Chateau Marmont

A Guest List Like No Other

Greta Garbo lived here for stretches under the alias Harriet Brown and reportedly spoke to no one. Howard Hughes took a higher-floor suite specifically so he could watch the pool through binoculars; when he was not doing that, he was working through what staff remembered as a truly heroic standing order of ice cream from the kitchen. Jean Harlow moved in with her new husband, the cinematographer Harold Rosson, in September 1933 on the principle that one suite would not be enough. They took two. Jean redecorated hers in white-on-white, and the staff began to notice a steady traffic of gentleman callers in and out of her rooms while her new husband, when he was in residence, slept on the sofa in the living room. When the marriage collapsed a few months later, the news that they had "moved out of the Chateau Marmont" became the sentence that put the hotel on the front pages of every newspaper in America. The Chateau has not had to advertise since.

Billy Wilder lived at the hotel in the early 1940s, and legend has it that the seedy bachelor apartment Walter Neff occupies in Double Indemnity, which Wilder co-wrote at the Chateau, is more or less his own Chateau lodgings transposed wholesale to the screen. James Dean once leapt through a window during an audition in one of the suites, won the lead in Rebel Without a Cause on the strength of it, and gave Hollywood a new monologue. Montgomery Clift convalesced at the Chateau after his catastrophic 1956 car crash, hiding from the press while his face was being reconstructed. Desi Arnaz fled here after almost every one of his famously frequent rows with Lucy. Shelley Winters and her second husband, the actor Anthony Franciosa, were such reliably enthusiastic guests in the late 1950s that Winters later delivered the verdict below.

" "If there had been an Olympic sex team, Tony would have been the captain." — Shelley Winters, on her husband Anthony Franciosa, both Chateau regulars

The Last One Standing

What makes the Chateau essential for the Old Hollywood traveller is not its past but its persistence. The Trocadero, the Garden of Allah, the Brown Derby, Schwab's: all gone. The Chateau is still here, still dark in the lobby, still overfurnished, still serving the old-school cocktails for which the bar has always been famous, still threaded with bougainvillea that has been keeping Hollywood's secrets for nearly a hundred years.

In 2020, owner André Balazs announced plans to convert the hotel into a members-only club, a proposal abandoned in 2022 after a high-profile dispute with the unionising staff. The hotel remains, for now, bookable by anyone who can afford it. Sleep where Garbo slept. Sit where Wilder wrote. Order the ice cream, and quietly toast Howard Hughes.