Keith Moon did a spectacular job destroying the Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan back in 1967, but his was not the first or the best celebrity hotel trashing. The practice began with a bang, decades earlier, at Koreatown's lost Ambassador Hotel, with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1927, United Artists brought FSF to Hollywood to write a flapper movie called Lipstick for Constance Talmadge (it was never made); while they were in town, he and Zelda stayed in a bungalow at the Ambassador. FSF began a relationship with actress Lois Moran and, one night when he was out, jealous Zelda threw all her self-designed clothes in the bathtub and set them on fire. That's the only part that seems widely-confirmed—other accounts say Zelda torched all of the furniture and several unsourced tellings say the couple had to flee after the whole bungalow caught fire (amid concern over the bill they had racked up, conveniently). Anyway, the LAUSD trashed the rest of the Ambassador back in 2005.
LA's second great celebrity hotel trashing was caught on film: In 1972, the Rolling Stones were staying in room 1015 at the Continental Hyatt House (aka the Riot House, aka the Riot Hyatt, now the Andaz), where Keith Richards founded the practice of throwing a hotel TV off the balcony. (Documentarian Robert Frank caught it for another movie that never saw the light of day, Cocksucker Blues.) Today, the TVs at the Andaz are bolted down and the balconies have been removed.
The TV move was still in play in 1997, when Green Day checked into the Sunset Marquis to record their album Nimrod (the thrower was drummer Tre Cool). But the band also (allegedly!) pulled something way punker, according to the book Nobody Likes You: Inside the Turbulent Life, Times, and Music of Green Day: "it was strongly rumored than on Oscar Night in 1997, while acclaimed French actress Juliette Binoche was onstage collecting a Best Supporting Actress award … she had no clue that Mike Dirnt's buttocks were extended, baboon-style, over her balcony—she had the misfortune of having been given the room below a very restless bass player. Dirnt's turd plunked onto Binoche's terrace and waited for her to return home. 'She was so pissed she tried to get us thrown out of the hotel,' Dirnt said."
Model Mary Forsberg, formerly married to Velvet Revolver singer Scott Weiland, seems to have a little Zelda Fitzgerald in her (unlike Zelda, she was officially diagnosed with bipolar disorder): in 2007, she set fire to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of her husband's clothes (smart twist) in her driveway. Earlier that day, she and Weiland trashed a Burbank hotel room; according to TMZ, they "ripped alarm clocks and phones from their sockets and threw them, made 'dents and gauges' in the walls, and … there was even blood found on some of the linens afterward."
Somehow, in ninety years of LA hotel room trashings, zero were publicly-attributed to a fucked-up starlet. Obviously Lindsay Lohan broke the streak, in late 2007, when she was banned from Shutters on the Beach after spending three days holed up in room 645 with then-boyfriend Riley Giles: "Staffers went into clean and were shocked ... It was a pigpen. There was filth everywhere and the room stank of cigarette smoke.There was also a bloody syringe that someone left lying on the bedside table on a room service tray," Star (via HotelChatter) reported at the time. Shutters had to bring in professionals to clean it all up.
A few years later, Lindsay was also banned from the famously permissive Chateau Marmont, but that's another story altogether...
· Hotels Week 2014 [Curbed LA]
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