62 - Those who never (officially) checked out ...

       Or Death in a Hotel  

     Death is never a very joyful subject, and not one hotels generally much care to discuss.  They do have to be prepared, however, because it is something they are likely to have to deal with sooner or later.

     When it does occur, staff are trained to react with maximum discretion.   Many larger hotels have special hallways and back stairways to accommodate the comings and goings of funeral-related activities.  As nothing is more of a downer than a sheet-covered gurney pushed through the lobby, hotels will usually do whatever is necessary to keep reminders of death out of sight.

     Here is a little potpourri of hotel obituaries.   The only thing these celebrities had in common is that they all breathed their last breath in a hotel. 
 

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The actor James Gandolfini (whom Brenda and I had seen on Broadway the year before) died of a heart attack in room 440 at the Boscolo  Hotel Exedra in Rome last summer. The 51-year-old star of “The Sopranos” was en route to my old stomping grounds in Sicily to receive an acting award at the Taormina Film Festival.

 The Boscolo Hotel Exedra  in Rome was the site of the heart

 attack that killed actor James Gandolfini (Getty Images)

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Poet and author Dylan Thomas succumbed to alcoholism in November of 1953 at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. It was just two days after having told the desk clerk : “I've just just had 18 straight whiskeys, I think that's my record.”

Playwright Tennessee Williams died in the more upmarket Hotel Elysée in 1983 in a similarly advanced state of alcoholism.  The official cause was that he choked to death on the cap from a bottle of eye drops.

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Singer Whitney Houston, was discovered dead in the bathtub of room 434 at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills in 2012. Death was attributed to accidental drowning, but hey! just between you and me, drugs were definitely involved!

Hendrix 1968 (Bing)

Houston's was but the most recent of a rock history of high profile drug-related hotel demises.  Rock legend Janis Joplin checked out not far away at the Landmark Motor Hotel just off Sunset Strip in Hollywood. She was only 27 when she died there in 1970 of a heroin overdose.

Jimi Hendrix succumbed to a fatal overdose of sleeping pills in London's Samarkand Hotel one month earlier. Both deaths were ruled accidental.

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Wilde (Google)

  Oscar Wilde, who was surprisingly only 46, died of cerebral meningitis at the Hotel Alsace in Paris in 1900.  His last words were reported to be: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death... and one of us has got to go!” (See Musing No. 58, Rue des Beaux Arts: Oscar Wilde, David Hockney and Francis Bacon, for more).

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Chanel at home at The Ritz (Vogue)

  It was 1971.  At the ripe old age of 87, Coco Chanel, the French fashion designer credited with inventing “the little black dress”, died of natural causes in her suite at the Paris Ritz where she had resided since 1934.  One of her most important rivals in the years between the wars, Jean Patou, was found dead across town at the Hotel George V some three decades earlier. 

Patou 1932 (Le Monde)

   Patou's name hasn't retained quite the luster of Chanel's in the intervening years, but both of their couture houses have continued long after their deaths. Patou had the last word, of sorts, when his creation “Joy” was voted “perfume of the century” by an international perfume association in 2000, narrowly beating out “Chanel No. 5.”

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German composer Richard Wagner died at the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi in 1883 while wintering in the now defunct Venetian hotel with his family. He was purported to be composing a new opera when he lost consciousness.  Wagner's grand hotel death later inspired Thomas Mann's much adapted novella “Death in Venice.”

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Posthumous Harriman bio

   Pamela Churchill Harriman, the British-born socialite cum political activist who became a highly effective and popular U.S. Ambassador to France during the Clinton administration, suffered a fatal stroke while swimming in the Ritz pool in 1995. Then-President Jacques Chirac, who had a close friendship with the glamorous diplomat, awarded and placed the cross of the Légion d'honneur on her coffin before it boarded Air Force One for the U.S.A.

Covergirl Thatcher

Her compatriot Margaret Thatcher had already retired from active politics before Harriman was named ambassador. She began a long descent into illness soon after being pushed out of office by her own party in 1990. 

Two of her oldest friends were David and Frederick Barclay, the brothers who owned the London Ritz.   After being diagnosed with Alzheimers, Mrs. Thatcher continued to live in her London home for a number of years. But in her declining months, following bladder surgery, the Barclays insisted that she move into a suite at the Ritz where she was tended by her own caregivers as well as the hotel staff.    It was there that she died in April of 2013 of a stroke while reading in bed.

Mrs. Thatcher's home at the Ritz.  In her last weeks, she was sometimes able to lunch at the hotelrestaurant where diners and staff often applauded when she entered with her caregiver.

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This hotel necrology is far from exhaustive, I have selected but a few of the better known examples.  When you get right down to it, I suppose the luxurious surroundings mattered little.   Dying in a grand hotel is still dying, but for some it may have made the final exit just a tad more comfortable.

 

SIDEBAR: A Luxurious Exit

Marie McDill in her garden back home in Vermont (NY Times)

     When Marie McDill was diagnosed with a fast-spreading terminal cancer, she had one wish: to go out in style! 

No stranger to elegant living, the seventy-year-old New England widow always had a soft spot for her favorite NYC hotel, The Carlyle.  So, she put her affairs in order, said goodby to her friends in Vermont, and moved into the iconic Madison Avenue hostelry.

With the support and complicity of her three children, she had booked herself into an eighth-floor suite just ten days after receiving the grim medical prognosis.   Marie McDill died peacefully in her sleep ten weeks later.

The family hired two hospice attendants from Brooklyn to care for Mrs. McDill:  Rose and her sister Shirley rotated shifts on a 24-hour basis.  In the evenings, Rose would sing spirituals for her patient-friend.

"She would put her head back and close her eyes and ask me to sing 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.'  She'd say, 'Give me the long version, Rose.' "   Rose, who took the subway from her East New York apartment to stay in the Carlyle with Mrs. McDill, later shared her memories with The New York Times.

“It was like low class to high class, going in there,” she said. “I would call her my queen, my majesty, and she called me her princess. And you know, she treated me like one.”

 

McDill in younger days (NY Times)

  Even as she was dying, she would walk with Rose or Shirley into nearby Central Park most afternoons.  Evenings, she would sit on a sofa in the back of Bemelmans Bar, frequently sending requests for her favorite Cole Porter tunes to the hotel's resident pianist, Loston Harris.  

Mrs. McDill's children organized a memorial service at St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue.  It was a sophisticated and poignant and very un-funeral-like affair.  Loston Harris played "Just One Of Those Things" and "I've Got You Under My Skin."  The hospice care sisters were also there, and Rose sang "Swing Low ..." once again.   There was a colorful sprinkling of the green uniform worn by doormen, elevator operators and bellhops from her last New York residence.

The service was well attended, but Marie McDill would have undoubtedly been most pleased of all by the large turnout of her friends among the staff of the Carlyle.  

 


Your input is welcomed:  frank.pleasants@libertysurf.fr