Offering a fine spot to soothe weary travellers
Where could Dali call room service for sheep, Wilde sign a publishing contract or the petition of India be drawn up? One of the world’s grand hotels, of course. By Adrian Mourby
here did Salvador Dali ask room service to send up a flock of sheep? Where did John Wilkes Booth practice shooting Abraham Lincoln? Or Tchaikovsky decide to dedicate his new symphony to two lions? Where did the British special services plot to trick Rommel into thinking the 8th Army was twice its real size? Or Louis Mountbatten draw the line dividing India from Pakistan? The answer to all these questions is at a grand hotel (and at the end of this piece). In the second half of the 19th century and throughout the 20th, the great hotels of Europe, America, Africa and Asia were where so many big, dramatic events took place.
I’ve been travelling around the world for 25 years now and during that time I’ve heard a lot of hotel stories. Most grand hotels will tell you that here Hemingway drank in the bar, Churchill nearly set an armchair on fire with one of his cigars, Somerset Maugham scribbled a story, and Marlene Dietrich charged a small fortune to mumble into a microphone on a night that nearly bankrupted the management.
Funnily enough, many of those stories are true – but not all. If Ernest Hemingway really did drink in all those bars, he would have got even less written than he managed in his brawling, booze-laden lifetime. Grand hotels are full of myths and gossip, and over the last few years I’ve tried to untangle reality from the legends.
It is true, for instance that Red and White soldiers fought the Russian Revolution through the bedrooms of the Astoria in St Petersburg, and that 300 Japanese officers committed ritual suicide in Raffles, Singapore before the British retook the hotel in 1945. It’s also true that writer George Bernard Shaw claimed the only person who ever taught him anything was the tango master at Reid’s Hotel – and that in 1949 a defecting Czech tennis star hid in the basement of the Gstaad Palace while East European police searched for him. (Jaroslav Drobny was later granted political asylum in Egypt, and to this day he remains the only Egyptian to have ever won Wimbledon.)
I checked out all these stories as I visited the 50 hotels that appear in my new book, Rooms with a View. I saw where Orson Welles threw the furniture from his room into a swimming pool at the Copacabana Palace, and where a drunk F Scott Fitzgerald tried to swim in a tooshallow fountain outside the Plaza in New York.
All human life is to be found in a grand hotel, only in a more dramatic form. Bad people behave worse in grand hotels. Good people behave better, and people who like to drink fall off their bar stools with alarming regularity. There are very few American writers of the 20th century who weren’t drunk at the Monteleone in New Orleans at one time or another.
In 1937, Hemingway arrived with his wife and sister-in-law for what even he described as “a week of heavy partying”. Local boy Truman Capote after a few drinks would claim that he was born at the Monteleone (he almost was, but the hotel got his mother to the hospital in time), and Tennessee Williams spent so many days “researching” at the hotel’s Carousel Bar that he couldn’t afford to pay his tab when it was time to leave. The owner, Frank Monteleone, generously wrote it off, saying that Williams had given the hotel so much good publicity in his plays.
Significant events happen too. In 1889, an American publisher took two young British writers to dinner at the Langham in London – and afterwards commissioned The Sign of Four from Arthur Conan Doyle and The Picture of Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde.
Grand hotels are also famous as places for suicides. Dorothy Parker tried to kill herself while staying at New York’s Algonquin; a now little-known writer called Innis Paterson Truman jumped to her death from the 12th floor of the Montelone; a Polish officer shot himself as German officers marched into the Bristol, Warsaw, and the suicide of Prince Raimondo Lanza di Trabia at Rome’s Hotel Eden in 1954 was such big news that a popular song was written about it.
Some hotels are famously discreet however, which occasionally made my job of uncovering their secrets difficult. The Baur au Lac in Zurich where Fifa executives were arrested in 2015, never comments on what its guests get up to – even if they are taken out at dawn with hotel blankets over their heads.
All I was told was that from its opening in 1844, the hotel has received an extraordinary number of guests who stay under assumed names. In fact, when Empress Sissi of Austria visited in 1867 it was noted that she was the first VIP to have the bill made out in her own name.
In recording all these stories, one question has inevitably arisen: Why does so much extreme behaviour occur at grand hotels?
I believe the answer lies in the fact that these hotels were set up to pamper their guests as guests had never been indulged before. César Ritz, the man who opened so many grand hotels across Europe, believed in not just satisfying his clients but in anticipating their every need.
This may seem common sense to us today but in the middle of the 19th century, commercial hotels were places you stayed if you didn’t have a town house or friends in the city. Responding to the huge wealth generated by industrialisation – and by peace – in the 19th century, the grand hotel was a new concept: a public building so palatial even royalty would want to stay. It was an innovatory idea, and both costly and nerve-wracking too.
Ritz himself went literally mad in the process of creating our concept of a grand hotel, and ended his days in a sanatorium refusing to speak to anyone. But what he envisioned came to pass and by the end of the 19th century there were more Romanoffs staying in hotels on the Cote d’azur and in Switzerland than were to be found in Russia. In Berlin, the Kaiser took a lease on apartments at the new Adlon Kempinski in which to lodge his guests because they were far more comfortable than any rooms he could offer in the Hohenzollern’s royal palace.
Not surprisingly, successful authors, wealthy bankers, victorious generals and the world’s most ambitious gold-diggers saw the grand hotel as their natural habitat. And for someone like Salvador Dali, a hotel like Paris’s Meurice – which would bring sheep to his room when he wanted them, or send staff out to catch flies for him in the Tuileries Gardens when he needed them – was an ideal home from home. In fact, it was better.
You can read all these stories in Rooms with a View, but in case you want the answers to earlier those questions now: John Wilkes Booth practiced shooting at
“Grand hotels are full of myths and gossip, and over the last few years I’ve tried to untangle reality from the legends”
the Parker Hotel in Boston and Tchaikovsky fell in love with the statues of two lions outside the Londra Palace in Venice (though in the end he did not name his fourth symphony “Do Leoni” after them). It was in a first floor suite at Hotel Cecil in Alexandria that General Dudley Clarke’s A Force planned their successful deception of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and the partition of India and Pakistan was drawn up by Jinnah, Nehru and Mountbatten in the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel in Delhi.
All of these are great hotels are still there. They’re wonderful to stay in – and boy, do they have stories to tell. ● Rooms with a View: The Secret Life of Grand Hotels by Adrian Mourby is published by Icon books, £12.99