Hip-Hop’s Midlife Slump

In the summer of 1998, the line to get into Mecca on a Sunday night might stretch from the entrance to the Tunnel nightclub on Manhattan’s 12th Avenue all the way to the end of the block; hundreds of bodies, clothed and barely clothed in Versace and DKNY and Polo Sport, vibrating with anticipation. Passing cars with their booming stereos, either scoping out the scene or hunting for parking, offered a preview of what was inside: the sounds of Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Kim. These people weren’t waiting just to listen to music. They were there to be part of it. To be in the room where Biggie Smalls and Mary J. Blige had performed. To be on the dance floor when Funkmaster Flex dropped a bomb on the next summer anthem. They were waiting to be at the center of hip-hop.

What they didn’t realize was that the center of hip-hop had shifted. Relocated not just to another club or another borough, but to a beachfront estate in East Hampton. Although Sundays at the Tunnel would endure for a few more years, nothing in hip-hop, or American culture, would ever be quite the same again.

It’s been 25 years since Sean Combs, then known as Puff Daddy, hosted the first of what would become his annual White Party at his home in the Hamptons. The house was all white and so was the dress code: not a cream frock or beige stripe to be seen. Against the cultural landscape of late-’90s America, the simple fact of a Black music executive coming to the predominantly white Hamptons was presented as a spectacle. That summer, The New York Times reported, “the Harlem-born rap producer and performer had played host at the Bridgehampton polo matches, looking dapper in a seersucker suit and straw boater. The polo-playing swells had invited him and he had agreed, as long as the day could be a benefit for Daddy’s House, a foundation he runs that supports inner-city children.”

To be clear, hip-hop was already a global phenomenon whose booming sales were achieved through crossover appeal to white consumers. Plenty of them were out buying Dr. Dre and Nas CDs. Combs was well known to hip-hop aficionados as an ambitious music mogul—his story of going from a Howard University dropout turned wunderkind intern at Uptown Records to a mega-successful A&R executive there was the kind of thing that made you wonder why you were paying tuition. But to those young white Americans, in 1998, he was just the newest rap sensation to ascend the pop charts. When Combs’s single “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 the year before, it was only the tenth rap track to do so. The genre was still viewed as subversive—“Black music” or “urban music,” music that was made not for the polo-playing swells, but for the inner-city children whom their charity matches benefited.

Hip-hop was born at a birthday party in the Bronx, a neglected part of a neglected city. The music and culture that emerged were shaped by the unique mix of Black and Puerto Rican people pushed, together, to the margins of society. It was our music. I was a Nuyorican girl in Brooklyn in the ’80s and ’90s; hip-hop soundtracked my life. If Casey Kasem was the voice of America, on my radio, Angie Martinez was the voice of New York.

When I went to college in Providence, I realized all that I’d taken for granted. There was no Hot 97 to tune into. There were no car stereos blasting anything, much less the latest Mobb Deep. Hip-hop became a care package or a phone call to your best friend from home: a way to transcend time and space. It also became a way for the few students of color to create community.

You could find us, every Thursday, at Funk Night, dancing to Foxy Brown or Big Pun. Sundays, when the school’s alternative-rock station turned the airways over to what the industry termed “Black music” were a day of revelry. Kids who came back from a trip to New York with bootleg hip-hop mixtapes from Canal Street or off-the-radio recordings from Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia’s underground show were lauded like pirates returning home with a bounty. We knew that hip-hop was many things, but not static. We understood that it was going to evolve. What we weren’t perhaps ready for was for it to go truly mainstream—to belong to everyone.  

The media were quick to anoint Combs a “modern-day Gatsby,” a moniker Combs himself seems to have relished. “Have I read The Great Gatsby?” he said to a reporter in 2001. “I am the Great Gatsby.” It’s an obvious comparison—men of new money and sketchy pasts hosting their way into Long Island polite society—but a lazy one. Fitzgerald’s character used wealth to prove that he could fit into the old-money world. Combs’s White Party showcased his world; he invited his guests to step into his universe and play on his terms. And, in doing so, he shifted the larger culture.

Would frat boys ever have rapped along to Kanye West without the White Party? Would tech bros have bought $1,000 bottles of $40 liquor and drunkenly belted out the lyrics to “Empire State of Mind”? Would Drake have headlined worldwide tours? Would midwestern housewives be posting TikToks of themselves disinfecting countertops to Cardi B songs? It’s hard to imagine that a single party (featuring a Mister Softee truck) could redefine who gets to be a bona fide global pop star but, by all accounts, Puffy was no ordinary host.

The man had a vision. “I wanted to strip away everyone’s image,” Combs told Oprah Winfrey years after the first White Party, “and put us all in the same color, and on the same level.” That the level chosen was a playground for the white and wealthy was no accident. Upon closing a merger of his Bad Boy record label with BMG for a reported $40 million in 1998, he told Newsweek, “I’m trying to go where no young Black man has gone before.”

“It was about being a part of the movement that was a new lifestyle behind hip-hop,” Cheryl Fox told me. Now a photographer, she worked for Puffy’s publicist at the time of the first White Party. The Hamptons, the all-white attire: It was Puffy’s idea. But the white people, she said, were a publicity strategy. “He was doing clubs, and he was doing parties that did not have white people,” she told me. “I brought the worlds together, and then I was like, ‘You got to step out of the music. You can’t just do everything music.’” She meant that he should expand the guest list to include actors and designers and financiers—the kinds of people who were already flocking to the Hamptons.

In the end, “​​I had the craziest mix,” Combs told Oprah. “Some of my boys from Harlem; Leonardo DiCaprio, after he’d just finished Titanic. I had socialites there and relatives from down south.” Paris Hilton was there. Martha Stewart was there. “People wanted to be down with Puff,” Gwen Niles, a Bad Boy rep at the time, told me about that first party. “People were curious: Who is this rap guy?”

Hip-hop was already popular. The message the party sent was that hip-hop, and the people who made it, were also “safe.”

Rap music was for so long cast by white media as dangerous, the sonic embodiment of lawlessness and violence. This narrative was so sticky that it kept hip-hop confined to the margins of pop culture despite its commercial success.

Hip-hop didn’t always help itself out here. Artists screwed up in the ways artists in all genres do—with drug addictions, outbursts, arrests—but when it came to hip-hop, those transgressions were used to reinforce cultural stereotypes. Misogyny had been embedded in the lyrics of hip-hop nearly since its inception. A heartbreaking 2005 feature by Elizabeth Méndez Berry in Vibe exposed the real-world violence inflicted upon women by some of hip-hop’s most beloved artists, including Biggie Smalls and Big Pun. Homophobia in hip-hop perpetuated anti-queer attitudes, particularly in communities of color. And although lyrical battles have always been a thing, rhetorical fights never needed to become deadly physical ones.

This was the context in which Puffy headed to the Hamptons. Though only 28, he had baggage. While a young executive at Uptown in 1991, he had organized a celebrity basketball game at CUNY’s City College to raise money for AIDS charities. Tickets were oversold, and a stampede left nine people dead and many more injured. The tragedy stayed in the headlines for weeks. (Years later, Puffy would settle civil suits with victims.)

In 1993, Combs launched Bad Boy Records, with a roster of stars such as Biggie. The label met with immediate success, but also controversy, after a shooting involving the California rapper Tupac Shakur embroiled Bad Boy in a contentious battle between East and West. By the spring of 1997, Biggie and Tupac were dead—Biggie gunned down in Los Angeles in what appeared to be retribution for the killing of Tupac the year before. Biggie was shot while stopped at a red light; Combs was in another car in the entourage. (Neither murder has been solved.) That fall, Combs performed “I’ll Be Missing You,” his tribute to Biggie, live at MTV’s Video Music Awards. With a choir in the rafters, Combs danced through his grief. It was a moment of rebirth, of reinvention. Combs and the gospel singers wore white.

To be clear, most of what Puffy was making as an artist and producer in this era was accessible to a white, affluent fan base. These were the kind of tracks that sampled songs your parents would have danced to, spliced and sped up so that you wanted to dance to them now. Outside of “I’ll Be Missing You” and a few songs about heartbreak, many of the lyrics were about getting, having, and spending money.

But Puffy made possible the crossover explosion of more substantial artists such as Lauryn Hill and OutKast and Jay-Z, the first generation of hip-hop superstars.

You could also say that Puffy took a musical neighborhood—one that held history and heritage and layers of meaning—and gentrified it. Cleaned it up for whiter, wealthier patrons to enjoy, people who had no idea of what the “old ’hood” was about. Both things can be true.

The summer of 1998 was also the summer before my last year of college. Up in Providence, a local copycat to Hot 97 had cropped up and gained traction: WWKX, Hot 106, “the Rhythm of Southern New England.” Seemingly overnight, the frat houses added DMX to their rotation. A classmate—a white socialite from the Upper East Side—came back senior year with box braids describing herself as a real “hip-hop head.” Funk Night became a campus-wide phenomenon, and then it ceased to exist. Nobody needed a hip-hop night when every night was hip-hop night.

In rap, the feeling was “I’m keeping it real. I’m gonna stay on this block,” Jay-Z recounts of this era in the Bad Boy documentary, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. “And our feeling was like, Yeah? I’ll see you when I get back.” Emotions around this ran hot at the time—the idea that hip-hop had left its true fans behind. But in the end, more of us were happy to see hip-hop conquer the world than were grouching in the corner about the good ol’ days.

In 2009, Puffy, by then known as Diddy, relocated his White Party to Los Angeles; hip-hop’s new mecca was the land of celebrity. The vibe, according to people who were there, just wasn’t the same. But hip-hop itself was moving on to bigger and bigger arenas. In 2018, hip-hop dominated streaming, and accounted for more than 24 percent of record sales that year. That same year, Eminem headlined Coachella, Drake dominated the Billboard 100 for months, and Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize.

Then something shifted again. This year isn’t just the 25th anniversary of the first White Party. It’s the 50th anniversary of hip-hop itself. And although it’s come a long way since Kool Herc deejayed a Bronx basement dance party, the genre appears to be suffering a midlife slump.

For the first time in three decades, no hip-hop single has hit No. 1 yet this year. Record sales are down. According to one senior music executive I spoke with, who asked to remain anonymous because she wasn’t authorized to speak, festivals have been reluctant to book rappers as headliners since 2021. That’s the year that eight people were crushed to death at the Astroworld Festival in Houston; two more died later of their injuries. The performer Travis Scott was accused (fairly or unfairly) of riling up the crowd. (Coachella hasn’t had a true hip-hop headliner since Eminem.)

But the other question is: Which headliners would they even book? Kendrick Lamar is winding down his 2022 tour. Nicki Minaj doesn’t have a new album coming out until the fall. Staple acts such as J. Cole probably won’t release an album this year at all. Megan Thee Stallion, who got shot a few years ago and has been feeling burned out by the industry, is taking a break from music. As the legendary artists Too $hort and E-40 wrote in this magazine, since 2018, hip-hop has seen at least one rapper’s life a year ended by violence. The careers of Gunna and Young Thug—two major acts on the rise—have stalled while they’ve been caught up in RICO charges in Atlanta. (Perhaps sensing an opportunity, Drake just announced that a new album and tour would be coming soon.)

Recently, The New York Times ran an article about how the Hamptons have lost their cool. Too affluent. Too old. Too out of touch. Maybe hip-hop, for the first time, is suffering from similar doldrums. But obituaries to the genre have been written before. It’s only a matter of time before a new Gatsby shows up, ready to throw a party.

Why I Work Out

In the summer of 2015, one of my best friends died at work. Shannon was 38, childless, single and thriving, and working as an executive at a global public-relations firm, where she handled a major client. She was set to take a family vacation—treating her nephews to a Disney trip or some such—when her boss sent down an edict that no one on her account was allowed to take time off. Saying no to your boss is hard, but disappointing your nephews is even harder, so Shannon stood her ground and refused to cancel her trip.

She then proceeded—in a conference room—to have a panic attack about how the decision might affect her career. The panic attack triggered a heart attack; the heart attack revealed a preexisting tear in a heart valve; the tear led to internal bleeding that, after a two-week-long coma, led to her death. You can see why, though it isn’t technically true, I say that Shannon “died at work.” You can also see how my 36-year-old self—also single, also childless, also stuck in a successful but frustrating career and in need of some time off—–was very messed up by this. Everyone who knew Shannon was. As the bench in Prospect Park we dedicated to our friend says: Shannon, she gave a lovely light.

It was in this state of despair that I reluctantly accompanied a friend to SoulCycle. I’m allergic to exercise-guru talk and pseudo-spirituality, but in the dark of that studio with the music enveloping me, forcing my heart to push itself in the way that Shannon’s could no longer do, something dislodged the deepest layers of my grief. I sat, pedaling as hard as I could, sobbing with abandon, knowing the black of the room and the sound of the music and the whirring of the bikes were giving me cover.

I kept returning, booking a bike in the back and letting the sweat and tears wash down my face. I did this for weeks until one day, I realized I hadn’t cried. And another day, I realized I was smiling.

In the time that I was, as my friends would tease me, in the “Cult of Soul”—I dispute this, for what it’s worth; I never bought any merch—I transformed my life. Eventually I got up the guts to pursue what I had really always wanted to do, which was to write books. Unfortunately, because time is finite, I had to do it in the mornings before work and on the weekends—all of the times when I used to be on the bike.

Fitness can be a complicated thing. For some, the motivation is health, and for others it’s pure enjoyment of the sport or physical activity. But for many—especially the Gen Xers among us, who, if we weren’t given an eating disorder by our Boomer moms, picked one up at college or from our Cosmopolitan and Vogue magazines—the real point is weight loss. Yes, exercise has health benefits, but those are side effects of the aesthetic goal.

This was how I had always approached exercise. I worked out because of eating issues and body-image challenges cultivated early in my life. Drawn by my grief to SoulCycle, I’d seen a different side of exercise and of what it could mean to me. But after a lifetime of other messages, the lesson didn’t stick. I still thought that I worked out in order to not gain weight.

And at the same time, I felt bad about this. Against the backdrop of the body-positivity movement, I was suspicious of my devotion to physical fitness. I needed to write; was my fear of my own fat worth the time taken away from the work required to change my life? Couldn’t I simply love myself as I was?

For a long time, I did very little exercise. I was obsessed with my art and my project. Other things took precedence over fitness—or rather, as I saw it, over my own vanity.

And then something shifted. Well, two things.

First, a series of back injuries left me barely able to walk without pain and took a year of care to recover from. I yearned for movement, and my doctor recommended regular pilates classes.

Then, at the beginning of this year, the Netflix algorithm fed me the documentary Stutz, directed by Jonah Hill.

The film is about the life and work of Hill’s therapist, Phil Stutz, whom Hill credits with making his life “immeasurably better.” Stutz helps his patients develop what he calls their “life force”—the part of you that can guide you when you are most lost. Stutz describes the life force as a pyramid. At its base is your relationship with your physical body, meaning we need physical movement combined with quality sleep and diet. In the middle of the pyramid are our relationships with other people, meaning we need them. And at the top is our relationship with ourselves.  

Interestingly, Hill—not a Gen X woman—had a similar psychic relationship with exercise as I did. In the film, he discusses having been scarred as a child by being told he was fat, and how fitness was always seen as a punishment to fix the crime of being overweight. It was only when he viewed working out as a component of caring for his mental happiness—something that he could control, something that could increase the amount of joy he might be capable of feeling—that his perspective shifted.

Hearing him say that, it suddenly clicked for me too: Exercise can be an act not of vanity, but of psychological self-care. Many wars are being waged against women—against our bodies, our rights, our sizes, our images of ourselves, and who is and isn’t allowed to claim this identity. For a long time, I felt that by rejecting movement, I was rejecting an idealized and impossible body image, that I was learning “self-acceptance.” But really I was just sabotaging my own mental health.

This is not an anti-fat or anti-body-positivity message. I love that younger women are being raised without the internalized self-hatred I was steeped in. I really love that young women of color are spurning the notions of “good bodies” that are rooted in a beauty standard that excludes our communities. If anything, I’m finally personally connecting the dots that the fat-activist and body-positivity communities have been railing about for some time: Fatphobia in the fitness industry is harmful. It alienates many people from movement.

But in the Age of Ozempic, the idea that we work out to get thin may be even more dangerous than ever, no matter your size.

Ozempic now offers injectable skinniness to the same monied Alo- and Lululemon-wearing men and women who have been filling up fitness classes and gyms for years, all of them there to chase the elusive goal of “thinner,” or, if they’ve caught it, to keep that slim frame in their clutches. But at the same time, all of them have been benefiting from the side effects of endorphins and rising heart rates, the pleasure of experiencing the vitality of their own blood-pumping bodies.

If they can now stay skinny with just an injection and a few picked-over meals, will they abandon fitness? What is a life where you don’t need to move your body and you don’t need to eat, but you know you look good in designer clothes? What is real living if you are doing it for the ’gram?

A few weeks ago, I went to California for a book talk and signing. I’ve probably signed thousands of books, but for the first time ever, I was asked to dedicate a book to a Shannon. I immediately felt my eyes burn hot and my throat close up. My Shannon was the type of person who got off on her friends doing well, and I’ve often imagined how pumped she would be to see me now. But the truth is, I was able to make these changes because of her, because her death made me reassess my life and what being alive means.

And it also led me into that very dark spin studio where, class after class, I went from drowning in sadness to feeling that my crazy dreams might be achievable. It was easy for Stutz to convert me to his philosophy, because I already knew that what he was saying was true. I just hadn’t made the connection before. Did it need to come in the form of a luxury fitness class? No. But did being next to the other bodies help? Absolutely. Because people: We need them.

Since I watched that documentary, not a day has passed without me forcing myself, in some way, to move. Ideally, with somebody else—even if that somebody else is just my dog running up a hill with me. I even went back to a SoulCycle class for the first time in years. Not to be thinner or stronger, but to control the volume of my own happiness.

The Luxury Dilemma

Behind vine-covered walls on a modest hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard sits the decidedly immodest Chateau Marmont. The hotel was inspired by a French Gothic castle and, at 93, it is easily the oldest thing in Los Angeles that’s still considered sexy.

As a born-and-raised New Yorker without a driver’s license, I found the hotel the perfect place to park myself for a day of meetings in the era before Ubers and WeWorks and Soho Houses. I used to go there in the 2000s, back when I was a wedding planner. It was like a celebrity safari; stars would walk by, within arm’s reach. You could “do Los Angeles” without ever needing to move. I never could have afforded a room there, but I knew by reputation that at night it offered entertainment of a different sort: luxury and licentiousness and debauchery, unbounded by any rules.

In more recent years, I’ve returned to Los Angeles in a different career—as a screenwriter traveling on someone else’s dime. Naturally, I didn’t want to just take meetings at the Chateau; I wanted to stay there, to be a fly on the wall where the wild things were. Only I couldn’t.

I was told, in early 2021, that the hotel was not taking any new bookings. During the pandemic, a dispute between the owner and the staff had exploded, spectacularly. The hotel was now operating with a skeleton crew; employees were on strike, trying to organize a union. Even some celebrities were boycotting it.  

The debauchery the Chateau was known for came at a cost. After a massive round of pandemic-related layoffs, employees started talking, publicly, about what they’d experienced on the job, and the stories were gross. Allegations included maids being forced to handle used drug syringes, staff members being cajoled by poolside guests to lotion them up, sexts and slurs and relentless sexual propositions from colleagues or guests. (A spokesperson for the company told me that “the Chateau vigorously objects” to these allegations.)

The Chateau Marmont opened in 1929 and from its earliest days was known as a discreet playground for the rich and famous. “If you must get into trouble, do so at the Marmont,” the studio mogul Harry Cohn is rumored to have told his biggest stars. Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller made love there; Lindsay Lohan lived there; John Belushi died there.

In 1990, André Balazs purchased the property and began restoring it with his ex-wife. The son of academic Hungarian immigrants, Balazs made his fortune in biotech before turning his attention to nightlife and hospitality and opening a series of hotels and private clubs. “All good hotels tend to lead people to do things they wouldn’t necessarily do at home” is one of his widely quoted bon mots. The Chateau is known for catering to regulars, many of whom arrive precisely to do the kind of partying they wouldn’t do at home.

In many ways, the hotel operated like a very-high-end mom-and-pop enterprise, long functioning without corporate vultures lurking for earnings reports, in-house legal teams wringing their hands over the risk of litigation, or a fully functional HR department. Its last full-time HR director left in 2017 and was never officially replaced.

For years, the workers’ grievances racked up. In a major exposé, The Hollywood Reporter described complaints from housekeeping of short staffing and sordid parties to clean up after. Front-of-house workers said they’d experienced unwanted sexual advances from guests and colleagues alike. Ethnic slurs were reportedly hurled with regularity at Latino kitchen staff by management. Black and Latino employees said they had been back-burnered for the best shifts and promotions—allegations corroborated by their white colleagues. (In a statement to me, the spokesperson rejected all of these allegations and called them “unsupported.”)

Then, in March 2020, at the dawn of the pandemic, Balazs laid off all but nine of the hotels’ 259 employees—without severance or decent health benefits. Many had been in his service for years. Though I didn’t get to speak with Balazs directly, in a statement he said he saw the decision to cut down to a “‘caretaker’ staff” as necessary “because of the world-wide Covid 19 situation and my perspective of its likely duration.” The laid-off workers saw it differently. The move amplified murmurs about unionization, murmurs that grew louder that summer after Balazs announced to The Wall Street Journal a plan to convert the hotel into a private club, one served by staff with a “different skill set” from the old hotel workers’. Business publications interpreted this as a COVID-related pivot, but employees—and many others—speculated that it was an attempt to undermine the union effort. (The spokesperson told me that the private club was never “more than a concept.”)

A movie and a TV show were being filmed at the Chateau: Being the Ricardos and The Offer. Under pressure from Unite Here 11, the 32,000-member hospitality workers’ union that was representing Chateau employees, both moved production elsewhere. The celebrities were divided (despite the fact that most of them—Hollywood being a union town—belong to unions). Some, such as Amanda Seyfried and Issa Rae, boycotted the hotel. Others seemed oblivious or chose not to care; Jay-Z threw an Oscars after-party there last year, which celebrity scabs including Questlove and Rosario Dawson crossed a picket line to attend. (“I didn’t cross a picket line,” Dawson, under fire, later tweeted—apparently wanting people to know that she’d arrived so late to the party that most of the protesters had gone home.)

Reading about the employees’ grievances, I felt outraged on their behalf. But I was skeptical that unionization could transform their workplace. The Chateau is not a Holiday Inn; it’s a luxury boutique hotel. The Chateau doesn’t just offer rooms for guests to sleep in; it offers, as Balazs has put it, “experiences”—experiences that might, I suspected, be fundamentally at odds with a better environment for workers. Guests have been drawn to the Chateau over the decades less by the thread count in the bedding and the expansive wine list than by the seductions of a place that turned a blind eye to social transgressions.

In that Hollywood Reporter exposé, one regular anonymously described the Chateau as “this weird beast that kind of slipped by and shouldn’t exist as it is, but it does. But if you were to say, ‘It needs better HR and proper compliances and codes and egalitarianism at the door,’ it loses its touch.” When briefed on the staff’s troubles, a business associate of the hotel told the paper, “I’m reconsidering the Chateau through a totally different lens now. All of the talk of it being a ‘playground,’ of it exalting ‘privacy.’ It really was just a system that protected white men in power.”

In that light, the question for me became: Can debauchery and decency co-exist? Can luxury accommodate fair labor practices and still feel luxurious?

From personal experience, I had my doubts.

Owning a luxury service business of any kind can be ethically and emotionally challenging. It strains what you believe is acceptable behavior to tolerate at work, and what needs to be tolerated in order to turn a profit. I’ll never forget the first time I questioned the direction that my professional life had taken. I was underneath a princess-waist Vera Wang gown, helping my client hoist up the skirt so that she could pee, when I found myself at eye level with the words Meet Mrs. Cohen, written in cursive blue-Swarovski crystal across her underpants. I swallowed the moment, knowing that this service was the “above and beyond” that my clientele expected.

I had a harder time justifying this kind of dirty work when I had to ask other people to do it. Over the years, our staff members were told to, among other things, smoke cigarettes and exhale into brides’ faces (so the brides would not have to smoke themselves and ruin their lipstick), walk dogs, hold babies, dance with fathers/brothers/groomsmen, take shots, cover up infidelities, cover up relapses, buy alcohol, buy drugs, set off fireworks, and put out literal fires. There was verbal abuse, unwanted sexual advances, and wild, drunken accusations. (There were also some very nice people; you cling to the memories of the very nice people.)

Depending on my own exhaustion level, I heard staff members’ complaints with either horror or indifference. This was, after all, part of the job of being in “luxury hospitality.” My partner and I tried, as best as possible, to insulate our employees by adding behavioral clauses to our contracts: Thou shalt not curse at staff; thou shall not grope staff; thou shalt not force staff to smoke on your behalf.

But mainly, we did what people used to do in the good old days: We threw money at the problem. We would attempt to, within the bounds of profitability, make it worth our staff’s while to tolerate the abuse they endured while we kept saying yes to our clients’ whims. Because that’s what the luxury service business is all about.

But over the years, the rich got richer, and their behavior seemed to get worse. I began to wonder if hearing yes was no longer enough. Was knowing that the people who served you had to say yes an essential part of the fun?

André Balazs is very particular about his glassware—in particular, about whether the shatterproof glasses used near his pool feel as luxurious as real glass. I know this not because I’ve ever met or even spoken to Balazs, but because I have planned several lavish weddings for select clients to whom he would rent his former private estate in upstate New York. Through many people—his house managers, his personal chef, corporate executives from André Balazs Properties—Balazs made his preferences, opinions, and, in fairness, concerns for our clients’ happiness and satisfaction known. No detail was too small.

So when I heard, in December, that the hotel had struck a deal with the union, I knew that Balazs must have micromanaged every detail. But I was surprised when I read that the resulting contract was fairer and more generous than anyone in the luxury-hotel business could have imagined.

Among the workers’ victories were a 25 percent wage increase for nontipped workers; a raise to $25 an hour for housekeeping within one year; health coverage for employees who work more than 60 hours a month; free legal services for employees with immigration, tenant, or consumer issues; and job-protection measures for immigrant employees with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or Temporary Protected Status. Union representatives called the package “unprecedented.” And the spokesperson told me that many of the laid-off workers have since returned to the hotel.

After years of acrimony, how had such a seemingly unbridgeable gap been closed?

Balazs has never had a choirboy’s reputation. The bachelor made headlines for years with his steady rotation of celebrity love interests. A 2020 Tatler article described his life as “deliciously naughty,” noting his dedication to delivering “excess” to his guests and his reputation for “outrageous flirting.” Perhaps too outrageous. The actor Amanda Anka accused him of groping her in 2014, after the opening of Horrible Bosses 2. After the incident, Anka’s husband, Jason Bateman, spat in Balazs’s face.

But Balazs was apparently shaken by his employees’ charges, especially of racial discrimination. He felt that they were fundamentally at odds with who he was.

“André’s lived a life committed to social justice from his college years and throughout his adult life,” Neil Getnick, a lawyer specializing in whistleblower representation and one of Balazs’s oldest friends, told me. Getnick serves as the business-integrity counsel for Balazs’s properties. He also represented Balazs at the bargaining table.

Getnick and Balazs met at Cornell in the late ’70s when Getnick, a law student, and Balazs, an undergraduate working at a student newspaper, together lobbied the university to divest from apartheid-era South Africa. The ’90s, Getnick told me, found him and Balazs collaborating again, this time with the Reverend Jesse Jackson to free the Kenyan political prisoner Koigi wa Wamwere—another Cornell classmate. Later, the two friends established a scholarship in Kenya with, Getnick said, the support of Representative John Lewis. For a while Balazs was an investor in a New York nightclub called M.K.—“so called,” he said in an interview, “because we obtained the license on Martin Luther King Day.”

One day about a year ago, protesters outside the Chateau were joined by pastors and choir singers from nearby churches. Balazs, Getnick told me, found that “too much to bear,” and he went down to the picket line.

Pastor William D. Smart Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Southern California, spotted Balazs, and approached him. He later told me about the conversation: “We said, ‘Everyone wants to talk to you and try to resolve these issues.’” Smart recalled Balazs responding, “Well, you don’t know me, but I’m not the guy that they’re painting me out to be.”

A meeting was arranged. Getnick, Balazs, and union representatives convened for the first time, with Pastor Smart serving as mediator. But negotiations stalled; there was no follow-up. Early on Pentecost Sunday, Smart sat down to write his sermon, and was moved to call Balazs.

He told me that he asked Balazs, “Where have you been? What’s going on? We started something; you’re not finishing it.” And Balazs replied, “Well, there’s no excuse,” and bingo: “He made the commitment on that Sunday call that he would meet; he would start the process.” Six months later, they had a deal.

This, Getnick said, “was not at all typical of how these negotiations would typically proceed.” Which, of course, is how you would expect something to go down at Chateau Marmont.

I would like to think that the agreement will serve as a model for other luxury businesses—and certainly the hotel industry is watching—but I’m skeptical. Yes, the dogged commitment of workers and organizers is what brought injustices at Chateau Marmont to light. But this happy ending ultimately depended on the whims of one very wealthy man. One who—luckily—happened to be a Boomer with a soft spot for clergymen, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Yesterday, Jeff Bezos wanted to be a media mogul; today, a sports impresario. This whole thing could have easily gone a different way.

I also couldn’t help wondering how much the contract will change workers’ experience on the job. They’re better-compensated; they have retirement benefits and other protections. But the agreement does little to shield them from entitled or inebriated guests. It did what I used to do: It threw money at the problem.

This morning at the Chateau there will still be vomit to clean up from last night’s rager. Tonight, or the next, there will still be ass grabs by Hollywood honchos. I’m not sure whether a great place for the wealthy can ever be a great place for those who serve them. In a business where the key word is yes, unions can police employers, but the whole point of a luxury experience is that no one polices the guests.

Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman during HBO Films Pre Golden Globes Party Inside Coverage at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California.