The Chateau Marmont is a cunning temptress - a hotel renowned for its overindulgence, simple elegance, and a lauded discretion that makes it seem all the more normal.
Poolside at the Chateau. Credit Stephanie Diani for The New York Times West Hollywood, Calif.
THE first question people always ask when you tell them you’ve visited the Chateau Marmont, the great gothic pile of a hotel on the Sunset Strip, is “Who did you see?” For the record, during my sojourns there last month, I saw, in no particular order: ¶The stylist Rachel Zoe wearing fur, dining alfresco with a table of European fashionistas smoking cigarettes. ¶The musician Joel Madden, huddled on a lobby couch with his 2-year-old daughter, eating a grilled cheese and fries. ¶Amanda Seyfried, Keanu Reeves, Debra Messing and Carey Mulligan. Not together. ¶Joaquin Phoenix, coolly deflecting approaching strangers at a poolside bungalow party hosted by Flaunt Magazine. The Chateau Marmont, above, figures prominently in Sofia Coppola’s new movie “Somewhere,” which also stars Elle Fanning, below, and Stephen Dorff.
Credit Stephanie Diani for The New York Times From inception, the Chateau was a hangout for Hollywood’s most glamorous. Harry Cohn, former head of Columbia Pictures, famously exhorted his actors, “If you are going to get in trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont.” Visitors included Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne. But by the time Mr. Balazs bought the hotel in 1990, the orange shag rugs were being held together by duct tape (thanks, perhaps, to Led Zeppelin’s motorcycle rides in the halls).
“It felt like a very neglected, abandoned soul,” he recalled. Taking care not to upset the regulars, he began a slow updating process — hiring set designers to replace the thrift-store furniture with antiques that only felt as if they might have come from a thrift store, installing an elegant restaurant in the courtyard, and making sure to retain the beloved staff (including memorable characters like the singing waiter Romulu Laki, who has a cameo in Ms. Coppola’s film). “It was about creating a design that felt like it had always been there, and to make everyone comfortable within it,” Mr. The result is a grand lobby full of well-loved brocade couches and crooked sconces and murky paintings of reclining nudes; suites with recklessly mismatched furniture; bathrooms with chipped vintage tile and peeling paint; kitchens with unpredictable O’Keefe and Merritt stoves. “Shabby” is a frequently used descriptor; “homey,” another, which is perhaps why guests are willing to pay $500 a night and up to stay there — sometimes for years at a time. One result of so much comfort is that the hotel’s guests do make themselves exceedingly comfortable, and not just the free-spirited young families who frequently move in with their children.
The hotel has witnessed the misbehavior of generations of stars and would-be stars: Robert Mitchum (arrested for drug use), John Belushi (died of the same), Jim Morrison (who made a drug-fueled leap from a fourth-floor window) and Lindsay Lohan (who lived here before rehab). In the film “Somewhere,” Ms.
Coppola has Johnny Marco ordering twin pole dancers for room service, sleeping with other guests, breaking his arm in a drunken fall, and arriving at his hotel suite to discover a raging party already taking place — antics Ms. Coppola based, in part, on real-life stories. “People do things here that they wouldn’t dare think of doing at the Peninsula or the Four Seasons, and we think that’s a good thing,” said the hotel manager, Philip Pavel, who said it is not unusual (or forbidden) for guests to invite 20 to 30 friends to hang out. “I’m like the parent: I am both facilitating the level of rambunctious fun but also policing it. It’s about allowing people to embrace it, but also making sure no one overdoses.” He winced: “Oh, that sounds bad.” Photo. Credit Merrick Morton/Focus Features Though the shenanigans tend to get the press, the hotel’s more impressive legacy is its role as muse for generations of artists, photographers, novelists and screenwriters, of which Ms.
Coppola is only the latest. Thompson, Annie Leibovitz, Dorothy Parker, Bruce Weber, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tim Burton, Jay McInerney — all have produced work from within the hotel’s walls. “The Day of the Locust” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” were written here; Helmut Newton, who lived here every winter until dying in a car accident in the hotel driveway, shot many of his photos in its rooms. Advertisement “Being at the Chateau is like being in a place that exists out of reality, a sacred place, like a church,” wrote the novelist A. Homes, who loves the hotel so much she wrote a book about it, “Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill.” “And it is like not just any church, not just another California mission, it is the church — Our Los Angeles Lady of Creativity.” That cloistered atmosphere (what Mr. Pavel calls the energy vortex) explains why so many local writers, even if they don’t need (or can’t afford) a hotel room, spend their days loitering in the lobby’s dim, comfortable recesses.
Myself included: When I first moved to Los Angeles, I would park myself on a couch and write what became my first novel, nursing an overpriced orange juice as long as humanly possible, in hopes that the literary mojo of the place would rub off. Later, when writing my second novel, “This Is Where We Live,” about a Los Angeles musician and his wife, I set a scene of infidelity in a Chateau Marmont bathroom. In between, I conducted celebrity interviews in the lobby — the Chateau being perhaps the most popular spot in the city for such interviews — including, in 2003, with Ms. (Some things haven’t changed.) Memories are as varied as the occupants, though. On a recent Thursday night at the hotel, my three dinner companions all had their stories — the documentary producer who had a skinny-dipping tryst in the pool, the interior decorator who spent lunch eavesdropping on Sienna Miller, the screenwriter who hosted a dinner party for 20 in the courtyard. At 11 p.m., all the lobby couches were occupied by the young, stylish or both, who barely blinked when a girl in a sequined mini-dress tripped on her stilettos and tumbled down the stairs. In the ancient elevator two disheveled middle-aged men, reeking of pot, giggled uncontrollably.
By the time I rolled into bed at midnight, the hum of Sunset Strip traffic had been drowned out by the noise coming from a party by the pool. Fortunately, the walls are stone, thick and impenetrable.
After all, the ultimate purpose of any hotel — no matter how legendary or bohemian or inspirational — is sleep.
The Haunted Chateau Marmont Hollywood is full of celebrities, glitz and glamour, but with all of that comes scandal, tragedy and shock. Chateau Marmont has been called “the place to go to misbehave.” Henry Cohn, head of Columbia, told two young stars, “If you must get in trouble, do it at Chateau Marmont.” With its star-studded history and a touch of infamy, the Sunset Strip Chateau Marmont hotel is haunted. It has always catered to celebrities and the elite, and to this day, the chateau is not open to the public. You must have a room booked there in order to enter the premises. If you do book a room as an overnight guest at the chateau, don’t be surprised if you experience paranormal events.
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Guests and hotel employees have reported windows opening on their own, furniture moving, the sounds of voices when no one’s there, strange noises in the night, feelings of being watched, even apparitions of floating heads and the sensation of ghosts getting into bed with you. Celebrity ghosts in Chateau Marmont? Some claim that the ghosts of famous celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Howard Hughes, Boris Karloff and Jim Morrison have made an appearance at the chateau. There are those who will insist that the Chateau is cursed since some people who have stayed there have went on to encounter terrible deaths afterwards. Scandals and Deaths at Chateau Marmont The history of the chateau is long and varied.
Sharon Tate reportedly spent time in the building as a newlywed to Roman Polanski, but shortly after leaving the chateau and while pregnant, she was stabbed to death by one of the Manson family members. Natalie Wood was rumored to have carried on an affair with her director, Nicholas Ray, at the chateau. Where did John Belushi Die? On March 5, 1982, John Belushi was found dead at the age of 33 in Bungalow 3 of Chateau Marmont. He was pronounced dead, having overdosed on massive amounts of liquor and cocaine. His last roles on films were Continental Divide and Neighbors with longtime friend Dan Aykroyd. Does the ghost of John Belushi reside in Bungalow 3?
Since Belushi’s death, strange happenings and paranormal activity have increased in Bungalow 3. A family staying in Bungalow 3 in 1999, reported that their 2-year old boy was laughing and talking to himself several times. When the parents asked him who he was talking with he would say, “the funny man.” Later, when the boy’s mom held up a photo of Belushi to the boy, he replied “The Funny Man!” World Famous Chateau Marmont Room 64. Room 64 is one of the most famous rooms in the world with A-list history and is also where Howard Hughes holed up for several months spying from his balcony on the pool. Some theories have character loosely tied to this room.
Bungalow 3 is said to be haunted by the ghost of John Belushi. Guests have reported children talking to an imaginary “funny man” which is presumed to be the ghost of John Belushi. Room 79 is said to be the most haunted room of them all. Staff try to avoid this haunted place. Ghostly sightings and activities of moving furniture, visions of ghosts knocking on the door, even a floating head outside the window have been reported.
Ghost Stories from the Chateau Marmont Angela Bassett, of, asked the front desk if someone had cleaned her room in the middle of the night. The front desk begrudgingly responded “no.” Bassett told the story that she had left her clothes and jewelry out of sorts before going to bed, but once she awoke everything had been put away neatly and things were tidy. No explanation was available other than she had a “tidy ghost.” A man researching a book on the rock band The Doors was in his suite in a room that the band had stayed in back in the 60’s. He awoke to the sounds of a party. Once he opened the window to see where the noises were coming from, he quickly realized the noises were in his room and all around him.
He was quite disturbed and left the hotel in the middle of the night. One woman reported that someone opened her window and got into bed with her. She was freaking out, but stayed still in bed hoping that she was unseen.
Nothing happened and after awhile she looked up to see that she had bars on her window. She then noticed nobody was in bed with her, however the window had definitely been opened.