(
)
This Ain’t No Holiday Inn
Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980-1995
An Oral History by James Lough
Schaffner Press
While it’s supposedly well known that the 1970 death of guitarist Jimi Hendrix was caused by an overdose of barbiturates, this entertaining new book about the final years of the Chelsea Hotel’s long bohemian phase claims that Hendrix may have accidentally been killed by a female companion.
A “beautiful, troubled fashion model” named Devon Wilson was one of “Hendrix’s closer girlfriends,” and the subject of his “unflattering song ‘Dolly Dagger.’ ” A new oral history of the hotel characterizes Wilson as a troubled soul with a penchant for drug abuse, and tells of the time that Mick Jagger cut his finger at a party and Wilson “elbowed her way in to suck the blood off as Hendrix watched.”
According to a rock singer and Chelsea resident named Marlowe West, Wilson confided in him that “the only time [she and Hendrix] were sexually intimate was when they were on heroin.” So, desiring some private time with the nimble-fingered star, Wilson “made him a cup of coffee and put a tablespoon of heroin in it.”
Unbeknownst to her, Hendrix had already been using heroin all day. Her hidden addition, the book says, was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” and Hendrix died that night.
Wilson was so overtaken with grief that she “tried to throw herself into the open grave” at Hendrix’s funeral. The following year, Wilson “plunged to her death out of a ninth-floor window at the Chelsea.” Writer James Lough says it’s unknown whether she jumped, or was pushed.
West claims the latter.
Hendrix is not the only rock legend whose death tale is subject to re-examination in the book.
It’s a long-standing truism in the annals of punk rock and bohemian New York history that doomed Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious murdered his girlfriend Nancy Spungen by plunging a knife into her abdomen in Room 100 of the Chelsea.
Lough quotes a hotel regular who throws fuel on one of several alternate theories that have come to light in recent years — in this case, that Vicious was passed out in a “heroin stupor” at the time of the 1978 murder, and that the real killer was an actor, thief and heroin dealer who went by the name of Rockets Redglare.
Lough claims “the New York police . . . didn’t bother to conduct a thorough investigation because they assumed that Sid was the culprit.” But others there at the time place the blame elsewhere.
“The theory around here is that Sid didn’t kill Nancy, but Rockets Redglare did,” said longtime hotel resident Tim Sullivan of the actor who had bit parts in films such as “Big” and “Desperately Seeking Susan,” and who died in 2001.
“[Rockets Redglare] was the last guy seen leaving the room. He probably went there and sold the heroin and wanted his money and got pissed off. He was a misogynist — a very scary guy. The rumor here in the hotel was that Rockets killed Nancy. Somebody even asked him once, and he answered sarcastically, ‘Yeah, I killed her.’ ”
The Chelsea Hotel, as it’s known — its official name is the Hotel Chelsea — was built in 1883 and designed with a “fortress-like construction” that made it “unburnable.” Lough describes the building as possessing “an ugly-duckling sort of stateliness” and, noting that it was built “during the transition between the Victorian and Edwardian periods,” refers to its design, which was influenced by both, as “Awkwardian.”
Then New York City’s tallest building at a towering 12 stories, the Chelsea, on West 23rd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, was the height of glamour during the Gilded Age, with apartments that were purchased, not rented, and sprawled out over thousands of square feet.
In its first few decades, the Chelsea “sat at the epicenter of New York’s Theater District,” with “playhouses, opera houses and vaudeville houses strewn throughout the neighborhood.” But when “theater owners found bigger, cheaper spaces” for their theaters around 20 blocks north in the last century’s first decade, abandoning Chelsea for Broadway, wealthy residents took flight and the hotel slowly transitioned to a place where permanent residents took cheap shelter.
For almost a hundred years, the Chelsea — which long housed a mix of permanent residents, tourists and those who glided in briefly during periods of aimlessness — served as a home for those seeking an environment where freedom, art and debauchery conquered all, and where those with no interest in living according to society’s conventions could be surrounded by the similarly inclined.
Lough’s book does offer some fun and surprising celebrity anecdotes, such as how Madonna, when she was shooting pictures for her “Sex” book in the early ’90s, walked through the hotel halls decked out in “this long, black leather Nazi coat and a leather Nazi hat,” or how a dispute between famed punkers Dee Dee Ramone and Johnny Thunders led to Ramone “tak[ing] a bottle of drain cleaner in Johnny Thunders’ room and pour[ing] it all over Johnny Thunders’ stage clothes,” then smashing Thunders’ trademark guitar to pieces.
Overall, though, while many of the hotel’s legendary guests and residents are mentioned — including Arthur Miller; Tom Waits; Patti Smith, who lived there with Robert Mapplethorpe; Bob Dylan, who wrote “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” there; and Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the novel “2001: A Space Odyssey” at the Chelsea — the book mostly tells fantastical yet real-life tales of many of its lesser- or unknown residents, adds depth to some that the public knew only peripherally, and shares many wild, unhinged anecdotes that marked a very different era of New York City life.
Paul Volmer, the hotel’s longtime night watchman, tells the story of a painter named Adrian who accidentally ruined his life due to drugs in just one night, and did so on national television, scaring the hell out of a major star in the process.
A friend of Volmer’s had somehow obtained 40 hits of LSD, and Adrian bought them all. “When he was taking them home in his pants pocket that night, it started to rain,” said Volmer. “Adrian got soaked, and the skin on his leg absorbed all 40 hits at once. He lost his mind.”
Adrian wound up in the room of two S&M aficionados who lived at the hotel (and who also had success writing “trashy novels” under the name Judith Gould, including one made into a TV movie starring Joan Collins) and while “tripping his brains out” raided their gear.
He “borrowed these leather boots and shin plates and a leather skirt and shoulder pads and spiked gloves . . . [and] he had goggles and a sword. He looked like a heavy-metal Samurai!”
Adrian then walked through the lobby with sword in hand, told Volmer he was “taking on the world,” and stormed out.
That night, friends of Volmer’s were watching TV in his room and as he walked by, they told him they had just seen Adrian on David Letterman’s show.
Letterman had been filming a man-on-the-street bit from a limo, and when he saw sword-wielding Adrian, he said, “Oh, look at that weirdo over there!” But when the weirdo on 40 hits of acid began stalking Letterman’s way, the host screamed to his driver, “Get me out of here!”
Adrian’s tale is matched in its bizarreness by many others throughout the book.
A “corpulent” drag queen and hotel resident named Dainty Adore “dressed up like Little Bo Peep in a gingham pinafore and a curly blond wig and minced around carrying a parasol and singing opera in falsetto.”
To his great dismay, Volmer learned that Adore, who was “always in a bathrobe, sort of waiting for me” as Volmer made his rounds, was “obsessed” with him. After Volmer broke up with a girlfriend, Adore knocked on his door one night, and Volmer, depressed, told him to go away.
Soon after, he heard something that sounded like “a charging elephant.” According to Volmer, Adore, who “weighed 300 pounds . . . ran full throttle, hit my door, and with a tremendous crash right next to me, bashed this huge door frame down, making bricks and dust fly.”
Another out-there resident of the Chelsea was Harry Smith, whose “Anthology of American Folk Music” compilation is considered a key musical document that inspired the folk-music revival of the 1950s.
Smith was also, according to Lough, a Chelsea Hotel resident known for collecting more than just music — including jars of his own urine. Smith, who “died in his room at the Chelsea,” was so paranoid about someone stealing this collection that he didn’t leave his room for an entire year.
THIS bastion of eccentricity continued along as such until the mid-1990s, when new management echoed then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s desire to clean up the city. While certain longtime residents remained, artists found that the tolerance for their boundless lifestyles began to dry up.
The hotel was sold to a developer for more than $80 million in 2011 and has been closed to new guests since, as it undergoes massive renovations. While there’s no telling exactly what’s in store for the Chelsea when it eventually reopens as a hotel, there’s no question that its days as a tolerant bohemian artist’s enclave are long gone.
“The 1990s marked the end of the hotel’s 100-year tradition of supporting wild, counterculture creativity,” writes Lough. “With the dot-com bubble in the ’90s, New York — and by extension the Chelsea — came into new money. If you had to ask, you couldn’t afford it.”