Chateau Marmont

"Ray and I regarded our new acquisition as an investment, nothing more. It wasn't until Ray moved in and the renovation began that our thinking began to change. The Marmot, we discovered, was a most friendly castle. The atmosphere was warm and genuinely real. We fell in love with the place. As the months passed, we met many of the Marmont's guests. There were regulars, wonderful people, like , , , , , , , , , , and ."

"A month after buying the property with business partner Karl Kantarjian, Sarlot moved in and oversaw its renovation over the next few years. The walls and floors were redone, tacky plastic fixtures were banished, pilfered antiques were replaced, and the pool was rebuilt. The new owners also added more guest bungalows, including the one where actor would later be found dead. ... The most notorious event in the Marmont’s history occurred in 1982, when Belushi was found dead of a drug overdose in Bungalow 3. When the news broke, Sarlot was having lunch with Kantarjian in and rushed back to the hotel. “It was bedlam,” he said in his book. “The place was swarming with outsiders,” not only police but reporters and scores of curiosity-seekers. ... After Belushi’s death, the worst experience Sarlot may have had at his beloved hotel occurred in 1984, when he saw a copy of author ’s newly published biography of the comic actor, “.” On the inside flap, Woodward had written that Belushi died “in a seedy hotel bungalow off .” Sarlot and Kantarjian sued Woodward’s publisher for $18 million in damages. Woodward subsequently apologized, explaining that he had been referring to the squalid state of Belushi’s room on the day he died, not the hotel itself. The lawsuit was dropped."

"From to , to , to , to , Chateau Marmot has drawn the most iconoclastic and outlandish personalities from the worlds of film, music, and other creative arts. It has been the site of wild parties and scandalous liaisons, of creative breakthroughs and marital breakdowns, of one-night stands and days-long parties, of famous triumphs and untimely deaths."

"The story of Chateau Marmont parallel the story of Hollywood so thoroughly as to be inseparable from it: the , the , the , the influx of , the , the , the upsurge, and the current mingling of film and ."

"In October 1932, Los Angeles newspapers carried accounts of the Chateau Marmont for $750,000 cash* to , one of the men who had built from scratch the that would help define for the world. * Approximately $13.977 million in 2019"