“If you must get into trouble, do it at the Marmont.”
– Columbia Pictures founder and CEO Harry Cohn advising his male movie stars to rely on the Chateau Marmont’s reputation for discretion
Of the dozens of Loire Valley châteaux that Los Angeles attorney Fred Horowitz saw on his tour of France in 1925, one in particular stood out. Horowitz was so impressed with the Gothic-style Château d’Amboise that he chose it as the design inspiration for a real estate project he was developing in Hollywood.
Construction on the project, a seven-floor, 43-room luxury apartment building, began in 1927. The site Horowitz selected was on a hill above Sunset Boulevard at Marmont Avenue, at Hollywood’s far western border with the West Hollywood county district. After rejecting the names Château Sunset and Château Hollywood, Horowitz decided to call the project the Château Marmont Apartments.
The Château Marmont celebrated its grand opening on February 1, 1929. Its opening generated significant interest, and by the fall of 1929, nearly all of the apartments were rented.
An advertisement described the rental units as “1 to 6 room furnished apartments including complete 24-hour service. Garage in basement. Large rooms and private balconies. Distinctively furnished and decorated. View of Mt. Baldy, Catalina Island, and the lights of the city from private balconies and patios. Finest steel and concrete construction (class AA), fire and earthquake proof.”
The ad’s claim that the building was “earthquake proof” was only a slight exaggeration. When the Long Beach earthquake struck the region on March 10, 1933, wealthy guests at nearby hotels like the Garden of Allah and the Sunset Tower fled to the Sunset Strip. The Marmont remained strangely unaffected; other than a swaying motion so gentle that it failed to topple the flower vases, the quake went unnoticed, and guests did not panic.
On Black Thursday, October 29, 1929, eight months after the Château Marmont Apartments’ grand opening, the stock market crashed, setting the stage for the Great Depression. The building’s once-wealthy tenants broke their leases, and the rate of new rentals dropped toward zero.
In 1931, Horowitz sold the building to Albert Smith, a silent-era movie mogul whose recent sale of Vitagraph studios to Warner Bros left him flush with cash. Smith went on a buying spree, acquiring distressed residential properties in advance of the 1932 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. He determined that the best way to make the Marmont profitable was to operate it as a hotel. After a few months of renovation, the Chateau Marmont Hotel had its grand opening in 1932, months ahead of the Games.
As a hotel, the Marmont quickly established itself as a place for Hollywood stars to get away from it all without leaving town. Like the Garden of Allah across the street, its shabby-chic style and penchant for discretion appealed to wealthy and sophsiticated movie colony bohemians. As just one example, it became a favorite stopping place for golden-age superstar Greta Garbo, who was famous for wanting to be alone.
The Marmont’s popularity among the rich and famous has also made it a prime source of gossip and celebrity anecdotes. Here are a few of them.
- During World War II, the Chateau Marmont did its part by serving as a bomb shelter for its Sunset Strip neighbors, among whom were Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, Humphrey Bogart, Mayo Methot, Peter Lorre, and Lena Horne. Humphrey Bogart also served as one of the neighborhood air raid wardens.
- In 1956, after Montgomery Clift nearly died in a car crash, his friend Elizabeth Taylor arranged for him to recuperate from his disfiguring wounds at the Marmont. He spent weeks in Room 36 recovering from his wounds and the reconstruction of his movie-star good looks. He was known to appear on his balcony in the nude, screaming obscenities into the void.
- In the late 1960s, the Doors’ Jim Morrison fell from a Marmont balcony, an incident that he later claimed had used “the eighth of my nine lives.” In July 1971, he used the ninth of his lives when he died from a heart attack likely brought on by a herion overdose.
- Perhaps the most notorious incident at the Marmont was the drug overdose in 1982 of comedian and actor John Belushi, age 33, in hotel’s Bungalow 3.
- In the 1990s, Dominique Dunne chronicled the infamous OJ Simpson trial for Vanity Fair from Room 48.
- Fashion photographer Helmut Newton died from a heart attack as he was driving out of the hotel’s driveway in January 2004
- Lindsay Lohan ran up a $46,000 bill at the Marmont in 2012.