10 Surprising Facts About the Chateau Marmont Hotel. BY Karen Gardiner. Montgomery Clift was nursed back to health at the Chateau by none other than the. Star-studded history and discreet. August 1, 1993, Page 009001 The New York Times Archives A weekday afternoon, poolside at the Chateau Marmont, a Hollywood hotel in an ersatz Loire Valley chateau. A crush of several hundred at a birthday party and cookout for Sofia Coppola, daughter of the director. The guest of honor and her consort, Donovan Leitch, fellow Ford model and son of 'the' Donovan, greet their guests. Never mind that they don't seem to know many of them. Never mind that it's not her actual birthdate. After all, this is the land of make-believe. One thing is uncontestedly real: it's hard to imagine a more calculatedly hip scene. The bicoastal everybody-who-is-anybody set parades down the path to the pool -- a seemingly endless stream of actors and actresses, agents, directors, models, producers, rock stars, writers, their pets and their children. The New York contingent, in town for the California Fashion Industry Friends of AIDS benefit honoring Calvin Klein the next evening, includes Kelly Klein, Elizabeth Saltzman, Tatiana Von Furstenburg, Peter Gallagher, Ethan Hawke, Marina Rust and Brian McNally. The Beastie Boys and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are among Ms. Coppola's additions to the guest list. A peek at the list -- the front desk clerk is hopelessly trying to keep up with his screening duties -- reveals the notation 'CM' by many of the names. That's short for Friends of the Chateau Marmont, and those names are from the hotel owner's Rolodex. There's quite a lot going on here besides Ms. Coppola's birthday. Cozily nestled in a hillside dotted with red-roofed Mediterranean-style houses, in a fragrant tangle of eucalyptus, honeysuckle, midnight jasmine and rosebushes, the turreted Chateau Marmont looms above Sunset Boulevard under the watchful eye of a Marlboro man billboard propped up where the Strip meets the city limits of West Hollywood and Marmont Lane. Built in 1929 as an apartment hotel by Fred Horowitz, a Hollywood entertainment lawyer, the opening of what Mr. Balazs calls the 'Loire Valley folly in the onion fields' coincided almost exactly with the stock market crash. Rapidly recast as a hotel, it became a hit. Its success among Hollywood residents and actors, writers and directors lured westward by the Hollywood machine is attributed largely to its noncommercial origins. Conceived as apartments, its so-called suites, equipped with kitchens, were large, homey and self-sufficient. The hotel became a quiet place to hide for those with work to do or those in the public eye, and because of the elevator in the basement garage, guests didn't even have to pass the front desk to get to the sanctuary of their rooms. Printer driver will not install windows 10. It was never the biggest, never the swankiest, but it was always the most private. 'If you must get into trouble, do it at the Marmont' was the directive given by Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Studios, to two of his young stars, William Holden and Glenn Ford. Greta Garbo was alone here. Jean Harlow honeymooned here. 'Rebel Without a Cause' was cast here. 'Sunset Boulevard' was conceived here. Excel add trusted location. In 1935, Billy Wilder found no room at the inn; he slept on a cot in a vestibule by the women's restroom, saying, 'I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.' 'The Day of the Locust' and 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' were written here.
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