Bangkok - After 42 years of running Bangkok's famed Oriental Hotel, soon-to-retire general manager Kurt Wachtveitl has named Elizabeth Taylor as his most memorable guest. "The guests you remember are the ones who are really terrible," Wachtveitl told the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand Tuesday night in an event marking his pending retirement as manager of the 130-year-old hotel that has attracted the rich and famous for decades.
Wachtveitl, under whose management the Oriental has consistently been voted one of the world's best hotels, first met Hollywood superstar Taylor and her then-boyfriend Richard Burton in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was a vice manager of a hotel.
"Usually, they were drinking vodka by the bottle," he recalled. "Burton at 3 o'clock in the morning would fall down the staircase dreadfully drunk, crawling through the lobby."
Taylor later became a regular guest at the Oriental in the 1990s as part of her charity work for HIV/AIDS patients.
"Of course, these superstars, they always want to pay the lowest rate, less 50 per cent, and stay in an Oriental suite," Wachtveitl said. "And if you give them the second-best suite, all hell breaks loose."
The hotelier's advice for other managers on dealing with difficult celebrities was simple.
"People ask me, 'Are celebrities easy to deal with?'" Wachtveitl said. "They are always easy - if you do everything they want."
In Taylor's case, doing everything she wanted resulted in a small scandal for the hotel when she was given a baby gibbon while staying there.
The gift outraged animal-protection activists around the world because the only way to capture a baby gibbon in the wild is to kill its mother.
Wachtveitl, who came to Thailand in 1965, is leaving the Mandarin Group-owned Oriental during one of the worst slumps for the hotel industry in Thailand.
The kingdom has been hit hard by the international economic downturn, anti-government protests that resulted in the closure of Bangkok's two airports for 10 days last year and a cancellation of a regional summit last month, and now by the swine-flu scare.
"It's the perfect storm, for Thailand, in particular," Wachtveitl said. "We have 45 suites, and for the next two to three months, we don't have a booking for one suite."
