Читать книгу The Suite Life - Christopher Heard - Страница 8

My fascination with hotels, hotel living, and hotel culture began probably subconsciously when I heard my grandmother and grandfather (Annie and Raoul Godin) talk about the years they worked in a magical-sounding place called the Royal York Hotel. Life in this magic castle seemed unlike that of anywhere else, as if there was the life that swirled outside the doors and the life that had a different, dreamlike quality inside. Then later, when I began actually visiting the Royal York for weekend city excursions, I got a taste of the atmosphere first hand. We all know that life has a certain feel and that dreams have a quality of their own. Being in the Royal York was somewhere in between — better than one but not as fleeting as the other.

The allure of the Royal York never seemed to wane for me. For my 18th birthday my parents treated me to a weekend at the hotel for me and my best friend to tear up the town for three days by ourselves. It was the first time I checked into the Royal York by myself. I remember that weekend as a time of bookstores and fast food and hanging around in the suite watching movies and enjoying the place. When I checked out, the desk person said, “I hope we see you back here soon.”

Even then I experienced the magnetism of the hotel, so I told her, “Oh, I’ll most certainly see you all again … and often!”

My love for hotels really ramped up when I started staying in many of the finest ones in the world to interview movie stars for television. I got to know hotels well, to appreciate what they felt like, and to understand what made great ones great and what made mediocre ones always chase but never attain that greatness. I rubbed shoulders with people who had accomplished what I was dreaming of doing — actually living in a hotel. I could now ask the celebrities, the hotel managers, and sometimes the hotel owners about the magic of hotels.

By natural extension, because I was always a writer first and a TV guy second, I began writing about hotels and hotel living for various newspapers and magazines. Travel editors and hoteliers alike loved my take on hotels because I wasn’t functioning as a hotel critic but as a hotel lover who wrote about the experience, the atmosphere, and the rhythm, not the thread count of sheets. With each new hotel experience I lived and each new hotel story I was told, another fibre was added to the fabric of my desire and dream to live in a hotel. I always knew that one day, without knowing when or under what circumstances, I was destined to fulfill my fantasy. Like Goethe once said, “Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.”

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In the introduction I mentioned that one of the initial sparks of inspiration that led to this book was reading about Howard Hughes and his long-time love affair with hotels. However, the billionaire’s fascination didn’t emerge in the last years of his life, as many believe, when he completely surrendered to his obsessions and compulsions. No, it actually began much earlier when Hughes hit Hollywood and became a director, producer, and mogul of sorts. He had a particular fondness for the renowned Beverly Hills Hotel, especially its famed pink stucco bungalows. In 1942 Hughes kept three or four bungalows on permanent reservation. He occupied one while his women, most often among them actress Jean Peters, had another. When Hughes was in residence at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the kitchen staff were told they should immediately make room for Hughes’s personal chef when he needed to use the kitchen. Apparently, Howard’s chef knew how to make his favourite pineapple upside-down cake, a duty the tycoon didn’t entrust to anyone else.

It wasn’t until the early to mid-1960s that Hughes, who had descended rapidly into a dark world of obsessive-compulsive disorders and paranoia, surrounded himself with Mormons as his aides and assistants. (Hughes believed Mormons could be trusted, since they were committed to a religious life and didn’t drink, use drugs, or gamble.) He began to live permanently in one hotel after another, usually taking up an entire penthouse floor for himself and booking another entire lower floor to house his staff. In the 1960s, Hughes still operated his businesses, and when he embarked on his major hotel living phase, he had just been issued the largest personal cheque in U.S. history ($566 million) after selling Trans World Airlines (TWA).

Billionaire Howard Hughes (1905–1976) was possibly the most eccentric long-time hotel resident who ever lived.

The action in Las Vegas around that time was really heating up. The city was starting to seem like the new Hollywood, or at least Tinseltown’s looser and wilder sister. Hughes and his Mormon army headed to Las Vegas and the Desert Inn (which was demolished in 2002 to make way for the Wynn Las Vegas Resort and Casino that stands in its place today), but the welcome wasn’t exactly warm and open-armed. The owner of the Desert Inn was a Las Vegas swashbuckler named Barney “Moe” Dalitz, who had been a friend of another Vegas buccaneer (actually, a stone-cold killer) named Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who had built the Flamingo Hotel with Mafia money and was murdered by his gangster pals when the return on their investment wasn’t what he had promised. Dalitz was very concerned about Hughes and his Mormon squad taking up so much of his hotel, especially with Christmas and the lucrative holiday season approaching. A deal was struck between Dalitz and Hughes. The billionaire could take over the top floor of the hotel for himself and one a few floors below for his staff, but they all had to be out on December 1. Hughes moved in and found it very much to his liking, so when December 1 came and went, he and his posse were still there.

Dalitz was beside himself with frustration. Hughes and Team Mormon were costing him money. With the holidays coming up, it was intolerable to have his hotel filled with Mormons who didn’t drink or gamble. Dalitz tried everything in his power to move Hughes out of the hotel, which really irritated the tycoon. So, flush with the TWA sale cash, Hughes simply bought the Desert Inn and moved Dalitz out. At the time this action was deemed very eccentric, but the best was yet to come. Once Hughes owned the hotel, he sealed of his floor from public access and had a security checkpoint mounted at the elevators to make sure no one tried to get onto his floor. He installed a movie screen and a projector with a full theatre sound system in his penthouse, and during his time there, he became obsessed with the Rock Hudson movie Ice Station Zebra. Hughes watched the film over and over at all hours of the night at full volume, causing other guests to complain that their windows were rattling and that booming sounds were disturbing their sleep.

Next door to the Desert Inn at the time was another hotel called the Silver Slipper, which boasted a giant neon slipper sign out front. Hughes became obsessed with that giant neon slipper so close to his hotel. He was afraid it was too big and would one day collapse and fall onto his hotel, so he bought the Silver Slipper in order to do something about the sign. Hughes went on to purchase four Las Vegas hotels and casinos before he was through, often simply because he could, not for any rational investment purpose.

Howard Hughes was now a creature of whim but on a grand scale. When he tired of Las Vegas, he went on an eccentric world tour of hotel living that took him and his Mormon crew first to Britannia Beach Hotel on the Bahamas’ Paradise Island. However, the stay there wasn’t as long as Hughes desired because of visa problems with a number of his entourage. It was underreported how many people were in the group, causing Bahamian authorities to raise questions. Rather than go through any kind of scrutiny, Hughes simply selected another hotel and moved on.

The billionaire next set his sights on Canada, but his original idea of relocating at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal soured when John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved in and wrote and recorded their iconic anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance” during their famous bed-in. Ideologically, that scene didn’t sit well with Hughes, since Hughes Aircraft made huge profits supplying the U.S. armed forces with planes and helicopters for use in the Vietnam War.

Hughes settled on Vancouver, British Columbia, and took over a good portion of the Bayshore Hotel at the entrance to Stanley Park. From there Hughes and his team headed to the Ritz-Carlton in Boston on the edge of Boston Common. Hughes was in Boston to establish a medical centre in his name because he believed all the best medical minds were currently in that city. Once that was done, Hughes returned to the Beverly Hills Hotel because he needed to conclude some business, including details surrounding his impending divorce from Jean Peters. When that was accomplished, the Hughes team flew to Acapulco. Hughes took up residence on the penthouse floor of the Fairmont Princess Hotel, where John Wayne and Lana Turner had also lived for a while.

While in Mexico, Hughes, an avid and voracious reader, got it into his head that the next emerging place worthy of investing in was Nicaragua. He agreed with what President Anastasio Somoza was doing in the region and liked that the United States had friendly relations with the country. So he and his squad moved to the splendid Inter-Continental near Lake Managua in Nicaragua, a beautiful structure built to resemble a pre-Colombian temple. In December 1972, while Hughes and his entourage were in Managua, a 6.5-magnitude earthquake rocked the region and did extensive damage to the city. Somoza instantly had Hughes and his people moved into a wing of his presidential palace until he could arrange to relocate (and so Hughes would still consider investing in his country). Within a few days Hughes and his Mormons were on their way to the Xanadu Princess Hotel in Freeport in the Bahamas, and yes, he did buy that hotel, as well, before moving in.

The Xanadu Princess was the last hotel Hughes lived in. He died a few years later on April 5, 1976. The details of his demise are sketchy at best. He lived his life so reclusively, so mysteriously, that the circumstances of his death can only be narrowed to two scenarios. One is that he was flying from his penthouse at the Fairmont Princess in Acapulco to the Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, for treatment of a kidney ailment. The other scenario has him dying while headed back to his home in the Xanadu Princess in Freeport from Houston after treatment for a kidney ailment.

A number of Hughes’s biographers have speculated on why Hughes chose to reside in hotels for many years. The general consensus comes down to his desire to live in a controlled, convenient environment where he could be in absolute seclusion if he wished but still be surrounded by a support structure that was always there and could always be counted on.

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Another person I met who had an interest in Howard Hughes and was a long-time hotel resident was actor/filmmaker Warren Beatty, who tried for years to make a movie about Hughes but could never quite pull it together. For just over ten years Beatty chose to live in the old, iconic Beverly Wilshire Hotel that is almost right across the street from Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. The actor was at loose ends in the early to mid-1960s, he was a Hollywood Lothario more famous for who he was dating than as an actor, he had been in a string of flops, and he had a bad reputation among directors and producers in town. Then a script landed in his lap, and he thought the best way to get it done was to produce it himself. The problem with his scheme, though, was that it was still the time of the studio system. To make a film at Warner Bros., for instance, you had to get the approval of Jack Warner himself. Actors usually didn’t produce movies, especially pretty-boy ones.

Beatty returned from Europe where he had been shooting on location. He didn’t have a place to live, so he checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in a suite on the penthouse floor. However, his suite wasn’t as grandiose as the penthouse might indicate. He had a two-room suite, a large living room, and a bedroom divided with sliding French doors. What made the penthouse floor attractive was that the suites came with a large terrace off both the bedroom and the living room. Beatty checked into the hotel because it was a favourite haunt of his. (The Boulevard Restaurant and Boulevard Lounge were great spots to be seen having meetings in the old Hollywood.) It wasn’t his initial intention to remain there for more than ten years, but the comfort and the convenience became something he grew used to very quickly. “I can say I didn’t intend to live in the hotel that long, but since I wasn’t really actively thinking of an alternative, I must have been just fine with the arrangement,” Beatty told me. He lived in the Beverly Wilshire from age 28 through 39.

On May 9, 1998, I sat down with Beatty in a huge suite in the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. It was one of those warm, fragrant Southern California days that capture the very essence of why so many people drift out there and never leave. The interview was being shot for television, so Beatty asked for a good deal of control as to how it would be staged. He wasn’t comfortable doing television interviews, but he was proud of his most recent film, the political satire Bulworth, and was prepared to bite this particular bullet. When I entered the suite, he worked with the lighting people to arrange how the room was lit. The illumination was quite soft and gave him an almost gauzy look on screen. Beatty was still a handsome man, so I thought the vanity lighting was unnecessary. He was comfortably dressed in corduroy pants and a thin sweater and seemed extraordinarily talkative, especially when the subject of hotels came up. I mentioned my fascination for hotels to him and asked him about his experiences living in one.

“I had been living in hotels on and off for years, anyway,” Beatty said. “That’s the kind of transient, transitory life of an actor, so when you’re doing that kind of work, it isn’t a matter of liking or not liking hotel living. It’s almost a necessity.” But transient and transitory, I suggested, didn’t define a place you choose to live for more than a decade. “No, but that wasn’t the intention when I first moved into the Beverly Wilshire. I wanted a good central location to stay for a while during a time I was going through some career re-evaluation and adjustment. Then a month became two, two became six, a year became three …”

When I asked Beatty what was the one thing that sprang to mind about living in a hotel that made it something he elected to do rather than something he was forced to do out of work necessity, he said, “It’s very convenient and it’s very simple. Those two things are actually one in the same. When you live a simple, uncluttered existence, you gain a kind of personal freedom that’s very convenient. Living in a hotel removes many little decisions and choices in the day, and once you get used to not having to make all those little decisions, you don’t even think about them anymore and you have that much more time to do the things you’re trying to get done.”

During Beatty’s time in the Beverly Wilshire, he instructed the front desk to allow calls through to his suite without screening them first, since he loved talking on the phone. Those who visited his suite, such as his long-time friend and collaborator screenwriter Robert Towne, described the suite as “full of books and scripts and magazines.” Towne also told me: “Warren would always have at least one room service tray in the room. He would order room service, then forget to call down to have them pick up the tray, as he would be off on another phone call or get caught up in another meeting. Not that the space was messy. It wasn’t at all. It was all very ordered and arranged and neat, but you could look around the suite and get a pretty good picture of what kinds of things interested him and what kinds of things didn’t.”

After the enormous critical and financial success of Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty’s Beverly Wilshire suite became a busy hub of activity, meetings, and conferences all day. Romantic encounters abounded. The Beverly Wilshire became known partly as the place where Warren Beatty lived. Beautiful women seen in the lobby were naturally assumed to be on their way up to the penthouse, and because Beatty made the rare arrangement with the front desk that his calls be relayed directly to his room without screening, the hotel had no idea which women were invited by prior arrangement by Beatty and which were trying to catch his fancy, something that ultimately made living in the Beverly Wilshire quite inconvenient for him.

Beatty left the Beverly Wilshire in the early 1970s around the time he was making Shampoo. By that time he had been in the hotel for almost ten years, his star had grown much brighter, and his reputation had become far more dynamic. Because Beatty’s lifestyle was a kind of love ’em and leave ’em one, there were more than a few disgruntled women, husbands, and boyfriends out there. And, of course, everyone knew he lived in the Beverly Wilshire. Beatty was made even more uncomfortable when the Beverly Wilshire built an addition that looked down on Beatty’s once-secluded terrace.

But let’s get back to the connection between Howard Hughes and Warren Beatty. When I asked Beatty where his interest in Hughes came from, he told me he had been actively trying to develop a major film based on the later years of the billionaire. The actor could have certainly pulled off the feat. The movie he did after Shampoo, The Fortune, featured him styled to look like Hughes, slicked-back hair, thin moustache, and all. In this role he resembled a slightly more handsome version of the real Hughes.

Beatty told me he had purchased a house on Mulholland Drive in the hills above Sunset Boulevard (nicknamed then Bad Boy Drive because Beatty’s new neighbours were Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando) but seemed in no hurry to occupy the house. After he left the Beverly Wilshire, he moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel where he worked day after day with writer Robert Towne and director Hal Ashby on the Shampoo screenplay. One night Beatty noticed two big guys in black suits at the end of his hallway as he returned to his suite. Then he noticed another two equally stern-looking black-suited dudes at the opposite end of the hallway. Once in his suite, the oversensitive, borderline paranoid Beatty called down to the front desk and demanded to know who the guys were in the hallway. Clearly, they were bodyguards of one sort or another. The man at the desk explained that he wasn’t allowed to divulge that kind of information, even though he was aware he was speaking to Warren Beatty.

Not someone to be denied anything, Beatty persisted and wore down the desk attendant in short order. The man explained that these fellows were Mormon bodyguards for Howard Hughes. Beatty peppered the desk attendant with questions, starting with “Is Hughes in the suite next to mine?”

“Who knows?” the desk clerk said.

Hughes had reserved six suites and was in one of them, but not even the staff knew which one. Beatty then asked the desk attendant why Hughes didn’t take the secluded bungalows the hotel offered.

“Well,” replied the desk attendant, “Mr. Hughes actually does have four of the bungalows set aside, as well.”

Beatty asked why they were kept empty.

The deskman said, “Oh, they aren’t empty, Mr. Beatty. The bungalows are where Mr. Hughes keeps his women.”

It hardly seems coincidental that it was around this time that Warren Beatty began to develop his own ideas of one day playing the legendary billionaire on the screen.

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There is a spot in Los Angeles that is home to actor James Woods and has been for the past four years. The hotel is called L’Ermitage, or more accurately Raffles L’Ermitage (ermitage is French for “retreat”). Having stayed at Raffles L’Ermitage a number of times myself, I can fully attest to its luxury. The hotel was built in the 1970s as a high-end condo. Because of its proximity to the shopping on Rodeo Drive and to Sunset Boulevard in the other direction, the location is perfect. Thanks to the configurations of the layout when Raffles L’Ermitage was a condo, the standard rooms are actually quite large (over 675 square feet per standard room). The name of this hotel is appropriate, since unless you know exactly where you’re going, you’ll miss it. And that’s precisely why both Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor chose the place to recover quietly from cosmetic surgery.

I first met Woods at L’Ermitage before he was living there and before I was residing in the Royal York. My objective was to interview him about a role in Where the Boys Are, a movie he was starring in opposite Drew Barrymore. I was in a nice suite overlooking the Hollywood Hills; he was in a larger suite where we set up our on-camera interview. As we got ready, we chatted about our love of cool hotels and about the hotel we were in. We talked about our mutual wish one day to live in a hotel, and it was funny that while Woods was still a few years away from moving into L’Ermitage, he looked around the suite and said, “This might not be such a bad choice right here.”

Jump ahead six years. I was back in Los Angeles at L’Ermitage and once again speaking to James Woods, only by now he had actually been living in the hotel for more than a year. Of course, living in the hotel was our first order of business for conversation. “I was having problems with my house,” Woods told me, “structural things that needed work, some repairs. The house was in need of some substantial renovations and repairs. I had an estimate done and found that it was going to cost almost what the house cost all over again, so I just got rid of the house and moved in here with the intention of staying until I decided where I wanted to live next. But after a few weeks, then a few months, it kind of dawned on me that I loved living here, that this was where I wanted to live next.”

I pressed Woods on the pros and cons of choosing the life of a hotel liver, and he said, “Well, it can get a bit pricey in a place like this, but you balance it off with the added comfort and the significant convenience, and it becomes something that can be quite reasonably justified.” Woods spoke about the little things you grow used to when you live in a hotel. “One thing that is kind of nice is that I can ask one of the guys [bellmen] here to take my dog for a walk, and he happily does it. I’m not using the guy as a slave. It’s like he’s a pal doing another pal a favour. You can always count on that pal to do you that favour when needed. I bought the main guy a very nice set of golf clubs as a way of thanking him for always being there when I need him.”

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Other than my beloved Royal York in Toronto, perhaps my favourite hotel in the world is Chateau Marmont, located in the eight thousand block of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. That venerable place is as much a part of Hollywood as the Academy Awards and is one of the few hotels in the world that wears its notoriety like a badge of honour. Construction on Chateau Marmont began in 1927, and it opened for business two years later. California attorney Fred Horowitz built the hotel after being inspired by the Château d’Amboise in the Loire Valley in France. The hotel is tucked away off Sunset Boulevard and is accessible only by a steep, winding driveway. (Celebrity photographer Helmut Newton died when he lost control of his car on this serpentine driveway and crashed into the high wall beside it.) Horowitz made sure, to his brilliant foresight, that the hotel was erected well above the contemporary standards for earthquake-proofing, and because of that the hotel survived major earthquakes in 1933, 1953, 1971, 1987, and 1994. (I was actually in Chateau Marmont during the 1994 tremors, my first such experience with an earthquake. As instructed, I stood in the doorframe until the swaying and rumbling stopped, then West Hollywood went immediately back to being cool and laid-back.)

Chateau Marmont consists of a main building with standard rooms, larger suites, and penthouse suites with big terraces that overlook Sunset Boulevard and Beverly Hills. There are also four bungalows in the garden by the swimming pool. Strangely, to the discerning hotel person, Chateau Marmont is actually quite grungy on the surface, but that’s also a major part of its charm and a chief reason why Hollywood actors and musicians are drawn to the place. In 1990, when the high-flying New York hotelier André Balazs bought Chateau Marmont, he announced he was going to upgrade the establishment but quickly reversed himself when many of the better-known patrons of the hotel objected. They told him that if he messed with the hotel and diminished its charm and atmosphere, they would find a new spot to play in. Balazs did do some minor work and upgrades on the hotel, but they were done so that most people hardly noticed them.

Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood is one of the most famous celebrity hotels, having been the site of Marilyn Monroe’s suicide and John Belushi’s drug overdose death.

Movie mogul Harry Cohn once said to his new star actors William Holden and Glenn Ford, “If you’re going to get caught doing something indiscreet, make sure you get caught doing it at Chateau Marmont.” Before taking up residence in the Beverly Hills Hotel, Howard Hughes moved into the attic at Chateau Marmont because it overlooked the swimming pool. He would survey the pool with powerful binoculars, searching for beautiful starlets whom he would then have an assistant summon for him.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald had pretty much come to the end of his productive years as a novelist, he went to Hollywood to accept lucrative writing gigs from the studios and chose to live at Chateau Marmont where he suffered a massive heart attack. Judy Garland was fond of sitting in the lounge off the reception area where there was a grand piano. She would play the piano and sing at the top of her lungs while the hotel staff went about their business around her.

Vivien Leigh resided in the hotel’s suite 5D (at Chateau Marmont suites are assigned letters and numbers, the number indicating the floor, the letter the suite) after breaking up with her husband, Laurence Olivier. She was so traumatized by her estrangement that she had the entire living room area wallpapered top to bottom with photographs of the Shakespearean actor. However, in the bedroom of the suite there was just one picture of the two of them together that rested on the pillow beside where she slept.

In the 1950s, when bad-boy director Nicholas Ray lived in one of the bungalows at Chateau Marmont during the casting of his movie Rebel Without a Cause, a new young hothead actor named James Dean wanted to meet with him and talk about the film. Ray struck an intimidating figure — tall, black eye patch over one eye, gruff-voiced. He said he would meet Dean when he was good and ready. One night, while Ray was auditioning three actors — Natalie Wood, Dennis Hopper, and Sal Mineo — who made it into the legendary film, they were all startled by the commotion of the screen on one of the windows being ripped open. To their astonishment, Dean was crawling in through the window, demanding that he be allowed to audition for the role that eventually made him a celluloid icon. He fell into the bungalow onto a table that collapsed under him. Then he got to his feet and said that Ray had two choices: let him read or call the cops. Ray let him read.

A few years later, in 1956, another major heartthrob actor, Montgomery Clift, was in Los Angeles shooting a film called Raintree County with Elizabeth Taylor. One night, halfway through filming, Clift left a party at the home of Taylor and her then husband, Michael Wilding. His friend actor Kevin McCarthy was in another car ahead of Clift. The intoxicated Clift slammed his car into a telephone pole and was severely injured. His once-beautiful face was broken and mangled when it smashed against the steering wheel. McCarthy returned to Taylor’s house to get help. When Taylor heard about the accident, she rushed to the scene, cradled Clift in his wrecked vehicle, and stopped him from choking on his broken teeth. The stricken actor was minutes away from dying when help arrived. After Clift was released from the hospital, Taylor arranged for him to move into Chateau Marmont for as long as he needed to recuperate.

In the 1960s, West Hollywood was abuzz with the changing music scene. Just down from Chateau Marmont is the legendary nightclub Whisky a Go-Go. It was in that club that Jim Morrison and The Doors broke out. And it was in Chateau Marmont where Jim Morrison claimed he had used up “eight of my nine lives.” One of his most famous used-up lives occurred one evening when he was as high as a weather balloon and decided to take a shortcut from a rooftop terrace to his suite by leaping for a drainpipe and trying to swing into the window of his room. He barely made it and injured his back painfully in the process. Morrison used up life number nine in a hotel in Paris on July 3, 1971.

Chateau Marmont has seen tragedy as well as typical Hollywood antics. In 1982 comic actor John Belushi was living in one of the bungalows flush with the success of Saturday Night Live and his transition to movies, but he had also given in to the more self-indulgent aspects of Hollywood celebrity. Belushi was a well-known drug user and boozer whose intake of both grew daily. One warm night Belushi took his drug habit up a notch and injected himself with a lethal combination of heroin and cocaine that finally killed him. Another resident of the hotel and friend of Belushi, Robert De Niro, was so shocked by the comedian’s death that it caused him to re-evaluate his own life and career. De Niro lived in one of Chateau Marmont’s penthouse suites for two years.

Today Chateau Marmont is still a gathering place for hip Hollywood. The troubled actress Lindsay Lohan stayed there for a few years (2006 through 2008), and it was her preferred sanctuary after her drunk-driving arrest. One of Lohan’s friends, Britney Spears, has the rare distinction of being barred a few times from Chateau Marmont for being unruly. When you’re barred from Chateau Marmont for unruliness then it’s a certainty you were being truly unruly.

The hotel continues to be featured in movies. Sofia Coppola, the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, sets her 2010 film Somewhere in Chateau Marmont. In the movie Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a newly famous film star doing publicity for his latest flick while living in the hotel. Like many of his real-life counterparts, Johnny behaves badly in the hotel, drinking, drugging, and fornicating between bouts of driving around in his Ferrari and reacquainting himself with his preteen daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning).

Actor Keanu Reeves, who doesn’t own a home in Los Angeles, has lived in Chateau Marmont for years. He was photographed as late as February 2010 strolling out of the hotel, a place he finds comfortable, secluded, and familiar. Knowing that Reeves has resided in the hotel for a long time, I was curious about that part of his secretive life. I had a lengthy conversation with him in the Essex House Hotel in New York City where he was promoting The Devil’s Advocate, a movie he did with Al Pacino. Between interviews we sat in an empty suite where Keanu wanted to watch some of the Dallas Cowboys’ football games on TV. Outside of the formality of a structured on-camera Q and A we were free to chat about anything (except the movie he was promoting, of course; he was already tired of talking about that). We spoke about his youth in Toronto and how he skipped school to hang out in the pinball arcade in Union Station across Front Street from the Royal York.

I asked Reeves what it was about living in hotels that appealed to him. “After I started working in films regularly,” he said, “it was a big part of that life. I would live in hotels while on location and then live in hotels in L.A. when I was between films because I seemed to be only there for a couple of months before having to head out on a location again. So it became what I’m used to pretty quickly. I’m heading to Australia soon to make a film, and I’ll be there probably for the better part of a year.”

Reeves said the difference between living in a secluded private residence in Los Angeles and the relative public nature of living in a hotel, especially given the fact that he is a private man, is: “There’s a convenience and a simplicity and a lack of complication about living in a hotel, and there are layers of security that allow you to just withdraw into your space within the hotel and relax or do whatever you want with the confidence that you aren’t going to be bothered.” I then asked him why he chose Chateau Marmont as his hotel of choice. “I stayed there early on when I started getting some work, and it was just a very cool place to be. The building is old and rich with history, and the location of the place is pretty ideal. It’s where a lot of meetings happen, and it’s where a lot of other actors you end up knowing hang out. I really like it there. I find it very comfortable.”

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Hotels like Chateau Marmont are grungy almost by design. They straddle that fine line between grungy hip and plain grungy and do it in such a way that it becomes a selling point, a mythical energy that emanates outward and draws people there. Then there are other hotels that gain well-earned notoriety with no sense or plan of becoming part of a larger legend or myth and without any intention of making their fame a marketing strategy. One such hotel is the Chelsea in New York City. Situated at 222 West 23rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, the Chelsea has been a hub of New York’s artistic, cultural, and bohemian activity for almost 130 years. When the Chelsea, a 12-storey red-brick structure, opened its doors in 1884, it was briefly the tallest building in Manhattan. The hotel was originally intended as the city’s first-ever apartment co-operative. Back then Manhattan’s Chelsea district was a bustling part of town, but when the theatres and other attractions relocated uptown, the co-operative went under. In 1905 the building reopened as the hotel it remains to this day.

One of the architectural delights of Hotel Chelsea is the ornate staircase that reaches from the ground floor all the way to the top floor, a staircase that isn’t accessible to the public, only to registered guests. An early story of the Chelsea to make the papers the world over was when several of the survivors of the sinking of the Titanic were taken there to live because of the hotel’s proximity to Pier 54 where they arrived.

The Chelsea became even more celebrated around the globe as a place where writers and artists not only lived but created some of the greatest works of art and literature of the modern age. This fact is something that interests me a lot, since it’s been my experience that I’ve produced more work as a hotel resident than I ever did otherwise. The people and achievements associated with the Chelsea are too numerous to recount here. They would, in fact, make a book all by themselves and have done so a number of times, including in Ed Hamilton’s excellent Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Legends and Outlaws of New York’s Rebel Mecca. The short list of highs and lows at the Chelsea includes Arthur C. Clarke writing his landmark novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jack Kerouac penning his bohemian novel On the Road. Other authors who lived in the Chelsea are Mark Twain, Arthur Miller, Thomas Wolfe, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Charles R. Jackson wrote the novel The Lost Weekend while living in the Chelsea, then killed himself there. It is also a legend that poet Dylan Thomas died of alcohol poisoning in his suite at the Chelsea, but that isn’t entirely true. He collapsed in his home at the Chelsea but didn’t die until a few days later in a hospital.

Filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Milos Forman also resided in the Chelsea, as did actor/director/author Ethan Hawke. When I spoke with Hawke about his sojourn at the Chelsea, he said, “I have never been so inspired by a place ever, and not inspired in any way that is conscious. I cannot say that because of this I was inspired to do that. The whole fucking place just seemed to be alive, literally alive, like you could feel it breathing and thinking.” Hawke refers to the Chelsea in his novels Ash Wednesday and The Hottest State, and in 2002 he made a film called Chelsea Walls, which he directed and financed himself. It was shot on digital video and was a look at a day in the life of several artists living in the Chelsea at the same time.

Musicians who have called the Chelsea home are Edith Piaf, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, and Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols, who, on October 12, 1978, stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death in their suite. Visual artists once in residence at the Chelsea include Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Willem de Kooning, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many of Andy Warhol’s crew. Warhol made a film in 1966 entitled Chelsea Girls about the female members of his so-called Factory who called the Chelsea home.

New York City’s Hotel Chelsea is much loved by creative types as a short-term or long-term residence. Authors, artists, filmmakers, and musicians such as Mark Twain, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dylan Thomas, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diego Rivera, Milos Forman, Stanley Kubrick, Bob Dylan, Sid Vicious, and Edith Piaf have stayed here.

At present the Chelsea is still the residence of a number of long-term occupants, the longest of whom is Susanne Bartsch, a Swiss-born socialite who makes a living organizing and hosting outlandish New York nightlife parties. She has lived in the Chelsea for 20 years. Today the hotel has been refurbished into a respectable, almost upscale hotel. It wears its history proudly, but if you’re coming to the Chelsea to stay where Jack Kerouac drank and feverishly wrote On the Road, then you’ll be staying within the same walls, of course, but the place will be worlds away from the 1950s.

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A trend I find curious arose in New York City in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hoteliers bought up warehouses or office buildings and converted them into small hotels with a few rooms and rechristened them “boutique” hotels, even though they weren’t that by classic definition. They were merely small hotels. In the swinging 1960s in London, England, the term boutique hotel came into existence to describe establishments that were smaller, catered to the hip crowd, and offered amenities the big hotels couldn’t, such as addressing guests by their first names and providing particular needs ahead of being asked simply by knowing what those needs were. Now any hotel under 100 rooms receives the boutique label, even though they are nothing more than smaller versions of big hotels.

I spent some time in one such New York City “boutique” hotel that was considered super-chic and described itself as a seamless fusion of uptown luxury and downtown cool: the Chambers Hotel on Fifth Avenue just off 56th Street. Location-wise you couldn’t ask for a better spot. The Chambers is steps away from the main shopping section of Fifth Avenue and a short stroll to Broadway and Times Square, but the suites seem to strain, groan, and stretch themselves into an approximation of ultra-cool so that you won’t notice that the lobby is tiny, the lounge area is claustrophobic, and that what you can order to eat is extremely limited. The suite I was in had bare industrial concrete walls. The ceilings, too, were brutalist concrete, only they had exposed air duct tubing, as well. The bathroom had a modern rain shower but was quite tight and small. Notepaper on the desk was on a roll. You rolled it out onto the desk, made notes, then tore it off.

Of course, I understand the need to be unique and a little cooler than the guy down the block, but a hotel needs to consider one thing above all else — comfort. Every hotel guest I’ve ever questioned answers comfort when I ask what the first thing they expect from a hotel they’ve chosen. And while I’m not saying the Chambers Hotel doesn’t have an atmosphere of New York hipster cool, I can only relate my personal experiences with it. Waking up that first morning there, I had the feeling I was secretly moved during the night from a hotel room to the boiler room in the basement.

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In Canada the hotel landscape that resembles New York’s the most is Montreal’s. Both cities have a vast array of big old hotels with rich histories, brand-new modern versions of boutique hotels, and large convention-size chain hotels all functioning alongside one another by providing guests with what they need and expect. A Montreal establishment about the same size as the Chambers Hotel in New York is Hotel Godin at 10 Sherbrooke Street West. The chief difference between the Chambers and Hotel Godin is that the latter (which has the maiden name of my mother coincidentally) offers up minimalist cool, elegance, and chic but does so by enveloping its guests in shaded comfort. The walls are painted deep red, dark orange, and dark grey, and the rooms and suites have a high-tech look, but the beds and furniture are comfortable and cozy.

Hotel Godin was troubled since it opened in 2004. It never established a proper restaurant, which is essential in any hotel for it to be recommended over another hostelry. Because the hotel has a good location and because it was beautifully designed, it caught the eye of West Coast developer Trilogy Properties, which stepped in and transformed the place from the Godin into Opus Montreal. The first thing the new boss, John Evans, did was put in motion a multi-million-dollar plan to add a 1,800-square-foot restaurant as well as complete the never-finished terrace lounge and add an additional 500-square-foot bar separate from the restaurant. The scheme involved making the former Hotel Godin as close to what a real boutique operation should be.

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In the 1950s, British-born but Canadian-raised author Arthur Hailey was a writer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and got his first taste of success when he wrote a television drama called Flight into Danger, which was about a plane put into peril because of food poisoning. Paramount Pictures bought the rights to the drama and made a big-screen film entitled Zero Hour. (Decades later Paramount did a wildly funny spoof of the story with Airplane!) The story was so successful that Hailey was encouraged to write it as a novel. Runway Zero-Eight was published in 1958 and was well received. Hailey had found a new niche for his talents. He became known for tales that featured a multitude of diverse characters weaving in and out of one another’s lives within the context of a single setting, industry, or profession. His next book, The Final Diagnosis (1959), was situated in a big-city hospital’s pathology department. He followed that with In High Places, which has a backdrop of Cold War paranoia in North America. Then he turned his attention to the Royal York Hotel for his fourth novel, simply called Hotel.

Hailey had always been fascinated by the world within a world that hotels are and wanted to write a novel about what goes on in a suite juxtaposed against what transpires in the executive offices, the sort of things the general hotel guest would never imagine happening. He decided he wanted the setting for his novel to be a regal old hotel that had the distinction and colour of a long and storied history. Hailey needed a hotel that would be accessible to his audience. He didn’t want a hotel like the Ritz in Paris or the Waldorf-Astoria in New York because they were too well-known and too luxurious. If he used a model like that, his story would become focused on the place, not set in the place, would become about the hotel and not so much about the people in the hotel. He had to live in a hotel before he wrote his novel and knew he would be fictionalizing the establishment for added literary freedom. Without much thinking or searching, he chose Toronto’s Royal York.

The bestselling author’s methodology when writing a book was to do at least a year of research, followed by six months or so of reviewing and digesting everything he had come up with, then another year to construct the novel from the ground up. His research stint living in the Royal York began in mid-1962 and continued almost to the end of 1963. During his time in the Royal York, he read almost 30 books on hotel administration and made a detailed survey of the hotel from top to bottom.

Arthur Hailey’s Hotel was a mammoth bestseller from the moment it first appeared in 1965.

Hailey relocated his story from Toronto to New Orleans and renamed his hotel the St. Gregory, but every description in his book belongs to the Royal York. Knowing the Royal York as intimately as I do made for a strange experience when I first read Hotel. Hailey describes a character walking down the stairs, then out the ornate entranceway onto Corondelet Street. Well, I walk out those doors myself hundreds of times, and they don’t lead to Corondelet Street in New Orleans but to Front Street in Toronto. As dense as the book is in terms of characters and the dramas they’re involved in, the whole story plays out over five days. It has been suggested that Hailey based his novel not on the Royal York in Toronto but on the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, another iconic hostelry that was coincidentally bought by the Fairmont chain in 1965, the year of the novel’s publication, and renamed first the Fairmont Roosevelt and then later dubbed the Fairmont New Orleans. However, that supposition doesn’t make sense, since Hailey did all his research while living in the Royal York.

Like many of Hailey’s novels, Hotel was translated into a movie first and then a long-running TV series 16 years later (a testament to the popularity of the book and its subject matter). In 1967 Warner Bros. released the film version of Hotel, directed by Richard Quine. It was extremely faithful to the book and starred Rod Taylor, Merle Oberon, Michael Rennie, and my pal Karl Malden, who will turn up in this book again a little later and a lot more personally. On September 21, 1983, a television series based on Hailey’s novel debuted. It was directed by Jerry London (Shogun), the king of the miniseries, and starred James Brolin, who was twice nominated for Golden Globe Awards for his work in the show, as was his female co-lead Connie Sellecca. The series, produced by Aaron Spelling, was a solid hit and ran for five seasons and 116 episodes. The St. Gregory Hotel in the television series was moved once again, this time from New Orleans to San Francisco. Much of the on-location work was done at the Fairmont San Francisco Hotel where to this day you can call down and have the pilot episode shown on your in-room entertainment system.

Apart from Hailey’s contribution to the canon, there have been 16 other films and TV shows called simply Hotel, and they come from everywhere — France, India, Japan. Strangely, the one theme that occurs more often than not in the non-Hailey versions is that of a man or woman waiting alone in a hotel for a love who isn’t returning for whatever reason.

Perhaps the most notorious of the hotel books that also became a movie and a television series is Stephen King’s classic The Shining. I first read King’s chilling novel when I was a kid who already had a healthy love of hotels and a real familiarity with the Royal York, so the hotel setting and haunting King prose held me in a tight grip from first page to last. In the novel a writer/teacher and his wife and young son spend a long winter alone as caretakers in a fictional hotel called the Overlook in the Colorado Rockies. Awful things happened in the hotel in the past possibly because it was built on an old Native American burial site. Slowly, the writer, Jack Torrance, descends into madness, the same insanity that appears to have befallen other caretakers in years gone by. The question posed seems to be: Does evil live in the walls and the fabrics of the Overlook, or has Jack been driven crazy simply by being alone in a huge old hotel in the dead of winter for months on end?

In the late 1970s, Kubrick wanted to explore the horror genre. Slasher or splatter horror films were coming out weekly at the time and making small fortunes, which prompted Kubrick to think of making a movie that was as intellectually stimulating as it was scary. So he instructed his assistant to buy the ten top-selling horror novels of the day. She reported sitting outside his closed door, listening to book after book thump against a wall. Kubrick would read ten or 15 pages, then throw the book away. Eventually, 20 minutes went by without any thumping, then a half-hour, then an hour. The assistant peeked inside the office to see Kubrick engrossed in The Shining.

Kubrick was American but chose to live and work in Britain where he made all his movies no matter where they were set (he even shot a Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket, there). He created much of the Overlook on soundstages and backlots at Elstree Studios, but the exteriors of the hotel were shot by a second unit at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon. However, the managers of the Timberline would only grant permission to use their property in the film if Kubrick took out a reference to room 217 as the place where all the notorious and gruesome things happen. They were scared that no one would ever want to stay in that room again! Kubrick complied and changed the room number to 237, which isn’t a number the Timberline uses. But what really made the hotel aspect of the film so effective was the use of long hallways, huge, ornate ballrooms, and sumptuous lobbies filled with comfortable furniture and giant fireplaces — the ambience of delightfully comfortable isolation.

As Torrance slips into madness, that isolation is one of the triggers, but as a hotel lover, I was intrigued by the scenes where Jack loses himself in delusions and believes he isn’t alone but in a giant, noisy celebration in a ballroom filled with people. That’s one of the interesting things about living in a hotel. You can be absolutely solitary in a socially relaxed crowd if you want. The choice is entirely yours. If you need to be blanketed in the comfort of your suite, you only need to shut the door and you’re in your own little world. And if you feel the need to be around people, you’re an elevator ride from that, as well.

The Shining, both novel and film, wonderfully captures the essence of what makes big, old hotels great: when you’re there, you’re exposed to the collective energies of all that took place before you. Venerable hotels wear their history like comfortable old sweaters. When The Shining became a 1997 television miniseries, the locations were a lot more authentic to the book than were Kubrick’s. King wrote the teleplay for the TV series himself, while Kubrick created his own screenplay with Diane Johnson, his writing partner. The miniseries’ director, Mick Garris, shot the show in Colorado, using the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park as his setting. This version, in which Stephen Webber plays Jack Torrance in a less manic, strangely more effective manner than Jack Nicholson does, stays much closer to the tone and substance of the novel.

But of all the hotel horror books that have been made into movies, one of the most wildly entertaining is 1408, which few people seem to have seen. Again the story was hatched in the darkly fertile mind of Stephen King. However, what is wonderfully odd about the narrative this time is that while it was actually inspired by a real guy and a real (supposedly) series of events, the tale itself was never intended as anything more than an example in King’s instruction book On Writing of how to revise short stories. As he began penning the story for that purpose, King found himself getting deeper and deeper into it until it became a fully realized novella.

The story concerns a writer whose specialty is debunking paranormal myths. In the course of his research he is drawn to the dreaded room 1408 in the Dolphin Hotel in New York City, a suite that is said to be so haunted that the establishment has permanently declared the room off-limits. The writer, played by John Cusack, is convinced this will be his next great investigation, even though the manager of the hotel, played by Samuel L. Jackson, tells him that in the hotel’s 95-year history 56 people have died in the room and that people never seem to last more than an hour once inside. Again King employs the notion that big, old hotels contain a lot of stored-up energy from all the different people who have come and gone and all the events that have transpired within their walls. For my money this film (and story) far out-creeps The Shining in terms of hotel horror. The inspiration for the tale was derived from the real-life activities of parapsychologist Christopher Chacon’s investigation of the notoriously haunted suite of Hotel Del Coronado in Coronado, California.

Even directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez got into the old-hotel-as-perfect-setting realm when they collaborated with two other hot young directors, Alexandre Rockwell and Allison Anders, on the 1995 anthology film Four Rooms. (Actually, the movie was supposed to be called Five Rooms, since Richard Linklater was slated to do a segment, as well, but dropped out before production began.) This film is set on New Year’s Eve at the venerable Mon Signor Hotel in Hollywood. It is the first night on the job for a new bellman played by Tim Roth (the role was written specifically for Steve Buscemi, who ultimately had to turn it down due to scheduling reasons) who has to deal with four crazy sets of guests during his inaugural shift. West Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont was used during the shooting.

Of all the movies, television shows, and novels set in or about hotels, perhaps the grandest of them all is Grand Hotel from 1932. It stars Greta Garbo, who utters her signature line and somewhat prophetic statement, “I want to be alone,” in the film. Based on a Broadway show adapted from a German play about the life and times of a luxurious Berlin hotel, this movie was audacious for a number of reasons. First, it was one of the initial films to buck the two-star formula of the day. Studio bosses, especially young Irving Thalberg who was running Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at the time, believed that for a movie to be cost-effective no more than two big stars could be in it, otherwise salaries would cause the film to be budget-heavy and the studio would be unable to recoup its expenses. Grand Hotel featured the top five stars in the MGM stable and ended up being one of the biggest-grossing movies in the history of the studio up to that point. The film is still the only picture to win the Best Picture Oscar without being nominated in any other category.

Garbo and co-star Joan Crawford (who never appear in any scenes together) also made Grand Hotel legendary for their monumentally ridiculous diva behaviour while working on the set. There were two things that Garbo really hated: lateness and Marlene Dietrich. So, because Joan Crawford was terribly angry that Garbo was getting top billing in Grand Hotel, she exacted a bit of revenge by always showing up late and playing Marlene Dietrich records loudly between the shooting of scenes. Garbo, for her part, demanded that the colossal and ornate hotel set be lit a smoky red during rehearsals to get her in a romantic mood.

Incidentally, the original MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas (now where Bally’s is) was designed to resemble the Berlin hotel built on the MGM soundstages for Grand Hotel. As a further side note, Garbo herself lived in the Fairmont Miramar, a hotel in Santa Monica, California, in the 1920s and presumably found some of the solitude she sought.

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The Fairmont Miramar is known as a celebrity hideaway and has been such since Greta Garbo famously made it one. She was followed in the 1930s by Jean Harlow, who lived in the Miramar for years. In the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe, who spent most of her Hollywood days in hotels, resided in the Miramar. Most recently the Miramar was the hotel Britney Spears lived in while her Malibu mansion was being renovated.

Because of my long and deep history with Toronto’s Royal York, I tend to use that hotel as the standard by which I compare all others. In Los Angeles, as I mentioned earlier, I have a great fondness for Chateau Marmont due to its colourful Hollywood history. However, the L.A. hotel I most closely associate with the Royal York is a lovely place on Stone Canyon Road called Hotel Bel-Air. The Bel-Air has been around since 1946 but was originally built as a relaxing, secluded office space to service the Bel-Air Estates development mushrooming in the canyon area in the early 1950s. The structures that now make up the Bel-Air were bought by Joseph Drown, a Texan, who converted it into a 91-room hotel. He added lush grounds, a wonderful swan lake (with swans so big they look almost prehistoric), and a footbridge that guests must cross to enter the hotel.

Part of the charm of the Bel-Air is its relative seclusion deep in a canyon surrounded by trees and vegetation. When I stayed there, despite the relative isolation, I could still jog from the hotel to Sunset Boulevard in 20 minutes, only to get lost on a daily basis on the way back in the seemingly endless, twisty canyon roads. I spent a fair amount of time at the Bel-Air a few years ago and fell in love instantly with the place when I was told I’d be staying in the same suite Marilyn Monroe once occupied. As I was being shown to my suite by the delightful (and award-winning) concierge Charles Fitzer, we passed the large palm-tree-ringed oval swimming pool. Charles pointed out the area and the chair that John Wayne used when he lived at the Bel-Air. My suite was sumptuous and comfortable, with a working wood fireplace and a private patio.

The hotel is spread out over a number of acres, so no suite is higher than the second floor. You are either on the ground or one up. As with many older, classy hotels that attract movie people, an air of eccentricity and surrealism is part of the day and night there. It’s as if you’re always waiting for something strange to happen, and usually you don’t have long to wait. While I was there a typical Southern California heat wave scorched the landscape. In the canyon where the Bel-Air is situated it was marginally cooler, but the sun still seared skin as if it were in a blast furnace. Nevertheless, I was determined to do my usual morning laps in the big pool no matter what.

At Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles you can meet anyone from former U.S. First Lady Nancy Reagan to actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

That first morning I did my laps alone, since it was pretty early. The only other creature nearby was a strange, colourful, duck-like bird that splashed around with me here and there. After swimming I sat in one of the lounge chairs with a book and the Los Angeles Times to dry off. Without seeing them until the last second, I was flanked by two guys in black suits. I assumed at first that they were with the hotel, but they seemed a bit too officious for that upon closer inspection. Then one spoke to me. “Good morning, sir. We were just wondering if you wouldn’t find it even more comfortable over in that area there.” He indicated the other end of the pool.

I chuckled and asked the fellow why he was making such a suggestion. He produced credentials that identified him as an agent of the U.S. Secret Service and explained that someone under the Secret Service’s protection took morning tea where I was sitting. They would appreciate it awfully if I’d change spots for a while.

Seeing no point in arguing with two Secret Service agents, especially over a poolside chair, I moved to the spot they indicated and even asked them if my choice was okay. They waved and said it was. A tea service with fine china and silver was set up, and the two guys returned with former First Lady Nancy Reagan and a lady guest. Mrs. Reagan waved in my direction and mouthed the words “Thank you.” I thought that was nice, though I was sure that moving locations wasn’t actually a decision I could really make.

A few mornings later I was back in the pool doing my laps. There were a few people around the pool reading the morning paper and drinking coffee, but I was swimming alone. I noticed someone come in and take notice of the book I was reading. It was lying on my lounge chair. (I was reading a new book that re-examined the famous mutiny on the Bounty, with an eye toward realism over seafaring drama.) The fellow then stepped to the pool and hunched down to say something to me as I swam close. “Would you mind if I took a look at your book? I’ll mind not to lose your page.” I told him he was welcome to it. The guy was actor Daniel Day-Lewis, after all.

When I finished swimming, I got out of the pool and sat next to where Day-Lewis reclined. He told me he had a particular interest in the Bounty story, since he had done something on it himself years ago. I said I was well aware of that. Day-Lewis had played Master’s Mate John Fryer in the Anthony Hopkins/Mel Gibson film The Bounty.

“Ah, you know it?” he asked.

I told him I was an admirer of the movie and that it would have been fantastic if it had been made as originally planned as a giant two-part epic directed by David Lean (New Zealander Roger Donaldson ending up doing it instead). I said it would have been a spellbinding bit of cinema to have Lean reunited with his Lawrence of Arabia screenwriter Robert Bolt for such a saga. Part one would have been the voyage and the mutiny, while part two would have been the unbelievable feat of seamanship performed by the cut-adrift Captain William Bligh, who piloted a launch for months with no food or water and got his men to safety.

Day-Lewis studied me with a strange smile. “My, my, you know an awful lot about that film. May I ask why you know all that?”

I explained what I did, and we conversed for more than an hour, but not about films or acting. Instead we chatted about the mutiny on the Bounty and what life at sea must have been like. When he left for his meeting, we shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. I never saw Daniel Day-Lewis again in person, but my admiration for him as an actor doubled because of that accidental meeting at the Bel-Air. His intelligence and esoteric wonder about what other people think and feel are the reasons he’s a great actor.

One morning after a lovely breakfast with Charles Fitzer at an outdoor table, he asked if I’d like to see one of the bigger suites the hotel had to offer. He told me he could show me around the suite Oprah Winfrey kept on hold for her trips to California. I knew a woman who was a rabid Oprah fan, so I agreed to check it out. We strolled over, and once we got into the suite, it was pretty much what I expected it to be — spacious and comfortable. The suite came with its own private swimming pool, small fountain, and terrace. I thanked Charles for guiding me around the rooms, and as we were leaving, I grabbed a Bel-Air pen from one of the coffee tables and stuck it in my pocket. I wanted to give it to my Oprah-loving friend. When I eventually gave her the pen, she reacted as though I’d brought her a religious relic I’d snatched from the Vatican!

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On the subject of older grand hotels, one of the oldest and grandest in the world has to be Château Frontenac in Quebec City. Château Frontenac belongs to the Fairmont family of hotels in Canada, many of which were originally built by Canadian Pacific Railway. When you see Château Frontenac looming above historic Quebec City, it almost seems as if the solid edifice has always been there and that the rest of the provincial capital grew up around it. There is such an awesome majesty about even the look of the place, let alone its interior, which is every bit as majestic and awesome. The hotel was actually designed by American architect Bruce Price and opened in 1893. It was named after Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac, who was the governor of New France from 1672 to 1682 and from 1689 to 1698 and was responsible for building the nearby Citadelle.

Of the many times I’ve stayed at Château Frontenac, two stand out above all the rest. Coincidentally, I was in the same suite both times — a terrific one high up near the top of the hotel. The bedroom area had a low-sloped ceiling because of the configuration of the roof, and a hallway led to an enormous bathroom with an immense tub. Directly across from the tub was an alcove where a desk sat before a window that offered a stunning view of Quebec City. During that time, I was writing a magazine piece about Château Frontenac, which The Guinness Book of Records lists as holding the record for the most photographed hotel in the world.

Because of the assignment I was doing, I was treated to an extraordinary evening. I was asked to join a few members of the hotel management and public relations staff for dinner in a room that wasn’t a designated dining area but an ornate sitting room. It was explained to me that the room was used at the 1943 Quebec Conference by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill for relaxed conversations about the direction of the Second World War. The actual strategy meetings were held at the Citadelle, but when the two leaders talked off the record it was in the room where we were eating.

Dinner was a magnificent treat of French-Canadian cuisine, including a tourtière, a meat pie made from local game and the best I’ve ever had and no doubt ever will. As dinner wound down, a guest joined us. The door opened, and Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac, strolled in. Of course, it was an actor playing the count, but his costume and wig were perfect. I thought this was a wonderful touch to the evening and rose to be introduced to him. I stuck out my hand to shake hands, but the count quickly pulled a pair of white gloves from his waistcoat and swatted my hands with them hard.

Château Frontenac in Quebec City is one of the Fairmont chain’s grand old railway hotels. In the foreground is Auberge Saint-Antoine.

(Courtesy Fairmont Hotels & Resorts)

Momentarily, I was taken aback, then the count explained that since I was a commoner, it was highly inappropriate for me to approach him with such misguided familiarity, let alone expect to touch him. I apologized. Then he told me that simply bowing before him was sufficient. I frowned and leaned toward a public relations woman beside me. “Is he actually expecting me to bow to him?”

She winked and whispered, “Just play along.”

So I made a big gesture of bowing with sweeping arms before the count. He nodded and strode regally over to his chair at the end of the table; I was seated to his left. Of course, he stood behind his chair, indicating I was to pull it out for him. I played along. The count began a history lesson that was so engrossing and detailed that within 15 minutes I completely lost touch with reality and started thinking he actually was the Count of Frontenac. I even asked him questions and talked to him as if he were the real McCoy. “When you arrived here, Count, those first years must have been awfully challenging, given how inhospitable nature can be in this region.” He answered with such depth, with such authority of feeling, that I was truly mesmerized. After about 90 minutes, he got up to leave. Without prompting, I bowed to him very naturally, then he whipped out his sword and placed it on my shoulder. I almost cried. It was an incredible evening, and a brilliant public relations tool.

Another memorable time at Château Frontenac was when I interviewed the actors in a film — the thriller Taking Lives starring Angelina Jolie and Ethan Hawke — that was shooting there and around Quebec City and Montreal. One day I was sitting on the set when the production took over the entranceway to the hotel for a couple of shots of Angelina’s character first arriving in a car, then rushing out the door for another scene to be used later in the film. It was a windy day, so there was a lot of waiting around for clouds to clear in order to match the various angles of the shots in terms of lighting. After I got the official interview stuff completed with Jolie and casually related some of the hotel’s history, I recounted my meeting with the Count of Frontenac himself. Then I told the actress that in 1953 Alfred Hitchcock was so impressed by Château Frontenac that he used it for the thriller I Confess.

This piqued her interest. “Was that the one where Montgomery Clift played the Catholic priest?” she asked.

I told her that was indeed the picture. Karl Malden, who co-starred in the film, had told me great stories about how much he loved shooting in Quebec City. At the time it was so remote and unused as a film location that it had an exotic freshness about it. Jolie called over an assistant and asked her to run out and find her a DVD of I Confess. She then told me that if we saw each other on the set again we could discuss the Hitchcock movie. I thought that was a great idea but never did get the opportunity.

There is another hotel in Quebec City that also has a great history, even though it is relatively new, only a few years old, in fact. Because of where it is and what was discovered when construction began, the hotel took on a whole new atmosphere and design. It’s called Auberge Saint-Antoine. My friend and ace travel public relations person Ann Layton of Siren Communications introduced me to this hotel. She arranged for me to spend some time in the place and meet Llewellyn Price, its owner.

The story of this multi-faceted hotel is quite interesting. It began when the Price family (of the Abitibi-Price pulp and paper empire) bought a collection of rundown, abandoned warehouses, an apartment house, and a parking lot on prime property facing the St. Lawrence River. In 1992 they converted part of the collection of buildings into a small inn called Auberge Saint-Antoine. It had only 23 comfortable rooms then. In 1995 the second phase of the hotel, Maison Hunt, opened. It was the old apartment house restored to reflect its 18th-century heritage. Now the auberge had eight more suites, but these new ones were each completely unique and had a specific historical theme reflected in their decor. A third phase was planned that involved digging up the parking lot and erecting an ultra-slick, hip boutique hotel, but because of the location’s historical significance, the Quebec government stepped in.

“It was suggested to us that we do a bit of an archaeological dig, a survey, beforehand to determine if there wasn’t something of historical value there,” Price told me. “Of course, we could only benefit by that, too, so we entered into a partnership with the city, the Ministry of Culture and Communications of Quebec, and the Council of Monuments and Historical Sites of Quebec, and brought in experts from Laval University to begin the dig.”

That dig turned up a virtual treasure trove of museum-quality pieces large and small and revealed a 17th-century cannon battery complete with intact walls and cannons as well as a wealth of dishes, pottery, utensils, and weapons. “We decided to build the 63-room modern boutique hotel on the site,” Price said, “but make everything that was discovered part of the hotel. The walls and cannons are perfectly preserved as part of the lobby, and the artifacts we found are displayed in the hallways under glass, so the hotel is a modern hotel and a museum of the history of the very site it was built on, going back 300 or more years.”

While Auberge Saint-Antoine is a lovely hotel, and I enjoyed every minute of my several visits there, the museum-like aspect is sometimes a bit distracting. In the comfortable suites, artifacts are displayed under glass on end tables, in the coffee tables, the desk, and the walls outside doors. It gives the place a reverential sort of vibe, so much so that you don’t dare put a soft drink can anywhere. Still, the boldness of creating a slick, ultra-modern hotel with a historical theme running through every corner is admirable.

Quebec City’s Auberge Saint-Antoine weds history to modern convenience to create a unique boutique hotel.

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Perhaps one of the most endearing and lovable characters from film and literature who brings together hotel living and the beauty of old-world hotels is Eloise, the perennial six-year-old girl who lives in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The Plaza (now owned by Fairmont) is to New York City what the Royal York is to Toronto — a beacon, a place of history, grace, and class that’s larger than its already immense iconic reputation. The first time I had the opportunity to visit New York I wanted to go to the Plaza and stroll through its grand lobby. When I did so, one of the first things I saw was the portrait of Eloise painted by illustrator Hilary Knight. My notions of the Plaza were formed by Eloise and by Neil Simon’s play and film Plaza Suite, and here I was standing in, as Archie Bunker once said, “the middle of their midst.”

This history of the Plaza and the Royal York has a lot of similarities, which probably explains why the hotels have, in some respects, similar appearances and characteristics. The Plaza is located in a prime Manhattan location: Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. It was designed by the American architect Henry Janey Hardenbergh to be “the greatest hotel in the world.” The Plaza opened on October 1, 1907, and was built on the site of another hotel called the Plaza, which was knocked down to be replaced by the current, grander building. No expense was spared to erect this 19-storey French Renaissance château-like structure complete with marble lobbies, solid mahogany doors, 1,650 crystal chandeliers, Swiss organdy curtains, linens manufactured privately for the exclusive use of guests, and gold-encrusted china.

In the books by New York show business figure Kay Thompson, Eloise lives in a suite on the “tippy-top floor” of the Plaza. Tall and slender with a deep, breathy voice, Thompson first invented her make-believe character in 1948 when she arrived late for a nightclub performance. The nightclub owner reputedly shouted at her, “Who do you think you are?”

Thompson answered in a little girl voice, “I am Eloise!” and proceeded to lay the blame for her tardiness on her little girl alter ego. Over the next few years, the singer/dancer incorporated the precocious Eloise into her stage act. In 1954 Thompson’s friends encouraged her to put Eloise on paper in a children’s book. Thompson was introduced to illustrator Hilary Knight, whom it was thought could bring Eloise to life. Over Christmas of that year, Knight sent Thompson a Christmas card with her first impression of what Eloise would look like riding in a sleigh with Santa Claus. Thompson glanced at the picture and said, “It was immediate recognition on my part. There she was. In person.”

Knight moved into the Plaza with Thompson, who had been living there for years, to work on the first book. While the collaborators engaged in “writing, editing, laughing, outlining, cutting, pasting, laughing again, reading out loud, laughing some more,” it seemed natural to have Eloise live in the Plaza. The idea flowered fully for Thompson when she thought of Liza Minnelli, her own goddaughter, who was often left in the company and care of hotel staffers while mother Judy Garland was on the set of a film or singing in a club or recording an album. Now everything fitted together like a Swiss watch. Eloise would show up at weddings she wasn’t invited to, and she would crash meetings and parties and interrupt all sorts of different people in the hotel. The inaugural book, Eloise, was published on November 28, 1955, and was so successful that offers to write more installments were immediate, as were requests to record versions of the stories, do product endorsements, and authorize dramatizations of Eloise’s life. Thompson and Knight then set up Eloise Ltd., with the Plaza, of course, as their headquarters.

In 1956 Thompson allowed the TV anthology series Playhouse 90 to do a show adapted from her book. It was billed as “Eloise — based on the hilarious bestselling story about the sprightly six-year-old girl who runs — and often runs ragged — the lives of the celebrated guests and devoted employees of a distinguished New York hotel.” But the writer who penned the teleplay strayed wildly from the basic innocence and good nature of the character and created a drama involving Eloise being caught in the middle of her parents’ divorce and the hotel being filled with intrigue and scoundrels. The reviews of the show were terrible, and people who loved the books completely rejected this dramatization. Thompson was so angry about what had been done to her book that she vowed never again to allow her character to be dramatized in another medium.

New York City’s fabled Plaza Hotel is best known as the home of the delightful but fictional Eloise.

(Courtesy Fairmont Hotels & Resorts)

Later in the 1950s three more Eloise books were published, and Thompson became a celebrity mainstay at the Plaza where she organized huge tea parties for fans and entertained them with Eloise stories. In 1958 she helped create the children’s menu at the Plaza that features such dishes as “Teeny Weenies” and “Eggs Eloise.” For a number of years there was a special room at the Plaza named the Eloise Room. It was a large sitting room where guests could relax and mingle. There was also, for a while, an ice-cream parlour in the Plaza called the Eloise.

By 1989 the Eloise books had been in constant print for decades and were huge bestsellers. At the Plaza a new owner, Donald Trump, wanted to use the image of Eloise in an advertising campaign for the hotel. Hilary Knight was brought in to design special children’s suites in the hotel that featured murals on the walls commemorating the adventures of Eloise. She was also asked to design children’s menus with Eloise drawings on them. But Thompson didn’t like Trump and refused to allow him to exploit her character to sell his hotel. The entertainer’s aversion to Trump had arisen after the financier took control of the Plaza. Thompson had been living in the hotel for many years free of charge because the previous owners were eternally grateful to her for putting their hotel on the map in such a unique and indelible way. Trump, however, insisted that Thompson pay for her suite. Thompson said if that was the case then Trump would have to start paying her for the rights to use her character.

Eloise, by that time, had become world-famous and had made the Plaza renowned along with her. Knight painted a portrait of Eloise that hung in the Palm Court (the place where Eloise goes for lunch when it’s raining). That picture became a sort of Mona Lisa for the Plaza. Mothers and daughters came to the Palm Court for tea just to look at it. Then one night during a raucous college frat-boy party the portrait was stolen and never recovered. Knight was brought in to do another painting to replace the missing one when, it is said, Princess Grace of Monaco arrived with her children to see the portrait and was vocally dismayed that she had come all that way to look at an empty wall. The new painting of Eloise, the one I first saw, now hangs on the wall opposite the Palm Court.

While Eloise’s parents are never part of the action of the books, the child does have a nanny and a couple of companions, specifically her pug dog, Weenie, and her turtle, Skipperdee. However, it wasn’t until after Thompson died in 1998 in her early nineties that readers were able to see Eloise come to life again on the screen. The rights to the character and the books passed to Thompson’s sister, Blanche Hurd, who gave consent for a number of TV movies and straight-to-DVD feature-film versions using the Eloise character. In 2003 two TV movies were made based on the character that featured none other than Julie Andrews as Nanny. Three years later an animated series debuted and is a solid seller on DVD. It boasts the voice of Lynn Redgrave as Nanny. At this writing there is a big-screen picture being planned around Eloise that will star Uma Thurman as Nanny. To this day, one of the bestselling items in the Plaza’s gift shop is the postcard version of the Knight portrait of Eloise.

So when people hear my story of living in the Royal York and say, “You’re just like the little girl Eloise,” I not only take that as a supreme compliment but have to admit that, yes, I am Eloise!

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For a number of years I covered the Toronto International Film Festival for Reel to Real, a television show I co-produced and co-hosted in the InterContinental Hotel on Bloor Street West. We secured a suite, turned it into a mini-studio where we interviewed actors and filmmakers, and shot segments for the shows during the festival. I literally moved into the suite for a few weeks amid the camera equipment, lighting gear, and all the other equipment necessary to make a daily television show on location. Year after year I lived for those weeks in the space left over in the suite as people such as Ed Harris, Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Bana, Joaquin Phoenix, Monica Bellucci, and many others filed in and out for interviews and various eccentric adventures. Every day I ate at least once or twice in the main all-day restaurant and came to know the menu as if I’d designed it myself.

During those years, I got quite familiar with InterContinental’s hotels as a brand. Later I visited other hotels in the chain in Montreal and in Cannes, France, but I truly appreciated brand familiarity as supremely important when I was asked to do a magazine story in Seoul, South Korea. The scenario was quite surreal. I was called on the phone by the editor of Dolce Vita, a magazine I’d been contributing to for a few years. The editor asked if I had plans the following week. I told her no, and she asked if I wanted to go to Seoul. Although I’d never been to Asia at that point in my life and Seoul wasn’t somewhere I’d given much thought about visiting, I agreed to go. I flew to Los Angeles (five hours from Toronto), then lay over for a couple of hours before boarding a Korean Air jet for Seoul’s Incheon International Airport (13 hours more on a plane). When I arrived in South Korea’s capital, I was met by a smiling guide/driver who enthusiastically welcomed me, asked how my flight was, and told me I’d be relaxing in my suite at the COEX InterContinental inside an hour.

Seoul is a massive city, and the COEX InterContinental is a huge hotel in the centre of it. When I arrived in the lobby of the COEX, I was surprised that it resembled a combination of the lobbies of the two InterContinental hotels in Toronto (the other InterContinental is on Front Street West). After I got to my suite 22 storeys up, I was immediately struck by the fact that it looked similar to the suite we used to shoot the interviews at the InterContinental in Toronto. So while I was still a bit freaked out about being in this giant Asian city, I was very much at ease because I knew what to anticipate inside the hotel. Outside, in Seoul, I had no idea what to expect, but inside my suite I was relaxed and comfortable and knew where everything was and was familiar with everything, including the scent of the shampoo in the bathroom. The one big difference was that the COEX InterContinental was considerably more technologically advanced than I was used to, including air conditioning and lights that seemed able to sense when I was in the room, switching on and off accordingly.

During my time in Seoul, I crawled around in a tunnel in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea and glanced across the fence into the former at a soldier staring back at me. I made a Korean paper lantern with a group of schoolchildren, toured a palace, lay on a bed that a Korean princess was murdered on, and had lunch in a high-tech restaurant with a glass floor that was about 60 floors above the bustling city between two colossal office towers. But none of those experiences compared to the surreal episodes I had each day at the health club and then at the restaurant, The Brasserie, in the hotel, where I ate breakfast each morning.

To this day, living as I do in the Royal York, I put in an hour’s worth of laps in the swimming pool before breakfast, then commence working. My time in Seoul was no different. I timed it so I could swim for an hour and have breakfast in The Brasserie before meeting my guide for whatever was planned for that day.

The health club at the COEX (called the Cosmopolitan Fitness Club) is state-of-the-art. That first morning when I headed down for a swim I was given a rubber bathing cap by a pretty young Korean female pool attendant. I handed it back because I don’t wear bathing caps. She smiled and returned it to me. I passed it back and told her I didn’t use bathing caps. She then said in broken but serviceable English that wearing a bathing cap was a requirement for swimming in the pool. I apologized and said I would wear the cap if that was the rule.

When I got into the pool, I tried to put the cap on, but it kept sliding up my skull and off. The young Korean woman noticed I was having trouble and entered the pool area to help. She offered to put it on for me, but given my height (six foot four) and hers (not a hair over five feet), I literally had to get on my knees in front of her as she expertly snapped the cap on my head, where it stayed in place for the whole hour. Every subsequent morning I went down for the swim, and she put the cap on for me.

After swimming I went to The Brasserie for breakfast because I wanted to have one meal of the day that was familiar to me, since everything else I would eat during the day would be authentic Korean. The Brasserie looked almost exactly the same as the all-day restaurant at the InterContinental on Bloor Street in Toronto, only much bigger to reflect the size of the hotel. At The Brasserie I could have a bowl of oatmeal and some scrambled eggs and toast and coffee. On my first morning there I made the mistake of allowing the waiter to put kimchi in front of me. He explained that Koreans usually ate kimchi at every meal and that while there were many varieties of kimchi (there is actually a Kimchi Field Museum in Seoul), the kind I was exposed to was made from fermented cabbage stuffed with vegetables and seasonings (perhaps even nitroglycerin!).

I made the mistake that first morning of having oatmeal, then getting some eggs and toast and letting the waiter lay some kimchi on me. It was so spicy and tasted so diabolically vile that once I swallowed it I thought it might actually kill me. I drank about seven glasses of water and had three cups of coffee, but still the raging esophageal wildfire remained and a taste that couldn’t be described in words still lingered. At virtually every other meal I had in Korea, including every breakfast at The Brasserie, I was offered kimchi. Finally, I told my regular Brasserie waiter that if he dared bring kimchi to the table again, I would have no choice but to throw it on the floor. He never brought me more and seemed to go out of his way to not even mention it. Once, he even covered the word kimchi on a special addition to the menu so I wouldn’t have to think about it. That was nice of him and much appreciated.