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
