The only bad moment occurred in the middle of the night when I awoke to answer nature`s call.
The motel room was pitch-black. I climbed out of bed and started slowly toward the living room. This was a suite, and the bathroom, for some reason, was connected to the living room instead of the bedroom.
I was groggy but careful, pausing before each step and bending over with my hands in front of me, the way you do when you`re in the dark in an unfamiliar room and afraid of running into a piece of furniture and tearing your toes off.
As I crept into the living room, I was startled by a tiny glow of light over my left shoulder. I turned, and my blood ran cold.
There was someone in the room! My heart pounded. My saliva evaporated. Two eyes were staring directly at me. What was odd was that the eyes were rather beautiful. I relaxed a little. Yes, it was a woman`s face, a pretty woman, and she was . . . behind bars!
Behind bars? Then I remembered. It was only the cashier. I had forgotten to turn out the lights in her cage. Whew.
You laugh, but believe me, for a few seconds there it had been pure terror. Maybe not on the order of having Tony Perkins provide room service at the ol` Bates Motel, but enough to spook me for an instant and to remind me what an unusual place this was.
After all, you`re not likely to find a pretty woman looking into your eyes at 3 a.m. in a nice, conventional room in a Holiday Inn or a Motel 6, are you?
Well, not this kind of woman.
Let me explain. The woman was a dummy, the kind you see in department store windows, and she–it–was seated inside the type of cashier`s cage found in Las Vegas casinos because she–it–was part of the thematic decor of the Gambler Suite.
I was in the Gambler because the Continental, my first choice, was taken. The Continental, which is billed as ”the ultimate drive-in movie,” had sounded terrific. When you stay there, you and your companion sleep in a bed that`s built into an actual 1964 maroon Lincoln Continental convertible that`s parked in the middle of a huge room. The top`s down, of course, a drive-in speaker stands next to the driver`s side and there`s a giant TV screen on one wall.
Not that the Gambler wasn`t just fine–despite the incident with the lady cashier–but still, if they hadn`t been booked already, I`d have preferred to have bedded down in the Continental or the Space Odyssey suite or Northern Lights or Pharaoh`s Tomb or even Arabian Nights.
In Space Odyssey, you lie on a circular water bed inside a replica of the Gemini capsule, which is surrounded by realistic looking ”moon” rocks on the floor and wallpaper depicting planets, stars and comets as they might appear through a telescope.
In the Northern Lights suite, you`d swear you were in an igloo, and in Pharaoh`s Tomb, you hit the hay in a mummy`s sarcophagus.
The Viking and Jungle Safari were great, too–and also occupied for the night. The Viking, whose bed is a Norse ship with a figurehead at the prow, has its own sauna in addition to the king-size whirlpool spa that comes with most suites, and in the Jungle Safari, you curl up in a thatched-roof grass hut, mosquito netting drapes your bed and zebra skins hang from . . .
Maybe I`m getting ahead of myself. Maybe it would be a good idea to begin at the beginning.
— — —
Out here in the heartland, 40 miles or so north of Milwaukee, out here among the cornfields and dairy farms of eastern Wisconsin, where, according to what we`ve always been told, folks are friendly, industrious and decent, strait-laced and God-fearing, there is the pleasant, prosperous little city of West Bend, population 26,000.
And on the outskirts of solid, middle-class West Bend is the Dillon Royale Hotel.
And inside the Dillon Royale Hotel, which from the outside looks just like any other large, modern, respectable, upscale motel, there are 22
”fantasy suites” in which you and your beloved can spend the night and at the same time pretend to be everything from cowboys to Indians, from orgiastic Romans to Klondike gold prospectors, from jailbirds in a Mexican border town to the captain of a windjammer, from Chinese potentates to prehistoric cavepersons.
For those who like to sack on a rack, there`s the Dungeon. ”Return to the days of yore in your own medieval castle” is how the motel`s brochure describes this quaint concept. (Relax, the torture rack now functions only as a bed.)
Nowadays, of course, nobody`s going to be shocked to learn that for $80 on a weeknight it`s possible to check into a motel suite decorated as the Treehouse (”Me Tarzan, you Jane, complete with a swinging bed,” says the brochure) or into another named Cupid`s Corner (”For lovers only . . . A heart-shaped water bed sets the mood”).
Some people, however, may find it a wee bit incongruous that such accommodations exist in a community like West Bend, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Middle America, ground zero of the country`s moral bedrock, where the two leading industries are cooking utensils and farm machinery.
This reaction is understandable. Indeed, wouldn`t most of us expect to discover something like this in a big city? Big cities, it goes without saying, are hotbeds of sin and lascivious behavior and don`t we tend to associate such imaginative lodging with a kinky, hot-blooded, adulterous clientele who generally rent rooms by the hour?
In other words, doesn`t this sound like a ”hot pillow” joint?
And don`t we think of these establishments as being either tacky or sleazy or both?
Disabuse yourself of these notions. The Dillon Royale`s romper rooms are high-tech, not high-tack; sleek, attractive and squeaky-clean; they evoke Walt Disney more than wanton lust, diversion more than degeneracy; the atmosphere is more amusement park than assignation site.
Yet on another level, the Dillon Royale raises important sociocultural and psychosocial questions, which is why this article isn`t in the Travel section.
My assignment was to examine these larger matters, inspect as many fantasy suites as I could and share my impressions as a guest in one of them. Thus, on a recent weekday afternoon, the woman to whom I am married and I drove to the Dillon Royale. After signing the register as ”Mr. and Mrs. John Smith,” a habit that is hard to break, we met John Kozey, the manager, who graciously gave us a tour.
The Dillon Royale, I learned, has 69 ordinary rooms in addition to the fantasy suites and is part of the Dillon Inn chain, which has 14 motels in 8 states and headquarters in Minneapolis.
Jim Edlund, Dillon`s vice president of marketing, says owner Roger Dehring got the idea for the suites after acquiring his first motel, the Don Q Inn in Dodgeville, Wis., about 40 miles southwest of Madison.
”The Don Q,” Edlund says, ”had some unusual rooms. One contained a church steeple, and one had a bed made from a copper cheese vat.”
Dehring having noted the popularity of Don Q`s offbeat offerings, a few special ”honeymoon suites” were included in the West Bend property, and when the motel was given a major renovation about two years ago, Dehring decided to go all-out.
”The suites have been very successful,” Edlund says, ”especially in generating publicity. We have tours on weekends, and often there`ll be 50 or 100 or 200 people.
”Our opening was mind-boggling. We`d run one ad in the local paper and a few radio spots, and 5,000 people showed up. The traffic was backed up to downtown. And this was in February on a day of near-blizzard conditions.”
The prices range from $50 to $163, and the biggest selling points are the big whirlpool spas that are in 18 of the suites. ”We`ve found that people are looking for something unusual that is affordable,” Edlund says. ”They`re used to going to sporting events or on shopping trips to get away from home, and here there`s a totally different package.
”Our biggest market is Milwaukee, and the motivation for most people is strictly having fun. Sometimes, the suites are birthday and anniversary gifts. ”I don`t know how you would bring this up in an article, but I`ve seen a number of TV talk shows with people like Dr. Ruth Westheimer that say it`s beneficial for couples to go to motels occasionally.”
Ah, the psychosocial angle. The theory that motels add zest to sagging relationships because motels make a lot of people feel friskily uninhibited and naughty.
”Right,” Edlund says. ”Well, we take this idea one step farther.”
Although he won`t come right out and say so, the relatively remote, small-town aspect of West Bend makes it easier to attract more reputable, upstanding guests.
This may be partly why Edlund says there are plans to add more fanatasy suites at West Bend but not to ”expand the concept” to other hotels in the chain.
This means that the Dillon Royale is more a throwback than a trend, which brings us to the sociocultural area.
Since the interstate highway system was built in the `50s and `60s, the hallmark of the motel has become the Holiday Inns, Ramada Inns, Best Westerns and Howard Johnsons, the large chains with the uniform, standardized rooms, where you know precisely what you are getting. The newest innovations are merely chains with lower rates, such as Days Inns, Red Roofs and Motel 6s.
It didn`t used to be this way. In the March issue of Smithsonian magazine, writer Phil Patton traces the history of slumber along the open road. Motels, he declares, ”are shrines to the American cult of mobility”
and in the beginning, almost all were individually owned, ma-and-pa operations with distinctive, often quirky, usually banal and sometimes bizarre architecture, the latter characterized by imitation wigwams and miniature Tudor-style cottages.
At first, they were called motor courts and tourist camps, but in 1926 on Highway 101 in San Luis Obispo, Calif., Arthur Heineman named his mock Spanish mission the Mo-Tel Inn, combining motor and hotel and coining the term that would become generic.
These roadside havens, Patton tells us, always have had to fight a shady image. One of the most influential critics was Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover, who called them ”camps of crime” in an article he wrote in 1940 for American Magazine.
While it was true that Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow and their associates liked to hole up in tourist cabins after robbing banks, Hoover cited numerous instances of other criminals who chose similar retreats; according to Hoover, Patton notes, these fugitives invariably traveled with females ”of tender years and double names like `Mary Sue` and `Stella Mae.”`
The Bonnie and Clyde might not be such a bad idea for one of the new fantasy suites at the Dillon Royale.
In fact, Edlund says, the inspiration for the present suites came from guests and employees. ”We offered a free night`s stay if your theme was accepted, and we had hundreds of winners,” he says.
Because I was forced to make reservations only a day in advance, my options were limited, and I was forced to choose, sight-unseen, among the Dungeon, Klondike, the Teepee, the Wagon Train or the Gambler.
The Dungeon sounded too much like home, and neither did the others seem plush enough. But after Kozey showed us most of the selections, I liked them all.
Then something else occurred to me. ”Is there anything like a Monastery Suite?” I asked. ”You know, where a guy might dress like a monk and his wife like a . . .”
”No, no, no, no, no,” Kozey said. And he got this disgusted expression on his face. Like I was some sort of pervert or something.
