Hollywood For Once, Hollywood Forever

I roll up to Chateau Marmont with nothing but a toothbrush in my purse and a plastic bag filled with several pounds of caviar that Gutes just ordered in fluent Russian at some rundown deli in West Hollywood. It felt like the most L.A. thing I could do, despite the fact that three days earlier, I’d never even been to L.A.

I’m here mostly to visit Gutes, partly to understand what all the L.A. fuss is about, partly to spend half my life savings on the Erewhon hot bar. Before going to L.A., I had a few assumptions—the main one being: I wouldn’t like it. I imagined Kardashian clones and pilates zombies, cars in standstill traffic shimmering across the freeway, $30 smoothies. Please, I convinced myself, you’re different. You walk the streets amongst violent strangers and obelisks of trash and only spend $20 on smoothies, celebrity co-curated or otherwise. I felt assured of the city’s artifice, stuck with a mental image of a sparkling sea of Instagram faces and Celine models, skinny boys and girls draped in vintage t-shirts and baggy jeans, walking, waiflike, through the streets.

This precise assumption was where I first went incredibly wrong: I wasn’t told that not one single person walks around the city of Los Angeles. It’s a glittering ghost town; it feels empty, vacant—both physically and metaphorically. It’s a vacancy that begets anonymity—there was no one in the world but us: restaurants darkened to the point of obscurity to cloak the faces of celebrity diners, oversized sunglasses, and baseball caps tucked down low. It's holographic: a mirage with an intrinsic sense of inhibition, begging to be filled with all your projections of promise.

The heat was phantasmic, oppressive, sparkling with the feasibility of fantasy, casting the sprawl into a glamoramapocalpytic glow. The city stretches out like a set perfectly preserved on a back lot. There’s something perverse about the ramshackle glamor, an unsettling stillness to the sunlight, like someone overhead is dangling from a scaffolding off camera, piping it in.

But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t beautiful. Los Angeles was the glory of the world for the week it lasted. We had dinner at Horses, started group chats with hotel valets. We made our Uber driver pull over so we could connect to Bluetooth and blast the Charli XCX Lorde remix, our goosebumps rising higher than the Hollywood Hills. We dropped almost every dollar to our names at Wasteland on leather Prada dresses, vintage pink princess slips, lace, and silk mini skirts. We accidentally spent 30 minutes washing the car, taking turns spraying out clouds of soap across the glossy navy shine of our convertible.

In L.A., driving is like breathing. It’s the most L.A. thing you can do—the best hobby, the most well-practiced. Almost cheaper than therapy, depending on gas prices. We speed (read: crawl) down all the streets people sing about, silk scarves rippling across our skulls, driving with the top down along the boulevards of dreams (dashed, divided, or dazzling) in the UV9 sunshine. Sunset, Santa Monica, Ventura. Hollywood and Vine. We DJ our car on the freeway, play Kim Petras for Kim Petras at a birthday blowout. That morning, we nearly roll back down to the bottom of Mulholland Drive on our attempt to wheel ourselves as close as physically possible to the Hollywood sign without having to hike, silver screen fantasies unspooling with every twist and turn up the winding roads.

There’s an unabashedness to the city. L.A. exists as an image of itself—at once a song on the radio and the radio itself. Billboards sprout up from the ground like stalagmites, more indigenous to the city streets than the Palms. Everything springs forth fully formed: the girls in Salomons and saucer-sized sunglasses and sweatshorts sauntering into Erewhon; delivery robots careening across the crosswalk, clinking with bottles of green juice.

On Friday, we checked into the Chateau. In the days leading up to our stay at Chateau Marmont, I became increasingly obsessed with its lore, the salacious secrecy lingering within each suite. We were staying in Room 46, once inhabited by the “Eloise” of the Chateau: Jill Selsman, then 10 years old, the daughter of Carol Lynley, a writer and producer who lived there with Jill for 3 years. We became obsessed with a line Jill wrote in an essay about growing up in the hotel in which she describes losing an older, befriended neighbor to an overdose. “He was the first person I knew who died just because.” Just because.

The Chateau was self-indulgent to the point of violence, both hedonistic and heaven sent. At the party in our suite, quoting Shakespeare—who, frankly, said it best: these violent delights have violent ends; violent hangovers, violent hotel bills. Cigarettes on the balcony at sunrise, hide and seek by the bungalows with reality TV star children, pulling lemons from the tree to drizzle into glasses of white wine in the water. It was The Island of the Lotus Eaters, but instead of fruit keeping us chained to the island, it was the ability to smoke by the pool.

There’s something so devilish about the city of angels. Something sinister is in the streets, a snarl masked by a smile. There’s something violent vibrating behind your reflection in the mirror, a twisted, sadistic beauty. A ghost town haunted by the chicest specters, a gun in a briefcase tucked gently against the side of your king-sized Chateau bed. Glamor is not without violence in this city. The idea has been both glorified and canonized in the L.A. artverse: films like L.A. Confidential, books like Sex and Rage. Los Angeles is beautiful, but it’s coming to get you. Though there’s also something holy about it, devotional, a place so unreal as if to be divine—Erewhon its own perfectly preserved garden of Eden. By kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Los Angeles.

John Mulaney was right about one thing: everybody’s in L.A. Indie-sleaze rock stars smoking in the courtyard, creative directors laid out by the pool in a pair of toe-shoes, stylists reciting sonnets on the front stoop, Coppola-adjacent producers holding court at the party outside the party. We are drinking white wine straight from the bottle, everyone at the bungalow plastered around the room like wallpaper while photographers immortalize us on film.

And yet we were the only people in the whole world: floating alone underneath the full moon in the Chateau pool, staring out at the Hollywood sign from the Erewhon window; no one on the streets to stop and stare at except for each other. I’ll leave the week tucked away like a dream in the corridors of my hippocampus, to which I can never return—not for all the glory in the world.