One small confession: I think the New York Hilton may be my favorite hotel. Because the New York Hilton understands me and people like me: I am a man who enjoys creature comforts in moderation, but most of all, I like to be left alone. In the Hilton—and in the many hotels like it throughout the world—I feel like a citizen. The Hilton fits like a good blue suit off the rack.
And in the Hilton I always feel as if I am somebody else, somebody whose company thinks my time is important enough to put me up in a $225 hotel room in midtown Manhattan, somebody who owns a good-quality raincoat from Brooks Brothers or another fine American firm, somebody whose boss probably won’t object too much to the $125 ($125!) steak dinner for one at Maloney & Porcelli, which one of those airline magazines called “One of the Great Steak Houses of the World”... somebody who just might need a bacon cheeseburger at a quarter to three in the morning.
Hotel rooms are empty spaces yearning to be filled—with work, with sighing, with sex; cool, perfect voids screaming for completion. But as you scale the heights of hotel luxury and your perceived needs begin to be anticipated one by one, and the hotel rooms begin to acquire personalities of their own, the vacuum begins to look like a jigsaw puzzle with just a few pieces missing or a bit part in somebody else’s play.
At one fancy downtown hotel, for example, some of the rooms are furnished with enormous bathtubs, and with candles and flowers and big gatefold doors that can be turned back so that the bathroom becomes a continuation of the bedroom. And you wonder, “What am I supposed to do with this? Does everyone want to monitor the bathroom sink? Is there something I’m supposed to be doing that I am just not cool enough to know about, something that Calvin and Leo know about because they’re staying here, too?”
And you have probably lingered at the sort of luxury hotel, sprawled inside your room reading the new Russell Banks novel or something, where somebody knocks at the door every quarter hour with a fresh amenity: “Would you care for a fruit plate, sir?” or “May I plump your pillows, sir?” or “Miss Willingham has just baked some of her delicious rum-walnut snickerdoodles, sir. Would you care to have a plate of them with some cold milk?” And when you step outside for a minute to gaze at the placid azure sea or something, somebody is in your room sprinkling gardenia blossoms on your bedclothes or replenishing your bucket of ice. That isn’t a vacation; it’s surveillance.
Bed-and-breakfasts are even worse, with their frilly curtains and thin walls, bar-brand Sherry and forced intimacy, and the dreary little brochures describing the provenance of every wainscot, so that to be a good sport you end up asking questions about the artisans out in Missouri who hand-blocked the period wallpaper. Business-intensive hotels, rooms all fax machines and blinking computer screens, make you feel too guilty for watching the Knicks game instead of signing on to Bloomberg or firing memos out to the Coast. And may the good Lord save us all from the kind of hotel where you can order up tribal tattoos, navel piercing, and minor elective surgery from the room-service menu.
At the hilton, where I go sometimes just to be a man at the Hilton, my room is a fine room, a New York room, without distractions but with a comfortable bed, a packet of Chock full o’ Nuts for the coffee machine, and a decent conditioner for my hair. The television tunes in HBO and all the pertinent sports channels but, in the spirit of the new, Disney-enhanced Times Square, is free of the naughty bits that often shock first-time visitors to New York.
When I open the drapes, I am struck by the perfect New York view, which is not to say the ideal view of park and river and famous skyscraper but a smack-on Sixth Avenue view of the slab right across the street and, around its edges, of a dizzy-making vista of the hundreds of high buildings that make the few blocks near the hotel perhaps the densest business neighborhood in the world. Through a narrow gap between buildings, I can see several of the great apartments on Central Park West and even a tiny bit of the park itself, a characterless yet nicely vegetated stretch that must be near, but does not include, Wollman Rink. Late at night, when the air is still and clear and cold, I can see in the distance a single cable support of the George Washington Bridge: one, two, three, four, five dim blue lights describing a graceful, massive curve. I cannot describe the painting over the bed even though I am looking straight at it at the moment. Suffice it to say that it has been chosen for its soothing qualities.
The New York Hilton used to be even better before remodeling into corporate friendliness began earlier this year. (It was also renamed the Hilton New York.) The huge, impersonal lobby seemed designed to move as many people through its spaces as modern traffic management would allow. Hints of brass and smoked glass alluded to what always used to be alluded to as the Go-Go ’60s, and there was a sense that anything was possible in absolute anonymity, that you could stride up to the elevator banks with a rhinoceros and three Romanian gymnasts and nobody at the bar would look up from his drink.
And still, at the Hilton, it is almost always possible to avoid what I sometimes call the Royalton Moment, when I reach the door and a man in head-to-toe Yohji Yamamoto sweeps it open for me. And as he sizes me up I wince, anticipating the response: either a nod, a wink, and a peer- to-peer “Du-ude,” which establishes me as a member of the tribe (and member of the tribe may not be exactly what I am looking for when I am coming back from a business meeting), or, even worse, a slightly deeper nod and a “Good morning, sir,” which means that I am unhip or old enough to pass beneath his radar entirely. It’s like standing on line outside Moomba at one in the morning: I would almost always be happier at home in bed, but at the same time, I would be crushed if I were passed over by the burly guy with the clipboard. In a previous life, I used to be that burly guy with the clipboard.
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