I’m not the first person to stand outside Suite 434 at the Beverly Hilton out of morbid curiosity, and I won’t be the last.
Those who have taken the lift to this floor and passed the framed images of Marilyn Monroe, the Rat Pack, and a couple of Kennedys have doubtless been many since an infamous February night in 2012. A figure dwarfed by those who have made similar, shall we say, pilgrimages to hotel rooms in this city where drugs have brought the wild and the famous to their end. How many, for instance, have stood outside the room where Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose at the Landmark Motor Hotel in 1970 (wisely changing its name to the Highlands Garden Hotel in the years that followed)? Or the room at the Chateau Marmont where John Belushi suffered a similar fate in 1982?
Calling this a pilgrimage on my part is stretching it. I’m in Los Angeles to interview an architect. The magazine has parked me in this hotel for four days and three nights. It occurred to me that this was the hotel where Whitney Houston was found dead six years ago. It was gala night the day before the Grammys which, like the Golden Globes, is held annually in the mammoth International Ballroom on the ground floor.
Standing here outside the door to the suite — the number has since changed — tucked away in the corner of a corridor in muted shades of beige and brown which, like the carpet and the aforementioned gilt-framed photographs, belong in a less salubrious hotel, a story emerges. It is the story of another night, and another awards ceremony held in this City of Angels years before a body was found in the bathroom of Suite 434 at the Beverly Hilton.