Up the driveway behind those ivy-covered walls sits the Chateau Marmont, the private clubhouse of Hollywood for nearly a century. The Chateau Marmont was built in 1927 as a luxury apartment building modeled on a Loire Valley chateau, converted to a hotel in 1931, and for the decades since has been the preferred address of actors, directors, and musicians who value discretion above all else. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, told his stars: if you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont, where the management won't talk.
They didn't. Jean Harlow honeymooned here. F. Scott Fitzgerald suffered a heart attack in a bungalow here in 1940, the first of two; the second killed him.
Howard Hughes rented penthouses and watched starlets by the pool through binoculars. Led Zeppelin rode motorcycles through the lobby. John Belushi died of a drug overdose in Bungalow 3 in 1982.
Lindsay Lohan lived here for months at a cost of thirty thousand dollars a month. The hotel is up the driveway behind the ivy-covered walls; you can enter the lobby and have a drink in the bar, but the rooms and bungalows are as private now as they have always been.