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| Raymond Sarlot |
Developer #Raymond #Sarlot was looking for a tax write-off when he and
an associate paid $1 million for a down-on-its-luck #Hollywood landmark,
the Chateau Marmont, in 1975.
Long a haven for privacy-loving
celebrities such as Greta Garbo and Roman Polanski, the old
Normandy-style hotel was on the verge of foreclosure, with threadbare
carpets, peeling wallpaper and falling plaster.
It still had loyal
guests but was so dilapidated that one of them, actress Myrna Loy,
called for a new room chair after the bottom fell out of the one she was
using. "I was what you call shocked," Sarlot recalled later in The
Times. But the hotel quickly became more than just a business for Sarlot.
"He fell in love with the place," said his wife, Sally Rae Sarlot. "It became almost like a mistress."
Sarlot, who helped restore the Marmont's low-key elegance and secure
its place as one of the city's cultural treasures, died April 27 in #LosAngeles after a long illness, his wife said. He was 89.
A month
after buying the Sunset Strip property with business partner Karl
Kantarjian, Sarlot moved in and oversaw its renovation over the next few
years. The walls and floors were redone, tacky plastic fixtures were
banished, pilfered antiques were replaced, and the pool was rebuilt. The
new owners also added more guest bungalows, including the one where
actor John Belushi would later be found dead.
In
1976, the year after Sarlot and Kantarjian bought it, the Marmont was
declared a historic-cultural monument by the Los Angeles Cultural
Heritage Commission, which cited it as
"one of the few remaining
landmarks to remind us of the glitter of Hollywood's past."
"The big thing Ray did for the hotel was save it," said Fred Basten,
who with Sarlot wrote an anecdotal history called "Life at the Marmont,"
published in 1987. "It was going to be destroyed. He bought the hotel
and revitalized it."
Sarlot, who co-owned the landmark for 16 years until selling it to hotelier Andre Balazs
in 1991, was also an early supporter of the downtown Museum of
Contemporary Art, which featured prominent artists who were Marmont
regulars, including Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Robert
Rauschenberg.
And although he was no athlete — 6 feet tall and
burly, he was "forever popping a button on his shirt," his wife said —
Sarlot helped launch another institution, the Los Angeles Marathon.
"Ray was one of the originators," Marathon founder and former President William Burke
said in an interview last week, noting that Sarlot helped him sell the
idea of the race to Mayor Tom Bradley and secure the financing for the
first one in 1986. Sarlot's main passion, however, was the Marmont.
Built in 1927,
the Marmont was "practically a capsule history of Hollywood itself,"
Kantarjian wrote in the foreword to "Life at the Marmont." Modeled after
a castle in the Loire Valley of France, it became a home away from home
for writers, actors and others who earned livelihoods at the nearby
studios. Among the early guests were Stan Laurel, Katharine Hepburn,
Billy Wilder, Mary Astor and Jean Harlow.
In later decades, playwright
Arthur Miller
came for weekend trysts with Marilyn Monroe. Paul Newman met Joanne
Woodward there, and their pal, Gore Vidal, used it as a setting for his
novel "Myra Breckinridge." In the rock era, regular guests included
Graham Nash, David Crosby and Pink Floyd. "Rosemary's Baby" director
Polanski lived at the Marmont in 1968 with his w
ife, Sharon Tate, before
they moved to the Benedict Canyon house where she was murdered by the
Manson gang; several years later, Polanski took refuge at the hotel
while facing charges of drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.
The
most notorious event in the Marmont's history occurred in 1982, when
Belushi was found dead of a drug overdose in Bungalow 3. When the
news broke, Sarlot was having lunch with Kantarjian in Beverly Hills and
rushed back to the hotel. "It was bedlam," he said in his book. "The
place was swarming with outsiders," not only police but reporters and
scores of curiosity-seekers.What people don't realize about the night Belushi died," Sarlot told
The Times several years later, "is that the whole time all that stuff
was going on, Tony Randall was living right next door" in another
bungalow. "Tony had no idea what was happening until he saw the
coroner's wagon."
Sarlot was born in Chicago on Aug. 1, 1924. The
son of a businessman who owned several meat markets, he studied
engineering at what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology before
serving as a mapmaker in the Army during #WorldWarII.
He moved to
#LosAngeles after the war, obtained his contractor's license and began
doing remodeling, gradually working his way up to building tract homes
and apartment complexes.
He
moved into the Marmont during his divorce from his first wife, Regina
Bragato. In addition to his wife Sally Rae, to whom he was married for
29 years, he is survived by his children from his first marriage, Debra
Sarlot, Renee Knott and Joel Sarlot; two brothers, Roland and John; a
sister, Rhoda; a granddaughter and a great-grandson.
After
Belushi's death, the worst experience Sarlot may have had at his beloved
hotel occurred in 1984, when he saw a copy of author Bob Woodward's
newly published biography of the comic actor, "Wired."
On the inside flap, Woodward had written that Belushi died "in a seedy hotel bungalow off Sunset Boulevard."
Sarlot
and Kantarjian sued Woodward's publisher for $18 million in damages.
Woodward subsequently apologized, explaining that he had been referring
to the squalid state of Belushi's room on the day he died, not the hotel
itself. The lawsuit was dropped.
"Ray had spent so much time and
effort bringing the hotel up to respectable condition that it was a blow
to him to hear someone call it seedy," Sally Rae Sarlot said. "He wasSource:
LA Times
