Пустой вечер в легендарном отеле Chateau Marmont: бармен рассказывает о кризисе знаменитого места

The Chateau Marmont, Hollywood’s supposedly hottest hangout, was dead. It was pushing 9:00 p.m., and I’d been standing by the pool with a tray of tequila cosmos for two hours. The only partygoers to drink them, brand and PR reps for 1800 Tequila who were hosting the event, waved me off to pace themselves. How much money went into buying out the Chateau pool, transforming the patio of chaises and umbrellas into a nightclub lounge, building the pop-up bar, and hiring the army of caterers in which I’d been enlisted, only for no one to show? The Chateau Marmont first opened as a luxury apartment building in 1929 but sold after the stock-market crash and became a hotel in 1932. It grew into a pied-à-terre for actors, writers, and directors; a clubhouse for industry insiders; a singular place in Hollywood history. The cast of Rebel Without a Cause rehearsed in a Chateau bungalow. Writers Joan Didion and Eve Babitz chronicled its cultural significance. Rock legends like Robert Plant and Jim Morrison held lengthy residencies. John Belushi famously died there in the early eighties. To this day, no hotel in Hollywood, in the world, can surpass the Chateau’s if-these-walls-could-talk aura. But as I stood poolside on the night of Thursday, May 2, 2002, I wondered if this was still the nexus of Hollywood. Clearly I had not yet learned the first rule of Los Angeles nightlife: The cooler you are, the later you show up. First came the sound of slamming car doors on Marmont Lane, then the blitzkrieg of flashing cameras from shouting photographers. Within ten minutes, I was in the middle of the hottest party in the world that night: “Tell No One.” All of “Young Hollywood” was there: Ethan Hawke, Rashida Jones, Vince Vaughn, Minnie Driver, Adrien Brody, Nicole Richie, Bradley Cooper, Matthew McConaughey. Proximity to fame is a cheap thrill, but it touched the deep desire for belonging that I’d been carrying most of my life. On a path filled with doubt, this moment said loudly: If you are here, then you must be doing something right. Stars drank heavily and puffed on American Spirit yellows. Every morsel of food was snatched like raw meat through the bars of a lion cage. After a couple rounds, guests started throwing their martini glasses into the pool. Anyone who wanted to get high could’ve run to the bathroom, swiped a finger across the lid of a toilet tank, and rubbed their gums. I kept my tray held low when moving through the crowd, hoping that I might somehow be mistaken for a guest. I had almost convinced myself that I was part of the scene when an actor, who would soon strike gold on Entourage, spilled a full cosmo down the front of my white dress shirt, the very one I wore to my college graduation before moving to California. I’d left Vassar full of confidence that I would make it as a screenwriter, but now, with the shirt dyed pink and stuck to my stomach, my delusions were destroyed. The actor turned around without apologizing and laughed about it with his friends. I went to the pop-up bar—at the time, the hotel didn’t have a permanent bar—for soda water to get the stain out. The skillful drink slingers cranked out cocktails in the amber glow of a backlit bottle display. One was an actor with leading-man looks named Rob. The other was a handsome and cerebral screenwriter named Burk. Though only in their early thirties, they seemed like sage elders to a twenty-four-year-old like me. Women flirted with them. Men showed them respect. I realized that, if you couldn’t be a guest, bartending at Chateau parties was the next best thing. It was still the era and the industry where being seen at the right place at the right moment could change your entire life, and there was no better place to be seen than the Chateau Marmont. From that night on, I would work my way up from a lowly caterer to the hotel’s most tenured bartender, despite having no previous bartending experience and never officially being hired. My temporary shortcut to success turned into a twelve-year run. I always told myself I’d leave when I had a big script sale. When I finally did move on, it was for the right reason—just not the one I expected. Accidental Employee Weeks before that party, I was a substitute teacher. The L.A. public-school kids thought I was a joke, and I agreed with them. I came to L.A. to be a screenwriter, yet I was losing time in classrooms instead of making moves in Hollywood. The only real luck I’d had so far was getting an apartment in the Villa Carlotta, a then-crumbling Spanish Colonial Revival filled with artists on their way up or down the Tinseltown ladder. One of my neighbors on the way up was a dashing and ambitious man named Alan, who was the food and beverage director at the Chateau Marmont. I asked him for a job. “We’re not really hiring…” he said, which gave me the sense they never were. “But I could bring you in for catering shifts.” When he called me on my Nokia a few days later, I threw on my black pants and white dress shirt and raced to the Chateau. But a few weeks later, after I had taken double shifts and manned the doors to private parties, Alan pulled me aside to tell me he was leaving. He was my only connection. The thought of going back to substitute teaching filled me with dread. But he had a Hail Mary idea: If he wrote my name on the schedule before he left, there was a chance that the incoming manager would keep me on. It worked. Room Service Roulette The 7:00 a.m. breakfast shifts were easy pickings from the other waiters. I’d get late-night calls with bar noise in the background and five hours’ notice to get there. My very first room-service order was an Earl Grey tea for Peter O’Toole. He answered the door to his bungalow in a blue silk robe, infuriated that the breakfast he’d ordered the night before for his son was MIA and his son was already in a car to LAX. “Fire the bastard!” he yelled at me about whoever messed up the order last night, flailing his right arm like Lawrence of Arabia ordering troops into battle. After I acted sufficiently apologetic, he slipped me a twenty-pound note for a tip. Any time the room-service phone rang, my heart raced a little. Any call could turn into a story I’d remember for the rest of my life. A simple order of granola might lead to Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien inviting me to listen to him practice on his acoustic. An unassuming omelet order could lead to gossiping with Joan Baez about her breakup with Bob Dylan. In those days, I was the only waiter who got excited when Hunter S. Thompson popped up on the caller ID. The other servers just called him “that crazy writer guy” and complained that he was a tipless pain in the ass. Thompson wanted two buckets of ice every hour, and I was happy to oblige. His wife Anita would let me in, and he was always hunched over his IBM Selectric typewriter with a lit cigarette in a long filter wedged between his teeth. “Perfect,” he’d bark warmly, “put ’em anywhere.” I lingered while he refreshed his drink with a handful of ice and the handle of Wild Turkey on his desk. Sometimes I saw evidence of the prior night’s excesses, like a broken pane of glass in the window and a corresponding bandage on his right hand. Months later, during a night shift, I’d see Thompson blast into the lobby with a pair of Hollywood icons, all three doing lines off the crystal of his Rolex GMT-Master II. Whoever he was by night, though, was not the man I encountered at the typewriter by day. “Hey, Stinson, how’s the writing?” he’d ask. Just hearing him say my name and writing in the same sentence made me believe it in a new way. I would say, “Good, thanks,” because any further explanation would make me sound like what he’d call a “rube.” I’d leave with the promise of more ice in an hour. Bartending for Dummies The night waiters were the Chateau’s varsity team. They made the best money, had the most A-list celebrity friends, and guarded their shifts fiercely. My friend Philippe was my best ally from the elite crew. One morning in 2003, I came into work to see a construction crew digging up the back corner of the Chateau Garden, the most coveted reservation in Hollywood. Back then, it consisted of only a dozen tables and a small lawn protected from paparazzi by high hedges, where celebrity dogs peed and buzzed stars wrestled and cartwheeled. By day, it was a palm-shaded oasis where agents and producers talked shop and courted stars. By night, it transformed into a candlelit open-air Babylon. The Garden was the Chateau’s crown jewel, and its exclusivity kept it that way. Word was that they were putting in a bar. The Chateau had no permanent bar at the time, no dedicated bartenders save for pop-ups. Instead, the waiters made drinks in the kitchen service station, often for their own consumption. As the crew dug up the Garden tiles, I wondered if the change would allow Sunset Strip tourists to flood the place. Would that drive the celebrities elsewhere? Without them, I would just be another Hollywood waiter, without an inside track to my dreams. Later that day, Philippe convinced me that the new bar was an opportunity, not a setback. He rumbled up to the kitchen door on his Ducati for his night shift, and I showed him the excavation in the Garden. “They’re gonna need a bartender,” he said. It took me a minute to realize he was hinting at me. If industry insiders continued to come, then bartending for the night crew was my best shot to meet them on better footing than I would as a waiter. “But … I don’t know how,” I said. “I just told a casting director I played in the Canadian Football League,” he said. “Get the fucking job and worry about the rest later.” I went to the office of the food and beverage manager at the time, Christophe, a tough man from Dijon who seemed like he was always one French-mustard joke away from punching you in the face. “The new bar,” I said. “I want to be the bartender.” “Do you know how?” he asked. “Yes,” I lied. “Okay,” he said, waving me out of his office. And the job was mine. I divvied up the night bartending shifts with Rob from the 1800 Tequila party. Unlike him and his Tom Cruise–in–Cocktail moves, I didn’t earn any style points. I kept two cocktail books, including Bartending for Dummies, hidden under the bar. Margaritas, cosmos, and Manhattans were the only cocktails I knew by heart. If a guest called me out—like when I put pineapple juice in a margarita because I’d read somewhere that the famous L.A. Mexican restaurant El Coyote did—I would say, “It’s a Chateau margarita.” Using Chateau as an adjective made up for many of my early mistakes. This was years before mixology ushered in the adoption of jiggers, strainers, syrups, and tinctures. Bartending was about speed and banter, and if there was one thing I was great at, it was banter. I slowly began to realize that I was pretty damn good at this job and confident that I was one bar shift away from my big break. Until one guest made me question what the hell I was doing. Martini for a Bull It was early on a night in 2009 when a server named Larissa came up to the bar with a nervous look on her face and a vodka martini on her tray, which I had just sent out five minutes earlier. “The guest wants you to remake it,” she said. “What the fuck?” I mumbled as I grabbed my shaker, but she stopped me. “No, he wants you to remake it at his table.” I pointed to the tickets spewing out of the printer. Leaving the bar would put me in a hole I’d be digging out of for the next hour. “It’s Robert De Niro,” she said in a whisper. He wanted me to bring the shaker, a fresh glass, ice, and olives to his table in the lobby and show him my full process. I carefully brought my overloaded tray inside to his table, where he was sitting with an old friend who seemed happy with the martini I’d made him. I filled the glass with ice to chill it, then the shaker, then gave it a hefty pour of Grey Goose and started shaking it as hard as I could. De Niro raised his arm like a conductor’s baton, waving it as his way of telling me to keep going. My arms started giving out, and I could feel sweat staining my armpits and dripping down my temples. Finally he grabbed the chilling martini glass, dumped out the ice onto my tray, and told me to pour it. I carefully poured it between the rims of the Boston cups—we barely ever used strainers in those days—and it was swirling with ice shards as I gently lowered in a skewer of olives. By this point, everyone in the lobby was staring at us as he raised it to his mouth. He took one tiny sip, then shook his head with a heavy frown. “I’m gonna need you to do that again,” he said, “in a new glass.” He started telling his buddy about his favorite martini in New York and how different it was from mine. I ran back to the bar where the drink tickets were now piling up on the ground. I grabbed a new glass and more ice, then headed back to his table. I started chilling the glass, then filled the shaker with ice and Grey Goose—the Chateau martini glasses were massive, and I’d gone through a third of a bottle on just this order. His conducting hand went up once more, and I shook my shaker like hell. But his hand didn’t go down this time. He just kept waving it, deeply focused on some internal gauge by which he was measuring me. At a certain point I wondered, What if he never lets me stop? What if this is some kind of hazing ritual? Then, finally, he dropped his hand like he was cutting off a symphony. “Now!” he said. I dumped the ice from his chilled glass and poured a martini as thick as a 7-Eleven Slurpee, then added the olives. With the whole lobby watching, he slowly lifted it and took a tentative sip. He was silent for a long beat. “Okay,” he said with a shrug. I took a deep breath, gathered my accoutrements, then walked back to the bar with what felt like all eyes on me. De Niro’s friend later pulled me aside. “You got to see a side of Bob most people only see on set,” the man said with a smile. “His perfectionism.” By passing his martini test, the Godfather imparted a lesson to me: If you want to make it in Hollywood, you have to sweat the details. Once you get your break, that’s not the end of work; it’s the beginning. Raised (by) the Bar I’d get my first break as a screenwriter by slipping a script to a hotel guest over the bar and my start as a journalist by trading drinks for assignments with New York editors. It turned out that the same skills I’d acquired as a bartender—asking questions of strangers and appearing immune to fame, even when delivering Mick Jagger’s pinot grigio or Paul McCartney’s margarita—were useful skills for writing magazine profiles. Though it was sometimes awkward when a Hollywood player I’d interviewed noticed me stirring their Manhattan a week later. But bartending was changing, as was the Chateau. My first clue came from Anthony Bourdain, a cherished regular in the mid-2000s: He ordered a Negroni. Then obscure in L.A. bar culture, the cocktail would soon be as common as a vodka soda in the brave new world of mixology. Shortly after, the Chateau owner flew out two bartenders from an esteemed New York bar to give us intensive cocktail training. No longer could I be a storyteller who also made drinks; I’d have to become a craftsman who sometimes looked up. I embraced it. When I was the newest hire on staff, I couldn’t shut up about being a screenwriter, but as I became the super senior, I felt more like a bartender who also wrote screenplays. Talking about it was an admission that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. By the early 2010s, celebrity had also changed. Instead of running from the paparazzi, the new generation of celebrities assumed the role themselves. Fame, which was talked about in terms like heat and buzz when I started, was now measured by “likes” and “clicks.” I missed the inexact science of analog fame; Hunter S. Thompson and Robert De Niro never needed blue checks. For nearly a decade, I had a front-row view of everything I ever thought I wanted. So close I could almost fool myself into thinking I had it. But with every snap of fingers or sent-back drink, I was reminded on which side of the bar I really was. I had given the Chateau my twenties and then some. It had given me stories and genuine friendships with crazy coworkers and the rare regular like Stellan Skarsgård who saw beyond my uniform. I had wanted the bar to be my shortcut to Hollywood success, but what it became was a way of looking at the world, a doctorate in how to recognize my kind of person in a matter of seconds. That ability would soon change my life. In 2011, I met a girl in a Key West bar while on assignment for WSJ magazine, and we had a perfect weeklong romance. I told her if she ever wanted to come to L.A., I would buy her a ticket. A few months later, she took me up on it. But I was scared to say yes. Before that assignment, I’d gone through a bad breakup. “I can’t marry a bartender,” that ex told me. My time in Key West made me excited about love again, but I was afraid of trying and failing, then losing the faith it had restored in me all over again. As I aired out my angst behind the Chateau bar, a waiter a decade older than me, who had a wife and son, offered some advice. “She’s young, right?” he asked. “Twenty-two,” I said. I was thirty-three. “Then there are two lessons she can learn from you right now, and both are important,” he said. “The first lesson is that some men don’t do what they say they’re going to do.” I nodded. “The second lesson is that some men do.” He looked me in the eyes. “So you just need to decide which lesson you want to be.” I pulled my phone from my pocket and bought her a plane ticket then and there. The first of many. I took a “leave of absence” from the Chateau Marmont in 2014. A big script sale didn’t do it after all. What made me leave was the chance for love. I moved across the country to Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, three weeks before my wedding day. As of this year, I’ve now lived as much life beyond the hotel as I did in it. The lessons I learned were simple and universal and would stick with me forever: Work hard, be kind, treat busboys with the same respect as movie stars, and never trust a baggie from a stranger in the bathroom. But since I was never officially hired and never officially quit, it’s entirely possible that I never really worked there. Or, maybe, I still do.