The Chateau on Sunset

Prologue Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, 1957

Prologue

Chateau Marmont,

As studio boss Harry Cohn once said, If you must get into trouble, do it at the Marmont.

Never has it seen one so young as this. Never one who’s here so emphatically against her will.

Just two weeks ago, she was standing beside a window in a Manhattan apartment, chanting with her parents, Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have this wish I wish tonight.

Mrs. Jones’s wish had been that her family would always stand hand in hand and make wishes. Mr. Jones’s was that his fledgling photography studio would capture enough smiles that they could afford to vacation out of state once a year. Their daughter Aria’s was…

Nothing. Aria couldn’t imagine being happier than she was right then.

And Aria’s childhood would have continued to be so idyllic that wishes were unnecessary except that her parents stopped for gas on their way home from the Copacabana. At the same time, an elderly gentleman backed his Cadillac into a gas pump. Fuel spilled over the ground.

If only the elderly gentleman hadn’t been smoking.

From the depths of sleep, Aria heard night break apart like a bone.

She crept down to the living room and saw Tina the babysitter sobbing on the sofa.

The book they’d been reading, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, about teeny people who lived beneath the floor and could never be seen by humans or else they vanished, lay open beside her.

A man dressed in a policeman’s uniform was saying, “Calm down, miss.”

Tina pulled Aria into her arms. “You poor orphan girl,” Tina wept. “You poor orphan girl.”

While the poor orphan girl—who’s flown by herself from New York to Los Angeles—stands at the foot of this place she’s been delivered to like a piece of junk mail, the Chateau Marmont looks beyond her past to her future.

Then it exhales so far down into its ground-floor rooms that the curtains fly out the windows like voile birds.

For it sees a life in which every woman Aria meets is either mad or mean or poor or dead.

The mad and mean ones are the bad guys, of course. The poor and dead ones are the angels.

But what kind of story is that?

So the Marmont does what it’s never done before. It reassigns the roles.

It nudges a young woman called Flitter and one called Calliope (yes, their names are ridiculous, but they’re actresses, so what do you expect?) into the lobby.

It makes Aria wear the kind of vulnerable expression on her face that both Flitter and Calliope once vowed they’d never again wear on theirs.

It creates that connection so they can all come together in a story where there are women who are mad and mean and poor and dead—but it’s not quite that simple.

The madwoman deserves more than an attic. The mean ones deserve more than forgiveness. The poor ones deserve more than to say they’re a bird and then to let the net ensnare them anyway. And the dead ones…

You’ll see.