In a way, the history of the Chateau Marmont echoes that of Hollywood itself. The storied hotel on Sunset Boulevard opened in 1929—the same decade that the film industry shifted from New York to California, due to the good weather, abundance of land, and cheap labor. Billed as “Los Angeles’s newest, finest, and most exclusive apartment house,” the Chateau boasted premiere accommodations at $750 a month (just over $13,800 in today’s dollars).
So it’s fitting that in Rizzoli’s book about the Chateau—The Chateau Marmont Hollywood Handbook—tales of almost a century’s worth of guests are interwoven with reflections on life in LA more generally. One page has staff notes on notables like Orson Welles (“somewhat a mystery guest”); another has a timeline of the city’s development from Spanish colony to entertainment capital. Flip a few more and you’ll find a chronicle of Hollywood’s best scandals.
That’s not to say the Hollywood Handbook is all about debauchery—though there is plenty of it. (One page includes a giant quote by Harry Cohn, founder of Columbia Pictures: “If you must get in trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont.”). Many, many literary greats have found inspiration within its gothic halls: Eve Babitz set her short story “Expensive Regrets,” published in 1993’s Black Swans, at the Chateau Marmont. Dominick Dunne treated the Chateau like his home, living in room 48 for six months while he covered the trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez. Meanwhile, F. Scott Fitzgerald likened the Chateau to the “hanging gardens of Babylon”—before suffering a fatal heart attack after a trip to Schwab’s drugstore across the street.
Also threaded throughout the book are essays by Jay McInerney, Gore Vidal, and Lillian Ross—all creatives who have stayed, and been inspired by, the Chateau. “During the past ten years, I have changed addresses more often than a fugitive, but the Chateau has been a constant in my life, a kind of club for someone who has never been a joiner,” McInerney writes in his. “Although there was something indisputably Hollywood—old Hollywood—in the ambience, there was also a kind of international boho atmosphere; these were the same people you would see at Blake’s in London or the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Writers, rockers, and young actors who just didn’t feel like bothering with the hassle of owning their own place or maybe did own their own place but were hiding out from their girlfriends or boyfriends, their agents, or the press for a few weeks.”
Then there are the photographers—Helmut Newton, Dennis Hopper, and Annie Leibovitz, among others—who turned their lens on their Chateau. (In 1992, Leibovitz spent a week there photographing Demi Moore for Vanity Fair.)
