The Castle on Sunset by Shawn Levy

Author:Shawn Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

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In 1963, as the Sunset Strip was transforming into an internationally known youth destination and cultural stew pot, two hotels opened mere blocks from Chateau Marmont that would play important roles in its story and that of the neighborhood in the coming decades.

The Gene Autry Hotel (before long, renamed the Continental Hyatt House) was the bigger of the two, and the closer to the Chateau—just two blocks west. Featuring 239 rooms and standing fourteen stories high right out on Sunset Boulevard, it was built by and named for the cowboy star of singing and acting fame whose offscreen empire also included the Los Angeles Angels of Major League Baseball and the Melody Ranch, a working cattle ranch that also served as a location for Western films. Farther west yet, just on the other side of La Cienega Boulevard, was the Sunset Marquis, more modestly scaled in size (it had approximately 100 rooms when it opened) and designed, according to its original owner, George Rosenthal, along the lines of the Garden of Allah or the Chateau itself, with each room a self-contained suite or villa including a kitchenette. Those two hotels—along with the Tropicana Motel, a lower-rent and even more louche spot about half a mile south on Santa Monica Boulevard—formed a troika of havens where musicians indulged in bacchanals and reveries when touring through—or sometimes lingering for as long as several years in—Southern California. The history of rock ’n’ roll, at least the sensational, nonmusical parts of it, was largely written inside their walls.

These spots were all different from Chateau Marmont in crucial ways. Movie people would always favor the Chateau, along with the Beverly Hills and the Beverly Wilshire, in large part because those hotels—through their size or the cost of staying in them or their vigilant security staffs or a combination of all three—kept outsiders outside. No autograph hounds, snooping journalists, pushy photographers, or buttinsky civilians threatened the privacy of its celebrity guests. They were oases of isolation, a luxury that so many movie people craved.

Rock ’n’ roll people were different. For one thing, they were, literally, bands: trios and quartets and more, with entourages that included managers and stage technicians and road crews and record company operatives and personal associates. An excessive movie star might be attended by a confidant or companion, a dresser, an agent, a manager, a publicist, a bodyguard—a group that you could squeeze into a limo. A band like the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin would have three to four times that cohort in tow, often more. These cavalcades required a lot of rooms to house them all—more rooms than the relatively tiny Chateau could provide; Zeppelin, for one, would sometimes rent out as many as six entire floors of a hotel when they settled in.

Musical acts were also far more itinerant than actors. Movie people might settle in for as much as three or four months at a time, twice that if they were shooting a TV series. Musicians

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