Mad Men Hotels: Will Draper Make Them Boring?

One of the more intriguing aspects of AMC’s Mad Men, the over-marketed, over-blogged-about, and overly fetishized (and fetishizing) TV drama that returned this year partnering with Banana Republic and Hilton hotels, is how it has portrayed the travel and more fantastically, the hospitality world of the early 1960s.

In the premiere episode of the current (third) season, lead character Don Draper takes the luxurious option of flying south to Baltimore with his company’s art director Salvatore Romano, only to pick up an appropriately game blonde flight attendant; meanwhile, Sal attempts to indulge his closeted desires with a randy bellhop. Both execs are staying at the famed Belvedere Hotel, an ornate, pre-war building that to this day stands as an emblem of a time when traveling businesspeople took trips for truly important reasons, and to grander establishments than just the latest W.

Of course, today’s Belvedere is a co-op. I used to live in it, along with a few John Waters impersonators in smoking jackets, and I can tell you that it never felt like a real home precisely because it had been somewhat preserved in its originally theatrical state.

But hotels and hotel fantasy figure even more prominently in Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men world. Last season, Draper flew to California, where he found it “new and clean,” sleeping at an implied rendering of the pink-and-green Beverly Hills Hotel and then making a (tenuous) lust connection with an aimless California Girl who lured him out to the dreamscape of mid-century Palm Springs. Earlier in the series, Draper took wife Betty out for dinner to the Savoy on their anniversary; amid the opulence and modernist classical music, Betty ran into an old roommate, a former model-turned-prostitute, causing her to re-consider the role that such home-extensions served for men like her husband.

More recently, of course, Draper makes the acquaintance of Conrad Hilton, a revered international hospitality pioneer on the cusp of seeing his face grace the cover of Time magazine. For people who aren’t acquainted with the hotel business, the show teaches us that Hilton didn’t just own his brand of local glorified flophouses but the Waldorf Astoria, and that he takes his guests’ experiences seriously.

Last week, a former Sterling Cooper exec, Duck Phillips, even invited a young copywriter to meet him at the elegant Pierre Hotel, where he holds meetings, despite his new company’s New York headquarters. Phillips feels it’s more impressive to meet clients in swank, personalized hotel rooms, and it just so happens to also provide him a homebase to bed new prospective employees.

And last night, in Draper’s new life as Conrad Hilton’s on-call adman, Betty accompanies Don to Italy, presumably to the 1963-built, $50 million Rome Cavalieri Hilton, outside of which they play out a public seduction scene at a sidewalk café, before Don takes the mother of his children back to his room with a view of the Vatican, and treats her like the big-haired, bedroom-eyed mid-century model she longs to be every day she has to spend in the dull New York City suburbs.

Are hotels, in life and art, just about freedom and make-believe? Maybe.

But Mad Men goes deeper. It reminds us that in the 1960s, the hotel, like the airplane, was also still a special, mysterious, momentous place, a phantasmagoric portal to anonymity and celebration, success-making and (exciting, or at least two-person) sex. It’s the Hotel as multi-tiered theater with hundreds of hidden mini-stages. An objective site that allowed — rather, invited — real and wannabe movers and shakers to play out social and socially deviant rituals in private.

Today, for the most part, the hotel’s just a boring matrix of impersonal compartments designed for you to get a night’s sleep at the lowest cost, whether you’re in the Waldorf, the W, or the Weehawken Radisson (is there a Weehawken Radisson?). The big question, if we choose to accept the Mad Men mythologizing, is: How, if at all, have hotels — particularly the grand ones that want us to remember them — changed in our minds amid their massive expansions,  corporatizations, online booking options, and in-room porn menus?

With the news this week that Sheraton is offering free nights at 86 of its locations, to say nothing of other deals that show the mighty chains groveling for our business, it would appear that America no longer does its dreaming, its scheming, its demeaning in Big Hotels — and that Big Hotels are no longer Big. Of course, that may be completely untrue. After my recent stay at the historic Hyatt Century Plaza in Los Angeles, I began to wonder just what went down in those feisty rooms across the hall from me — I thought about more than myself, unlike those stale days and nights in a Westin or Hyatt designed to make me feel comfortably numb.

That said, the curved wall, 1960s-style Century Plaza is exactly the type of hotel Don Draper would have stayed in if he had business in Los Angeles again, and it may be demolished soon. The new urban structures that house brands like Hilton, Sheraton, Marriot, are so impersonal, so clearly designed to feel generic, that it’s almost impossible to imagine anything creative (even within the sexual realm) happening within their walls. Sleeping, meeting, drinking, cheating, screwing, or even walking through these hotels are nothing more than functional practices today — not unlike going to the bathroom — and perhaps that’s a mistake on the part of the branding departments. Or perhaps that’s what they’re going for.  Maybe it’s just matching up the product to the client base.

One bright light is the fact that the Pierre, owned by Asia’s Taj Hotels since 2005, has reopened following a worthwhile $100 million renovation, mixing its crazy 1967 tromp l’oeil murals with Murano glass and super high-end Bang & Olufsen audio systems. A new ad campaign entitled “Pierre, Again,” which flaunts its classic appeal — or in my view, its ability to transport guests to another reality — has already appeared in some print magazines that still exist.

More compelling, Sam Nazarian’s SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, high-designed by Phillipe Starck and integrated with star-chef Jose Andres’s avant-garde Bazaar, just named Esquire’s Restaurant of the Year, is a true progression from the type of hotel one Don Draper might have stayed and played in back before JFK fell. Modelesque women saunter in all night; a-list actors and rockstars dine at the restaurant; and even on a cloudy day, you can find designer bathing suits and heels at the pool. Who knows what these people are really doing — or what they have to say? They are celebrating the act of existing within the confines of a dramatic hotel’s ecosystem. They like it there.

Sadly, America’s more generic boutique design hotels, even those branded by the stay-classy Hard Rock Café people, have taken the boring, corporate feel and extended that to poorly made furniture that simply looks more modern, cloying attempts to seem “naughty” with interior design (say, see-through bathroom doors), and ad campaigns that render them no less exclusive than a New Jersey turnpike strip club. There’s no element of mystery in most of today’s boutique hotels because they’re not really boutique hotels — the same way Fox Searchlight isn’t really making independent films.

The SLS may seem frenetic, with all of its vibing, but it’s something of a small, high-intensity town, the way Mad Men Hotels seem; it’s just tuned up for 2009. The hotel stands out for its well-married themes and facets: innovative and cheeky design, food, and luxury. But it’s more than that. It’s a big open theater.

What some might accurately call over-the-top sceney-ness is to me exactly what a grand hotel ought to be when it’s done with high-minded, intelligently playful thinking, and this is what the huge hotel companies have destroyed — and what they will never be able to replicate. Especially now, when the economy has forced them to give rooms away for free, and a weekend at the Century Plaza puts you at a pool aside families in town to see a Price Is Right taping.

What’s unusual about Mad Men is that it gives old hotels their due — as opposed to just fetishizing them like a Saarinen chair — offering them more personality, more actual character, than any set on the show. A night at the Waldorf, which was already owned by a corporation, didn’t feel like an everyday affair in Draper’s 1963. You could want to go to the Rome Cavalieri Hilton (now branded by the Waldorf), and to role-play when you’re there.

What I wonder is, with Draper’s conservative approach to advertising — Matthew Weiner has admitted that his protagonist is the type of adman who will be replaced by the real rebels of the ad world in the late ’60s, ’70s, and beyond — will Sterling Cooper’s lead man, a guy who lives the best moments of his life in hotels,  singlehandledly make the Hilton brand so boring that Conrad’s played-out granddaughter remains the most interesting thing about the company?

Poor Betty.