I can’t quite

put my finger on the precise moment when I developed a passion for hotel lobbies, but I suspect it was fuelled by my teenage obsession with Hollywood movies of the 1930s, particularly those of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or Carole Lombard, which invariably featured scenes set in the grand lobbies of hotels like New York’s Waldorf Astoria. Not surprising then, that when I first went to New York in 1983 and walked into the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, where I was to be soon ensconced in a magnificent suite, I felt instantly as if I had come home.

Growing up in Melbourne, the nearest thing we had to a grand hotel lobby was the Windsor on Spring Street. I did an inordinate amount of lurking about there, soaking up the slightly musty Victorian atmosphere. Captain Peter Jansen, who occupied the entire top floor of the hotel, seemed to me to be the most rakish, romantic man in the Southern Hemisphere. When I began to write The Woman in the Lobby, a novel about an Australian woman who travels the world sleeping with the wealthy men she meets in hotel lobbies, it seemed appropriate that I started her story in a fictional hotel not unlike the Windsor.

Like Eloise, the little girl who lived in the Plaza in Kay Thompson’s books, or Valley of the Dolls novelist Jacqueline Susann, who lived for 36 years in the Navarro on Central Park South, I fully intended to make my home in a hotel one day. (I still do). Failing that, I soon discovered that taking up a chair in a suitably glamorous lobby and watching the passing parade gave me the vicarious experience of actually being a guest. Whenever I travelled, even if I were on the tightest budget, I’d seek out that city’s most gorgeous hotel and prop.

In London, I’d skip lunch and dinner, but save all my pennies for afternoon tea at The Ritz, where you could sit for hours in luxury and be plied with food by waiters who were delighted to see a young woman eat. (Tea at The Ritz cost £4 then: it now costs £60 and reservations need to be made weeks ahead). Only recently, I paid a small fortune for a glass of wine in the lobby lounge at the George V in Paris, but felt it was worth every euro for the entertainment value of watching some of the world’s very rich at leisure. Unlike Violet Armengard, the heroine of  my novel The Woman in the Lobby, I’m not a participant in any of this. But – oh yes – I’m certainly a voyeur.

In the 1932 film, Grand Hotel, which starred Greta Garbo as an aging ballerina and John Barrymore as an elegant jewel thief, a character makes an observation about the lobby: “People come and go. Nothing ever happens.” Not true at all, in my opinion. A hotel lobby is a place of transition, between public and private spaces, but it’s also a theatre set, a stage for people to reinvent themselves, pretend to be someone else, act out fantasies, or connect with strangers and move the narrative to another location.

The best hotel lobbies, to my mind, create a tantalising kind of foreplay to whatever goes on upstairs.

Andre Balazs, the Los Angeles hotelier (Chateau Marmont, The Standard) says, “A good hotel sets up a zone of comfort and security that envelops you…and encourages you to do things that you wouldn’t necessarily do in your own environment.” One of the hoteliers in The Woman in the Lobby tells Violet, “It’s as if we give them a key, not to a room, but to another life altogether.”

It’s not all glamorous, of course. A lot of waiting goes on in hotel lobbies, some tedium, and occasionally unpleasant things. Russell Crowe throws a phone at a testy desk clerk at The Mercer in New York. Call girls entice politicos in the lobby of The Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, where the Governor of New York state has his tryst with Ashley Alexandra Dupré. Benjamin Braddock is excruciatingly embarrassed trying to book a room for himself and Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate.

In the grim Romanian film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a young woman tries to get past a series of stony-faced desk clerks in order to book her friend a room for an illegal abortion. These scenes reminded me of my own Romanian experience, when I travelled to Bucharest to write the Romanian chapter for The Woman in the Lobby. Not only was the woman behind the front desk of my one-star dive similarly humourless, the waiter in the lobby “café” (if it could be called that) refused to serve me coffee with the toast menu, only with cake, for no apparent reason.

I’ve met some wonderful people in hotel lobbies, but I’ve also had my fair share of wrangling with snooty concierges, including the Parisian concierge who denied for days he had found my precious notebook (left by mistake at the desk) until I was instructed by a French friend to give him a hefty tip.

I suppose that much of the success of the Julia Roberts-Richard Gere fantasy Pretty Woman, which takes place in the Beverly Wilshire hotel in LA, is due to the fact that we root for the young hooker when she triumphs over the shop assistants and concierges who have made her life hell. A hotel lobby can be a microcosm of an unequal world, and you have to establish your place in it the moment you walk through the revolving doors.   If you want your own Cinderella experience in this particular theatre, you need to wear a “costume.” A gracious-but-haughty demeanor is essential.

The best hotel lobbies, to my mind, create a tantalising kind of foreplay to whatever goes on upstairs. Unfortunately, the trend these days in hotels is to make the lobby a more efficient space by removing much of the seating – so the foreplay has to be very fast indeed. I despair whenever I find myself in an expensive hotel that feels, well, corporate, with a lobby that’s more like a holding pen than a destination in itself.

In Australia we are particularly badly served – I can’t think of a lobby here which has the decadent opulence of the lobbies of the great European hotels, such as the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, next door to the casino. Lobbies don’t come much more extravagant than this – a fantasy of golden marble columns and arches, mirrored walls, crystal chandeliers with a leadlight dome (plus an Alain Ducasse restaurant for good measure).

I don’t mind if a lobby is a bit shabby and dusty, as long as it has a good coating of atmosphere too. The charm of the old Roosevelt on Hollywood Boulevard is a lobby furnished with dark leather club chairs and dripping, gothic candelabras, and the ghosts of Theda Bara and Rudolph Valentino. Who could fail to create her own melodrama (even if only in her head) here? Perhaps some hoteliers are too prosaic and fail to understand the value of a good entrance or appreciate the art of useful time-wasting, of which I am an expert.

Vicki Baum, the Austrian novelist who wrote the novel upon which the film Grand Hotel is based, has one of her characters comment at the conclusion of the story, “There is a strange thing with guests in this hotel. No-one goes out the door the same way they came in.” I venture to say that is the effect all great hotels should have on us.

Tags