We follow the path of Hollywood ’s most notorious to uncover the hotel’s enduring glamour.“Oh, it’s definitely back,” Bret Easton Ellis told me when I asked him about the Chateau Marmont . The novelist first started going to the Los Angeles hotel in the early eighties, when “it was really run-down.” He lived there for a stretch in the mid-aughts, after coming back from a few years in New York while looking to buy an L.A. house.
“Welcome back,” the blonde woman at the desk told me when I arrived. While I’d been to the Chateau for a handful of dinners, I’d never stayed at the hotel in my life, and this greeting, though surely rote, still made me feel like Tom Ripley getting away with something. After a brief moment of inner confusion, however, I decided to embrace the vibe. Why not? “Thank you,” I said, accepting the tasseled key fob.
“So many hotels are pervaded by this corporate feeling,” Ellis told me. “The Chateau still feels incredibly idiosyncratic.” And if there was something just a touch seedy about the room, it was also, somehow, glamorous. Right there outside the window was the Sunset Strip with its rushing traffic, and that very same small oval hotel pool, and the palm trees, and the enormous billboard for Bradley Cooper’s.
He credited the discretion and expertise of the hotel’s staff for providing the emotional security that enables guests to let loose or plunge into creative work. “The head reservationist has been here 27 years,” he said. “So-and-so calls, and they know exactly which room they want, whether they’re drinking or not, whether they’re sulking or not.”
The Chateau is unlike anywhere else, Balazs went on, because, despite the subtle and ongoing remodeling he embarked on when he took over from its previous owners, it has never lost its old-world, slightly shabby charm. The photographer Helmut Newton, he told me, who for decades wintered at the Chateau with his wife, June, made him swear the hotel would remain untouched.
Chateau Marmont Hollywood Hotel Glamour Bret Easton Ellis Chris Black
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