I’m a failed celebrity whore.
Most of the time I don’t recognize famous people until someone tells me who they are. And the older I get the more enigmatic celebrities become: a fast-scrolling passel of pretty, pouty Gen Zs popping up in my feed thanks to some misfiring algorithm.
I did see Uma Thurman once.
She kept looking up and peering at me in a Soho restaurant.
"Susan," I whispered to my friend. "Uma Thurman keeps staring at me!"
Susan, ever the New Yorker, glanced up from her coffee.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “She’s looking for the bathroom. It’s over your shoulder.”
And that pretty much sums up my relationship with celebrities.
Dead ones, however, are another matter.
In the 1935 and 1936 writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) would come to the Western North Carolina mountains to see his wife Zelda. They were probably not happy reunions. Zelda, who suffered from mental illness, diagnosed then as schizophrenia and now as bipolar disorder, was consigned to Highland Hospital, a psychiatric clinic in Asheville, She would die there in 1948 when fire consumed it.
Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise, was celebrated for giving voice to the generation who came of age during the Roaring Twenties. He and Zelda got famous. Got rich. Became the toast of two continents. Those were the golden days. Now, after seeing Zelda, he needed a refuge.
The hotel worthy of him was the Grove Park Inn.
The Omni Grove Park Inn, the official name insisted upon by a marketing department and ignored by everyone else, is the great Arts and Crafts hotel that doesn't so much sit atop Sunset Mountain as grow out of it. Built in 1913 from rough-hewn granite hauled from nearby hillsides, the hotel appears less constructed than assembled by giants with Fred Flintstone as general contractor. Great boulders rise into chimneys large enough to stand inside, while the vast lobby glows with firelight even in summer. The Roycroft oak-and-leather chairs glow beneath exposed timbers, rocking chairs line the verandah, and out beyond the terraces and the spa the Blue Ridge Mountains roll away in indigo waves. It's a place that invites lingering rather than rushing, as though modernity itself has agreed to check in and call it an early night.
I had loved Fitzgerald’s writing since I first read The Great Gatsby as a high school junior. So when I learned I could stay in his room at the Grove Park Inn, I jumped at the chance. He always stayed in Room 441, using adjoining Room 443 as his office. I checked in, got the key and ascended in an elevator built into the boulders themselves. I stood in front of 441. A gold plaque affixed there informed the world that this was, indeed, where the literary genius had slept. I opened the door, expecting something worthy of Jay Gatsby himself.
The room was . . . small.
Not charmingly so. Just small. Tight quarters. Comfortable enough. But hardly the sort of expansive salon for penning a paean to the Jazz Age.
My expectations weren’t being managed, they were being deflated.
Disappointment might be the most Fitzgerald of emotions. Like Gatsby staring at the green dock light across the bay, I built something bigger in my mind only to see it vanish in reality.
We're attracted to the hotel rooms of famous people not just for their celebrity, but for the faint hope that some trace of their genius stuck to the wallpaper—or tucked inside the bedspread's batting—might still be waiting for us.
You learn it never does.
But that doesn’t keep us from booking the Churchill Suite in Marrakech at La Mamounia, the Moroccan landmark where the British prime minister painted in its garden; or Suite 1742 of the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, the Montreal hotel where John and Yoko held their famous “bed-in for peace” in 1969. You want rooms occupied by HRH herself? Request the Queen Suite in Virginia’s Williamsburg Inn. She crashed there in 1957 while commemorating the 350th anniversary of Jamestown’s founding.
Even the very-much-alive Backstreet Boys have their own pilgrimage. Guests at the Venetian Las Vegas can book the “Terminal Fan” experience during the group’s 2026 residency, complete with access to hang in a faux airport lounge filled with BSB swag—and the lingering hope that AJ, Howie, Nick, Brian or Kevin might show up.
I want it that way. But they probably won’t.
Maybe that’s why I still seek out these rooms, whether it’s Fitzgerald’s modest digs at the Grove Park, or the swanky Noel Coward suite at the Red Carnation’s Milestone in London. (An homage; the playwright never stayed there, but what are facts to fame?Blithe spirits?) All of them reminders that a famous hotel room was once simply a place. A bed. A desk. A window with a view.
The magic was never in the room.
It resided in the imagination of the person who looked out a window and saw something the rest of us missed, and found the words or deeds to make us see it too.
Months later, I couldn’t recall much about Room 441. I couldn’t tell you where the dresser was or what hung on the walls.
But Fitzgerald’s writing? Now that stays with me.
A century on he still explains the people you meet better than any online talking head. Like the passage Fitzgerald wrote about the Buchanans, an immensely rich, foolish couple in the Great Gatsby.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
His observations on privilege only grows sharper with each news cycle regarding our current crop of fools in Silicon Valley or on Capitol Hill.
The real souvenir from the Grove Park Inn?
Not the room.
The words.
Other hotels worth giving a go:
Do you have a favorite brush with fame in a hotel?
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.