Travel: The Sunset Tower Hotel, Hollwood

When US Weekly reported last August that Rene Zellweger and her new beau had guzzled champagne in a Sunset Tower suite, Klein had a meltdown. The detective was hired and, soon, a room-service waiter was fired.

"He claimed he only told his mother," Klein says. "I didn't care. Gone!"

A New York society brat turned serious hotelier and restaurateur, Klein, 39, bought the Sunset Tower in 2004 and has transformed it, partly by throwing out the handbook of how entertainment industry haunts are managed, especially in Los Angeles. A ban on media leaks about business deals or celebrity frolicking is strictly enforced. Klein is also very careful about curating a clientele. Celebrities deemed out of place, including the rapper Sean Combs and Britney Spears, have been – gasp – turned away.

Hollywood hotels have long played a role in how the gears of show business grind. They are where the moguls show off (Harvey Weinstein conducting multiple meetings simultaneously at the Peninsula), where publicists monitor interviews (the bar at the Four Seasons) and where pretty young things are discovered poolside (the plucking of Robert Evans, the former actor turned producer, decades ago from obscurity at the Beverly Hills Hotel).

"Hotels have the whole gamut of elements that people use to send signals in this business," says Peter Guber, former chairman of Sony Pictures. "You don't want to be seen unless nobody is looking – then you want to be seen."

These deal-making hotbeds exist, partly because the business culture of entertainment is transient; most of the money to make movies comes from somewhere else, and hotels are neutral meeting spots. Or maybe Hollywood hotels became integral for another very simple reason. "It's a casual place," says Evans, who parlayed his tan into a long career as a producer of films such as Chinatown. If you could do a deal by the pool, he asks, "wouldn't you?"

But the polarity of hotel power is shifting here. Out: the snarly parking valet, the too-cool-to-notice-you hostess and the tipsy-hipster pool scene. That is all so pre-recession. In: old-Hollywood glamour, and an intense focus on privacy and service that warrants the price.

"The Sunset Tower has made it impossible for me to ever stay anywhere else in Los Angeles again," says Lauren Zalaznick, an NBC Universal president. "Nice is the new mean."

The Creative Artists Agency now holds an ultra-exclusive Golden Globes event at Klein's hotel, and some agents use the lounge and bar as a second office. ("They take nothing and no one for granted," says Bryan Lourd of Creative Artists). Vanity Fair held its lavish Oscar party there last year and will do so again next month.

Klein's closest competition is the Chateau Marmont, famous as the place where John Belushi overdosed in 1982. The hotel, owned since 1990 by Andre Balazs, is still packed, with the crowd leaning toward music and fashion. Celebrities such as the director Sofia Coppola and Arnold Schwarzenegger have been spotted there recently, but it has suffered a string of tabloid humiliations that has soured some of moviedom's A-list. Lindsay Lohan has been a regular.

How has Klein done it? The Hollywood crowd recites the attention to detail and the privacy, but his New York connections have helped. The designer Tom Ford, for example, insisted that Klein hire what has become one of the Sunset Tower's secret weapons: a Macedonian maitre d' named Dimitri Dimitrov, who formerly worked at a caviar bar, knows the producer pecking order, and is careful not to seat rivals next to one another.

"I was kind of annoyed actually – I don't tell Tom Ford how to hire models – but I put my pride away and listened," says Klein. "He was right."

Catering to celebrities, including movie moguls, has long been a high-wire act. The mood could shift with one errant paparazzo. Klein attracts the big titles and the big stars in part by being blunt about the kind of clientele he is not looking for: what he calls celebrity "trash."

In one incident, Klein blew up when he discovered that Spears had tried to book three rooms. "She can't come here with all my chic guests; she'll ruin the place," he was overheard, yelling in the lobby.

Would Lohan receive a reservation? Klein shudders and makes a sour face, adding that he believes the hotel, to some degree, self-selects its clientele.

"C-list television actors walk into the hotel and see what it is – a classy place – and leave," he says. "They don't understand it. They say, 'Eww, let's go to the Chateau.' And I'm truly fine with that."

The Sunset Tower, perched on the Sunset Strip, has oscillated between a well-heeled apartment building and a hotel – of various names – since opening in 1929. It was not an immediate hit in its latest form. People didn't quite know how to take its quiet elegance.

As Klein likes to say, the property has "good bones." Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross, Howard Hughes and Bugsy Siegel have all called it home at various times. Legend has it that John Wayne kept a cow on his balcony.

But by the 1980s, the 15-storey building had fallen into disrepair. Klein and a business partner, the developer Peter Krulewitch, bought it for 18.5 million and spent about 15 million redecorating. Klein was obsessive about details. The cocktail napkins had to be quilted. The walnut panelling in the restaurant had to perfectly match that Architectural Digest picture of Siegel's room in the 1940s. And Klein spent 60,000 to replace window handles in the guest rooms.

"I almost had a coronary – window knobs?" Krulewitch says.

Klein says the hotel is profitable, but he would not back that up with numbers. He won't talk about his clientele, but all you need to do is book a table at Tower Bar and look around. Regular customers include Brad Grey, the chairman of Paramount Pictures; Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation; and Brian Grazer, the Oscar-winning producer. Celebrity devotees include Jennifer Aniston, Sean Penn and Johnny Depp.

Having conquered Hollywood, Klein is now trying to move into another echelon: the one inhabited by Balazs and Ian Schrager, who is credited with setting off the boutique hotel craze in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Klein later regrets making snipes about his competition, such as the comment about C-list actors preferring the Chateau Marmont to the Tower.

"It was completely wrong of me to say such a stupid thing and make such silly jokes," he says. "The real truth is that I am jealous of Andre and I only wish I had the same level of success."

New York Times

This article was originally published in The Scotsman on 20 February 2010