The Chateau Marmont: between myth and reality!
To say hello, Americans prefer “hugs” to kisses on both cheeks. These hugs – in which one person’s upper torso embraces the other’s body, with varying degrees of length and intensity depending on the intimacy involved – accompanied by a “hiiiiiii” and followed by the more traditional “how are you? – have replaced the more traditional European kiss in the hug pantheon. But Californians are in a class of their own! Even if their cheeks don’t actually touch, they draw a great deal of inspiration from the old-world embrace, and accompany their distant kisses with two languorous “mouahs” (in other words, one for each cheek). Welcome to the Chateau Marmont, where excess and the wildest excesses are tucked away in an offbeat glamorous atmosphere, right in the heart of the City of Angels behind lush greenery.
“Get bored at the Beverly Hills Hotel”
While an Oscar-winning actor – whose name, for reasons of discretion, will remain a secret – is having lunch with his agent, a young man enters the restaurant. Sandals on his feet, dreadlocks, fully tattooed, sporting some thirty bracelets on his wrists and a dozen necklaces around his neck, dressed in mauve jogging suits with a black sweater with white polka dots and a pompom hat, his appearance is certainly astonishing. Alongside him, three over-make-up-wearing young women, looking strangely like botoxed Kim Kardashian replicas, slit skirts and broken voices, make a point of specifying when ordering – to avoid any misunderstanding – that they are (to date) all vegan. Once seated in front of eggs Benedict (the last straw for so-called vegans), their lack of refinement is evident in the way they hold their forks, rather like broomsticks, and in the vain attempt to extract a strand of salad stuck between their tines with a (false) fingernail.
Surprisingly, this cheerful melting pot of individuals, all so different from each other, get along well together, and the atmosphere works under a cocktail of palm trees and neo-Gothic columns. The people who frequent this boarding house for adults don’t care how others look at them; on the contrary, they feed it without giving it the slightest importance. Eccentricity is an art that blends into the background. Here, everyone is treated the same. “You’re not happy with who I am… just walk away”. The Chateau Marmont’s profoundly offbeat snobbery is disconcerting. “If you don’t like it, go and get bored at the Beverly Hills Hotel”, one hears at a nearby table in a lively debate.
The Château won’t wait
Time has (literally) stood still at 8221 Sunset Boulevard. Only a few signs of the outside world – such as wifi or flat-screen TVs in the rooms – manage to break through the bushy barriers of a jungle of palm trees, canisses and bamboo planted to protect guests from prying eyes. The Chateau has to stay true to its roots: even the kitchens, found in some rooms, are worthy of the fifties! If the carpet is “new”, it has to look old; if the armchair and the rug don’t match, pretend they don’t and consider that they go perfectly together. If you don’t like it? You’re the one who hasn’t understood anything, not the Chateau!
Here, the Chateau is king before the customer! Such a feat is astonishing in a country where the notion of service is a religion. The customer waits, not the Chateau. The customer will leave at some point, but the Chateau remains! An ambiance totally at odds with the modern hotel industry, which relegates a Costes Hotel to the rank of a banal Hilton. The symbiosis between the elegant, classic “Hush Hush” style – reminiscent of the décor in the film “L.A. Confidential” – and the ordinary modernism of a certain form of reality TV, proves to be the establishment’s tour de force. How can we explain such self-assumed decadence, an ambient “je m’en foutisme”, a redefinition of luxury, a middle finger to conformism… all bathed in an ambience lazily numbed as if in the aftermath of a sleepless night.
Technicks MK2
The discreet outdoor pool (reserved exclusively for hotel residents), lined with rusty wrought-iron deckchairs, looks more like a duck pond; the lobby, however, is a pure success. If only the walls could talk… What can we say about the console housing a first Technicks MK2 turntable elevated by a magnificent McIntosh amplifier backed by two boxes filled with LPs ranging from Gloria Gaynor to Bob Dylan to Prince’s cult hit “Purple Rain”? What about the tiny bar with its four stools next to a grand piano at the back of the room? With its chandeliers and wide wooden beams on the ceiling, sofas and armchairs of all kinds play elbows in a Spanish hacienda atmosphere. While the restaurant is a haven of peace (although you still have to get through the screening process at the hotel entrance), the food on offer is cosmopolitan and doesn’t reflect the diversity of the city’s culinary scene.
The ghosts of James Belushi and Helmut Newton (both died at the hotel, one of an overdose and the other following a car accident just outside the parking lot), still haunt the corridors of this indefinable, unclassifiable and out-of-the-ordinary mansion. From Montgomery Clift to Led Zeppelin, via Jim Morrison, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean and Natalie Wood, the Chateau Marmont maintains the myth, and even if times change, a change of scenery is guaranteed! It’s up to you whether you like it or not. A perfect imperfection in a perfect world. Change? Certainly not! And in the end, what’s the point?
