The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont

by Shawn Levy

Schwab’s Pharmacy, a drugstore, luncheonette, soda fountain, and newsstand, opened in 1932, one of a string of such establishments owned and operated by the four Schwab brothers of East L.A. From the start, Schwab’s became an essential piece not only of Hollywood day-to-day living but of Hollywood lore.

3. Despite being owned by the former head of a movie studio, despite having a former silent film star as its manager and public face, Chateau Marmont didn’t get nearly the attention from Hollywood as did other Los Angeles–area hotels. The Beverly Hills Hotel, the Beverly Wilshire, the Ambassador, and the Roosevelt all enjoyed more prominent names—not to mention offering more deluxe accommodations and amenities. And the Garden of Allah, just across the street, was far more famous as the site of Hollywood shenanigans and sinning. At the start of Albert Smith’s reign, the Chateau was still chiefly a haven for Southern California aristocracy. Even the gossip coming out of the place had less to do with film people than with blue bloods. And that was largely because of one resident in particular, Nellita Choate Thomsen, wife of Carl H. Thomsen, a wealthy jeweler, architect, and amateur travel film director. The Thomsens had taken an apartment at the Chateau as soon as it opened, and their dinner parties were among the earliest noteworthy social events held in the building. Nellita was particularly well liked, gracious, lively, and, at just over thirty years old when she moved in, relatively youthful. She was, acquaintances noted, a particularly keen conversationalist and a great listener, qualities that helped her achieve a bit of renown as the Chateau’s unofficial greeter and omnipresent gadabout. There was nothing apparently unusual about her sociability or the fact that she w...

A gossip reporter.

Before she married, Nellita Choate worked at the Los Angeles Herald (later the Herald-Express), writing about sensational local criminal trials and light feature subjects. After her marriage, under the pseudonym Pauline Payne,

Pauline Payne was not a Hollywood gossip columnist in the vein of, say, Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, Rona Barrett, or Liz Smith. She had no public image, she didn’t have enemies or favorites in the business, and the pseudonymous woman who wrote her columns didn’t seek to use her voice and platform as a means to elevate her status in the media world.

Harlow had transformed from society wife to movie star. The story was that she had given a ride to an actress friend who was working at 20th Century Fox, and a casting director noticed her sitting in her car. Still a teen, she was a great natural beauty, with sun-bleached hair, a Kewpie doll pout, a bold, inviting gaze, a curvy figure, and an air of worldliness beyond her age. The fellow asked if she wanted to submit to an audition, and she brushed him off but took his card.

Jean Harlow wasn’t the only Hollywood notable who found sanctuary at Chateau Marmont in those early days. Movie people slowly discovered the place in a way that might best be described as subterranean, or else through the back door. Everyone at the studios knew of the area’s more luxurious and fabled hotels—the Beverly Hills, the Beverly Wilshire, the Ambassador—and they would steer the out-of-towners whom they wished to impress or pamper toward them. The Chateau, on the other hand, was where they went when they weren’t putting on airs—or hoping to be seen in the act of whatever it was they were getting up to. The difference was right there upon first impression. Arriving at the Beverly Hills Hotel, you rode up the curved drive, between the palm trees and flower beds, to a grand porte cochere where you were met by a valet or bellman and led through an ornate lobby. Pulling in to the Ambassador brought you along massive lawns and gardens, and the Beverly Wilshire’s front door was right out on the street, at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive, as near as you could get in Beverly Hills to the feeling of pulling up to a luxury hotel in New York, London, or Paris. Chateau Marmont was something else entirely. The entry was off a side street

Lloyd Bacon,

(The Singing Fool, Wonder Bar) and John Barrymore (Moby Dick), as well as the immortal musicals 42nd Street and Footlight Parade.

With that, a light went off in Little’s head. Off the main lobby, there was a women’s restroom, and in the corridor leading to that facility there was a bit of an antechamber, little more than a closet. It wasn’t a room, per se, but it did have a door, and if Wilder would promise to keep it locked so that no one would accidentally walk into it while searching for the bathroom… He took it.

And thus, during Christmas 1934, Billy Wilder lived next to—or, as he sometimes told it, inside—the ladies’ room in the lobby of Chateau Marmont.

Sunset Boulevard,

BUNGALOWS Charming secluded hillside homes, with the complete 24-hour hotel service which has always been an outstanding feature of Chateau Marmont…exquisitely decorated…quiet sunny patios and gardens. Now open for inspection.

Smith had correctly predicted that the population of and tourism to Southern California would thrive after the 1932 Olympics.

One was to Heinrich Brüning, chancellor of the Weimar Republic from 1930 to 1932; Brettauer supported Brüning with financial contributions to his political works and, after Hitler was elected, by letting him live in his home on Lake Lugano, where the former chancellor wrote his memoirs, oversaw the publication of an anti-Fascist newspaper (financed by Brettauer), and worked to organize resistance to the Nazis, all in the service of what he hoped would be a return to power for his own German Centre Party. Brüning made his way to the United States, then back to Germany, and finally back to America, and during all that time he and Brettauer sustained a correspondence and a financial relationship.

Jay Ward, who created The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, among other successful TV series, leased office space for his studio across Sunset from Chateau Marmont, eventually adding a retail gift shop, the Dudley Do-Right Emporium, to the premises.

For several years, the Poetry Society of America curated a series of readings at the hotel where some of the nation’s best-known poets—James Merrill, Carol Muske, Mark Strand, Tess Gallagher, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and James Tate among them—shared their work alongside well-known actors (including Tim Curry, Alfre Woodard, Helen Shaver, John Lithgow, Ally Sheedy, and Michael Ontkean), who recited work by still other noted poets. It was an unlikely marriage of verse and screen, and it was very successful. The poets, naturally, knew that the crowds that turned out to see them were drawn more by the movie stars than by the words,

Without a doubt, there were masterpieces imagined, written, and created by artists who were resident at the Chateau at the time and, at least in part, influenced by their surroundings: Rebel Without a Cause chief among them, but also Sunset Boulevard, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” and works by such writers as Ben Hecht, Lillian Hellman, S. J. Perelman, Elaine Dundy, Carole Eastman, and Menno Meyjes. Curiously, a number of screen adaptations could claim to have been born at the Chateau, including Meredith Willson’s of his stage musical The Music Man, Leonard Gardner’s of his novel Fat City, Robert Stone’s of his novel A Hall of Mirrors (retitled WUSA for the screen), Waldo Salt’s of Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust, and Gore Vidal’s of Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur. And then there was the sort of creation that actress-director Lee Grant reveled in when

On July 4, 2012, Lindsay Lohan threw a little birthday-slash–Independence Day party at the Chateau, where she had been living on and off for several months. The revelers spent several hours in the garden restaurant ordering food and drinks, and several more hours in Lohan’s suite—number 33—calling room service to send up

FILMOGRAPHY Barfly—Barbet Schroeder, 1987* Blume in Love—Paul Mazursky, 1973 Dangerous Game—Abel Ferrara, 1993 Danny Collins—Dan Fogelman, 2015* The Doors—Oliver Stone, 1991** Four Rooms—Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, 1995* Hangmen Also Die!—Fritz Lang, 1943 Hitler’s Madman—Douglas Sirk, 1943 Maps to the Stars—David Cronenberg, 2014** The Mayor of Sunset Strip—George Hickenlooper, 2003*** Mondo Mod—Peter Perry Jr., 1967* Myra Breckinridge—Michael Sarne, 1970 The Night Walker—William Castle, 1964 Rebel Without a Cause—Nicholas Ray, 1955*** Riot on Sunset Strip—Arthur Dreifuss, 1967* Somewhere—Sofia Coppola, 2010 The Strip—László Kardos, 1951* Summer Storm—Douglas Sirk, 1944 Wired—Larry Peerce, 1989