Sin place

In a city that recycles buildings like cardboard boxes, the 70-year-old hotel is as much a historical site as the building on which it was based: the Chateau Amboise, a 16th-century royal retreat in France's Loire Valley that counted Leonardo da Vinci as a long-staying guest.

Today, the melon-coloured Marmont, with its steeply canting gables and pointed tower, rises above the concrete ribbon of Sunset Boulevard.

The debate over what impact the writers' strike will have on this month's Oscars ceremony may continue, but one thing is certain: no picket line will prevent the parties that pop up in the hotel's famous bungalows, the cute stone cabins that cluster around the swimming pool before rising in tiers up a steep embankment. It was in one of these, prior to the 2005 Oscars, that the controversial footage was shot of the late Heath Ledger apparently taking cocaine.

When Harry Cohen, head of Columbia Pictures, told William Holden and Glenn Ford: "If you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont," it was in an age before camera-phones, when Cohen could rent suite 54 and rely on the bellboy's discretion about what happened behind closed doors.

Plenty of others paid heed to his advice. Jean Harlow enjoyed her honeymoon here, although this was much to do with her nocturnal strolls along to Clark Gable's room. The husband of Shelley Winters took the same walk to canoodle with Anna Magnani, an Italian bombshell, while Natalie Wood, then under-age, snuck in to meet up with Nicholas Ray, her director on Rebel Without A Cause.

Although these incidents didn't emerge until decades later, the "scandals" that did come out point to the times: Greta Garbo was seen smoking a cigarillo, a gesture considered a little too 'butch', while Robert Mitchum almost torpedoed his tough guy image when he was photographed in a pinny, doing the dishes at the sink in his room.

Writers appeared to enjoy the hotel's Stygian gloom. Billy Wilder wrote early scripts while living in a small room on the ground floor next to the ladies' toilets. Dominick Dunne, the crime writer and columnist with Vanity Fair, a regular guest, slept face-down on his typewriter through an earthquake that measured 5.5 on the Richter Scale and which drove the rest of the guests on to the street.

When Chateau Marmont, named after the lane on which it rests, opened on 1 April, 1928, it was conceived not as a hotel, but a fashionable apartment block, described by the Los Angeles Times as "of French gothic design". Built using steel and concrete, it was advertised as "earthquake-proof", but the venture could not withstand the financial tremors of the Great Depression the following year. By 1931 it was a casualty of the slump and was bought as a hotel by Albert Smith, a British-born former movie producer, who encouraged his own film friends to come on by. The hotel's popularity with stars is, in part, tied to its construction as an apartment block. Guests can arrive in the underground garage and take the elevator straight to their rooms. Or, if they are staying in the bungalows, use the side gate and bypass the hotel entirely.

While the Chateau is associated with sex, it also has a close personal relationship with death. Doors singer Jim Morrison didn't die here, he merely fell off a roof during his residency in 1971. But actor John Belushi took a fatal speedball of heroin and cocaine on 5 March, 1982. When Bob Woodward wrote his bestselling account of Belushi's life and death, Wired, he described the hotel as a "seedy dump". The hotel sued. And lost. It was, at the time, "a seedy dump".

Today, however, it is a dump no longer. Purchased in 1990 by Andre Balazs, the hip New York hotelier with an on-off (currently off ) relationship with Uma Thurman, he refurbished the interior "to evoke the past and the way Hollywood coveted European culture, but to make it a bit quirky". Guests still head through a vaulted Gothic portico, painted with murals, to reach the lobby, where the furniture is a mix of comfy sofas and chairs from the 1930s and fringed lamps – grand but with a touch of home.

Yet what is the hotel like to visit for the non-celeb? Taking advantage of the weak dollar, my wife and I booked a bungalow for one night, only to arrive and discover it was occupied by a more prominent, and regular, guest. However, the receptionist apologised and assured us we had been upgraded to a suite in the main building.

"Yes, but does it have a balcony?"

"Yes sir," smiled the receptionist, "I assure you it does."

Unfortunately, our room was currently engaged for a fashion shoot and so we rested for two hours at the bar, wondering if Mary-Kate Olsen's pug, whom she was cradling, ate more than she did. We were then led to our room.

During the 1950s, Howard Hughes was a regular at the hotel and he ensconced Mitzi Gaynor, then a starlet, and her over-protective mother in the penthouse. After Gaynor went off with a talent agent, Hughes moved in, spending quiet afternoons spying on the bikini-clad girls in the pool below. And it was Hughes' old room that we were to spend the night in.

The penthouse is a spacious, two-bedroom apartment complete with a kitchen and dining room that would make a 1950s housewife weep tears of joy. Yet the crowning achievement is a vast, L-shaped balcony, on which you could safely land a helicopter.

The following day the swimming pool was off- limits for a private party attended by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, among others. Sadly, we weren't invited.

Chateau Marmont, 8221 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, California (tel: 00323 656 1010,

www.chateaumarmont.com

). Rooms start from 188 for a standard double.

The 80th annual Academy Awards is due to be held on Sunday, 24 February, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.