Tales of the Chateau : Garbo Slept Here. Belushi Died Here. The Chateau Marmont Has Always Attracted a Certain Kind of Hollywood Crowd.

There’ve been so many scenes at the Chateau, between rock ‘n’ roll parties and people dying and people having a good time and songs being written and books being written. Just a big cloud of memories at the Chateau.

--Graham Nash

The Chateau Marmont feels anchored to the ground by an immense gravity field. There is a solidity, a heaviness about the old hotel. The cathedral-like arches looming over the entry arcade, the cool red tiles of the lobby floor, the robust blue furniture, the darkened oil paintings--all provide a safe, eternal feeling. Neither flood nor earthquake could shiver the fortress. If the city were under siege, the Hollywood rabble would likely gather at the steps of the Chateau to hear reports from the front. There are faithful guests of the hotel who--never mind its curious reputation--view it as the last flickering light of civilization, a stronghold of virtue surrounded by modern callowness. Certainly, if you stand on the small round front lawn and gaze down Sunset Boulevard, you will see scant evidence of the gaudy hubbub that once charmed this neighborhood. This is the regrettable aspect of our town’s history--the memorable scenes have been so easily planed down and forgotten.

But there, up the graceful loop of Marmont Lane, is a crusty old edifice that has survived, relatively unchanged, from the era when this intersection was the hub and the nexus of movieland, through a coarsened epoch when the ragged flotsam padded by barefoot, to today’s era of rebuilding along the battered Sunset Strip.

Visually out of sync with its surroundings, the Chateau Marmont’s combination of Norman and Moorish lines gives it a faint hint of chintz, a touch of old Hollywood madcap. But the years have also awarded it substance, as if it were a movie prop that became three-dimensional, where the actors assumed their characters’ names and went on living their roles.

The years have also awarded the place with a raft of legends. It is where, up top at the penthouse railing, Howard Hughes stood at a telescope, peering down at the women at poolside. Where Edith Piaf warbled a little melody in a hideaway that reminded her of Paris, and where today Sting may wander down to the lobby and try out a song on the piano.

A guest rolls into the dark and dignified manor--looking either for a room that is quiet, sober and substantial, or a room redolent of old times and the stale cigarette smoke of Duke Ellington. The guest might wonder, who has been in this bed? Greta Garbo or Marilyn Monroe? Pink Floyd? Is this the bungalow where John Belushi died, or the one where Jean Harlow enjoyed her honeymoon?

Check into the Chateau Marmont sometime and open the windows onto the Sunset Strip. Drink in the view, look for the remaining relics of bygone Hollywood. Think back to a time when no man would dare to go out into the morning without his hat. The straw boater was the snappy hat of distinction in 1927, the year the Chateau was constructed on an empty hillside.

IN 1927, MARMONT LANE STOOD AT THE HINGE OF NO PLACE. IT WAS not even in Hollywood proper, standing a few hundred yards west of the boundary line of Crescent Heights Boulevard. The trolley line went no farther. The citizens of the westerly precinct had only recently decided to give the little area called Sherman Township the new handle of West Hollywood. West of La Cienega, Sunset Boulevard was not even paved. Behind the streetside shops were rolling fields. A man on horseback had his choice of bridle trails into Beverly Hills.

Fueled by the movie business and by huge oil strikes, Hollywood’s population had jumped from 36,000 in 1920 to 157,000 at decade’s end. Mind you, Los Angeles was another city entirely. That’s where the big department stores were. If you wanted to telephone New York, you took the streetcar down to Los Angeles. In that year 1927, City Hall was going up downtown, and over in the empty fields of Westwood ground was being broken on UCLA’s new campus. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre opened that year.

Lots of people were walking around with fresh money. They needed proper hotel rooms. The Roosevelt Hotel went up on Hollywood Boulevard, across the street from the sumptuous Garden Court apartments. And in 1927 one of the town’s most notorious hostelries opened on the southwest corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights: the Garden of Allah.

Across Sunset, a lawyer named Fred Horowitz wanted to build a hotel, and he wanted to give it an authentic European grandeur. He sent his architect, Arnold A. Weitzman, to France to capture a certain rugged look. There was a lot of this sentiment going around America after World War I. Americans had taken the fallen European nobility into a sudden embrace. Hollywood, in need of a quick shot of class and having the gelt to make it happen, was a natural lair for high strutters. Many takeoffs of weighty European architecture were dropped into the sunny lap of Southern California.

When Horowitz’s seven-story hotel opened in 1929, the advertisements offered “Views of Mt. Baldy, Catalina Island and the lights of the city from private balconies and patios. . . . Fire and earthquake proof.” A society magazine of the era, Saturday Night, noted approvingly that the hotel’s furniture had come direct from Grand Rapids, Mich. With stout walls and vast, kitchen-equipped suites, the Chateau was, in fact, a luxury apartment house. References were required.

Horowitz sold his castle in 1931. The buyer, Albert Smith, had made his fortune by building one of the largest movie studios in town, Vitagraph, and then selling it to Warner Bros. It was Smith’s luck to install as manager what every grand hotel must have--a figurehead. The Chateau Marmont’s was Anne Little, leading lady in silent Western serials, well thought of and well connected. Under Little’s hand the Chateau Marmont became home to the wandering minstrels of filmland.

“She was why the hotel became what it became,” says director Billy Wilder. The Viennese emigre lived there for a time in his early days. Once, in the ‘30s, before he was truly wealthy, he returned to the hotel after a trip and found it was booked solid. He pleaded for his room, and was finally given, for the night, the vestibule that led to the ladies’ room. Over the years, as Wilder enhanced the story, he had women climbing over his bed all night to get to the commode.

Within the hotel over the years, figureheads have come and gone among the often eccentric staff--though, for outsiders, especially movie people who call the hotel a lot, one person comes to mind when they think of the Chateau. It is the morose, vaguely haughty late-afternoon operator who sounds “like Dracula answering the phone at the morgue,” as one guest put it. The operator may not know it, but people all over town can do impressions of him. One movie director claims that friends in England call up long-distance just to hear this foggy voice. When it comes on the line, you can almost hear the rustle of bats’ wings in the tower and the groaning of the ropes on the drawbridge.

His name is Daniel. And he does not speak for publication. But this unforgettable is one of the reasons that the hotel has earned such remarkable loyalty from show people. One actress says she likes the way Daniel and the other operators carefully screen out the tiresome calls. What else does it take to win their favor? Another actress says she likes the personalized wake-up service. But more important is that fine currying of clientele and the ambiance that lets the guests know that they are swaddled safely in a thoroughly bohemian retreat.

One bright afternoon, a taste of music can be heard echoing in the lobby. It’s that piano again, the one that Sting played, the one that Rickie Lee Jones once sat at all night to give the hotel staff a concert. And there, by the window, a column of sunlight streaming in on him, is Ben Sidran, author, radio commentator and composer of modern be-bop, riffling out a few elegant flourishes. After a brief passage, he stands and says quietly, “It could use a tune.”

Actress Beverly D’Angelo (“National Lampoon’s Vacation,” “Coal Miner’s Daughter”), a resident for months at a stretch, recalls the time she was banging away on the piano in her suite one night when there came an urgent knock on the door. “I went to apologize for playing so loud and so late, but then the man says that he heard the music and wondered if he could come in to play, too. It was Hans Giger, the artist, the one who designed ‘Alien.’ So he came in and played, too. He sort of rolled his arms on the keyboard--very avant-garde.”

The artists who have chosen the hotel make quite a list: Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns. Robert Rauschenberg, Michael Heizer, Ellsworth Kelly, David Hockney. Kenneth Price says he likes the view of Sunset Boulevard, with all the visual metaphors bouncing back at him.

While the painters may like the star-spangled view toward Hollywood, writers inevitably ask for the side facing the hill, the quiet side, where instead of traffic they hear the wind in the tall eucalyptus and the low cooing of mourning doves.

“There’s something womb-like about it,” says singer-songwriter Graham Nash. “Writers like to be left alone but be taken care of at the same time.”

That ideal suits Dutch writer Menno Meyjes, who thinks that the hotel’s mixture of writers, European directors and Japanese designers makes it a “dormitory for Left Bank artists.” Since this is where he wrote his screenplay for “The Color Purple,” he might also consider it his lucky charm. “I’ve lived there for nine months at a time. When I write, I often like to do nothing but write. In your room, there’s nothing to look at, you don’t have to go out for coffee--you just have it sent up. Then about 4 o’clock, because I have a bad back, I can go down and do laps in the pool.” A San Francisco resident, he recently returned to the hotel to write his first draft of the next Indiana Jones movie.

Screen works as disparate as “The Music Man,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Fat City” and “The Day of the Locust” were also written here. Recently up in the throne room of the hotel, the $350-a-night penthouse with the 180-degree view, were playwright-actor Sam Shepard and his wife, actress-screenwriter Jessica Lange.

“I ALWAYS STAY THERE,” SAYS ACTRESS GERALDINE FITZGERALD, ANew York resident who has camped at the hotel on and off for more than 30 years. Her contracts stipulate that she be put up at the Chateau. “It’s like coming and going into home. They really take care of people, they really do. It’s ideal for people who are artists of any kind. They understand if I need to be left alone, and they understand if I need to be taken care of in an unobtrusive way.

“You can have a very, um, elaborate social life there, if you like, or you can live the nun’s life, very monastic.”

At the Chateau Marmont, an actor does not return from work and find the lobby filled with what Fitzgerald calls “conventionally dressed people.” The hotel could be packed, but the lobby is still somehow empty. There is no restaurant or coffee shop or saloon--nothing social, really. This is why agents and entertainment executives go to other, more regal hotels, such as the Beverly Hills or the Beverly Wilshire, for power breakfasts, power lunches, power swims, power cocktails--all with a telephone sitting at their table.

New Yorkers Tony Randall and his wife, bungalow guests through five years of filming television’s “The Odd Couple” in Hollywood, plus two more years for “Love, Sidney,” enjoy a privacy so profound that they can risk nude sunbathing in their garden. “And I have to have a kitchen,” he maintains. “We don’t want to go out to dinner every night, or send down for dinner. We want to cook our dinners like Ma and Pa back home. Like Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch.”

Serious namedropping. Over the years, these people have resided at the Chateau Marmont: Errol Flynn, Whoopi Goldberg, Marcel Marceau, Sean Connery, Desi Arnaz, Peter O’Toole, Boris Karloff (for five years), Dustin Hoffman, Francois Truffaut, Sidney Poitier, Alan Jay Lerner, Meredith Willson, Burl Ives, Lynn Redgrave, Debra Winger, Nicholas Ray, Della Reese, Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Yul Brynner, Bud Cort, Sergio Leone, Mickey Rourke, Jill Clayburgh, Laurence Olivier, Paul Newman (who met Joanne Woodward there), Grace Kelly, Dominique Sanda, Robert De Niro (who lived in the penthouse for two years), Montgomery Clift, Quentin Crisp, Imogene Coca, Maureen Stapleton, John Hurt, Richard Harris, Bob Seger, Harry Belafonte, Eartha Kitt, Pearl Bailey, Carol Channing, Phil Spector, Beatrice Lillie, Joel Grey, William Goldman, Maximilian Schell, Diane Keaton, Roman Polanski, Nastassja Kinski, Lauren Hutton, Bianca Jagger and Clark Gable.

WHILE THE CHATEAU IS TODAY THE TOWN’S RANKING CITADEL OF bohemian bonhomie--comparable in some ways to New York’s Chelsea Hotel--it was not always so. In the ‘30s, the writers who blew in from the East to grab at quick screenplay fortunes stayed across the street at the Garden of Allah. The founder of that party house, actress Alla Nazimova, considered herself a patron of the arts, and her world was congenial to the wits and the rowdies, the tipplers like Robert Benchley and F. Scott Fitzgerald. One didn’t have to worry about the inquiring knock of the house detective at the Garden of Allah.

During the movie industry’s first big hurly-burly era, this neighborhood was the center of town. Still scattered around the intersection are such grand palazzos as the La Fontaine, the Grenoble (originally called the Voltaire), and quaint, almost stagy, Spanish-style court apartments such as Mi Casa and the Andalusia.

Sunset Strip quickly evolved into the main place to hang out. The raucous-sounding “strip” actually refers to its being on a strip of unincorporated land. Being under county jurisdiction, which was considered more lenient than the city side, the boulevard became the natural breeding ground for hot nightclubs: the Trocadero, the Mocambo and Ciro’s.

Agents liked doing business along the Strip, too, because they got out of paying the city’s licensing tax. An army of agents set up camp. Still, the real business was done not in their shops, but in Hollywood’s central waiting room, Schwab’s Drugstore. The recent loss of Schwab’s was particularly painful to Chateau residents. Damn it, that’s where you went for breakfast.

“It was like a duty to go there, just to show people that you were still around,” Hollywood writer Tony Drake recalls. “It was open late, so there was more movie business done at Schwab’s than at any other place in Hollywood.”

Like many people who spent an important part of their lives in Hollywood during the ‘40s, Drake spoke with an intense longing. You can hear the same wistfulness in the voices of people who went through the ‘60s flower-child era on the Strip. For a certain blessed period, they had someplace to go. The eccentric movie director Preston Sturges (“Sullivan’s Travels”) ran a restaurant / theater, almost in the shadow of the Chateau Marmont, called The Players. It featured the Mighty Sturges Art Players on a stage that lowered after the show and became a dance floor. Across the street was Benny Pollack’s Pick-A-Rib, a place to hear jazz stars like Illinois Jacquet.

There were the gambling joints, such as the Clover Club, stashed in the back of an old house on La Cienega and Sunset. And while mobsters from Chicago loved to drop in on the Strip, West Hollywood had its own boy--racketeer Mickey Cohen, who operated out of a haberdashery on the corner of Holloway.

After the war, the cafe-society overflow would hike next door from Schwab’s to Googie’s, where James Dean and other strugglers from the nearby Actor’s Studio would hold court over coffee. On the northwest corner of the intersection was a club called Frascati’s.

BY THE END OF THE’50S, MUCH OF THE SUNSET STRIP HAD BEEN scattered. The torch had been passed to a new generation of good-time society. The nightclubs went out of business. The Garden of Allah succumbed to an increasingly loose reputation, and it closed in August, 1959. At the farewell bash, guests came dressed as famous movie stars; Hollywood had already begun to feed on its own memories.

Legend has it that Joni Mitchell was living across the street in the Voltaire at the time. Looking out her window at the bulldozers tearing into the Garden of Allah, she wrote the classic line, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Still, the Chateau persisted, and took in the minstrels. But a slow decline began to creep over the hotel. The phone and room service deteriorated. Guests had to suffer the monstrous indignity of a huge Las Vegas casino billboard right outside their windows--a drum majorette endlessly pirouetting. She became a memorable bit in “Myra Breckenridge,” filmed partly in the Chateau (from a book by one-time Chateau resident Gore Vidal), as a symbol of new Hollywood sleaze. The Marlboro Man has since replaced her.

When rock ‘n’ roll took over the Strip in the ‘60s, the new clubs had names like The Daisy, The Whisky, Fred C. Dobbs, The Trip, The Fifth Estate. In 1966, the city moved to knock down a purple-and-gold hangout called Pandora’s Box, which occupied the little triangular island where Crescent Heights meets Sunset. The claimed reason was street realignment, but the kids smelled a plot. The police moved in, and the ensuing disagreement came to be known as the Riot on Sunset Strip.

DURING THE YEARS OF THE BIG ROCK TOURS, THE EARLY’70S,THE Chateau Marmont was largely spared the circuses that visited the other area hotels such as the Sunset Marquis and the Continental Hyatt House. Singers of a certain kind stayed at the Chateau, like Graham Nash and David Crosby, or Pink Floyd.

Some observers looked at the Chateau’s hectically hip crowd and sensed something dark about the scene. Novelist Eve Babitz calls it the Epitome of the Irrevocably Elusive. “It’s everything you wanted but couldn’t have,” she notes warily. “It’s too fast and too tough. It’s like the Lakers playing the Celtics: hardball.” Her perceptions were perhaps colored by associating the hotel with doom-struck rock ‘n’ roll finales, such as the demise of singer Gram Parsons, who chose the hotel for his last stand.

Graham Nash has better memories. “I went there for a night in 1971 and stayed for five months. I was between romances--I had just broken up with Joni Mitchell--and was isolating myself in the Chateau. I moved in with my electric piano and wrote a lot of good songs at the Chateau. ‘Southbound Train,’ ‘Girl to Be on My Mind,’ ‘Strangers Room,’ which was Bungalow B.”

When he moved back in fours years later, he met his eventual wife, Susan. He first saw her over breakfast at Schwab’s. “Later, back at the Chateau, I was sitting up in a big tree in the garden--I used to spend a lot of time in that tree--and she was sculpting this piece of alabaster into a bird in the garden. I walked over and put my hands on her back and said, ‘I love you.’ And at the moment she was startled, the bird’s head flew off. So that’s how the song ‘Broken Bird’ came to be.”

“The Chateau,” he said, laughing, “has got a million stories.”

But no story marked the hotel like the death of comedian John Belushi in 1982. When he died in Bungalow 3 after a stupendous session with narcotics, the hotel acquired a sudden infamy.

“What people don’t realize about the night Belushi died,” says hotel owner Raymond Sarlot, “is that the whole time all that stuff was going on, Tony Randall was living right next door!” Sarlot made Randall sound like an agent from the Vatican. “Tony had no idea what was happening until he saw the coroner’s wagon.”

“We were worried that this would become a cult place,” said Sarlot, a big, expansive man with a heavy Hungarian face and tinted glasses. “We had tight security right after he died, but we quickly got back to normalcy. After the coroner unsealed the room, we had an opportunity to go in there and totally change it, replace the furniture, everything. It is no longer the John Belushi room because, well, we don’t have groupies here. The only groupies that come around here are when Duran Duran are in town.” (When Bob Woodward’s death opus on Belushi, “Wired,” went to the stores with a dust jacket that called the Chateau “seedy,” the hotel owners had to sue. They won a retraction.)

When Sarlot bought the Chateau with partner Karl Kantarjian in 1975, the price was a mere million. That figure may seem low for such a plum, but it had in fact been languishing on the market for two years, its 49 units not being enough to interest the hotel chains. According to Sarlot, the hotel by that time had fallen into a state of advanced crumminess, with all the furniture replaced by threadbare relics, and Myrna Loy calling downstairs for a new chair because the bottom gave out of the last one.

Sarlot and Kantarjian only wanted it as a tax write-off. Sarlot came from a family that was “in property,” and he made his own fortune building apartments, condos and subdivisions. Then Sarlot separated from his wife (and current hotel partner), Regina Bernstein, and moved into the hotel for a five-year bout of work therapy remodeling rooms. “So it’s like home. As our guests feel about it, I feel about it.” With the purchase of neighboring apartment bungalows, the Chateau’s total runs to 62 units. The cheapest room goes for $80 a night.

Leading a tour of the hotel, Sarlot proudly points out the fresh paint, the exacting carpentry. “This place was in pretty bad shape when we took it over,” he says. “Probably the only reason we could do what we did 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. Look at this--” He points to strips of mirrors added to the elevator walls and grimaces. “When Duran Duran were here, their groupies marked it up. We had to put these in to hide it.”

As for the money he’s put into the place, he’ll only say: “Lots. I don’t think it’ll ever go into the black because it’s kinda like a toy. You never stop. Craziness.” He shrugs.

“The biggest problem here? All the guests want a certain room. We’re pulling our hair out when Richard Gere comes in at the same time as Sam Shepard comes in, or any of a half-dozen guests, and they all want the same unit. Kit Carson, he wants a certain one, Bobby De Niro wants a certain one. Unfortunately you can’t accommodate them all, and our policy is that if someone’s in there, you don’t throw them out.”

On the top floor he walked out to a narrow open patio. The city stretched away to the east and the south. Recent rains had washed the city sky back to 1937 condition. Past the knobby roofline to the west was the pale blue perimeter of the sea. Tall pines rose up from the garden and climbed into our view. On the hills, the tropical greenery glistened. A silvery stream of traffic hissed around the bend on the Strip.

And Sunset Strip didn’t look to be such an old dog of a street anymore. The prostitutes that once clustered around this intersection were rousted just before the 1984 Olympics, and they have been kept out. The nightlife has changed in other ways, too. It’s getting tough to hear a band play live, although the Hyatt on Sunset opened up the Silver Screen Lounge. Ciro’s became the Comedy Store. Preston Sturges’ The Players became the Imperial Gardens, where the bar fills on a Friday night with smooth kids.

From where Sarlot stood in the hotel crow’s nest, though, you couldn’t think about the nightlife. On such a sunny, twinkly day, peering out to the hills of Palos Verdes on the horizon, he seemed to be looking down on such a satisfied city.

Directly below the perch was a view of the penthouse patio. Two chaise longues draped with towels were arranged together in the sun. Somebody had recently been at ease. “From the patio,” Sarlot said quietly, “you can look all the way down Sunset. That’s something, isn’t it?”

Yes, it is. And more than that, this wind-swept aerie is certainly worth the price of admission. For only $350 a night, you can feel like the king of Hollywood. With the price of grandness these days, it seems a pittance.