests of the hotel not only avoided intrusions into their lives but didn’t even know that something so dreadful and sensational was going on right under their noses. Sarlot relished a particular example of how well his staff managed to deal with the awful scene. “What people don’t realize about the night Belushi died,” he confided to the Los Angeles Times a few years later, “is that the whole time all of that stuff was going on, Tony Randall was living right next door! Tony had no idea what was happening until he saw the coroner’s wagon.” (“Sarlot made Randall sound like an agent from the Vatican,” noted Times reporter Chris Hodenfield.)
Eventually, Belushi’s body was strapped to a gurney and rolled out to a coroner’s vehicle on Monteel Road. The street was lined with photographers, reporters, and curiosity seekers, as close to the bungalow as they had been able to get for hours. The reporters pushed toward the body, barking out questions, until Suzanne Jierjian stepped up and reproved them. The reporters, chastened, quieted and backed off. A police lieutenant watching the spectacle approached her and asked if she had any interest in working for the LAPD. “We need somebody like you who can handle the press,” he said.
The following day, Bernie Brillstein and an assistant were permitted to enter the bungalow and retrieve Belushi’s personal belongings. The police had already made a thorough sweep of the place, turning up some marijuana and residue of white powder in a dresser drawer and in some small folded paper envelopes of the sort commonly used to package cocaine and heroin. Brillstein couldn’t believe the state of his client’s rooms: “The scene was not only depressing, it was depraved. I couldn’t believe John had lived there.” There were half-drunk beers and bottles of wine and cups of coffee, plates of cold food, heaps of garbage and dirty laundry, and scattered papers, including piles of phone messages. Brillstein grabbed up a few documents that he thought looked personal and a jacket that he thought was appropriate to dress Belushi in, and he left for the mortuary, where he would help prepare the body to travel back east for a funeral, a trip on which he would accompany it.
Sarlot and his staff, meanwhile, cleaned the bungalow more thoroughly, throwing away most of what they found and identifying a few valuable-seeming items to put in the hotel safe in case the comedian’s family claimed them later. They then set about completely remodeling the room, changing all of the furniture and decor. “It was no longer the same unit,” Sarlot said. “We didn’t want the place to become a cult symbol.” The hotel kept a small but tight security cordon in place for about a month after the comedian’s death, hoping to discourage the wrong type of attention.
But that wasn’t to be, not entirely. For decades, even during the sixties heyday of the Sunset Strip, Chateau Marmont had enjoyed something of a privileged position amid the hurly-burly of Hollywood: It stood slightly apart from the commotion around it—compact, old-world, elegant, just off to the side of the circus, much as it sat just off Sunset Boulevard itself.
After Belushi, that changed. The Chateau became part of the show. A species of tourism sprang up in the eighties, a variant on the traditional tours of movie stars’ homes dedicated, instead, to the locales where various notorious Hollywood incidents occurred. Invariably, these “ghoul tours” would slow down in front of Marmont Lane so that guides could point out the famous “naughty” hotel where John Belushi died. Looky-loos would occasionally enter the grounds trying to get a glimpse of the infamous bungalow, but they would either be turned away or simply leave in disappointment when they saw how staid and demure the setting was. (Among those who wanted a piece of the place was the New York painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who came to Los Angeles soon after Belushi’s death and insisted that his art dealer host put him up in the bungalow where the comedian had overdosed—a fate to which Basquiat himself would fall in 1988.)*9
In 1984, Bob Woodward of The Washington Post and Watergate fame published Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, a painstakingly thorough but often tone-deaf account of, in the main, the final years, days, and hours of the comedian’s life, interviewing scores of Belushi’s intimates including his widow; his brother Jim; Dan Aykroyd; Bill Wallace; Bernie Brillstein; even Cathy Smith, who in 1986 pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter for supplying Belushi with drugs and injecting him with his final fatal speedball doses of cocaine and heroin. The book was a best seller, but it was something that nobody wanted: a misdeed-by-misdeed account of a life gone wrong, a chronicle of addiction that indicted everyone, a book that uncovered everything about Hollywood, drugs, and Belushi and yet seemed to understand none of it.
Brillstein felt that Woodward had an agenda of his own by taking on a project outside his habitual milieu of politics, saying he “came to town and looked at the situation through the eyes of a guy who knew nothing about the times or the environment or the people. He didn’t want to understand how Hollywood worked. He just wanted to condemn it. I think he already had his mind made up.” Aykroyd shared in the disappointment: “He painted a portrait of John that was really inaccurate….This was my friend that was being besmirched….It was all about the drugs and the excess, not about the quality of work and the background in theater and the preparation and the respect that John’s friends had for him.” And Jim Belushi held back nothing in his disdain for his brother’s biographer: “Woodward—that cocksucker. That motherfucker!…I don’t think Woodward’s capable of understanding what love is, or compassion, or relationships. He is one cold fish.”
Even from the vantage of Chateau Marmont, to which Belushi was technically no more than a guest who’d caused an unusual disruption, Wired was an affront. The owners of the hotel didn’t mind what was said about the comedian. They objected, rather, to the first line of the dust jacket: “John Belushi was found dead of a drug overdose March 5, 1982, in a seedy hotel bungalow.”
“Seedy”? Their $250-a-night bungalow?*10 That was a fighting word.
“He made it sound like some place near a downtown bus station where big drug deals are made,” Ray Sarlot moaned. He and Karl Kantarjian filed an $18 million*11 defamation suit against the publisher, Simon & Schuster, demanding that the cover be removed from the books and/or recalled. “Ray had spent so much time and effort bringing the hotel up to respectable condition,” remembered Sarlot’s wife, Sally Rae. “It was a blow to him to hear someone call it seedy. He was defending its honor.”
At first, Simon & Schuster pushed back: “It was the author’s opinion that the bungalow was seedy on March 5, 1982.” But they quickly realized it was best to put the squabble behind them. They settled with the hoteliers within weeks, changing the wording in subsequent printings of the book jacket and issuing a press release in which Woodward qualified that it was Belushi’s mess that he was referring to and not the hotel itself. “The Chateau has a charming ambience,” the author said, “and I would enjoy staying there myself.”*12 (His first words had a lasting sting, though: The month after the hotel and Woodward worked out their conflict, a travel piece about the Chateau in the Chicago Tribune was published with the headline “If the Marmont’s So ‘Seedy,’ Why Is It a Retreat for the Elite?”)
Wired was a big enough hit to draw the attention of moviemakers, although many in Hollywood were loath to touch the material. Veteran producer Edward S. Feldman managed to get the film made, despite obstacles and even violence: Jim Belushi stormed into his office one day and trashed it, instructing a secretary to “tell Feldman who did this”; “I would,” she replied, “but I don’t know who you are, sir.” The film premiered at 1989’s Cannes Film Festival to a reception of walkouts, catcalls, and boos. Much of the film was set at Chateau Marmont, which was explicitly named and shown in exterior shots several times early on. A mock-up of a bungalow stood in for Belushi’s rooms (for the record, it wasn’t especially seedy); it was the primary set for the final third or so of the story. Woodward, who was written into the script as a kind of observer/hero, walking through Belushi’s final days with him like an impartial guardian angel, told reporters that he found the film “exceptional….It deals with the themes with utter clarity.” But critics and audiences agreed with the Cannes crowd; the picture died, grossing barely $1 million.
More than three decades after Belushi’s death, the tragedy was still synonymous with Chateau Marmont. Almost every article about the hotel would mention the connection, and even for many in the Hollywood community the comedian’s overdose was considered a feature of the hotel and not a sad fact from its past. Novelist Jay McInerney, who was a regular at the Chateau for a number of years and became a good friend of one of its owners, made his first trip to Hollywood as a guest of a production company that was interested in acquiring rights to his novel Bright Lights, Big City. “They told me they were putting me up at Chateau Marmont,” he remembered, “and I said, ‘Is that good?’ And they said, ‘Is it good? John Belushi died there!’ ”
4.
One afternoon in the early eighties, a journalist sat in the lobby lounge of the Chateau with coffee and a notepad, writing down impressions of the place for a long story that was growing out of his obsession with the hotel. The whole while, he was slightly rattled by a spectacle on a nearby couch: “a small, elderly man dressed in a herringbone suit and a brightly colored ascot. His hair was dyed bluish-grey, and he wore matching eye-shadow. He was sleeping—arms akimbo, mouth open—with all the abandon of a child.” The dozer turned out to be Quentin Crisp, the eccentric English author and bon vivant, passing through Los Angeles on a book publicity tour and happily ensconced in the hotel with his publisher and co-author Donald Carroll. Crisp loved the Chateau and rhapsodized over it in a travel piece in The New York Times. “It is a place apart,” he said, conjuring “a leisurely, almost rural past.” He marveled at the lack of amenities, such as the overly solicitous bellmen who’d besieged him at the Beverly Hills and Beverly Wilshire hotels on previous visits: “I at last felt completely liberated from the fear of hotel staff by which my new life had so far been haunted. There didn’t appear to be any….No demands were made, no suggestions even were put forward….It is possible to carry on exactly as though you are living at home.”
Crisp wasn’t a regular at the hotel, but in a mere three-night stay he captured its decaying charms perfectly, and the fact that his article appeared within weeks of John Belushi’s overdose was a boon to the hotel, which was in danger of becoming notorious. The air of ill repute hovered over the place for several years afterward. In a 1985 article describing a film director’s rebound from a career dip, the Los Angeles Times mentioned that he was staying in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel rather than “a back room at the Chateau Marmont.” And Michael O’Donoghue, one of the very few among Belushi’s Saturday Night Live chums who didn’t abandon the hotel in the wake of the comedian’s death, made a joke of the Chateau’s lack of creature comforts, such as nighttime turndown service of guests’ bedding and complimentary mints on the pillows; in 1987, he was staying at the hotel and played a prank on a friend who was also in residence, inviting him for a late-night drink and then, before the friend arrived, turning down his own sheets, placing a mint he himself bought on the pillow, and acting as if the hotel provided these little amenities for him each night. Such was the quality of service at the hotel that a guest could readily be convinced that his or her room was simply being overlooked by staff.
But not long after the death of John Belushi, the Chateau went from a hidden bohemian enclave to an open secret, taking on a patina of retro chic. Along with the Musso & Frank Grill and the Formosa Cafe, two other long-standing relics of the classic era of Hollywood, the Marmont was elevated into a status it had never enjoyed previously, with nostalgia for a heyday that had never quite existed, at least not in the tenor in which those celebrating it assumed. During this time, the hotel’s name was bandied about in the press more than it ever had been. Virtually every newspaper or magazine interview with an actor or a director that took place on its grounds saw the hotel’s name mentioned in it, at first with the obligatory “where John Belushi died” attached but after a few years with no need to explain what the Chateau was at all. It was fashionable, even though it was still, in the words of one frequent guest, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, “funky—not quite dumpy, but not luxurious either.”
This was an era of regular media accounts of interviews at the Marmont with such auteurs as Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, Agnès Varda, Spike Lee, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Derek Jarman, Wim Wenders, Claudia Weill, Bruce Beresford, Claire Denis, Terry Gilliam, Jonathan Demme, Stephen Frears, Jim Sheridan, Shirley Clarke, Terence Davies, and Volker Schlöndorff. John Waters became a Chateau regular in these years in part because he considered it his lucky hotel: The one time he didn’t stay there, he liked to complain, “I didn’t get my deal and I caught the flu.” Actors continued to pour into the place and sit for interviews—the likes of Carol Kane, Fernando Rey, Sonia Braga, Klaus Kinski, Judy Davis, William Hurt, Dominique Sanda, Annie Girardot, and that almost-vaudevillian pair Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn. Musicians residing at the hotel were another interview mainstay, not only such longtime regulars as Betty Buckley and Tommy Tune, but Sting, Bono, Joe Strummer, A Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran (one of whose members, Andy Taylor, was married at the hotel in 1982), and the Lemonheads. In the feature sections of American magazines and the Sunday arts sections of American newspapers, the phrase “Hollywood’s legendary Chateau Marmont” became more and more common.
At the same time—and not necessarily in print—the eighties was when the era of Hollywood bad boys going wild at the Chateau began. The rascals of the Method acting insurrection were legitimate hell-raisers. But they were, by and large, still under the thumbs of movie studio publicity departments. The new lot seemed happy to let the whole world know what sorts of antics they were getting up to at the funky old hotel they were colonizing. The whole of the Brat Pack—as the young Hollywood of the moment was known—seemed to wander into its halls, sometimes at tender ages, always in some sort of rite of passage to do with excessive boozing, drugging, and sexing. It sometimes seemed as if the agents, managers, and studio executives running the town deliberately placed these young stars in an environment where they would get up to no good, perhaps in hopes of the stories leaking to the public—just the opposite of the strategy that Harry Cohn had employed with Glenn Ford and William Holden decades earlier.
“I remember arriving at 17,” recalled John Cusack, “and I had been in one movie, and they put me up in the Chateau Marmont where Belushi had died not long before. And I saw Andre the Giant in the lobby with a satin jacket that said ‘Hell,’ and I thought, ‘Rock on!’ ” Cusack was in town to make Sixteen Candles, and another member of that cast, an actor even more associated with the Brat Pack label and the antics that went along with it, Anthony Michael Hall, would also soon reside at the hotel. At age seventeen, he was living in a suite overlooking Sunset Boulevard where stood a giant billboard of…himself. Cusack didn’t quite buy into the hedonistic world into which he had been thrust. “I was a teen star,” he once said. “That’s disgusting enough.” But Hall had his head turned. “I was living by myself at the Chateau,” he remembered, “and though the scene around me wasn’t like an Elvis trip, there was a fair share of that. All of a sudden you’ve got girls whenever you want ’em, and the place was always full of people I hardly knew.”
Robert Downey Jr., then beginning his struggles with substance abuse, was an occasional guest, and he made himself at home in the hotel in his own fashion. “My wife and I were sitting in the lobby one night having coffee,” remembered the screenwriter L. M. Kit Carson, “and all of a sudden Robert Downey Jr. comes in, wrecked and surveying and scanning the room. He looked like he was thinking, ‘I’m supposed to be having a meeting but I don’t have a clue with who….’ So he comes over and sits down beside us and says, ‘Hey, how about having a meeting? I know I’m supposed to be having a meeting. Can we have a meeting? Let’s just start having a meeting.’ ” They chatted for a while and Downey left, satisfied that he had done his agent’s bidding.
Other stars merely cavorted, prankishly, boyishly, and if they were chemically altered in the moment it didn’t seem to affect them. English actor Rupert Everett recalled a Christmas when he and a pair of acting chums, Eric Stoltz and John Philbin, alleviated boredom by climbing around the fire escapes and seeing what they could see. When they found a suite that was fully decorated for Christmas—tree, wrapped gifts—but apparently unoccupied, they began an elaborate practical joke, replacing the packages under the tree with wrapped gifts of their own devising: a box of sex toys with a gift card reading, “Happy holidays from everyone at the William Morris Agency”; a kitchen knife with a card declaring, “To stab yourself in the back—we can’t be bothered to do it. From all your friends at Paramount.”
Ethan Hawke, another semi-regular of the era, had a more sober and reflective attitude toward the hotel. “If someone spun you around in Manhattan and then dropped you down anywhere, you’d immediately know where you are,” he said. “Los Angeles is not like that. I’m not a huge fan of it, but the Chateau makes me feel like I know where I am. It’s a tad reminiscent of New York to me. There’s so little history in L.A. and something so attractive about a place that has a past.”
Among the other young actors of the era who stayed at the Chateau were Matt Dillon, James Spader, Winona Ryder, Sarah Jessica Parker, and a pair who made their homes in Hollywood but kept returning to the hotel for staycations—Johnny Depp and Keanu Reeves, the latter of whom actually lived in a suite for several years between periods of owning his own house in the area.
The granddaddy of all of this excess was, arguably, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the famed gonzo journalist and lifestyle experimentalist who became a semi-regular at the hotel during the seventies and eighties. His visits occasioned the appearance of odd characters of his acquaintance at all hours, not to mention the various actors, writers, and filmmakers who chased around after him trying to secure rights to his books—even his life—for new movies. He was such a large character that his influence over the hotel persisted even when he wasn’t there; the actress Jennifer Beals recalled reaching for the bedside table Bible in her room one night to solve a question that had arisen during a day’s work on a film set, only to find a piece of Chateau Marmont stationery tucked inside with the inscription “I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I do” and Thompson’s signature below.
As much as he might have loved the hotel, Ray Sarlot had a steeply uphill job on his hands making a true success of it. For one thing, he had a clientele who, however enviable their celebrity status might make them to other hoteliers, actually preferred the Marmont to be low-key, slightly less than luxurious, and, most of all, cheap. Carol Lynley, for one, complained in the mid-eighties that Sarlot’s price increases drove her to seek less costly accommodations. Lauren Hutton, speaking with affection but calling attention to the low-fi character of the hotel, called it “my dorm for 15 years. I would never stay anywhere else.” And Jill Clayburgh, spotted by a reporter while she was having coffee in the lobby, actively discouraged him from praising the Chateau in print: “Oh, don’t mention the hotel! Then all the tourists will come. If you must say something about this place, say it’s terrible. Please say it’s terrible!”
As if a cadre of regular customers resistant to change weren’t obstacle enough, the neighborhood around the Chateau had grown increasingly seedy and unappealing throughout the years after the “riots” on the Sunset Strip had driven the music scene away. There were still some music clubs, and there was always nightlife of some sort, but the tenor of things had changed. The strip clubs outnumbered the coffeehouses, there was hardly any street life of the sort that characterized the sixties, and the businesses—especially the entertainment businesses—that had flocked to the Strip in its heyday had begun to move away: Playboy Enterprises, Warner/Chappell Music, and United Talent Agency had all found new homes in less seamy environs.
There were some signs of resurgent life, though: In 1972, the entrepreneur Mitzi Shore acquired the lease to the onetime Ciro’s and turned it into the Comedy Store, which launched the careers of generations of superstar comedians and helped create a comedy club boom in the eighties. And in 1982, the visionary Austrian chef Wolfgang Puck opened Spago, a restaurant that had some of the glamorous cachet of the old movie star haunts of decades past, drawing young and old Hollywood alike and helping define modern California cuisine for the rest of the world. But no matter how influential the two places were, neither seemed to define the Sunset Strip the way the coffee shops of the fifties or the music clubs of the sixties had.
And the music venues that still thrived, the spots where so much classic rock talent emerged in the sixties, had given way to a new sound and culture, a scene that combined elements of glam style and thrashing, guitar-dominated music that was supported, again, by kids from the L.A. suburbs but didn’t have the same allure or sense of cultural self-declaration that the scene of a prior generation had borne. Rather, it was a time of screaming guitars, peroxide blond hair, ferocious partying—think Mötley Crüe, Van Halen, Ratt, and their ilk. Outside the fervent adherents of the style, there was, up and down the Strip, a sense that the golden age had passed—again—and that the new crowd represented a cultural and social falloff. “This ain’t rock ’n’ roll,” said Llana Lloyd, a veteran of the Strip scene. “This is genocide. These people are vegged out. I think the era is dead.”
It was a tough time, in short, to be in the business of restoring a genteel hotel.
Unless, that is, you were a visionary in the vein of Fred Horowitz, able to see riches where others saw a wasteland.