Stephen McGinty: Hotel California, the final resting place of Whitney Houston and so many others

IN MAY 1977, Whitney Houston was, by day, a pupil in a pleated skirt at Mount Saint Dominic Academy, a Catholic girl’s school in Caldwell, New Jersey, and by night a teenage chanteuse.

As the daughter of an entertainment executive and a gospel singer, at the age of 13 little Ms Houston began watching from the wings as her mother, Cissy, performed in night clubs, while at 14 she sang back-up vocals on the Michael Zager Band’s hit Life’s A Party.

The soundtrack of that early summer of 1977, the summer of Star Wars and the first Apple computer, was a number one hit single by The Eagles, to which Whitney Houston would have danced with her friends and which would prophetically predict her death. The song was Hotel California.

“Mirrors on the ceiling,

The pink champagne on ice

And she said: “We are all prisoners here, of our own device”

And in the master’s chambers,

They gathered for the feast

They stab it with their steely knives,

But they just can’t kill the beast.

Last thing I remember,

I was running for the door

I had to find the passage back

To the place I was before

“Relax” said the night man

“We are programmed to receive.

You can check-out any time you like,

But you can never leave.”

The story behind the song Hotel California is one around which myths have grown like ivy. In the village of Todos Santos, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, there sits a Hotel California, where staff claim Don Henley, the drummer for The Eagles took up residence in the early seventies, but he denies having ever visited.

The cover of the album of a mission-style building, framed by palm trees and backlit by the golden light of dusk in southern California is actually a photograph of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the “Pink Palace” as it is known and which is rendered unrecognisable by the photographer David Alexander’s curious angle.

However The Eagles have always insisted that Hotel California refers not to a physical place but the surreal and dark state of mind experienced by the veterans of the music scene in Los Angeles during the seventies, a time when cocaine fell like snow.

“The song is an allegory about hedonism, greed and self-destruction, about the music industry in the 1970s,” explained Don Henley. The original riff was created by Don Felder, who had been suggesting song ideas since joining the band, but this was the first to capture his bandmates’ imagination. The working title was “Mexican reggae” but it soon changed with the lyrics.

Although the band was now based in Los Angeles, everyone was an outsider and that feeling of discovery, of driving into the neon city of lights from the dark of the desert was reflected in the song.

As Henley said: “It’s basically a song about the dark underbelly of the American dream.”

It’s a song I’ve always loved, particularly as it combines two of my favourite things: hotels and California, specifically Los Angeles. Above the desk at which I’m currently writing there are two framed black and white images of Los Angeles.

The first is of a girl in a ball gown, sitting at a candy-striped hot dog stand and the second is a souvenir of a previous visit: the letterhead of stationary from the Chateau Marmont, a personalised extra provided to guests, which reads: “In residence: Mr Stephen McGinty.”

It was at the Chateau Marmont, a 1930s copy of a Loire Valley Chateau, which rises above Sunset Boulevard, that Jim Morrison leapt from the roof. He survived. And where Jim Belushi, who didn’t, checked into bungalow number 3 and checked out after injecting a speedball of cocaine and heroin in March, 1982.

I’ve always thought that a hotel was a strangely appropriate place to shuffle off this mortal coil. They are already transitory with a strong element of limbo. Guests are scattered souls resident in one place for a period of time, before moving on.

According to statistics, there are usually two deaths a day in hotel rooms across America, (the majority quietly huckled out before residents are even aware) but, of course it is only the most famous victims that we recall.

If the spirit of the sixties did die, then it was in a hotel in 1968 and it wasn’t peaceful but violent. On 4 April, Martin Luther King stepped outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis only to be gunned down, while two months later Bobby Kennedy suffered the same fate at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

The rock star lost to a “Hotel California” has become a regular occurrence. For Janis Joplin, it was at the Landmark Hotel in LA, hours after buying a bad bag of heroin in 1970. (Is there such a thing as a good bag?)

For Jimi Hendrix it was in room 507 of the Hotel Samarqand in Notting Hill in the same year. John Entwistle, the bass player with The Who died in room 658 of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in style, having “partied” with a stripper, he was carried off as he slept by a cocaine-induced heart attack.

It would be morbid and, well, frankly rather strange to have, say, a favourite hotel death, but I can’t help but have a regard for two writers who had the misfortune to pass away, not at home, but exiled in a rented room.

For Oscar Wilde it was in room 16 of the Hotel Alsace on the rue des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he encountered a floral wallpaper so foul as to hasten his demise from cerebral meningitis. As he said gazing upon his new companion: “One of us must go.”

Meanwhile for those of us looking forward to seeing David Suchet tread the boards of Glasgow’s Theatre Royal in Long Day’s Journey Into Night in March, we should remember the sad demise of the play’s author, Eugene O’Neill. At 65, broke and suffering both alcoholism and a form of Parkinson’s which made his hands tremble and writing impossible, he was resident in room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel in Boston.

His last faint words were: “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room, and God damn it, died in a hotel room.”

Whitney Houston would have had no such thought if, as is assumed, she overdosed and was already dead before slipping beneath the surface of her bath.

The pictures of her hotel room, the luxury of five stars reduced to a bleak squalor of scattered plates and half eaten turkey sandwiches, hairbrushes and a plastic razor, may have dismayed some people, while feeding the voyeuristic appetites of others.

But the fact is previous generations displayed no less a morbid interest. It is long forgotten now, but the last portrait of Marilyn Monroe was not of her frolicking by the pool of the Hotel Bel Air, but a far more intimate and depressing shot. She may have been nude but for a sheet, but the allure that beguiled millions of men had departed. She was recognisable only by the cardboard tag on her toe.

As the lyrics of Hotel California and Whitney Houston’s fate makes clear, Los Angeles, the “City of Angels” has an uncanny ability to destroy those who seek success in that vast sprawl between the high mountains and blue of the Pacific ocean.

For the past few weeks I’ve been dipping in and out of a birthday present, Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, published by the Library of America, which distils the futuristic city into 800 pages of essays, extracts, poems and journalism. The theme that rolls through each piece is of a warm paradise with serpents on every tree, where those who fail resent those who succeed and those who succeed are in danger of being destroyed by their own desires.

In the early 1990s Whitney Houston was the Queen of Los Angeles, the star of The Bodyguard and the singer behind some of the best-selling albums of all time. But, as the song said, she could never leave.

One who did was William Faulkner, who arrived in Los Angeles to work on screenplays for MGM, in the days when writers wore shirt and ties and toiled from nine-to-five in offices on the movie back-lots.

He did not take to the city and wrote of its insidious corruption in a single short story Golden Land. One day, fearful for his own sanity and soul, he asked his supervisor if he could take his work home with him. Impressed by the author’s diligence, the supervisor agreed, at which point Faulkner went immediately home – to Oxford, Mississippi.