Los Angeles

by A M Homes

  More than anything, the Chateau Marmont reminds me of one of the most sacred places in my own life—Yaddo, an artists’ colony, a magical castle, hidden in the woods among the tall northern pines near Saratoga Springs, New York. As there are those who believe the Chateau Marmont is built upon a kind of energy vortex, a creative meridian, there are people who strongly believe that the land Yaddo rests on is a source of great power. At both Yaddo and the Chateau, I am able to get more work done in several weeks than I can in months at home. My powers of concentration are enhanced, as is my imagination. In the 1830s and 1840s, a popular tavern operated by Jacobus Barhyte stood on the site where Yaddo is now. Numerous well-known writers of the period dined at the tavern—it is believed that Edgar Allan Poe wrote part of The Raven on that land.

  Like the Chateau, each of Yaddo’s rooms are different and you never know exactly where you will be until you arrive. There is the same cool dark cave-like interior, heavy velvet draperies, deep old sofas covered in crushed velvet, large carved chairs, and stained-glass windows. The only difference between Yaddo and the Chateau is that the Chateau is a hotel open to anyone who makes a reservation and pays the room charges. One must apply to Yaddo, submit samples of work and ultimately be chosen to come—at Yaddo one is truly a guest. The Chateau Marmont is, in effect, an artistic enclave, “frayed around the edges with a touch of the old Hollywood glamour. It is a place where a lot of different worlds come together, a hub for the creative community,” says Lisa Phillips, director of New York’s New Museum for Contemporary Art.

  “I’ll tell you another thing,” John Waters says. “The only time I didn’t stay at the Chateau when I came to L.A., I did not get my movie deal. So I’m really superstitious. I stayed at that one down on the corner on the other side? Where a lot of rock and roll people stay. I didn’t get the movie deal and I got the flu.”

  Hotels are the stuff of stories, mini-dramas. An entire world operates behind the scenes, making the running of the hotel seem effortless. The staff itself is a community not unlike a small town, not unlike something you’d find in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, or Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, not unlike a postmodern Peyton Place, or an American version of Fawlty Towers. Among the staff of reservation agents, housekeepers, kitchen workers, prep cooks, waiters and waitresses, car jockeys, managers, engineers, pages, the night auditor, are those who have been working at the Chateau for ten to twenty years or more. And what becomes apparent when talking with people who have been staying at the Chateau year after year, is that the staff is as much identified with the place as anything—numerous people spoke with me about the man who used to answer the phone in the 1970s.

  “I always thought it might be interesting to find the guy who answered the phone,” Griffin Dunne confessed one day. “You know who I mean? He was as famous as the Moviefone guy is now.”

  “The most fantastic thing was the guy behind the front desk who would answer the phone, [deep voice] ‘Chateau.’ He was amazing,” Jennifer Beals also remembered. “You would sometimes just want to call the hotel just to hear him say ‘Chateau.’ It was like performance art. He was like an European aristocrat—he would tolerate you, but let you know that you were calling a place that was very wealthy, and old, and weren’t you lucky to be calling! And yet it was not a put-off, it was incredibly charming. I would love to know what that guy’s name is.”

  Pat Abedi is the current hotel operator. She mans the switchboard in the back office, a small cramped area just behind the front desk. This area is command central for the entire hotel; nothing happens that the folks sitting here don’t know about first. To sit with Pat is to have the consummate backstage pass, to be an absolute insider, and it’s an incredibly good time.

  “Good morning, Chateau Marmont, one moment I’ll connect you.” “Good morning, Chateau Marmont, I’m sorry there’s no one here by that name.” “Chateau Marmont, can you hold?” The phone rings as many as twenty times in a minute and she remains incredibly down to earth, focused, unflappable. She has been answering hotel phones for years. She is sometimes funny, sometimes makes faces at annoying callers, sometimes uses a foreign accent. Pat is like the reference librarian for the hotel. There is a bulletin board in the back office with special instructions—“BE CAREFUL, THERE ARE TWO SMITHS IN HOUSE”—like a hospital where you wouldn’t want to mix food trays or medications. Another sign says MR.___ IS A VERY IMPORTANT VIP, PLEASE BE CAREFUL WITH HIS MESSAGES AND MAIL. There are also signs giving the code names for various super-famous guests. I have no idea how often these names change and who makes them up, I also have the impression that it’s best not to ask, best to pretend not to have noticed in the first place. An enormous amount of information passes though the switchboard, much of it from nameless voices. Does Pat care if she’s talking to a famous person?—truly not. One complication of fame is that it can bring with it a peculiar kind of entitlement, the expectation that things should happen more easily, more quickly, simply because a person is recognizable. When I ask Pat about what it’s like to deal with famous people all the time, she is genuinely not interested. She likes the guests who are nice to her, and can’t be bothered with those who cop an attitude.

  Across from Pat sits Carol O’Brien, currently the director of Human Resources. If you want a job at the Chateau, she’s the one you have to talk to. Carol has worked at the hotel for twelve years and has seen it through a variety of incarnations. She lives just about an hour from Sunset Boulevard on a farm with two horses, a dog, China, two cats, Bill and Dorothy, chickens and rabbits, and homegrown vegetables among other things. She used to have two iguanas, Hector and Liz, but their relationship became abusive, with Hector beating up Liz, and so Hector was sent on his way. She tells me a story about a longtime hotel guest, a man who had been both an illustrator and a famed pearl diver who divided his time between the Chateau Marmont and Cabo, Mexico. He had several dogs, one of which had a litter of puppies in his room at the Chateau—the pups were dubbed the Chateau Mar-mutts. He called Carol from Cabo after finding out that he was ill and asked if she might come down to pick him up and bring him back to the Chateau. And it wasn’t just that he needed a ride—he had the dogs and all his worldly goods with him. After agreeing to meet at a place somewhere between Cabo and Hollywood, Carol and a friend set off in a truck and rescued the fellow and brought him back to the hotel, where he passed away soon after. And while Carol seemed to think that this wasn’t a particularly good story because it didn’t have the happiest of endings, it struck me as a perfect illustration of not only the profound attachment of the staff to the guests, but also the notion that someone terminally ill would want to return to the hotel, the place he identified as home.

  Erin Foti, design director of the hotel, is responsible for the subtle changes, the things you wouldn’t exactly notice on their own. The cumulative effect has been a wonderful reconsideration, a slow upgrading of the hotel’s spaces, furnishings, design aesthetic. She is involved with everything—the color of the wicker chairs under the colonnade, the fabrics on the sofa, the paintings in the lobby living room, the plantings one sees in the garden areas. Maintaining the look of the hotel is like taking care of a heavily trafficked great house; something always needs updating.

  Among the longtime guests there was a strong resistance to change. Just after Andre Balazs had completed his renovation and redecoration, some of the guests would arrive and request that the old furniture be put back into their rooms. The Chateau, being the Chateau of course, had the old furniture on hand and would return it to the room, only to take it out again after the guest checked out.

  “I never resisted any of the renovation,” says John Waters. “I think it looks nice. In the courtyard. I always throw a penny in that fountain. It’s a goddamn wishing well. Right out front by the door, there’s a little water there. I always throw coins there, like a fool! I never would think of doing that anywhere else in the world. [funny voice] Because I think my wishes will come true there!”
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  I ask Erin if she think the hotel is built upon some kind of energy field. She tells me about a recent trip she took to India for the Kumbha Mela Festival, one of India’s most significant spiritual festivals, occurring once every twelve years and drawing millions of people. Part of the festival involves taking a ritual bath in the magical waters found at the confluence of three rivers: the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the Saraswati—an invisible spiritual river. Erin brought back waters from this festival, water from the Ganges, and added a little bit of it to each of the pools of water at the hotel—the fountain, the koi pool, the pond with a Buddha at one end, the swimming pool, and the wishing well that John Waters mentioned. The myth or legend being that any water that mixes with Ganges water becomes Ganges water—magic water. She also brings Nag Champa incense, which burns around the pool. It is India’s most popular meditation incense and has been used for deep calming meditation and for creating sacred spaces.

  “When people breathe in the incense, it changes them spiritually. They don’t know this. but I personally believe it—it brings memories to people that they’re not aware of, memories of ancient experience, it awakens us,” she tells me as we are touring the property. The scent is inescapable; I breathe deeply.

  The man who oversees the hotel is thirty-two-year-old general manager Philip Pavel. Slightly larger than life, he’s six foot two and moves through the hotel with ghostlike grace, deftly handling the stickiest of situations with a homespun sense of humor.

  MS. HOMES: Where did you grow up?

  MR. PAVEL: I grew up in Hickory Hills, Illinois. Which is on the southwest side of Chicago. As you’re coming off the I-55 expressway, the Double Nickel, as they call it in Chicago.

  MS. HOMES: Why do they call it the Double Nickel?

  MR. PAVEL: Because it’s two fives in there, I-55. Right where the turnoff is to go to Hickory Hills, you go way out by what they call the “shit pits,” where they process all of the human waste for all of the city of Chicago. So it just smells terrible. And as you pass that, you pass the Wonder bread factory, which smells wonderful! And for some reason, these two extremes, shit and Wonder bread, seem to sum up my suburban childhood to me! [laughs]

  MS. HOMES: What kind of people lived there?

  MR. PAVEL: Working-class. South side Chicago. You were either Polish, Italian, or Irish. Mostly white working-class ghetto.

  MS. HOMES: And then how did you end up coming to California?

  MR. PAVEL: I studied acting at Northwestern. I knew that I wanted to be an actor at about eight. Northwestern took pride in calling itself the Harvard of the Midwest. A lot of the kids were really pretentious. They would say, What do you want to do when you graduate? I want to create great art. And I remember thinking that I had to rebel against all that. So I said, I’m gonna go to L.A. and I’m going to be on a sitcom. And I’m gonna sell out in a New York minute and make lots of money. … I was known as L.A. Phil long before I ever came to L.A. And I always liked that when I first arrived in L.A., the L.A. Philharmonic had big posters all around town that said L.A. Phil. That all seemed right.

  MS. HOMES: When did you come here?

  MR. PAVEL: I got here right after I graduated, so in the fall of ’91. The great California recession of ’91! I couldn’t find a job, and I was so naïve, still being from the Midwest, that I didn’t lie on my résumé. But, as fate would have it, in the case of L.A. style over substance, I got cast in my first job. I applied for a job as a waiter at the Café Plaza, the coffee shop in the Century Plaza Hotel. But they needed a maître d’ for their French restaurant. I was twenty-two and had no business being a maître d’, had no experience, but even though I’m a hybrid of mostly Polish, German, Austrian, Russian, English, Irish, Lithuanian, they thought I looked like I could be French! My real last name is Pawelczyk, but Philip Pawelczyk became Philippe Pavel, and I was reborn. But Pawelczyk I was happy to throw out. I never looked back!

  MS. HOMES: Does the rest of your family go by Pawelczyk?

  MR. PAVEL: Yes … they were very upset at first because I’m a junior. … But my parents, now that they’ve seen me in a movie and stuff, they think the name’s very glamorous. And sometimes when they order a pizza they’ll feel a little dangerous, and they’ll say Pavel instead of Pawelczyk.

  MS. HOMES: And when you were thinking that you wanted to grow up and come here, what was Los Angeles to you?

  MR. PAVEL: I read Bret Easton Ellis when I was in high school. And the city seemed very glamorous to me—kids who just had tons of money and did cocaine. It all seemed dangerous and decadent. I listened to a lot of Duran Duran in my bedroom in Hickory Hills. MTV had just come out … through music videos and also through movies—Richard Gere in American Gigolo—L.A. was this sexy place where there was lots of neon and people wore designer jeans.

  MS. HOMES: One of the things that interests me about L.A., is that it’s a place where people come to find themselves.

  MR. PAVEL: That whole go west young man kind of thing. I definitely, in retrospect, moved to L.A. because I was south side, working-class Chicago, and I had to move as far away from home to deal with my sexuality and come out.

  When I first moved here, I had this miserable day-to-day, trying to scrape for sustenance, existence. But at night, I would wear these crazy outfits, and thought I was the whiter Lenny Kravitz. And would go to clubs and was just this big club kid—but there I was, in my fantasy life, I was in L.A., and I was going to be discovered.

  MS. HOMES: And did that happen?

  MR. PAVEL: Mm, no.

  MS. HOMES: How long were you Philippe Pavel?

  MR. PAVEL: Only for the two and a half years I was at La Chaumiere, which means “country retreat.”

  MS. HOMES: What other jobs did you have before you ended up at the Chateau?

  MR. PAVEL: At La Chaumiere, I kind of cut my teeth in the restaurant business The Century Plaza Tower was a testament to the Reagan-era 80s. So it was sort of Miss Havisham … a really grand environment, but its heyday was long past. We served a veal chop in morel mushroom cream sauce, and there was a silver dome, and we would literally pull it off and “voilà!” But we never had any business. So I got hired to be a maître d’ at Barney Greengrass, on top of Barneys New York. And that was my first time in a very sort of “scene” type environment. We were right across the street from UTA, and down the street from CAA, and that was a total baptism by fire. I learned to deal with the entertainment industry. And I got yelled at a lot.

  MS. HOMES: Really? By who?

  MR. PAVEL: By agents. Agents were the worst. And everyone needed to get in and out of there … in an hour … but have the corner table. And I was naïve. … It was a real education in terms of how the social system, the class system in Los Angeles works.

  MS. HOMES: How would you describe that social system?

  MR. PAVEL: I guess it’s knowing who has heat. People in L.A. are heat-seeking missiles. And that’s the whole thing you were talking about, in terms of you’re only as good as your last project. So it’s a subtle … it’s being able to judge the few millimeters between the falling box-office star and the rising TV star. But I always took great pride in what I thought was Midwest integrity; that if you made a reservation, and you were nice to me at the maître d’ stand, you got a better table than the TV actor who actually would yell, “I’m famous, doesn’t that mean anything?” I kind of saw myself as a Robin Hood.

  MS. HOMES: Did it demystify celebrity culture?

  MR. PAVEL: I always thought that actors had something extra, something special. That they must have been really, really beautiful, or really, really smart. And what I realize now is that, it’s only after people are movie stars that they have that thing. Because people are so gaga, because our culture so worships celebrity. They don’t have that to begin with. It’s all something that’s in people’s minds that they project.

  MS. HOMES: Was L.A. a place that allowed you to become yourself in a way that you probably wouldn’t have in Illinois? />
  MR. PAVEL: Oh. definitely. There was this decadence, this sexual freedom. And I also studied Latin in high school, six years of Latin. I equated sexual freedom with this level of decadence. L.A. seems like the modern day equivalent of Rome.

  MS. HOMES: OK, so back to the story.

  MR. PAVEL: The people who had hired me at Barneys, who had been fired, were living at the Chateau and they had spoken to Andre about the Chateau’s evolution—they wanted to upgrade the food and beverage. I guess they had frozen pizzas, and they had a four-burner stove with a handle hanging off it. Henry and Melanie were the consultants. … They knew I was a really hard worker, they knew I was smart, but I was also young and they could get me for a song. I had never been to the Chateau. I remember I read Interview magazine in high school diligently. And I remember seeing the ads, and it was always sort of this mysterious place. And I came up and I sat in one of their tan chairs out in the colonnade out there, and immediately fell in love with the place. They sang me this siren song about how it would be perfect, it’s a small hotel, it’s only sixty-three rooms, they have a new no-party policy, so all you have to do is run room service, and there’s about five tables in the lobby. And you can come or go for auditions whenever you want. I’m sold. So I did it. That was six years ago, 1996. It was non-stop parties. One after the other.