The Chateau Marmont Hollywood Handbook

by Andre Balazs (Editor)

Overview

A classic, first published by Rizzoli Universe in the 1990s, now brought back into print: the insider’s view of Hollywood as narrated by famed guests who visited or resided at the Chateau Marmont over its 100-year history.

If the walls could talk, this would be the great story of Hollywood. Through the lens of the legendary Chateau Marmont, Hollywood’s hippest and hottest haunt, comes an extraordinary, glamorous, and fierce history and exquisite literary collection baring the stars, the landscape, and the ever-changing mood of America’s most absorbing town as narrated by legends including William Faulkner, Eve Babitz, Dominick Dunne, Gore Vidal, Jay McInerney, and many others. Rare and original texts, heart-stopping photography—including images by Helmut Newton, Wolfgang Tillmans, Sofia Coppola, and Bruce Weber—and decades of gossip and anecdotes take the reader from film to rock and roll, from scandals to masterpieces, from starlets to moguls, and from studios to bungalows in an unprecedented tour of Hollywood from the Golden Age to this morning’s wake-up call. A beloved classic, Hollywood Handbook’s cult is summarized best by Jarvis Cocker: “I’ve been carrying this book around for 20 years. Things happen at Chateau Marmont. Mythical, glamourous, sexy, wonderful, tragic things . . .”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780789324641
Publisher:	Rizzoli
Publication date:	02/04/2025
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	49,403
Product dimensions:	6.58(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.97(d)

About the Author

The editor of this volume, hotelier André Balazs, is responsible for some of the most iconic hotels in the world, including The Mercer, The Standard hotels, and Chiltern Firehouse. Balazs’s first hotel was the Chateau Marmont, which he saved from demolition in 1990 and has been restoring ever since. Balazs’s talents as a thinker, director, social networker, and innovator imbue his hotels with cultlike status. Described both as a global tastemaker and design-obsessive, Balazs makes you believe that—here, tonight, at this moment—anything is possible.

Editorial Reviews

"So it’s fitting that in Rizzoli’s book about the Chateau—The Chateau Marmont Hollywood Handbook—tales of almost a century’s worth of guests are interwoven with reflections on life in LA more generally. One page has staff notes on notables like Orson Welles (“somewhat a mystery guest”); another has a timeline of the city’s development from Spanish colony to entertainment capital. Flip a few more and you’ll find a chronicle of Hollywood’s best scandals. The Chateau Marmont Hollywood Handbook was originally published in 1996. In the decades that followed, it amassed a cult following—so much so that Rizzoli decided to reissue the text after 29 years out of print. Since then, the Chateau has only shrouded itself in more secretive scandal: in 2012, Lindsay Lohan racked up a room bill of over $46,350.04 in less than two months (to the tabloids’ delight), and Jay Z and Beyoncé made it the location for their annual Oscar Party. And so the legend grows." — VOGUE

From the Publisher

The subhead for this sleazy and rather dull pseudo-expos of Hollywood scandal should probably be Style Slaughters Substance. The ugly, tabloid-sendup layout not only makes the book difficult to read but degrades the little bit of quality it contains. Editor Balazs, who owns the Chateau Marmont Hotel (famous as the place where several celebrities checked in in order to check out), had the taste to choose a very funny selection from Lillian Ross's Picture and the chilling William Faulkner short story "Golden Land" but wastes too much space on the tedious excesses of the druggy 1960s. The surprisingly conservative recounting of the "Top Ten Hollywood Scandals" breaks no new ground. If Balazs's intention was to pique interest in the Chateau Marmont, that venerable survivor comes out sounding like a place with tatty carpets and pleated lampshades, where the sad and desperate go to end their lives. Photos. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly