The Hot One by Carolyn Murnick

Author:Carolyn Murnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

11

SCORPIO RISING

COME AROUND THE curve of Sunset Boulevard a few blocks past Fairfax, and you see Chateau Marmont emerging like some fantasy castle in the sky, all gleaming white spires and faux Gothic arches and Italianate pointy trees reaching up and up. It looks so much like a European estate from the fifteenth century that if you squint your eyes you almost don’t notice there’s a Starbucks/rental car outfit right down the road and a flashy Mexican place called the Pink Taco across the street.

The Chateau, everyone in LA calls it. “The after party was at the Chateau,” says my actress friend, who also does voice-overs. “Let’s definitely get drinks at the Chateau when you’re in town,” says another, in development but technically the assistant to a showrunner. I find all of it—the job titles, the fake-European allusion—laughably pretentious, but I’m just not from around here.

The place has certainly earned its city lore. Built in the 1920s as Los Angeles’s first earthquake-proof apartment building, the Chateau quickly became the spot for bad behavior of all types in Golden Age Hollywood and thereafter. Back then, studios had a code of conduct written into stars’ contracts for what was permitted on camera as well as what was expected of them in public. Who those people really were was another story, and the studios knew that with or without their control, something would have to give. To make up the difference, the studios rented rooms at the Chateau for stars to go at it and get up to no good. Clark Gable and Jean Harlow were rumored to have had a torrid affair upstairs. Howard Hughes was said to have gawked from his room through binoculars at women around the pool. Led Zeppelin’s drummer rode his motorcycle through the lobby. Roman Polanski fled there after his statutory rape charges before leaving the country. John Belushi overdosed in Bungalow Three. Helmut Newton fatally crashed his car in the driveway. Lindsay Lohan holed up there during her first drunk-driving scandal.

The Chateau is like a movie set that way, an intricately constructed fantasy that encourages you to play against type. It’s like being in permanent vacation mode. It’s a place where you can imagine losing all your clothes, and then maybe your mind, and still wanting to go back as soon as you’re able to. It’s a place where you can picture getting discovered or meeting someone who might change your life, whether for good or ill you don’t yet know but you go ahead with it anyway. And it came as little surprise to me to learn from Chris that this magical mystery castle was Ashley’s playground.

Ashley would go to the Chateau with her crowd for late-night drinks at the turn of the millennium, lazing about in the low lighting and faux worn banquettes in the bar, drinking Red Bull and vodkas. Did she ever meet someone and make her way upstairs to a suite or the penthouse? Did she ever skinny-dip in the pool

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