35+ Celebrity Scandals That Happened at the Chateau Marmont

The unmistakable Los Angeles landmark was built in 1929 and modeled on Chateau D’Amboise, a castle in France’s stunning Loire Valley. Almost as soon as the modern castle was built, its proximity to Hollywood studios saw it attract all sorts of scandals.

In 1933, while on honeymoon with her third husband, 22-year-old Jean Harlow installed a door in her suite to smuggle in her many male visitors, including her Red Dust co-star Clark Gable. Harlow would hang a “Gone Fishing” sign on her door and trawl Sunset Boulevard looking for lovers.

Legendary gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson introduced Johnny Depp to the hotel after the controversial actor played him in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Depp instantly fell in love with the Californian hotel. Speaking of which, it’s believed that Chateau Marmont was probably the inspiration for the Eagles’ megahit “Hotel California.”

Depp adored the place so much that he once boasted that he and his then-girlfriend, English model Kate Moss, made love in all 63 of the hotel’s rooms!

One of the first people to use Chateau Marmont as a secret love nest wasn’t a film star; it was Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn. He was famous for being the original Tinseltown tyrant, giving aspiring actresses parts in films and a chance at stardom in exchange for favors. He kept a suite at the hotel for extramarital meetings with his starlets.

In the 1930s, Cohn told his actors, “If you must get into trouble, do it at the Marmont,” which suggests that the hotel staff were already party to many secrets.

Gorgeous British actress Sienna Miller and actor and heir to the Getty fortune, Balthazar Getty, first met through Getty’s Brothers & Sisters co-star Matthew Rhys. Sienna and Balthazar started an affair and decided Chateau Marmont was the best place to stay away from the public’s prying eyes.

However, their plan didn’t work, and photos of them meeting up at the Sunset Boulevard hotel soon appeared online. Getty dumped Miller to return to his wife, Rosetta Millington, but paparazzi again snapped pictures of them at the Chateau.

In 1974, after playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather: Part II, one of the most famous actors in the world, Robert De Niro, approached Chateau Marmont’s front desk to ask if he could rent out the penthouse. However, the hotel manager mistook him for “a bum” and ushered him away.

But there was a happy ending. The misunderstanding was quickly cleared up, and De Niro went on live in the Chateau. And to say sorry, he got to store his car in the garage and have all his laundry done in-house for free.

Jim Morrison was known for swinging between windows, roofs, and balconies on tree branches and drainpipes. The Doors lead singer lived at the Marmont in 1970 when he tried out his Tarzan-like escapades on the seven-story building as seen in Oliver Stone’s excellent biopic.

One night, he fell two stories, badly injuring his back. Morrison said his time at the hotel had used up “eight of my nine lives.” He was right because, within a year, he passed away in Paris.

Jim Morrison wasn’t the only famous person to fall from one of the renowned hotel’s balconies. Actress, singer, and dancer Pearl Bailey was one of the first African American entertainers to break into Hollywood. Just like Jim, Pearl also fell from a Chateau Marmont balcony.

However, Pearl was more fortunate than Jim Morrison, aka “The Lizard King,” who thought he could do anything. Luckily, Pearl landed on a canvas awning, where she proceeded to fall asleep!

Led Zeppelin, aka singer Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham, stayed at the Marmont in 1968. The English rock band’s loud partying, constant flow of groupies, racing through the halls on bellhop trollies, and pouring baked beans over their road manager, got them moved into a bungalow.

Now, if you know anything about rock n’ roll, you’ll know that drummers are always the craziest band members. Zeppelin’s drummer, John Bonham, once drove a Harley Davidson motorbike through the hotel’s lobby!

In 2007, Britney Spears was kicked out of Los Angeles’ most famous celebrity hangout for acting out. To give you a clue to her “Toxic” state of mind, this happened not long before Britney shaved her head. Other diners there that fateful night, including fellow pop star Victoria Beckham, alerted staff that Britney was “acting weird.”

But Britney wasn’t done yet. She made a fool of herself by smearing food across her face, so hotel management escorted her off the premises and told her she was no longer welcome. Spears was welcomed back two years later.

Britney wasn’t the only troubled star to get kicked out of the Chateau Marmont Hotel. In 2012, Lindsay Lohan was kicked out and permanently banned from entering the establishment over her unpaid bills. It should be noted that a penthouse at the West Hollywood hotel can cost $5,000 a night.

Throughout her 47-day residency, the notorious wild child had racked up a 16-page, $46,350.04 bill. The hotel’s manager diplomatically informed Lohan that he couldn’t host her until she’d fully settled the account.

Lindsay Lohan claimed that she slept with James Franco at Chateau Marmont. However, Franco paints a different story. The actor said, “She even broke into my room one time, I was on the couch and opened my eyes, and there’s Lindsay in my room at 3 am.”

Franco confessed to radio host Howard Stern that he kissed Lohan but called her “delusional” for claiming they slept together. He also wrote a short story called Bungalow 89, in which the narrator spends the night with a fictional celebrity called Lindsay, but again, they only kissed.

In Shawn Levy’s brilliant tell-all book, The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont, he claims actress Grace Kelly had an affair with her High Noon co-star, all-American cowboy Gary Cooper at the hotel.

At the time, Cooper was still married to his wife, Patricia Neal. Levy also wrote, “Kelly was known by staff to have a notable appetite for men, particularly other guests, whose room numbers she would try to wheedle out of desk clerks.”

Irish actor Richard Harris often frequented the West Hollywood hotel. He was famous for British New Wave cinema and later in life played Professor Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films.

He was also known as a rabble-rouser, and the last time he stayed at the hotel was in the early 1960s. When he was a little worse for wear, he went from door to door, screaming. As a result, Harris was banned forever from the property.

The late Australian actor Heath Ledger partied at Chateau Marmont. Consumed by darkness by fully immersing himself in the role of The Joker in The Dark Knight, the troubled actor was caught on camera partying and getting up to no good in the hotel.

On tape, Heath states, “I’m going to get serious […] from my girlfriend; we had a baby three months ago. I shouldn’t be here at all.” Within a week, Heath Ledger had tragically passed away.

In an interview Benicio del Toro gave in 2005, he implied that he and Scarlett Johansson had hooked up in the Chateau Marmont hotel elevator after the previous year’s Academy Awards. In a later interview, Scarlett described the idea of getting fruity in an elevator as “very unsanitary.”

18 years later, Scarlett finally denied the story, saying, “I’m a person who’s terrified of being caught doing something I’m not supposed to be doing. So that made the story even that much more absurd to me.”

At the height of Billy Idol’s fame, the English punk rocker smashed up his Marmont bungalow and stood unclothed on his balcony as authorities responded to calls from the hotel. However, the authorities were responding to calls about John Belushi, who passed away in the hotel that same night.

But that’s not Billy Idol’s most rock n’ roll moment. During a three-week party at the Bangkok Oriental Hotel, he caused $250,000 worth of damage. The authorities eventually removed Billy altogether!

Jim Morrison and Pearl Bailey aren’t the only stars who played Tarzan at the Chateau. If you can call David Arquette a star, that is. The Scream franchise actor and ex-Mr. Courteney Cox was once so frustrated at the number of stars at the Chateau during 2010’s GQ Men of the Year Awards party that he climbed out of his window just so he could get a drink.

According to an insider, the impeccably dressed Arquette – who cut a dashing figure in a snappy metallic brown suit – cut his distance to his drink by half.

In 1956, actor Montgomery Clift had a car accident near Elizabeth Taylor’s driveway after leaving the English actress’s dinner party. She found Clift under the dashboard, conscious but in a bad way.

Taylor then brought her soulmate Clift to the Chateau Marmont, where she leased Penthouse 36 to nurse him back to health. But instead, he’d emerge on the terrace to shout obscenities while unclothed.

Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski lived in Bungalow 54 in the late ’60s. They’d host wild parties every Friday, and the attendees would include Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Mia Farrow. When Sharon became pregnant in early 1969, the two moved into a proper house.

That fateful house was 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon. The property became one of the most infamous addresses in American history. Joan Didion wrote, “The Sixties ended abruptly on August 9th, 1969.”

In Shawn Levy’s book, the author uncovers the hotel’s scandalous and sometimes tragic history. Levy wrote that, “Gay Hollywood hung out at the pool.” Author Gore Vidal called the pool “a navel filled with sweat.”

Levy recounts how 1950s heartthrob, Tab Hunter, “stopping by for a dip on his way home from horseback riding in the Valley — met Anthony Perkins there, and they began a two-year affair.” If you want to know more about Chateau Marmont, you must wait for John Krasinski and Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Levy’s book into an HBO mini-series.

Funk musician Rick James was another musician who liked to party at the “No-Tell Hotel.” The “Super Freak” and “Mary Jane” singer once partied so hard at the Chateau that, according to Shawn Levy, “He had to be revived while staying at the hotel.”

Apparently, Rick James liked to stay in Bungalow 3, and he wasn’t the only one. As more and more ghoul tours stopped outside, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat also preferred to stay in the room where James Belushi perished.

Famed German-Australian photographer Helmut Newton took some of Vogue magazine’s most iconic photos. The New York Times describes him as a “prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, […] charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications.”

Eccentric Helmut had wintered at Chateau Marmont every year since 1957. On January 23rd, 2004, the 83-year-old lost control of his silver Cadillac SRX while leaving the hotel and slammed into a wall. Sadly, he passed away later that same day at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

From the 1930s onwards, businessman, aviator, film producer, and philanthropist Howard Hughes was one of the world’s richest and most influential people. He was also one of the most eccentric. Hughes was a germaphobe and once famously spent four months in a dark screening room, watching films and eating nothing but chicken, chocolate, and drinking milk.

Hughes would always rent Penthouse 64, a two-bedroom penthouse at Marmont. He always stayed in that particular bungalow, which gave him the perfect view to spy on starlets sunbathing by the pool with his binoculars.

Now, if you’re not familiar with British singers Lily Allen and James Blunt, she’s the daughter of actor Keith Allen and sings pop ditties. James is also British, and topped the charts with “You’re Beautiful.”

Now, James is famous for being boring and even has a hilarious Twitter account where he parodies his boringness. But the singing Brit wasn’t being boring the night Lily Allen walked in on him and an unknown beautiful lady in the foyer of her suite!

F. Scott Fitzgerald is most famous for writing the great novel, The Great Gatsby. But in 1929, his popularity waned and his sales plummeted. So, he moved to Hollywood to try and make it as a screenwriter.

In the late 1930s, after suffering many rejections in Hollywood, the author had a heart attack on the grounds of Chateau Marmont. He passed away in 1940 from another heart attack.

In 2009, stunning Salma Hayek tried to get a table at Marmont’s restaurant. Salma didn’t have a reservation, so the staff had to inform her she’d need to wait because the patio was full. And that’s when the Mexican-American actress’s fiery side kicked in!

According to eyewitnesses, she fully lost the plot and started screaming at the hostess in Spanish. Her girlfriends tried to placate her, but Salma only calmed down when a table became available. This was years before Salma lost the plot again in Netflix’s Joan Is Awful.

Billy Wilder became one of Hollywood’s most famous filmmakers by writing The Seven Year Itch, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot, and The Apartment. But when he first arrived in Hollywood, he was penniless. At first, the aspiring screenwriter stayed in Chateau Marmont’s cheapest windowless room.

The next time Wilder stayed at 8221 Sunset Boulevard, he had to stay in a closet-sized antechamber of the women’s lobby restroom. He joked, “It was a small room, but it had six toilets!”

Peaches Geldof was Boomtown Rat lead singer and Band-Aid charity creator Bob Geldolf’s troubled daughter. One night in 2010, Courtney Love “tried to help” Peaches with her struggles surrounding dependencies but eventually had to push Peaches out of the door of her Chateau Marmont hotel room due to illegal behavior.

And when Courtney Love is the person telling you to get your act together, you know your life is on the wrong path! Tragically, Peaches’s life ended four years later, in 2014.

Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball famously played sweethearts in the hugely popular 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. But behind the scenes, their marriage was a rollercoaster. Desi constantly cheated on Lucille, and every time she found out, they’d end up fighting, and he would slink away to a suite at Chateau Marmont.

According to legend, one time, Lucille and Desi were arguing on the terrace of his doghouse suite when a briefcase came crashing down from the balcony. The case burst open mid-air, and a shower of cash rained down on Sunset Boulevard.

Did you know Nicholas Ray wrote Rebel Without a Cause at Chateau Marmont? In 1952, the writer-director rented a bungalow at the Chateau after finding his second wife, actress Gloria Grahame, in bed with his son Tony from his first marriage.

Soon after this crazy event, the studio greenlit his project, and he met James Dean. Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Stewart Stern worked on the screenplay and used his bungalow as a rehearsal space for the iconic film.

After appearing as a child actress in movies like Miracle on 34th Street (1947), Natalie Wood was desperate to shed her goody-two-shoes image and land a role in Rebel Without a Cause. She was so desperate to get the part of Judy that she followed Nicholas Ray around like a puppy.

The two went out for dinner, eventually became lovers, and spent time together in his Chateau Marmont bungalow. Needless to say, she won the role. At 44, Ray was 27 years Natalie Wood’s senior, so you do the math.

Another actor who rehearsed at Nicolas Ray’s Chateau Marmont room for Rebel Without a Cause was James Dean. While trying to impress the director to land his break-out role, Jimmy Dean jumped through a window. It must have worked, as he got the part!

Lovers Natalie and 18-year-old Dennis Hopper crashed their car returning to Marmont. In the hospital, Natalie asked doctors to call her director. When Ray arrived, she said, “They called me a juvenile delinquent. Now do I get the part?”

Rolling Stone magazine described Red Hot Chili Pepper John Frusciante as the greatest guitarist ever. But John hasn’t always had the best of times. He’s struggled with dependencies, often at Chateau Marmont, where he once lived with Anthony Kiedis.

A Phoenix Times reporter wrote of Frusciante, “He looks 20 years older than he did during his Peppers days, and his voice is harsh and slurred now. He doesn’t eat food, instead gulping canned high-calorie formula. He likes the way his body appears – a skeleton covered in thin skin because that’s how David Bowie looked in The Man Who Fell to Earth.”

Veteran Hollywood actress Bette Davis had screaming rows with her husband, Gary Merrill, at the Marmont. In 1958, the 50-year-old fell asleep in her Marmont bungalow while watching one of her movies on TV, and accidentally set her room on fire as she was holding something lit when she fell asleep.

Luckily, actor Lou Jacobi was staying in the bungalow next door. He saw smoke coming out of the window and saved Davis’s life. A few years later, Davis was again staying at the hotel when an electrical short in her room set off an alarm. It was the last time she stayed there!

In 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z hosted the biggest party Chateau Marmont had ever seen. Their inaugural Gold Party took place on Oscars night, and the 150 elite guests, including Jamie Foxx, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, and Daniel Kaluuya, were sworn to secrecy and had to leave their bodyguards at home.

They controversially transformed the basement parking lot into a silk bedecked nightclub, while under crystal chandeliers, guests sipped Jay-Z’s bubbly and snacked on caviar and truffle quesadillas. The next year, they did it all again!

Now, we all know that English stage actors are known for being terribly serious luvvies, right? Well, you better think again when it comes to star of stage and screen, Rupert Everett. He’s best known for roles in My Best Friend’s Wedding, Shakespeare in Love, and the Shrek movies. Oh, and he’s also a bit of a practical joker.

One Christmas, Rupert found a bounty of wrapped gifts in an unoccupied Chateau Marmont room. So, being a prankster, he switched out the gifts for some rather rude toys!

In 2009, director Sofia Coppola spent three weeks filming Somewhere at the Chateau Marmont. But it wasn’t her first visit. Her father, director Francis Ford Coppola, would write his movies there, meaning she was a regular since she was 11. One time, Colin Farrell crashed one of her sleepovers.

Sofia loved the hotel and threw a raucous 21st birthday party there. She explained, “Back then, everything wasn’t documented – thankfully. You could do things, and nothing was being recorded… except in the hotel log.” It’s probably a good thing that events at Chateau Marmont aren’t documented!

In 2017, The New York Times published an article detailing numerous allegations against Chateau Marmont’s owner Andre Balazs. In January 2018, the Times ran another story alleging Peruvian fashion photographer Mario Testino – who photographed the British royal family – used his room at the Chateau as ground zero for his unsavory behaviors.

Male model Jason Fedele said, “If you wanted to work with Mario, you needed to do a […] shoot at the Chateau Marmont.”

Chateau Marmont isn’t just a place for controversy and conducting clandestine affairs. The storied hotel has also seen many less shady romances. Paul Newman courted Joanne Woodward at the hotel. They married in 1958 and were together for 50 years until Newman passed away in 2008.

In 2012, Australian actor and Marvel’s greenest actor, Skrull Ben Mendelsohn married English film director, screenwriter, and novelist Emma Forrest on the terrace. They divorced two years later. In 2014, Jurassic Park actor Jeff Goldblum tied the knot with Canadian gymnast and dancer Emilie Livingston at the Chateau.

Sandra Bullock is one of the few stars who hasn’t gotten into trouble at the infamous hotel. But she had the perfect viewpoint for celebrity gossip as she lived practically next door for 17 years. Bullock bought her Sunset Boulevard home in 2001 for $1.485 million and sold it in 2018 for $2.995 million.

Sandra said, “No wonder people come here to have affairs – it’s got that air of history where you know a lot of people did things that they weren’t supposed to do.”

The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Jefferson Airplane aren’t the only bands to cause havoc at the Marmont. In 2012, weird, angry, experimental hip-hop group Death Grips moved into the hotel after recording their second album, No Love Deep Web.

They described Chateau Marmont thus: “There’s another energy within that building. It sounds cliché, and everybody says it’s haunted, but we felt like the building was talking to us on a minute-to-minute basis.” Many guests have reported seeing a ghost wearing a blue robe.

Hollywood stars had to be seen as bastions of virtue, but actors Glenn Ford and William Holden were known as wild party animals. So, in 1939, Harry Cohn instilled the pair at the Marmont to keep them out of the way at a hotel at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, where Laurel Canyon meets the Sunset Strip.

For three years, Ford, Holden, David Niven, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, and John Barrymore threw wild parties at their bachelor pad – at Cohn and Columbia’s expense.

Dashing, debonair Australian-American actor Errol Flynn was most famous for playing heroes in swashbucklers like The Adventures of Robin Hood. According to the Daily Mail, he took his three wives to Chateau Marmont before quickly getting bored of them and moving on to German actress Marlene Dietrich, French actress Lili Damita, and Mexican actress Lupe Vélez!

In 1959, when a room cost $8, Errol Flynn famously went on a rampage in Bungalow 3. A week later, he passed away from a heart attack in Vancouver.

John Belushi was an actor, musician, and comic genius who was one of Saturday Night Live‘s seven original cast members. Along with Dan Aykroyd, he made up one-half of The Blues Brothers. However, the weight of fame lay heavily on his shoulders, and sadly he spiraled into an abyss of mental health struggles and chronic dependencies.

On the night of March 5th, 1982, the legendary comedian passed away in Chateau Marmont’s Bungalow 3. The authorities announced he passed on account of his dependencies.

So, now we’ve got to know the ins and outs and ups and downs of the world’s most rock n’ roll hotel. Sadly, it’s time to check out. But how do we say goodbye? Hollywood chronicler Eve Babitz once lamented that leaving the hotel was harder than leaving a lover.

She once wrote, “I had almost a year frequenting the Chateau Marmont as the girlfriend of someone who lived there. In fact, breaking up with him, my worst regret was that I’d broken up with the Chateau Marmont too.” We couldn’t have said it better, Eve!