Life in real hotel

Press, 8 March 1984, Page 19

Life in real hotel

The sign on the marquee says Hotel St Gregory, but do not be fooled. That monumental grey edifice with its festoons of flags, seen in all the exterior shots of “Hotel” (Two tonight), is really the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. The producers have built a replica of the lobby in Hollywood. It fills one of the biggest sound stages and is still only 80 per cent of the size of the original.

Like most television series, “Hotel” contains in abundance the three elements a novelist once described as being unfailingly appealing: sex, death and money, which led Robert MacKenzie of the American “TV Guide” to ask himself whether the steamy goings on in the television series happened in real life. To obtain his answers he spoke to Fairmont staff.

He asked Maria Muhlegger, who runs the Fairmont’s housekeeping department, whether hotel staffers ever use the rooms for “recreational” purposes.

She answered with a shrug, “How do you stop them? When you have up to 1000 employees of both sexes, most of them healthy, many of them with access to keys, in a building full of beds . . . well, you must expect nature to take its course now and then.” What does the hotel do with corpses? The remains are discreetly shipped out

the back entrance, through the garage. Hotels are frequently chosen as the site for suicides by people who want to dispose of themselves in agreeable surroundings. In one instance, a man checked into one of Fairmont’s suites, called room service and ordered a lavish dinner with the finest wine, polished off the meal and then put a revolver to his head. The hotel declined to send the bill to his next-of-kin, deciding that they had trouble enough.

A large hotel is like a city, according to Richard Swig, the Fairmont’s owner. “It’s like running a city. We’ve got carpenters, plasterers, painters, police .

The hotel has its own upholstery shop. The main kitchen, a room the size of an aeroplane hangar, serves 3000 to 6000 meals a day. The room cleaners change 1500 sheets a day in the hotel’s 678 rooms. Unclaimed articles left in the rooms are held for three months, says Ms Muhlegger, and if the guest does not claim them, the staff members who found them may take them, by the timehonoured rule of finderskeepers.

Once an absent-minded guest left $lOOO cash in a drawer and did not call for it. Ninety days later, a happy housekeeper took the money home.