Link: Confessions of a tourist: It's only rock'n'roll, but I like it
This travel section article about a travel journalist visiting Hotel Chelsea might have been good. If only she had written something about the Hotel it might have justified publishing in the Sunday Times. Perhaps if she had had the guts to name 'Mr Big' the story would have titilation value. Instead, we get a visit to Serena's [which it seems our reporter couldn't name] and brief mention of 'hot sex in a YMCA'.
She continues to propogate the Sid killed Nancy story despite the absence of evidence and ignorant of all the factors that suggest the proposition is all but impossible to sustain. Maybe they should have sent someone a little more focussed if they wanted to report on the Chelsea? I could nominate a candidate.
This one left a nasty taste in my mouth. All that this journalist is doing is cashing in on the Chelsea's reputation as an excuse to publish a prurient piece of non-reporting. It's too easy to reduce the Chelsea to one giant orgy of drugs, sex and wanton violence. It is a tactic that keeps the fringe on the fringe and it fails to recognise the real significance of the Hotel.
It speaks to how far we haven't come in rebuilding a world that doesn't require a woman to be a satellite of a man that Nancy no longer warrants a surname. In fairness, the research effort in establishing Nancy's surname may well have overwhelmed the author's neural capacity. At least she avoided 'Nauseating Nancy', I do find having to travel all the way to England to firebomb journalists tiring.
But then, if analysis deficient non-reporting mixed with a new journalism that long ago abolished fact-checking keeps people like Lydia Marshall from checking in, bring on the horror stories of axe-wielding, sociopath, nymphomaniac junkies running freely from room to room...
I was about to fulfil a lifelong ambition by staying at the Chelsea hotel, where Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen made love, Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy to death. It was, apparently, the only hotel edgy enough for Mr Big to be interviewed in.
The next morning, I waited in my room for the call. And waited. And waited. After five hours, a flunkey arrived to tell me that Mr Big was in the building, but wasn’t in the mood for journalists. I had breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hotel, afraid to stray more than 5ft from a house phone. The next day was the same.
I was almost in tears.
At 5pm on the third and last day, I was finally granted an audience. I placed my tape recorder between us, and asked him my meticulously researched questions. He didn’t make eye contact with me once. He was surly and truculent but, after waiting for three days, I wasn’t going to let him get away with the same old pap, and eventually got some juicy, exclusive gossip about his equally famous former wife and his new love, a supermodel.
To celebrate, I had a martini in the trendy bar underneath the Chelsea. As the bar filled up with an elegantly wasted crowd, my attention focused on a beautiful youth with an unkempt mop of black hair, skinny jeans and a battered leather jacket. We got chatting: I told him I’d just interviewed Mr Big and his eyes widened underneath his floppy fringe. His name was Joey, he was at film school in New York, and he was Mr Big’s greatest fan. He implored me to let him listen to the interview: I said I would if he bought me another martini.
We couldn’t hear the tape over the din of music and chat in the bar, so he suggested we listen to it in his room at the YMCA. We bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a packet of Marlboro Red at the liquor store next door to Joey’s hostel and went upstairs.
When I woke up, parched and headachy at 5.30am, I kissed my sleeping conquest, whispered that it had been beautiful (and meant it), grabbed my things, jumped in a cab with wild hair and laddered tights and sped through New York as dawn broke, feeling like the star of a Patti Smith video. I showered, checked out and made the flight with seconds to spare.
A few days later, I was back in the office, very pleased with my interview as well as my conquest. I popped on the headphones and prepared to transcribe my nuggets of rock’n’roll chitchat. To my horror, instead of Mr Big’s voice, the sounds of two people having hot sex in a New York YMCA emanated from the Dictaphone. Clearly, one of us had hit the “record” button in the heat of the moment. I had to write the interview from memory, but Joey’s boundless energy and eagerness to please had, I reckoned, been worth risking career suicide for.
And yes, I’ve still got the tape. As souvenirs go, it surely beats an I (Heart) New York T-shirt.
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