Isabelle asked me, “What’s in there?” I told her we could peek inside and have a look. We did so and saw the chandeliers and huge, draped windows. I heard a little “Wow” come from knee level. We slipped inside to look around. Isabelle was dazzled by the room’s size, her attention drawn to the velvet curtains on the stage. I told her that singers and musicians once played on that stage and that all the empty tables we saw had been filled with people watching. She asked me if I could lift her onto the stage, and when she was up there, I sat at one of the circular tables directly in front. Isabelle danced and twirled and sang on the enormous stage.
As she performed, I envisioned the stars who had graced that stage over the past several decades — everyone from Peggy Lee and Tony Bennett to Marlene Dietrich and Ella Fitzgerald. I was sitting at a table where many a dandy had sat with his date taking in a show over drinks. Glancing around the room, I marvelled at how much history, how many stories, were contained in this place. Up on that stage, with the lingering spirit of Dietrich perhaps in attendance, my beautiful little girl was making her stage debut all by herself to the proudest and most enthusiastically supportive audience imaginable — her daddy.
Isabelle bounced across the stage, singing one of our favourite songs from the movie version of The Cat in the Hat — “He’s a cat in a hat, he’s a chat in a chapeau, he’s a gato in a sombrero …” The more she twirled the more energy she seemed to have. It was as if Peggy Lee were silently telling her to “Sing, Isabelle, sing.” When she finally wore herself out and collapsed onto the stage laughing with red cheeks and an exaggerated show of being out of breath, she called to me that it was “Spaghetti time!” That meant lunch at the nearby Old Spaghetti Factory.
Outside, as we strolled along Front Street toward The Esplanade, Isabelle peered back at the Royal York. (The farther away you get the more immense and regal the old hotel looks). She smiled and asked me if the building was a “magical castle.” I bent down to take in the view she was seeing and said, “Yes, Isabelle, it is.”
Book 1
BOOK ONE
A PRIVATE OASIS
OF
SOLITUDE
… WITH ROOM SERVICE
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