The pursuit of happiness

Whoever said that the best things in life are free had clearly never sipped a Dry Martini in the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel. Or seen the starched white tunic, breast pocket stitched with the hotel’s emblem of three golden pine trees, of the waiter approaching with a silver tray laden with local salted almonds, highball glasses, ice, lemon, tonic and a bottle of Tanqueray on the Terrace of the Hotel Formentor as the evening sun casts the whole scene in an orange-pink glaze. Or smiled as the bellboy opens the door to the suite you’ve been upgraded to at the Principe di Savoia in Milan.

Free is for the birds. For me, I like the birds roasted and served with game chips on a platter in a dining room filled with the chatter of convivial company and the silence of silver service.

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I love luxury. I love luxurious hotels. They are my happiness. The free stuff? Keep it. I never knew a view that wasn’t enhanced by the addition of a beautiful glass of something cooling and alcoholic, with another just a request away. And hotels – at least the kind I am talking about – usually have views which sear themselves into your memory.

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Hotels mean a world away from mundanity. Hotels are the antithesis of the everyday – places where you are treated as a VIP. Un-anonymous. Significant. Hotels make you feel what it must be like to be Aristotle Onassis or Burton and Taylor for a while. They are the backdrop for big events and clandestine activities – affairs, breakups, get togethers, fraud, theft, murder, mayhem, rock stars, weddings, parties, scandal, hideouts, bed-ins. In an hotel there is the drama of life’s tragedies and triumphs – they are mini-cities, Broadway musicals and page turner novels all in one. In them, you rent the right to be treated like royalty and are the star in your own melodrama. And who doesn’t deserve a bit of that every now and again? Or, even every day.

Hotels are where life happens but on steroids. One of my favourite novels of all time, A gentleman in Moscow, happens entirely in an hotel over some three decades. It’s a beautiful, moving and intricate story and it encapsulates the unique character of living and working in a top class hotel, both as a guest and as a member of the staff. It evokes the atmosphere of a top class hotel accurately, the effort it takes to make everything work well, the problems that result from poor management, the petty squabbles that go on behind the scenes and the way a grand hotel has to fit within the political and cultural system it exists within. It also tells a very human story – an indoors Odyssey – about a charming man born to luxury, who personifies privilege and makes that charmed upbringing work to best effect for all those around him. If, like me, you are a fan of luxury and of the microcosm universe within a world class hotel, this book is a feast. So much so that I went to have a drink in the Metropolitan Hotel – where the novel is set – on my last visit to Moscow.

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Luxury is an everyday necessity in my life. I am only half joking. And there are few luxuries that give me more joy than walking through the front door of an hotel. Hotels have featured heavily in many of my best memories and have been an ever-present part of my life for as long as I can remember. My first real memories took place in the hotel on the tiny island of Comino, near Malta: playing for hours on end in a swimming pool and not feeling cold; food I had never tasted before but which made me smile; my parents befriending the intrepid OO7 cameraman, Johnny Jordan, who lost his leg the year before we met him filming a mid-air scene in You Only Live Twice (1967) and who plummeted to his death from a C32 Lockheed freight door filming another aerial scene for Catch-22 in May 1969. Being shipwrecked on a day excursion and my dad tossing us from the boat to another parent on the rocks as the craft disintegrated under our feet. My brother (on the next trip there) sleepwalking and eventually being found on the hotel roof. Floor tiles so hot they scalded your feet. The smell of Ambré Solaire and sea salt on your skin. Hotels were mad, bad and dangerous. But they made you feel that life could be so exciting and different from normality.

From this first trip in 1967, aged three, I was hooked. My world became that depicted by the 1960s and 70s jet set photographer Slim Aarons – full of beautiful people and places. Hotels became my crack cocaine, my addiction. Full of joy, of possibility, of luxury and of course, full of excitement.

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The habit got worse, fuelled by my parents partiality to Colonial style architecture and outstanding service. My elder siblings rarely holidayed with us due to an odd divorce settlement, so the three of us travelled to Paradise-like locations: my dad, my mum and me, the gooseberry. If they had had to pay for us all to travel, we’d have been in B&Bs in Torquay. But they didn’t, so we weren’t. Instead, I got to see St. Lucia, Antigua, Mauritius and other locations from an extraordinary vantage point that a young boy doesn’t normally enjoy. This gave me to feel utterly at home in grandeur from a very early age.

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When I was in my teens I wanted to work in the hospitality industry, mainly because I saw myself as the character played by Rod Taylor – indispensable general manager and part time lover of the French beauty Catherine Spaak – in the movie of Arthur Hailey’s novel Hotel. I even quit advertising and was about to take a position with Raymond Pajares, who was then the wunderkind making waves at the Savoy in London, in 1996. At the last moment I took a job as new business director of the agency BMP, which I had wanted to work for more than any other. If BMP hadn’t come along, I would have had a career behind the front desk rather than in front of it.

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Much of my career has been spent in hotels – travelling to conferences to give speeches or to run workshops. And we’re not talking the Premier Inn on the A37 Barnstaple bypass. Many of the backdrops to my performances have been breath taking: a yoga hotel on Om Beach in Goa; the Cigaran Palace in Istanbul, which fronts on the Bosphorus; the W Hotel on Miami’s South Beach and numerous others from Siem Reap to South Africa, from LA to KL. I have trashed rooms in Tokyo after drunken nights on corporate entertainment in Shinjuku and passed expenses for thousands of pounds for the indulgent corporate lifestyle that came with the job. The largesse of hotels is unlimited if you have the pockets for it and there were few pockets deeper than an advertising expense account in the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s. No whim has not been sated, no desire unfulfilled.

In this era of Airbnb, Booking.com and home swapping, hotels mix it up with camping, glamping and renting apartments on our trips. But our itineraries always include a few nights in a really good hotel. We get to clean up from three days’ camping, sit on a comfortable chair and eat well, which makes me happier and kinder. This is a distinct benefit on a long trip. After all, who wants to sit next to Mr. Grumpy for six weeks, especially if he’s driving?

And even if the budget doesn’t allow for a really swanky hotel, we’ll still head to the best rooftop bar for a few hours of luxury and high living wherever we are. I have imbibed with some beautiful backdrops. Travelling Greece in 2019, we drank Campari and orange juice overlooking the illuminated Parthenon in Athens from the roof of the Hotel Grande Bretagne. In Prague we took refuge with a crêpe suzette in the restaurant at the Paris Hotel. My wife puts up with this rather than puts me up to it – she is a Soviet-born girl and my bourgeois habits fight her Class War instincts.

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In 2013 in Cape Town, I whiled away several afternoons on the rooftop sipping daiquiris at the shady end of the pool in the Table Bay Hotel. We were supposed to be working but the client cancelled at the last minute whilst we were in Jo’burg, so we flew to the Cape and had three marvellous days anyway. Why not – we’d come a long way already and the hotel was booked and paid for? When you see luxury as a birthright you’ll bend the rules to get it. Many times I have breezed past the security guards at the main gate of the Hotel Formentor with an airy “212” to their enquiry about which room we were staying in. We weren’t staying in 212 or any room, but conviction in the tone of voice and a matter-of-fact confidence in behaviour (plus a working knowledge of how many floors the hotel has and how they are numbered) usually do the trick.

The only exception was the Eden Roc in Antibes where the doorman was having none of it. In the 1960s, my parents went on holiday to the South of France with another couple. They went to the Eden Roc to stay by the pool for the day and soak up the atmosphere. The husband, John, said he was just going for a stroll around the grounds and disappeared. My father was despatched to look for him several hours later and found John tucking into lobster and a bottle of Sancerre at a table set for one on the terrace. “What the Hell, John!” exclaimed my father. “Don’t tell Anne” pleaded John, “I couldn’t afford lunch for both of us so I just got it for me.” Maybe I inherited my chutzpah from the generation before me.

My wife calls me entitled. She can see how I am instantly at home in the environment of plush lobbies, uniformed flunkies and gentillesse. This is my natural habitat. But is an entirely alien landscape to her. Some are at home in the Great Outdoors. Others up to their armpits in mud or on a football terrace. Not me. I am a luxuriant. I am at home on a terrace, but not the Chelsea FC type, more the terrace with an orchestra playing, people dancing, waiters bustling between tables, Maitre d’ presiding and, preferably, overlooking the Amalfi coast. The sort of terrace at the Grand Hotel Excelsior depicted in the 1972 Jack Lemmon romantic comedy Avanti! No chanting, no swearing, no diving (other than into the pool); that behaviour can stay outside in the real world.

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There was an hotel consultant who, when asked by potential clients how much he charged, replied:

“The first half day is £250,000. Every day after that is free.”

Top hotel consultant

When pressed on why his fee was so exorbitant he explained that merely by sitting in reception for that first half day would reveal to him everything that was both both wrong and right about the hotel in question. Every day after that was superfluous – a reconfirmation of the original list of sins. This is entirely believable. The experience of checking in is immensely revealing and the best places make it all effortless and enjoyable. The worst make it tedious, make no eye contact and set the whole experience up for failure. The front desk is the first real test. How disappointing to drive up a mile long avenue of oak trees, hear the crunch of gravel under your tyres, walk through the heavy front doors and along the flagstone floored corridor hung with oil paintings of hunting scenes and grand forebears, only to be greeted by a chirrupy “Hiya!” from the perma-tan receptionist behind the antique partners’ desk that serves as the check in in so many aspirant country house hotels. All that investment in ambiance up in smoke with a thoughtless two syllable utterance.

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Once upstairs, I love the cocooned feeling of being safely hidden from all intrusion (unless specifically invited in). I lay out my things in the way I like them laid out. Make the bathroom my own. Throw the always ludicrous amount of cushions heaped on the bed onto the floor. Open the window or turn on the air con. Tidy my case away. Lie on the bed. And relax. Just the room and I, alone together – sanctuary, study, temporary home. So familiar. A place I have stayed up all night in to watch the drama of the 2000 US Presidential election (the one with the hanging chards). Where, jet lagged and unable to sleep, I have admired the tub-thumping histrionics of the Bible Belt preachers who dominate the early morning airwaves of America. Where I sometimes treat myself to a massage – the best of which was given by an octogenarian Japanese woman, the smallest masseur I have ever seen, who walked up and down my back and inflicted both pain and pleasure without word. And where – always – I treat myself to room service. Breakfast and dinner. Always once, often twice.

Occasionally I have donned a towelling bathrobe, gone down to the pool at 5am in Florida or to the sea at 6 in Mallorca, and swum alone as if the whole dawn was mine, and the hotel too. Only once to the gym, in Prague – it wasn’t for me. And, naturally, to the bar. Hotel bars can be so elegant. A piano player (can there be a more soul destroying job than playing light piano music as the whole room ignores you?) unobtrusively adding atmosphere as you strike up a cigarette (depending on where you’re staying) and a conversation with the barman, with a fellow guest or, usually, with some members of the client organisation you are here to entertain tomorrow. Over a beer. Or seven. And whisky. The bar is where I am sociable and where I read my audience for the day to come. It never does to overdo it – however much is drunk and however good a time is being had, everyone must turn up on parade at 0800 the next day. Especially me, if I am the paid entertainment. It is the only time I hold back in an hotel.

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Once the gig is done and I have delivered, as all my busy clients rush straight off to the airport to scatter all over the world and return to their busy day jobs. I take my ease, stay for another night and enjoy the host town’s delights. And in the hotel bar, often alone and always glad of it, I raise my glass first in toast to the client, for the gig and giving me the chance to visit this lovely spot; second, to my family, time away from whom I am borrowing; and third to my hosts at the hotel, for looking after me and for yet another glorious stay in another world. The next day I sightsee, usually fixed up by that paragon of all great hotels, the concierge. The one at the Cigaran Palace in Istanbul set me up with the best city guide ever and arranged for me to have a Turkish bath at the Kaiser’s favourite Hammam. (To be honest, these tasks were nothing for a man who once tracked down, in 6 hours, a model of fridge for a guest that the guest last bought 30 years previously on his last visit to Istanbul. The guest wanted a replacement and the concierge not only found the three decades old fridge but found an unused one.) Hotels create memories in lots of ways, not just the obvious ones.

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At University, I studied philosophy. I could have written about the meaning of life and existential issues around the pursuit of happiness. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to. Happiness, to me, is these places and others yet to be enjoyed. It is not my only happiness. But it is a big part of the life I like living, the life that makes me happy. Such places have provided the civilised backdrop to fun with old friends, new friendships, holidays, escapes, earning income and memory making with my children and wife. This article is an homage to that happiness, a thank you and a token of my esteem for all the beautiful places and caring, hardworking staff who make these places so unforgettable and enjoyable. It is not, most definitely, for the waiter who served us breakfast in a supposedly 5* hotel wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the legend: “You can take this job and stuff it“. He, I can live without. His hotel I can live without. His manager I can not recommend. But for all the others, and to all the ones yet to come, of which there are, hopefully, many, I raise my dry martini in gratitude for the best definition of happiness money can buy.

The best of times – hotels I have loved

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The best is yet to come

Where to next? There are a few hotels I have in mind. Places that have stuck in my mind because they are historic – La Mamounia in Marrakesh was Churchill’s favourite place to paint – or famous, such as the Victoria Falls Hotel in Zimbabwe and Reid’s on Madeira (which my parents returned to year after year). Or are renown for their beauty – Venice’s Gritti Palace, the Mount Nelson in Cape Town, Durban’s old style Oyster Box and the Monastero Santa Rosa on the Amalfi coast. And some I need to research, which is half the fun, because we want to go on safari in Africa and I want to return to Bali. And we always have Paris, as long as it’s at the George Cinq. Open up world, we need to see you.

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