Hollywood Gothic

A few years ago, when I first journeyed to far Hollywood, The Studio, as Joyce Carol Oates portentously calls it in Blonde, put me up at the Chateau Marmont, an antique mock-Norman castle that might have been designed by Charles Addams and whose dark reputation was out of the pages of de Sade. My suite in the hotel vibrated with sullen echoes. One could sense the overdoses, the suicides, the tragedies that in all likelihood played themselves out in those venerable rooms. After all, it was in a bungalow at the Marmont that John Belushi died, some years earlier. Perched atop Sunset Boulevard, the hotel seemed like a circus funhouse, the very symbol of the wilder, darker side of Hollywood. I had writer pals who made a mordant point of requesting the death bungalow when they stayed there.

The pure products of America go crazy, said William Carlos Williams. There was never a more pure product of Hollywood than Los Angeles–born Norma Jean Baker, known to...