Los Angeles

by A M Homes

  When it wants to, Hollywood can be exceptionally good at keeping its own secrets. The Chateau, with its own eccentric and highly personal history, was the perfect coconspirator. With its external appearance of a castle or Gothic fort, combined with its residential past, incredibly thick walls, discreet entry, and highly protective staff who treated guests like members of the family, the Chateau Marmont became the ideal hideout. European guests found the architecture familiar and comforting, sexual outsiders felt accepted, the exceptionally shy were shielded, and anyone else with a reason to hide simply blended into the woodwork—from the start there was the feeling of a shared sensibility. Greta Garbo felt comfortable here, as did Howard Hughes.

  This peculiar charm was passed on over the years through a small group of interesting, if eccentric, owners. The service and room conditions ranged from high style to deep dilapidation before landing in the able hands of New York hotelier Andre Balazs in 1991. Balazs put the hotel through a major renovation, seeking to both modernize and preserve the history, and in the end successfully returned the hotel to its original glamour. A mark of that success is that when you ask hard-core fans of the hotel what’s different about it now from the 1970s, they say nothing. And while it is true that much of the hotel staff has been here for years—testament to the feeling of family and their dedication—everything in fact is different, the carpets, the furniture, the lighting fixtures, telephones, etc.

  “Ha! Well, I’ve been staying there for … thirty years,” says filmmaker John Waters. “And I’m mad they charge you to park your car overnight. That’s my only quote. No, just kidding. That’s my pet peeve about it. But it is really the place where everyone stays that hates L.A., if you’re from Europe, from New York. And all the people that love L.A. don’t understand why you ever want to stay there. They think it’s horrible when they come there, they’re snobs about it. The whole point is that the Chateau Marmont is reverse snobbery against L.A.”

  Among the guests, there are always people from New York. Familiar faces, people you’ve met at parties, come up to you in the lobby, “You’re a friend of Sofia’s, of John’s, of Rob’s. Didn’t I meet you at Wendy’s, with my friend Julie? What are you doing out here?”

  There are far fancier hotels in this city of transients, but this place is home. In fact, it’s better than home—it’s home away from home, and with it comes the fantasy of having, at least temporarily, left your cares behind. I like this hotel for many of the same reasons that originally drew me to New York from my hometown of Washington, D.C. Washington is a self-conscious city, uptight, deeply khaki, essentially afraid of its own shadow, a company town much in the same way that Los Angeles is or believes itself to be. In L.A. there’s a myopic tendency to think that the movie business is the only business, forgetting, of course, farming, aerospace, the arts, and anything and everything else. Long ago, when I thought about where I would live when I grew up, I knew it would be New York—a big city, expansive, wild. In New York, I would never be the one on the farthest edge; whatever I did with my life would seem middle of the road, but in Washington, I was among those on the periphery, the fringe. In Los Angeles, it is the same, I am that dark and mystical thing, a woman from the East, an “intellectual.”

  And yet at the Chateau Marmont, they’ve seen it all and then some. The hotel is like an apartment building, a halfway house for creative people who can’t live alone, and I am the faux little old lady, the librarian living upstairs—there is deep comfort in being the blue-haired woman among the wild ones.

  “I’ve put you on the seventh floor,” the man at the front desk says.

  “Is there anything else open?” I automatically ask. I have the need to see every available room. At the Chateau, what you get is the luck of the draw. You can’t reserve a specific room in advance, and since every room is so different, it’s worth checking to see what else is open. They never really know when someone is going to check out—guests at the Chateau have a way of lingering for days, weeks, months, years.

  “When I was growing up in Los Angeles, the hotel was always sort of a part of our lives,” says filmmaker and actor Griffin Dunne. “You know how some families have these uncles, they’re not really their uncles, but you say uncle. Our uncle was a guy named Uncle Earl, who was Earl McGrath. And Earl and Camilla lived on the fifth-floor penthouse. I was there recently and I was told it was the largest terrace space in Los Angeles. It looks exactly the same now as it did then. I mean, they might have gotten a new rug, but they got the same crappy new rug. And the same kind of secondhand-feeling furniture. But that’s where they lived. It was very kind of exotic to us that there were people who lived year round in a hotel. It felt kind of a bit of an adventure, every time we went there. If you’re a kid it’s like going to a castle. Earl and Camilla’s place was very much like being in the turret of a castle. Also, the Strip at that time was happening, there was so much to see. I’ve always been such a die-hard fan of rock and roll and I knew that the Doors stayed there, and Janis Joplin. All these older people were my gods. I remember hearing stories about Jim Morrison jumping out the fourth-floor window and not breaking a leg—these were things that made it feel legendary.”

  There is about hotels the sense of a second chance, an opportunity for re-invention; you check in as someone else, an alias, another character, if only for a night. Suspended from yourself, from your everyday life, you have the chance to be a king or queen, to be waited upon hand and foot, unless of course you check into a Motel 6, Best Western kind of thing where there’s a noisy ice machine at the end of the hall and a big neon sign that says FREE TELEVISION AND AIR CONDITIONED.

  As a kid, I was always fascinated by the peculiarities of hotels’ sani-wrapped drinking glasses—for your comfort and pleasure—the toilets with a paper strip across the bowl to prove they’ve been cleaned, the thin veneer of wood paneling, meant to give the feel of a rustic mountain cabin. Hotel, motel, motor lodge, where you park just outside your room, the motel court with the rooms in a wide half circle, like a wagon train stopped for the night, pulling close for security.

  The best hotels have exaggerated amenities: heated towel racks, bottles of water by the side of the bed, treats on your pillow, fresh fruit in the room, stationery with your name printed on it—a list of things you might like doing while you’re there, a treat they remembered you especially liked the last time around, new little gifts every day. …

  But whether it is the highest end or a highway special, one always feels a ghostly sense that someone has been there before you, that these rooms belong to no one. The absence of ownership, of care, is perhaps why people feel free to trash them, to steal from them, to behave so differently in them than the way they would at home. There are hotels for the tawdry affair, hotels for sweet sixteens, hotels for wedding nights. And then there are hotels like the Chateau Marmont, where you lie down to sleep and conjure those who lay there before you, you perform as you might imagine they performed, you feel visited in the night by the ghosts of guests past.

  “You feel the haunted quality,” says photographer Todd Eberle, a frequent guest at the hotel. “There are a lot of ghost stories. You feel like you’re sleeping with everyone who ever slept there.”

  The bellman carries the master key. He lets me into my room—every room has a thousand stories. I remind him that later I want to see all the empty rooms.

  The door to the room next door is open. It is in the process of being cleaned. I glance in. The bed has not yet been stripped. It’s rumpled, thoroughly slept in. There is a pile of newspaper on the floor, some towels. It has the feel of a crime scene, stumbled upon after the fact—you can’t help but wonder, what happened here? Who did what to whom? Stories ooze out of the carpet, out of the walls.

  The maid hauls a big bag of trash into the hall.

  What is the biggest mess they’ve ever seen, the oddest sight they’ve come upon? Are they trained to act as though nothing’s happened? What is the largest thing someone’s sto
len? How do they count the sheets, the towels? What do people do with all the towels that they bring home? Does anyone know someone who’s been billed for a towel?

  I am a hotel person, a kind of a hotel fetishist. I use them for escape, for meditation, as a place to run away, to hide, to contemplate big decisions. It started when I was a teenager—during a particularly difficult time, I left my parents’ house and checked into a nearby Holiday Inn. I spent the evening smoking pot, eating ice cream, and wondering what to do with my life. Later, when I was slightly older, I borrowed my parents’ car and took off for the Delaware shore in the dead of winter, checked into a fancy high-rise hotel, and pretended I was a rock star, ordering tequila sunrises from room service, walking on the boardwalk in the blustery wind, and again thinking about what I would do with my life.

  There is something about stepping out of your ordinary life and into the suspension of hotel life that allows you distance, perspective, a chance to look in on yourself, to act with a certain remove.

  In the early days, I used hotels to act out my cowboy fantasies, and now in my advancing age, I’ve settled for being treated like royalty. I’ve developed aesthetic allergies. If a hotel doesn’t feel right, if the rooms are overwhelmingly generic, if they depress the hell out of me, I have to get out of there right away. My reaction is immediate and severe, a brand of artful anaphylaxis. In general, I am such a creature of habit, a person so profoundly affected by my surroundings that I cannot bear the discomfort, the disassociation, the anxious fracture that comes from feeling uncomfortable about where I am. It is strange enough to be miles from home. I want a hotel room to comfort me, to make a strange city familiar, to make everything all right at the end of a long day. I want it to hold me very well.

  I have arrived in distant cities in the middle of the night and checked in and out of hotels within an hour. I’ve been led to my room, only to use it for ten minutes to get on the phone, get out my book with lists of hotels and call around town. I’ve taken tours of every empty room, have moved from hotel to hotel in the wee hours of the morning. I have driven friends crazy with it—Why can’t it wait until morning? It’s as though there will be no morning unless this is solved immediately. There are hotels that could kill you with their lack of affect, their absence of personality.

  I once arrived in San Francisco near midnight. I was both on book tour and on deadline for a magazine article. I had phoned ahead and said I would need a room with a desk in it—the bellman pointed to a tiny table framed with a lighted make-up mirror. “Your desk.” As I peered into the mirror, the room began to howl, to literally whine.

  “Wind,” the bellman said. “She blows in the wind.”

  I unzipped my suitcase, took out the volume listing all the good hotels in America, and started dialing.

  In Edinburgh, I stayed at a hotel that came highly recommended, but when I lay down to sleep, I felt a kind of crawling that caused first my arms, then legs to jerk reflexively. After fifteen minutes of doing a certain spasmodic dance I realized that it was the sheets, the bed, crawling with no-see-ums. I wrapped myself in my raincoat, spread my suit jacket under my head and called it a night.

  In Paris, a friend raved about a particular hotel—a room at the top with a terrace. For months I faxed back and forth trying to secure the room. At first it was not available and then at the last minute it was. I envisioned opening the windows out onto a classic Paris street—bellowing, “Who Will Buy?” from Oliver! I arrived, the elevator was big enough for one person and one suitcase; it let us off at the floor below ours, we wound our way up a spiral staircase. And the room—the room was dark, dank, and everything in it was a leftover from a garage sale. The terrace was tiny, really more of a big windowsill than anything else. I sat on the bed, made a huge sighing sound, and sank.

  In the room next door a baby began to scream, to howl. I could feel the mold spores from the carpet rising up into my nose, lodging in my lungs. And once again I took out the guidebook. I dialed fast and furious. At this point, if I was going to give up this great deal, if I was going to go through the trouble of changing, I wanted something really nice. I called every major hotel and asked what they had available. We left our bags and went on a tour of every room in the city before deciding on the Montalambert. We took a suite, the windows opened up onto a beautiful view, there were birds singing, the sounds of church bells. It was truly fantastic—and of course cost four times more than the first hotel.

  The phone rings, pulling me out of my reverie.

  It’s Benedict, at the front desk. “Your car is here. The rental agent is waiting for you in the lobby.”

  “What color is it?” I told the rental agency I’d take anything but white.

  “White.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Please Remain Calm

  In the elevator at the Chateau Marmont there is a sign—IN CASE OF EARTHQUAKE PLEASE REMAIN CALM.

  The elevator itself is small, a single car accommodating two to six people, or fewer people and more luggage. The walls are a deep maroon and trimmed with ornate tin, like decorative strips of ribbon. On the back wall are picture frames that hold that day’s covers of Variety and Billboard—the headlines written in the code of the biz—Head Honcho Axed. Indie Surprise. Julia Inks Big Deal.

  Please Remain Calm. I immediately jot it down in my notebook.

  The idea of an earthquake has been bothering me since before I left New York. Stepping out of the car and onto the ground in Los Angeles, I felt tentative. That first footstep was a test—my foot touching the surface, testing to make sure it is solid, not quick to give way, not already rumbling. In my suitcase, I have a pile of printouts, a seismic hazards map showing probable earthquakes from 1994 to 2024. I am looking at them, trying to read them, like a layman trying to interpret an EKG—heart waves from the center of the Earth. I’ve been reading information on strong motion, the Earth’s crust—what affects the shaking is the softness of the ground, the thickness of sediments below.

  Strange things happen here, large events on a kind of biblical scale, and the size and sprawl of the city seems not only to accommodate it, but rather to absorb it.

  “It’s very Ten Commandments,” one of my friends says.

  “When I was staying there doing this show, 2000 Malibu Road and Joel Schumacher was directing, he said he was thinking about the Bible and the devil,” Jennifer Beals tells me, from a cell phone on location in Canada. “As a kid I had read the Bible a lot, and I said you know, there are not that many references to the devil. And we started to go over it, and I said, when I get home tonight I’m going to take out the Bible in the room, look at it, and see what I can find. And that night I went back to this room, I opened the Bible, and at the front of the Bible, on the Chateau Marmont stationery, it says ‘I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I do,’ and it was signed Hunter S. Thompson. So I went through the Bible … and I was reading about the devil and reading about the devil and reading about the devil, and I got really tired. And it was one of those things where I fell asleep with all my clothes on in bed with the Bible next to me. And in my dream I feel the room shaking, and I’m scared to open my eyes, because I know that the devil will be at the end of my bed. And I get really brave and I open my eyes, and I realize it’s just an earthquake.”

  It’s something about the weather. What was once the stuff of the farmer’s almanac is now a television channel all its own, a subject that requires constant monitoring, anxiety, and anticipation. The chance of rain, the allergy index, the brush fire equation, the rise and fall of the tides, El Niño/La Niña, brush fires, mud slides, apocalyptic disaster, indexes for humidity, for wind chill. Add to the weirdness that these phenomena bring the notion that people choose to live in Los Angeles because of the weather. The weather is one of the city’s selling points, one of the prime quality-of-life advertisements for living here. The weather is described as perfect, consistently sunny and bright. Furthering the
mixed message is the psychological fact that a lot of people who live in L.A. are obsessed with repetition, dependability, the sameness of their routines. They are creatures of habit who can’t bear it when things are out of their control, when they have to adjust. When you stop to look carefully, a lot of people in Los Angeles are prone to temper tantrums when they don’t get their way. Despite their age and or seeming success, they behave like children. A certain tolerance for this behavior appears one to be one of the underlying organizational factors, one of the personality principles of the city. It occurs to me that these folks might look at weather phenomena as the temper tantrums of the gods, as something they relate to on a primal level (given that they aspire to one day become one of the gods), and so when weather happens, it in fact impresses them, stuns them, and then calms them. The potential scale of a disaster is one of the few things that makes an impression—Los Angeles is very much about size and comparison.

  And yet there exists this constant threat. They live with it, building houses on the sides of cliffs, navigating as though challenging the possibility, tempting it on some level, convinced it won’t happen to them.

  “My other favorite memory,” John Waters tells me as we’re talking about the Chateau Marmont, “is that I was there in an earthquake and I heard somebody just upstairs go ‘yahoo!’ Which was such a Chateau moment that it was like they were on an amusement park ride. Not a national disaster …”

  What is the fear of an earthquake? Is it that the Earth will open and you’ll fall into a bottomless crevasse, to the center of the Earth? Is it that you’ll be on a highway, on an overpass, and it will crumble beneath you and leave you hanging from an edge? Is it the sound of it, the rumble, a rolling thunder like a heart beating too fast? Is it things falling, objects taking flight, the temporary suspension of gravitational laws—that a building will collapse, that something will hit you on the head? Is it the shaking, the non-amusement of having to ride the up and down, the side to side, the bucking/buckling beneath your feet? Is it being cut off, the telephone going dead, the bulb in the refrigerator going black? Is it that no one will be able to reach you, to rescue you? Is it the potential for chaos, explosions, gas fires, water main breaks, looting, man-made eruptions, events that make a rolling blackout look like a cocktail party prank? Is the biggest fear that California itself will break away and become an island floating off the coast of America and you will be left on this geographic raft (fantasy land), this sinking ship with no way back to shore (reality)? Is it that all of this will happen without warning, you could be in the bathroom, on the Stairmaster, in the grocery store, in the middle of a meeting, having a facial, giving birth to a baby?