I was once sitting next to Joan Didion, one of the great American writers, when she told me she was worrying about a forthcoming trip to Hollywood, where some organizer had arranged for her to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I always stay at the Beverly Wilshire. And I like it there. What should I do?” It was a balmy New York evening and the wine was lovely and the mood was controlled and sweet, so I decided on the spot that it was a very Joan Didion kind of problem and one that had to be solved.
“You should insist,” I said to the world’s least insistent author. And I think she did insist, and she got what she knew would help her.
On another occasion, in London, I drove Didion in my beat-up Volkswagen back to her hotel in Covent Garden. I worried the hotel wasn’t right for her, but she said it was fine and I felt the word “fine” had never had such ample meaning. I tell you this because I consider Didion, whom I love beyond words, to be the genius of what the critic Wayne Koestenbaum once called “hotel prose.” She knows precisely how to be in an anonymous, air-conditioned space; indeed, you might say she craves them and knows them, as the women in her books do, and I’ve always been a devoted believer in the peculiar freedom one can enjoy in a hotel. Such devotion can feel almost professional — or, at least, amenable to the working-out of problems — and there is special value in occasionally staying in hotels in one’s own city.
As soon as Vladimir Nabokov had enough money, he moved from America to Switzerland and went to live in the Montreux Palace hotel. He never left it again. And you can see it in his later books, the sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere at the same time, as if the only furniture one might seek to possess is the furniture in one’s own mind. A friend of mine in London was once considering moving permanently into the Dorchester. As it happened, she had the means, and I don’t just mean the money: She has what the poet Keats called “negative capability,” an innate talent for devoting herself, at times, to being something other than she is. Actors very often have that — they often live in hotels, and one of the stars of the HBO series “Game of Thrones” told me recently that, more than anything, he would like to live in a hotel with nothing in it.
The only thing he gets wrong, from my point of view, is the idea that the hotel should be like any modern, empty place. For me it would have to be Claridge’s, the best hotel in the world, set across a whole block of London’s Mayfair. I’m afraid I feel about Claridge’s the way Holly Golightly felt about Tiffany’s: I go for breakfast there, but also for sleeps, and during an especially difficult period in my life it was a kind of sanitarium. I can’t really afford it, and, as with Ms. Golightly on her excursions to Fifth Avenue, much of my time at the hotel would best be described as window-shopping. When people say you can lose yourself in a wonderful place, they must be talking about the suites at Claridge’s, because, when the chips are down, there is nowhere in the world like it and I make no apologies.
I used to see Joan Didion’s brother-in-law Dominick Dunne there. When he was in London, he’d spend hours in the corner table of the foyer, meeting people, taking notes, watching the world and its mistress go by. He saw that Claridge’s was made for him. I was supposed to disapprove of all that, being a resentful son of toil with a penchant for down-at-heel Glasgow pubs, but I’ve never had time for nostalgie de la boue. The black-and-white tiles of Claridge’s are like a pathway to otherness, a heavenly runway to freedom when you’re feeling imprisoned by yourself.
In a perfect world, everybody would have a hotel room of one’s own. It could be treated, in the Virginia Woolf mode, as a matter of personal freedom. It needs to be somewhere you can call your own, a place that appeals to an idealized version of yourself. When I go to Claridge’s, in a way I’m no longer in my home city or in a geographically defined space. I’m putting a beloved singular address in the universe of Claridge’s. In that sense, one is, at the same time, checking into perfection and checking out of the overfamiliar mess of life. Not far from you, there should be a portal, a place of infinite grace such as Claridge’s. It’s your home-from-home, a hotel in your own city that refreshes the parts that your own kitchen can’t reach.
The other day, having paid my way, I moved into a suite for the weekend. I drank cold champagne and recovered from a serious bout of regular selfhood, putting jazz, the only kind of music that really works in hotels, on the iPod dock, and wrapping myself in an obscenely fluffy robe before falling into bed and watching several bad movies. I had my own butler. He understood a lot about ice and a lot about how to let a person have a lovely time doing nothing. Holidays can be social affairs, of course, and they usually are, but a break in your own city is often more about getting away from other people. Hiding from them, indeed. Just occasionally, what could be nicer than to find yourself in a silent zone of discretion?
Certain kinds of niceness are not easy to recover from because they so thoroughly destroy your appetite for the opposite. I mean, I love home comforts and I love being able to travel around, but two nights at Claridge’s, which I reached in 15 minutes by taxi from my house, were a very different order of bliss. And a large part of the joy comes from not having any of your stuff around you. That must sound perverse: Everybody wants his own desk and his own tin of pencils, his own aftershave, his own towels. But there are times in life, I’d argue, when those things are just part of the general oppression. Sure, you fought to have them; sure, you’d defend them with your life, or with life insurance; and, sure, if you woke up tomorrow and your books had gone you’d blub like a nostalgic baby. But freedom is a multifaceted jewel. A person can feel trapped in his choices, in his commitments, in his loyalties and in his taste, which is why a holiday in your own city can feel like such a relief. What I want is somebody else’s choices, perfect ones, and I get them every time I go through the revolving doors in Brook Street.
Later, I brought three friends to dinner. I like to cook, but there’s no way — not in this life — that I’m ever going to produce a 13-course tasting menu with matching wines. Simon Rogan’s restaurant at Claridge’s did it all as if it was entirely one’s due (which it’s not), whilst leaving room for a little introspection on the subject of what makes a person happy. People say they go on holiday because it breaks their routine and gets them out of themselves: That’s correct, but it’s no less correct when it comes to staying at your home hotel. It was London Fashion Week when I put up at Claridge’s, so the entertainment downstairs came for free, this model and that model, this designer and that designer, reminding one that reality, for some of us, is only any good if it’s the sort you can place on hold.
There will be grungy days in any life, and many a trial that can’t be solved with an airline ticket and a brandished passport. When Woolf wrote “A Room of One’s Own,” she was thinking about women, thinking about herself and not about perfect hotels with fountains of fresh flowers in the hall. But I am. A hotel room of one’s own might provide a little bout of perfection, disappearance and luxury amid the workaday madness that passes for our lives. During my weekend at Claridge’s, I got to be somebody else. The suite was Art Deco and the bathroom was a gleaming vision of the 1930s. The desk was a beautiful carved dream-machine. There were mirrors everywhere, but I hardly knew myself, and, though I was only a cab ride from home, I could have been in Shangri-La or Avalon. It was the best holiday I had this year. And like the purest love or the coolest cocktail, I knew it couldn’t last. Claridge’s is a state of mind, and everyone should have such a place, even if it’s just a cafe, a bench or a spot of grass, a vantage point from which one can clearly survey the possibility of improvement. Before going down to dinner, I sat at the elegant desk and picked out a pen and thought of Janet Flanner, the New Yorker writer who lived in a hotel in her chosen city of Paris. “I believe in traveling light,” she once told an interviewer. “I have few possessions and fewer clothes. I never wanted a home. The Continental in Paris, where the Empress Eugénie once lived, suited me. I had a single room there under the roof and could see the Tuileries gardens where Louis XVI took his last walk with his little son before being guillotined. The king said to him, ‘I think it’s going to be a nice day after all.’”
