Chateau Marmont, the hotel for Hollywood hellraisers, is no more

For nearly 90 years Hollywood actors hoping for discreet debauchery have checked in to Chateau Marmont

Director Shawn Levy described Chateau Marmont as a ‘club house for people too rich and famous to belong to clubs, a bolt-hole, a trysting place, a recovery room, a hideaway, an opium den, an atelier, a last resort’.

For nearly 90 years Hollywood actors hoping to raise hell discreetly have checked in to Chateau Marmont, the great white castle that rises from a hill above Sunset Boulevard.

The director Shawn Levy described it as a “club house for people too rich and famous to belong to clubs, a bolt-hole, a trysting place, a recovery room, a hideaway, an opium den, an atelier, a last resort”.

Now the hotel will be no more. Andre Balazs, proprietor of the Chateau Marmont, plans to convert the establishment into a private club by the end of the year, reserved for fee-paying members.

The hotelier, who took over in 1990, said the pandemic had brought forward an idea that he had been considering for several years. “There is something to be said for knowing people,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “You can chat with them, you know where they have been.”

Guests at the Chateau Marmont have long counted on the discretion of the management and the idea that they were in the company of fellow celebrities who would not alert the press to scenes of debauchery.

Natalie Wood

Scarlett Johansson

A local blogger who mentioned the antics of a model in the restaurant on Twitter is said to have been barred from the hotel for a year.

“You can have a very, um, elaborate social life there if you like,” Geraldine Fitzgerald, the actress, once said.

The studio boss and co-founder of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, installed two of his stars there, saying that “if you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont”.

Jean Harlow is said to have received a succession of likely young men through a separate door to her bedroom, while her husband slept on a bed in the living room.

The director Nicholas Ray reportedly held auditions in his bungalow there for Rebel Without a Cause, pursuing an affair with a very young Natalie Wood and watching the young James Dean leap through a window in his efforts to secure the lead role.

Carly Simon was pursued by Warren Beatty there, and one of the hotel lifts was implicated in a rumoured tryst between Scarlett Johansson and Benicio del Toro. Del Toro responded by pointing out that “the Chateau Marmont only has eight floors,” and “I would still be struggling out of my leather jacket by the second floor”.

John Belushi died at the Chateau Marmont.

John Belushi died at the hotel from an overdose, Jim Morrison is supposed to have arrived by jumping from a roof and by making a failed attempt to swing in on a drain pipe, while members of Led Zeppelin helped burnish the band’s reputation by riding motorbikes through the lobby.

Mr Balazs said the pandemic had heightened the desire among his potential clients to feel secure while on the property — not from gossip but from infection.

In some respects it already functioned rather like a club. Members of the public seeking a reservation sometimes needed a recommendation from a regular guest.

“We have always screened our guests,” Mr Balazs said. “Guests are never more than one degree of separation away.”

In March when the coronavirus prompted a lockdown in California staff at the hotel were sacked and the establishment closed. Mr Balazs plans to rehire fewer employees when it re- opens as a private club.

The hotel started out as a block of flats when it opened in 1929, modelled after a French chateau and named for the lane on which it stood.

Mr Levy, who wrote a book about the hotel, said that at the time the Sunset Strip was but “a dream, with only a few low-slung buildings dotting a rutted dirt road that connected the edges of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills”.

It became a hotel in 1932 and the phases of its life have mirrored the story of Hollywood, he wrote in The Castle on Sunset. Now the Marmont will begin another chapter.

The Times