THE CASTLE ON SUNSET
LOVE, FAME, DEATH AND SCANDAL AT HOLLYWOOD’S CHATEAU MARMONT
SHAWN LEVY
Weidenfeld, 384pp, £20 Located in West Hollywood and now a luxury hotel, the Chateau Marmont was originally intended as a condominium of apartments when it was built in 1926. It has ‘spent nearly a century perched on the eastern edge of the Sunset Strip like the Rock of Gibraltar, a landmark defining a transition, a way station giving harbor to vagabonds, a milestone, a sentinel, a keep’, writes author Shawn Levy.
As Simon Callow explained in his review for the Sunday Times, ‘in its early days, its “shabby-chic furnishings and creature
discomforts”, as Levy says, gave the feeling to those who were in Hollywood but not of it, that they had resisted what he describes as its
“siren’s call”… Levy’s pages teem with extraordinary and extreme personalities; to find their antics amusing, you probably had to be there; at the very least, you need to share his delight in what he calls “celebrity naughtiness”.’ This is where director Nicholas Ray worked on the script of Rebel Without a
Cause and where he slept with his film’s 16-year-old female star, Natalie Wood, among others. Indeed, Ray ‘dominates the part of the book in which he features – sexually omnivorous, radical in his themes and the manner of his films, finally drugged and debauched. Levy becomes another writer in the account he gives of this driven, fitfully inspired, self-destroying man.’
But ‘Today,’ as Roger Lewis wrote in the Telegraph, ‘the Chateau’s days of louche monkey business and libertinism are on the way out.’