The Dark and Happy Place
Vol. 2, Issue 52
On my first day of nursery school, I wore a fireman's hat and carried a plastic shoe bag full of my favorite toys around with me like some tiny prop comic. I'd hung around the neighbor's kids and my cousins during Thanksgiving and Christmas time, but I mostly grew up an only child in the suburbs so maybe I just wasn't used to being around other humans that much. I always wondered why I made that choice and why my mother let this be the way I presented myself.
We took the first day of school photos as a class and most of the other students in it dressed for the occasion. Some of the girls wore neat and shiny dresses with bows and some of the boys even came in suits and ties. I kept my fireman's hat on and, perhaps sensing an early opportunity to further alienate myself from my classmates for the next decade, had a bunny rabbit puppet on my left hand, completely visible in the shot peeking out between two of my classmates' heads.
I only bring this story up because, throughout my life, there was always some variation on the fireman's hat and bunny puppet bit: consistent class-clownishness coupled with disruptive, oftentimes disturbing, ways to get attention.
All the usual colliding factors exist for why I became such an unexceptional fuck up, but one I haven't deeply explored is how desperate I was to belong. I wanted to belong–but I also needed to stand out. Does that make sense?
Most of my elementary school years were spent trying to find the perfect Dale Carnegie-approved formula for success, but I knew precisely where to be in the social hierarchy of 11-year-olds I was around: I wanted to be more like the kid who'd backflip off the high dive at the swim club on the busiest day of the year and less like the one who had rocks thrown at him on the way home from the bus stop.
As an adult, I never figured out how to do that without drinking and drugs.
****
I was a weirdo for most of my life after the first day of nursery school, too. And not even a cool weirdo, just a frustrating one. I wanted to pose as a mysterious outsider, but that was only because I couldn't interact with people normally. Well before The Game was published I pretty much negged everyone at all times when I was a teenager. I answered questions evasively, often with very elaborate lies, so much so that I'd often neglect to say, "Just kidding!" because I never could explain why.
Plus, I was also talentless. I played sports pretty decently when I was younger, but in high school got cut from baseball, basketball, and football within a nine-month span. I loved music, but never had the guts to devote my life to it. I was a mediocre student and a terrible dresser. I went to college, but I shouldn't have and I ended up depressed and adrift. I had friends, but I still constantly felt left out.
I never found my tribe, but I desperately wanted one. Actually, I wanted to find a tribe consisting of "Not Big Tribe People."
Working in New York City media was probably the closest I got to that but even during my most successful professional periods I still felt deficient–I was never as smart or as great a writer as most of the people I hung around with. I genuinely believed that but it still didn't make me happy for them when they got bylines in places like The Atlantic, or Harper's, or New York–places I believed I wanted to get published for careerist reasons, but it was really just so I could sound impressive to someone else who actually read those magazines.
And even at my professional peak, my job prospects were limited because I was such a well-known asshole and drunk. I still managed to find a way to fail upward in spite of myself. It's tough to admit, but being an asshole and a drunk cured most of my throbbing insecurities and definitely helped me have a career.
Still, even now as I'm sober and clear-headed, half the people I know probably see me as outgoing and extroverted but there are also many who've only seen me quiet and aloof.
****
When I lived in Williamsburg (Brooklyn, not Colonial) between the years 2014 and 2015 I spent thousands of hours at a place called Dardy Bar, so much so that I would talk about the place as if I owned it. I had a therapist in New York who told me Dardy Bar was my totem, a place that represented some elusive level of ease and happiness I couldn't find elsewhere. Well, there actually was one other place–Chateau Marmont.
In June of 2013 I got handed a spiffy summer job from Gawker media to relaunch its popular Defamer blog which was done as an ad strategy to help promote Showtime's Ray Donovan. Part of the deal was for me to spend the first week at the Chateau in one of its infamous bungalows and do a kind of open tryout to find the new editor of Defamer. but also to be chaotic and stupid.
It didn't take long for me to fall in love with the place. It seemed–I don't know how to describe it properly–regal, even though it was kind of a dump. The furniture smelled funny, like the ghosts of my great aunts had come through the room smoking while all dolled up in hairspray and perfume after a night at the Sons of Italy hall. But there was easy excess there–it was pretty much expected, so I abused the expense account constantly. My breakfasts were big and sloppy and I'd always order five or six mimosas at a time. I'd have two Dexedrine and a full ashtray before 11 a.m. Zero showers.
My first big stunt was to have one of the prospective Defamer hires live-blog from the restaurant and tell everyone all the famous people in attendance that night. The next day I found out I got pinched by management, and that's when I had my first run-in with Managing Director Phil Pavel, who sent me an amiable warning the next day.
The letter–delivered to my table personally by the concierge, but written by Phil–was an extraordinary piece of writing:
Our hotel's success has been about doing everything we can to protect the privacy of our guests, so we ask that you please respect our rule forbidding unauthorized photography, video, or internet posts about our guests while in house. The best part about my job is that this hotel attracts clever and fun people like yourself - I would hate to have to ask you to leave as a result of this policy being crossed.
I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay and find some great acolytes for the new Defamer. And for the record, we are totally okay with "toe-slurping," as long as it doesn't involve Mr. Tarantino.
Phil kept an eye on me the rest of the week, mostly by consistently picking up the tabs for every single thing I ate or drank, and, since I was usually dining with several people, several bills were more than $700. It was the dumb cat-and-mouse thing wherein I'd plan to do something devious and he'd counter by doing something exceptionally nice.
And, amazingly, Phil kept up the special treatment long after I'd checked out of the hotel–he'd promised me a seat in the Garden restaurant whenever I wanted to come back, which didn't seem likely since the Garden was sometimes very tough to get, even for guests who were staying there.
But for years, I always had a table and it always made me feel special, even after I'd left Gawker or could even be considered Z-list micro-famous–even after the trial. It was one of the kindest things anyone's ever done for me.
After 21 years as one of the most famous gatekeepers in Hollywood, Phil moved on to the NoMad Hotel in downtown LA. Since it's the middle of a pandemic, he's got some downtime and he agreed to grant me an interview. We talked about his many run-ins with the famously addled from all eras and why the Chateau is such a dark and happy place for so many people who consider themselves weirdos and wasteoids. – AJD
We All Carry Our Wounds
by The Small Bow
Ex-agents of Chaos
Illustrations by Edith Zimmerman.
There's a place for everyone. Don't stop searching for it.
How much of the Chateau’s reputation as a place of Hollywood, erm, excess was deserved? What kind of scenarios made you uncomfortable?
PP: Most hotel managers in the luxury market have not stood over a bathtub in a room watching a super-famous starlet get her stomach pumped while someone stands next to you yelling "NO ONE CAN FUCKING KNOW ABOUT THIS" at the top of their lungs. Ditto for finding yourself pushing her slumped frame down the hallway with a sheet over her in a wheeled office chair "Weekend at Bernie's" style so you can smuggle her into a car to ship her directly and discreetly to the nearest rehab facility.
AND I'll bet that the Managing Director of the Bel-Air has never recorded an esteemed guest defecating in a potted plant by the pool. So, yeah, I'd say it's entirely well deserved.
There is a quote in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" where he says the great trick of the heart is that you remember the good stuff but forget the painful parts (apologies to Marquez, but I'm paraphrasing). That very much resonates with me now: I laugh when I show someone the letter to Courtney Love where she apologizes for lighting a bed on fire, or the irate faxes from Sumner Redstone when I banned his favorite prostitute from coming to the restaurant because she always caused a huge disruption by taking over the entire bathroom to do cocaine on the sink counter. Why not just be a lady, and do in the stall like everyone else?
Were there any particular nights during the year that were consistently more wild and stressful than others?
Yes. There are the traditional greeting card holidays that anyone who works in the restaurant and hotel industry loathes that tend to bring in the partying drunken masses, like Halloween or New Year's Eve. But when you run a hotel that caters to the entertainment industry, Awards Season is particularly brutal: back to back endless parties that kick off with the Golden Globes and burn through the Grammys and end with the money shot of Oscar Night.
You have a concentrated clientele in the building buzzing with all of their entourage of publicists, make-up artists, stylists, and managers, and everyone's ego is particularly stressed and needy. Add dollops of Adderall, cocaine, and booze to the mix, and you have a volatile concoction, bubbling and ready to boil over at any given moment. A missing package from a stylist to an actress that includes the custom made purse she is supposed to be photographed in on the Vanity Fair red carpet suddenly becomes THE MOST FUCKING URGENT EMERGENCY IN THE WORLD.
Whenever I feel sentimental about my time at the Chateau, my partner likes to remind me how he would witness me sinking into a deep pit of despair around the end of the year, as I dreaded the approach of the prison sentence of Awards Season, which was something like emotionally running a three-month gantlet at the Tailhook Convention.
Which famous patrons were the most polite and pleasant?
Charlotte Rampling was elegant and extremely low-key: I think her father was an officer in the military and that must have instilled some qualities in her that are extremely sensible and not at all what you would expect of an internationally celebrated beauty, sex-symbol, and actress.
I loved the way Wally Shawn lept to his feet out of formal respect if I greeted him at his table in the Garden.
I upgraded Robert Plant to the Penthouse when he was on tour, and he invited me for a coffee and told me stories of his first time arriving in the United States in 1969: He and his bandmates got off the plane at LAX and came directly to the Chateau. He described walking barefoot down Sunset Boulevard and feeling he was home and only being spooked by the girls with shaved heads, floor-length skirts, and dead eyes who hung out in the Lobby, who turned out to be followers of Manson.
And my heart feels a sharp pang remembering Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, who were just delightful and kind to all of the staff, and I loved dearly. They were like the resident Jewish grandparents in-house, always cracking jokes, giving earnest hugs, and sending me a necktie from Barneys every year. They lived at the hotel for months at a time while Jerry was filming his TV work, and I remembering chatting with Anne on her way to the pool to help Jerry run his lines and letting her know how excited one of my front desk agents was that she had a recurring part on "Sex and the City." I can still hear her response, in perfect Brooklynese: "Awww, give him a grab in his private parts for me!"
And...who sucked?
Lindsay Lohan and Courtney Love were the worst behaved when both were at the height of their drug abuse while living in the hotel during my time there, but I don't hold it against them. I have empathy for their struggles. Courtney in particular is genuinely trying to evolve and be a better person, and I have enormous respect for her for that.
Do you know many people in recovery?
I have many, many friends in recovery. I have seen people go from on the brink of death to thriving and enormously successful as a result of getting sober. I support anyone wholeheartedly who chooses that path. I am not sober myself I but practice many of the tenants of sober living: taking one day at a time, not comparing yourself to others, embracing the life that is in front of you and what comes easily to you, having grace and compassion in your daily living. These are just healthy guidelines with which to live a mindful and spiritually fulfilling life.
Did the Chateau change alter your impression of Hollywood?
I grew up working class, in the South Side suburbs of Chicago. My father dug ditches for the gas company for a living, and my mother raised six children when she wasn't cutting and dyeing ladies' hair for cash on the side in the basement of our modest split-level ranch home.
My mother had a cousin who was a great beauty with bleach blonde locks who moved to LA in the 70's, motivated by her success of being chosen to appear topless in Playboy. I used to eavesdrop in the kitchen with orange and yellow seventies flowered wall-paper, while my mother gossiped with her sisters, listening wide-eyed about the glamorous life this distant relative lived in Hollywood, where her boyfriend ran a disco roller rink where CHER went skating.
Imagine my little gay boy's mind, watching "Xanadu" and thinking I COULD FUCKING BE IN LA DISCO ROLLERSKATING WITH CHER. It seemed like the furthest possible reality to me: no one in my family ever left Chicago, they just got married and had kids and watched Phil Donahue and drank cardboard suitcases of Schlitz Malt Liquor and that was enough.
Then as a fifteen-year-old, grappling with my emerging queer identity, I read Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero where all the kids were bisexual and doing cocaine and being fabulous. That is when I knew for sure I was destined to live in LA. Many years later, as I would sit telling this same anecdote through tears to a therapist in Beverly Hills, she flatly responded: "But everyone in that book ends up unhappy." I missed that part.
I think I was so drawn to the myth of Hollywood that I needed to be at the center of it to fully consume every aspect of it. I needed to breathe, eat, drink every last bit of it, see it up close under a microscope to break it all down. Of course, I wanted to be famous, too. I used to think that people were famous because they were special, smarter, more talented, more beautiful than everyone else. And that for all those reasons, they were experiencing life more fully and more happily than mere mortals.
Hollywood is a culture built on illusion, an entire industry sprung from flickering light through celluloid. I know now that famous people are just people with the same struggles and needs as everyone else but often trapped in the world of illusion that both creates and consumes them. I know that money, fame, and sex are no guarantees for happiness, and that quite frequently, the people who have so much of them are even more miserable, as they exist so briefly in time.
I later met and befriended Bret Ellis at the Chateau, and we bonded over having both dated and been systematically grifted by the same shady figure who was trying to gain fame in Hollywood. In the truth is stranger than fiction world, Bret ended up writing a sequel to Less than Zero decades later, Imperial Bedrooms. It is fueled by the vitriol that he had for the horrible person by whom we were both victimized. He incorporated details of the horrible things this guy did to me which I shared with him so I have had this strange moment of the dreamscape of my adolescence manifesting into my real life in La La land. It's a great anecdote to share, but the book is pretty vapid and forgettable, and the characters are awful, not unlike most of Hollywood.
Why did you let me in? Like, in-in. Like "taken care of" or at least made me feel taken care of. It was the first time in my life I'd felt truly special and it was almost past my expiration date of Gawker micro-fame.
We all carry our wounds. My otherness was being an effete, sensitive gay kid in a world where that was the absolute worst thing to be (1970's and 80's working-class South Side, Chicago). My adult life is overcompensating for the extreme loneliness I felt as a child, as well as the lack of joy and playfulness of which I was deprived.
The Chateau was a perfect fit for me for a long time because I was treated with respect and had authority and control (somewhat) over my environment, and it was a place where everyone was encouraged to have fun. I am magnetically drawn to people who bring out the joyful, playful side and make me laugh. I already had a talent crush on you from reading your work, and I found you hugely entertaining, so it was easy.
That was the best part about the world I created at the hotel: anyone who delighted me I could invite in to play. It could be the work of a photographer, a recording artist, an actor, a novelist. I enjoy taking care of people – it's in my nature – I'm a nurturer and a giver. But it becomes even more fulfilling when you admire the people who you are taking care of because of their gifts and what they have contributed to the world. Annie Lennox, Patti Smith, Michael Chabon, Helmut and June Newton, AM Homes, Patricia Clarkson, Christian Louboutin (just to name a few), are all artists whose work touched my soul, delighted and or inspired me. Maybe I'm just a frustrated artist, so I am drawn to those who are living it fully. Or maybe I just fall in love with people whose work genuinely delights me, and want to do anything to make them like me–that's the needy performer in me.
Illustration by Edith Zimmerman
