Hollywood's Secret Hideout

Morrison threw himself off a cottage roof shortly thereafter. Europeans not easily classified as Euro-trash have always liked the Chateau, but Aussies seem to be its newest off-shore minority. Way back before Tom, Nicole Kidman took the advice of her Australian Dead Calm director, Phillip Noyce, and joined him and his family at the Marmont when she first came to Hollywood; these days her fellow countrywoman and best friend, Naomi Watts, does extended stays; Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush are fans; and Baz Luhrmann and wife Catherine Martin celebrated their various Moulin Rouge! triumphs while in residence there.

The notion that a broad and unusual scope of personal fantasies play well within the confines of Chateau Marmont has been nurtured for the last dozen-plus years by owner Andre Balazs, whose own experience reflects more scope than his clubs and other well-known hotels (The Standard, which is just up from the Chateau on the Strip, The Mercer in New York, and the Raleigh Hotel in Miami) would suggest. Educated at Cornell and Columbia with a joint graduate degree in business and journalism, Balazs made his fortune in the '80s with a biotechnology firm and by the end of the decade was free to satisfy himself in other ways. He bought the Chateau in 1990 when it was difficult to imagine that it would ever become the scene of ultracool affairs like the recent bash put on by Absolut and Stella McCartney for the mutual launch of Absolut Stella (which Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Owen Wilson made sure not to miss). Balazs began a program of improvement, the remarkably slow pace of which was due partly to his joy in micromanaging everything down to the doorknobs, partly no doubt to the money-pit aspect of the endeavor and partly to his desire to reclaim Chateau Marmont from decay without destroying its inimitably decadent essence.

Chateau Marmont circa 1990 was at the bottom of a downward spiral that the hotel entered in the heyday of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Having been the hangout of every larger-than-life figure from John Barrymore to Hedy Lamarr to Orson Welles in the '30s, the hotel survived in good form through the '40s and '50s as a delicious island of paradise right smack in the middle of the star system. But by the late '60s the star system had been extinguished and the aging Rat Pack had abandoned the Chateau. Rockers moved in, and the place gathered a new, reverse cachet with hop-headed hipsters. In the aftermath of his success in Rosemary's Baby and the glow of his romance with Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski lived there for a while in '68 (he returned briefly years later just before jumping bail and fleeing the U.S.), and noted memorably in his autobiography that "you could almost get stoned from sniffing the haze that seeped through the various keyholes."

Each year of the next decade was a further descent on the slipperiest of slopes. The Eagles, The Mamas and the Papas and Gram Parsons held forth. The spirit of laissez-faire was hell on the furniture; the hotel "service" became largely nonexistent. The 70s killed a lot of people, like Chateau resident Gram Parsons, and they nearly killed the Chateau, too, which is no doubt what appealed to John Belushi when he moved into one of the hotel's bungalows in 1982. The bungalows are on the other side of the pool from the hotel proper and even more private, since they can be accessed directly through a locked gate that opens through a hedge onto the Strip. Belushi took full advantage of the utmost privacy the run-down place could offer and managed to kill himself.

Andre Balazs saw the soul of the place through its threadbare surface, though, and bought it out of deep affection and correct instinct. Balazs proved to have just the right combination of patience, vision and pockets to effect the slow-mo resurrection that began in 1991. He'd hired an art director named Shawn Hausman and a former painter's assistant named Fernando Santangelo who'd decorated clubs for him and put the duo to work bringing together an eclectic mix of old estate furniture that warmed up the "living room" of the Chateau's Gothic lobby hallway with its beautifully frescoed vaults. By 1996 Architectural Digest was extolling the Marmont's new Clarence House draperies, Scalamandre upholstery and Houles trims.

In a smart, entertaining gesture of marketing finesse in 1996, Balazs put out a book called The Chateau Marmont Hollywood Handbook that, while it isn't a handbook at all and isn't about Chateau Marmont half the time, contains wonderful bits of Marmont lore. Marmont kept "Staff Notes" on everyone, as any responsible hotel out to please its hothouse inhabitants would have to do. The notes on a pie-_Citizen Kane_ Orson Welles reminded, "Dining room will need to note: Breakfasts on fresh tomatoes (he's a hypochondriac!)."

Balazs freely admits that the hotel keeps such notes to this day, only now it's done on computer, which would be a kick to hack. Security cameras must be even more telling in tracking how the hell Hunter Thompson managed to put his hand through a window the day he met with Johnny Depp, Josh Hartnett, Benicio Del Toro and Nick Nolte (there's a cast!) about filming his new book, or which stars skinny-dip these days. There are always some witnesses to these type of things, but Balazs and his staff would never discuss the private affairs of Chateau Marmont's slightly dysfunctional, temperamentally delicate adopted family.

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