From biting a security guard to urinating pets to throwing spaghetti, celebrities have been known to wreck havoc on the hotels they grace with their presence. And it’s not just the rock stars—models, Oscar winners, artists, and even a secretary of state has caused problems. See the top 12 notable names that would lead anyone to switch rooms!
Karen Gillan plays Doctor Who’s sweet and loyal Amy Pond on the 11th incarnation of BBC’s series, the world's longest-running science-fiction show. During a promotional trip for the series in New York, the cast and crew reportedly had one epic party. On Tuesday, a guest of the Ace Hotel in New York said he found 23-year-old Gillan naked, “zonked out,” trying to wrap two towels around her and knocking on his door. Thankfully, hotel security soon showed up and took her back to her own room. If only she could time-travel her way out of this situation.
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Volumes upon volumes have been written about the waste laid upon hotels by The Who, a band known for its ability to trash rooms as much as for its exuberant music. The group exploded rhythmic energy and its most reckless member was Keith Moon. Moon’s boyish violence of hitting and destroying things was exhibited not only in rock, but in his propensity for using cherry bombs and dynamite to blow up toilets… lots of them. “We got thrown out of every hotel we ever stayed in,” The Who’s guitarist Pete Townshend once said. One time, Moon said he forgot something on the way to the airport, insisted on returning to the hotel, ran to his room, threw the television set out into the pool, and legendarily sighed, “I nearly forgot.” On August 23, 1967, his 21st birthday, he set in motion a now-mythical spree at the Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan. Though we can’t ascertain fact from legend, Moon claimed to have driven a Lincoln Continental into the hotel pool. But his antic spirit, fueled by alcohol and drug addiction, is also a warning to all celebrity irresponsibility. Eleven years later, Moon died at 32.
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Early on the morning of September 13, 1994, police were called to New York's Mark Hotel, where they found Johnny Depp and his then-girlfriend Kate Moss sitting amid a pile of debris in the $1,200-per-night presidential suite. Depp reportedly blamed the vandalism on an armadillo that he said had been hiding in his closet, but no one ever found the alleged creature. The couple was billed $9,767 for the damages, People magazine reported. Coincidentally, Roger Daltrey, former singer for The Who, was staying next to Depp and Moss at the time. The rock star told People later: "On a scale of one to 10, I give him a one. It took him so bloody long. The Who could've done the job in one minute flat."
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Russell Crowe apparently felt that the best use for a telephone was as a projectile weapon. The actor was arrested for throwing a phone at concierge Nestor Estrada at the Mercer Hotel in Manhattan in June 2005 after trying to call his wife and son at home in Australia. “This is possibly the most shameful situation I've ever gotten myself in in my life,” Crowe told David Letterman on his three-month public apology tour. “And I've done some pretty dumb things in my life. So to actually make a new No. 1 is spectacularly stupid." Eventually, both parties reached a settlement in exchange for Estrada dropping assault charges—it might have cost Crowe $11 million.
Perhaps Karen Gillan was following Britney Spears’ example: In 2007, Spears and her assistant reportedly invited some male extras from her music-video shoot to the rooftop pool of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles at around 2 a.m. Spears then allegedly got naked, then kissed and had “simulated sex” with one of the extras, a college student named Matt Encinas, who was 21 at the time. Luckily, it was a private party and no one was hurt, except maybe Spears after Encinas sold her out to Us Weekly. There was reportedly no damage to the hotel, but no word on whether the pool needed draining.
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In October 2010, Charlie Sheen gave beloved literary character Eloise a run for her money as the Plaza’s worst guest—his stay at the famed New York hotel led to $7,000 in damages and a serious downward spiral, much to the entertainment of the public. After dining with his ex-wife Denise Richards, Sheen took 22-year-old adult-film star and escort Capri Anderson to the Eloise Suite, where things got crazy. Tables, chairs, and a chandelier were tossed around and then Sheen allegedly passed out. Anderson called the front desk, prompting the police to come and take the actor to the hospital, which was just the start of months of more crazy behavior and the loss of his job on Two and a Half Men.
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Johnny Depp blamed his hotel vandalism on an armadillo, but in the case of Amy Winehouse, one could indict pasta. Just before she was scheduled to perform at the 2007 MTV Europe Music Awards in Munich, Germany, Snoop Dogg, who was hosting the ceremonies, wanted to meet Winehouse. When he got to her hotel room, the singer was allegedly in the middle of throwing a plate of spaghetti Bolognese at the wall and trashing everything. And that wasn’t Winehouse’s first hotel destruction. Two months earlier, she caused about $18,000 in damages to her room at London’s Sanderson Hotel after a fight with her then-husband. A hotel staffer told the Sunday Mirror: "They had to get an outside firm to clean blood off the walls, and then there was a hefty paint job.”
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Guns N’ Roses’ legendary frontman was allegedly in attack mode outside the Berns Hotel in Sweden in 2006. The rocker was arrested for biting security guard Pascal Håkansson in the leg. Rose was apparently intoxicated at the time and angry about being left alone at a party. He was cursing at his female coordinator in the lobby and started banging on the walls, which is when Håkansson approached the two of them. Rose attacked him, breaking skin and a mirror in the process. Rose admitted to the crimes and paid approximately $1,400 in damages. Håkansson told Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet: “He could have had Hepatitis B or something. It was very uncomfortable. In general, it's disgusting to bite people."
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Much like Russell Crowe, supermodel Naomi Campbell discovered a phone could double as a weapon. In September 1998, Campbell, then at the height of her career, pleaded guilty to punching and hitting personal assistant Georgina Galanis with a telephone inside a Toronto hotel room. The supermodel paid Galanis an undisclosed sum and was ordered to take anger-management classes. But seemingly, the classes didn’t do much good. In August 2005, Campbell’s friend, actress Yvonne Scio, accused her of punching her “like Mike Tyson” inside a suite at the Eden Hotel in Rome because she was wearing a similar dress. Though that was the end of Campbell’s hotel drama, she has not stopped the hitting—both a former housekeeper and two police officers have faced her wrath since.
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Speechwriter Christopher Buckley traveled to Paris with then-Vice President George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz in the late ‘80s. As he reported in Forbes (via MSNBC) years after the trip, they were all staying at the Hôtel de Crillon when Bush’s entourage members noticed their rooms didn’t have any towels and had to dry off with toilet paper. Eventually, the hotel staff finally handed over a few towels, but they allegedly weren’t happy about it. Why? Shultz and his staffers had reportedly taken a significant number of the hotel’s luxurious monogrammed towels.
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Hot-headed actor Christian Bale was arrested in July 2008 for allegedly shoving his mother Jenny and his sister Sharon inside his suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London the night before the premiere of The Dark Knight. Bale was not charged after the Crown Prosecution Service were advised to take no further action against him, but his anger didn’t stop there. In February 2009, audio was released of Bale flying into an angry tirade on the set of Terminator Salvation. Of course, that was outside of the walls of a hotel.
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“There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad,” Salvador Dalí famously said. The surrealist master was always in complete control of his brimming imagination, and he had a taste for the excessive. Dalí, for example, took his two pet ocelots, Babou and Bouba, everywhere. One could imagine what the wild cats could do to the Suite Royal at the Le Meurice in Paris, where Dalí would stay at least one month each year. The ocelots shredded furniture and sprayed urine everywhere. When Dalí checked out of the Meurice, the hotel’s website still boasts, “staff had to completely repaint the Suite Royale because his two tame ocelots particularly loved the carpets!” On one occasion at the St. Regis in New York, Dalí ordered room service: He wanted a horse, The Independent reported.
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