The Suite Life. Christopher HeardЧитать онлайн книгу.

      Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood is one of the most famous celebrity hotels, having been the site of Marilyn Monroe’s suicide and John Belushi’s drug overdose death.

      Movie mogul Harry Cohn once said to his new star actors William Holden and Glenn Ford, “If you’re going to get caught doing something indiscreet, make sure you get caught doing it at Chateau Marmont.” Before taking up residence in the Beverly Hills Hotel, Howard Hughes moved into the attic at Chateau Marmont because it overlooked the swimming pool. He would survey the pool with powerful binoculars, searching for beautiful starlets whom he would then have an assistant summon for him.

      When F. Scott Fitzgerald had pretty much come to the end of his productive years as a novelist, he went to Hollywood to accept lucrative writing gigs from the studios and chose to live at Chateau Marmont where he suffered a massive heart attack. Judy Garland was fond of sitting in the lounge off the reception area where there was a grand piano. She would play the piano and sing at the top of her lungs while the hotel staff went about their business around her.

      Vivien Leigh resided in the hotel’s suite 5D (at Chateau Marmont suites are assigned letters and numbers, the number indicating the floor, the letter the suite) after breaking up with her husband, Laurence Olivier. She was so traumatized by her estrangement that she had the entire living room area wallpapered top to bottom with photographs of the Shakespearean actor. However, in the bedroom of the suite there was just one picture of the two of them together that rested on the pillow beside where she slept.

      In the 1950s, when bad-boy director Nicholas Ray lived in one of the bungalows at Chateau Marmont during the casting of his movie Rebel Without a Cause, a new young hothead actor named James Dean wanted to meet with him and talk about the film. Ray struck an intimidating figure — tall, black eye patch over one eye, gruff-voiced. He said he would meet Dean when he was good and ready. One night, while Ray was auditioning three actors — Natalie Wood, Dennis Hopper, and Sal Mineo — who made it into the legendary film, they were all startled by the commotion of the screen on one of the windows being ripped open. To their astonishment, Dean was crawling in through the window, demanding that he be allowed to audition for the role that eventually made him a celluloid icon. He fell into the bungalow onto a table that collapsed under him. Then he got to his feet and said that Ray had two choices: let him read or call the cops. Ray let him read.

      A few years later, in 1956, another major heartthrob actor, Montgomery Clift, was in Los Angeles shooting a film called Raintree County with Elizabeth Taylor. One night, halfway through filming, Clift left a party at the home of Taylor and her then husband, Michael Wilding. His friend actor Kevin McCarthy was in another car ahead of Clift. The intoxicated Clift slammed his car into a telephone pole and was severely injured. His once-beautiful face was broken and mangled when it smashed against the steering wheel. McCarthy returned to Taylor’s house to get help. When Taylor heard about the accident, she rushed to the scene, cradled Clift in his wrecked vehicle, and stopped him from choking on his broken teeth. The stricken actor was minutes away from dying when help arrived. After Clift was released from the hospital, Taylor arranged for him to move into Chateau Marmont for as long as he needed to recuperate.

      In the 1960s, West Hollywood was abuzz with the changing music scene. Just down from Chateau Marmont is the legendary nightclub Whisky a Go-Go. It was in that club that Jim Morrison and The Doors broke out. And it was in Chateau Marmont where Jim Morrison claimed he had used up “eight of my nine lives.” One of his most famous used-up lives occurred one evening when he was as high as a weather balloon and decided to take a shortcut from a rooftop terrace to his suite by leaping for a drainpipe and trying to swing into the window of his room. He barely made it and injured his back painfully in the process. Morrison used up life number nine in a hotel in Paris on July 3, 1971.

      Chateau Marmont has seen tragedy as well as typical Hollywood antics. In 1982 comic actor John Belushi was living in one of the bungalows flush with the success of Saturday Night Live and his transition to movies, but he had also given in to the more self-indulgent aspects of Hollywood celebrity. Belushi was a well-known drug user and boozer whose intake of both grew daily. One warm night Belushi took his drug habit up a notch and injected himself with a lethal combination of heroin and cocaine that finally killed him. Another resident of the hotel and friend of Belushi, Robert De Niro, was so shocked by the comedian’s death that it caused him to re-evaluate his own life and career. De Niro lived in one of Chateau Marmont’s penthouse suites for two years.

      Today Chateau Marmont is still a gathering place for hip Hollywood. The troubled actress Lindsay Lohan stayed there for a few years (2006 through 2008), and it was her preferred sanctuary after her drunk-driving arrest. One of Lohan’s friends, Britney Spears, has the rare distinction of being barred a few times from Chateau Marmont for being unruly. When you’re barred from Chateau Marmont for unruliness then it’s a certainty you were being truly unruly.

      The hotel continues to be featured in movies. Sofia Coppola, the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, sets her 2010 film Somewhere in Chateau Marmont. In the movie Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a newly famous film star doing publicity for his latest flick while living in the hotel. Like many of his real-life counterparts, Johnny behaves badly in the hotel, drinking, drugging, and fornicating between bouts of driving around in his Ferrari and reacquainting himself with his preteen daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning).

      Actor Keanu Reeves, who doesn’t own a home in Los Angeles, has lived in Chateau Marmont for years. He was photographed as late as February 2010 strolling out of the hotel, a place he finds comfortable, secluded, and familiar. Knowing that Reeves has resided in the hotel for a long time, I was curious about that part of his secretive life. I had a lengthy conversation with him in the Essex House Hotel in New York City where he was promoting The Devil’s Advocate, a movie he did with Al Pacino. Between interviews we sat in an empty suite where Keanu wanted to watch some of the Dallas Cowboys’ football games on TV. Outside of the formality of a structured on-camera Q and A we were free to chat about anything (except the movie he was promoting, of course; he was already tired of talking about that). We spoke about his youth in Toronto and how he skipped school to hang out in the pinball arcade in Union Station across Front Street from the Royal York.

      I asked Reeves what it was about living in hotels that appealed to him. “After I started working in films regularly,” he said, “it was a big part of that life. I would live in hotels while on location and then live in hotels in L.A. when I was between films because I seemed to be only there for a couple of months before having to head out on a location again. So it became what I’m used to pretty quickly. I’m heading to Australia soon to make a film, and I’ll be there probably for the better part of a year.”

      Reeves said the difference between living in a secluded private residence in Los Angeles and the relative public nature of living in a hotel, especially given the fact that he is a private man, is: “There’s a convenience and a simplicity and a lack of complication about living in a hotel, and there are layers of security that allow you to just withdraw into your space within the hotel and relax or do whatever you want with the confidence that you aren’t going to be bothered.” I then asked him why he chose Chateau Marmont as his hotel of choice. “I stayed there early on when I started getting some work, and it was just a very cool place to be. The building is old and rich with history, and the location of the place is pretty ideal. It’s where a lot of meetings happen, and it’s where a lot of other actors you end up knowing hang out. I really like it there. I find it very comfortable.”

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      Hotels like Chateau Marmont are grungy almost by design. They straddle that fine line between