The Suite Life. Christopher HeardЧитать онлайн книгу.
Towne also told me: “Warren would always have at least one room service tray in the room. He would order room service, then forget to call down to have them pick up the tray, as he would be off on another phone call or get caught up in another meeting. Not that the space was messy. It wasn’t at all. It was all very ordered and arranged and neat, but you could look around the suite and get a pretty good picture of what kinds of things interested him and what kinds of things didn’t.”
After the enormous critical and financial success of Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty’s Beverly Wilshire suite became a busy hub of activity, meetings, and conferences all day. Romantic encounters abounded. The Beverly Wilshire became known partly as the place where Warren Beatty lived. Beautiful women seen in the lobby were naturally assumed to be on their way up to the penthouse, and because Beatty made the rare arrangement with the front desk that his calls be relayed directly to his room without screening, the hotel had no idea which women were invited by prior arrangement by Beatty and which were trying to catch his fancy, something that ultimately made living in the Beverly Wilshire quite inconvenient for him.
Beatty left the Beverly Wilshire in the early 1970s around the time he was making Shampoo. By that time he had been in the hotel for almost ten years, his star had grown much brighter, and his reputation had become far more dynamic. Because Beatty’s lifestyle was a kind of love ’em and leave ’em one, there were more than a few disgruntled women, husbands, and boyfriends out there. And, of course, everyone knew he lived in the Beverly Wilshire. Beatty was made even more uncomfortable when the Beverly Wilshire built an addition that looked down on Beatty’s once-secluded terrace.
But let’s get back to the connection between Howard Hughes and Warren Beatty. When I asked Beatty where his interest in Hughes came from, he told me he had been actively trying to develop a major film based on the later years of the billionaire. The actor could have certainly pulled off the feat. The movie he did after Shampoo, The Fortune, featured him styled to look like Hughes, slicked-back hair, thin moustache, and all. In this role he resembled a slightly more handsome version of the real Hughes.
Beatty told me he had purchased a house on Mulholland Drive in the hills above Sunset Boulevard (nicknamed then Bad Boy Drive because Beatty’s new neighbours were Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando) but seemed in no hurry to occupy the house. After he left the Beverly Wilshire, he moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel where he worked day after day with writer Robert Towne and director Hal Ashby on the Shampoo screenplay. One night Beatty noticed two big guys in black suits at the end of his hallway as he returned to his suite. Then he noticed another two equally stern-looking black-suited dudes at the opposite end of the hallway. Once in his suite, the oversensitive, borderline paranoid Beatty called down to the front desk and demanded to know who the guys were in the hallway. Clearly, they were bodyguards of one sort or another. The man at the desk explained that he wasn’t allowed to divulge that kind of information, even though he was aware he was speaking to Warren Beatty.
Not someone to be denied anything, Beatty persisted and wore down the desk attendant in short order. The man explained that these fellows were Mormon bodyguards for Howard Hughes. Beatty peppered the desk attendant with questions, starting with “Is Hughes in the suite next to mine?”
“Who knows?” the desk clerk said.
Hughes had reserved six suites and was in one of them, but not even the staff knew which one. Beatty then asked the desk attendant why Hughes didn’t take the secluded bungalows the hotel offered.
“Well,” replied the desk attendant, “Mr. Hughes actually does have four of the bungalows set aside, as well.”
Beatty asked why they were kept empty.
The deskman said, “Oh, they aren’t empty, Mr. Beatty. The bungalows are where Mr. Hughes keeps his women.”
It hardly seems coincidental that it was around this time that Warren Beatty began to develop his own ideas of one day playing the legendary billionaire on the screen.
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There is a spot in Los Angeles that is home to actor James Woods and has been for the past four years. The hotel is called L’Ermitage, or more accurately Raffles L’Ermitage (ermitage is French for “retreat”). Having stayed at Raffles L’Ermitage a number of times myself, I can fully attest to its luxury. The hotel was built in the 1970s as a high-end condo. Because of its proximity to the shopping on Rodeo Drive and to Sunset Boulevard in the other direction, the location is perfect. Thanks to the configurations of the layout when Raffles L’Ermitage was a condo, the standard rooms are actually quite large (over 675 square feet per standard room). The name of this hotel is appropriate, since unless you know exactly where you’re going, you’ll miss it. And that’s precisely why both Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor chose the place to recover quietly from cosmetic surgery.
I first met Woods at L’Ermitage before he was living there and before I was residing in the Royal York. My objective was to interview him about a role in Where the Boys Are, a movie he was starring in opposite Drew Barrymore. I was in a nice suite overlooking the Hollywood Hills; he was in a larger suite where we set up our on-camera interview. As we got ready, we chatted about our love of cool hotels and about the hotel we were in. We talked about our mutual wish one day to live in a hotel, and it was funny that while Woods was still a few years away from moving into L’Ermitage, he looked around the suite and said, “This might not be such a bad choice right here.”
Jump ahead six years. I was back in Los Angeles at L’Ermitage and once again speaking to James Woods, only by now he had actually been living in the hotel for more than a year. Of course, living in the hotel was our first order of business for conversation. “I was having problems with my house,” Woods told me, “structural things that needed work, some repairs. The house was in need of some substantial renovations and repairs. I had an estimate done and found that it was going to cost almost what the house cost all over again, so I just got rid of the house and moved in here with the intention of staying until I decided where I wanted to live next. But after a few weeks, then a few months, it kind of dawned on me that I loved living here, that this was where I wanted to live next.”
I pressed Woods on the pros and cons of choosing the life of a hotel liver, and he said, “Well, it can get a bit pricey in a place like this, but you balance it off with the added comfort and the significant convenience, and it becomes something that can be quite reasonably justified.” Woods spoke about the little things you grow used to when you live in a hotel. “One thing that is kind of nice is that I can ask one of the guys [bellmen] here to take my dog for a walk, and he happily does it. I’m not using the guy as a slave. It’s like he’s a pal doing another pal a favour. You can always count on that pal to do you that favour when needed. I bought the main guy a very nice set of golf clubs as a way of thanking him for always being there when I need him.”
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Other than my beloved Royal York in Toronto, perhaps my favourite hotel in the world is Chateau Marmont, located in the eight thousand block of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. That venerable place is as much a part of Hollywood as the Academy Awards and is one of the few hotels in the world that wears its notoriety like a badge of honour. Construction on Chateau Marmont began in 1927, and it opened for business two years later. California attorney Fred Horowitz built the hotel after being inspired by the Château d’Amboise in the Loire Valley in France. The hotel is tucked away off Sunset Boulevard and is accessible only by a steep, winding driveway. (Celebrity photographer Helmut Newton died when he lost control of his car on this serpentine driveway and crashed into the high wall beside it.) Horowitz made sure, to his brilliant foresight, that the hotel was erected well above the contemporary standards for earthquake-proofing, and because of that the hotel survived major earthquakes in 1933, 1953, 1971, 1987, and 1994. (I was actually in Chateau Marmont during the 1994 tremors, my first such experience with an earthquake. As instructed, I stood in the doorframe until the swaying and rumbling stopped, then West Hollywood went immediately back to being cool and laid-back.)
Chateau Marmont consists of a main building with standard rooms, larger suites, and penthouse suites with big terraces that overlook Sunset Boulevard and Beverly Hills. There are also four bungalows in the garden by the swimming pool. Strangely,