Sleeping with the stars (sort of)

Buck Wolf of ABC News has a list of places where you can sleep where movie and music stars once laid their heads.

Two are on Route 66.

One is at the Oatman Hotel in Oatman, Ariz., where Carole Lombard and Clark Gable honeymooned in 1939. It's Room 15, and it can be yours for $55 a night (it apparently doesn't have air conditioning, though, so go when it's not in the midst of the Mojave Desert summer).

Perhaps you'd expect more from Hollywood's most famous couple than a wedding night in Room 15 of the Oatman Hotel, where you'll still find the same white iron bed where Gable and Lombard awoke for the first time as man and wife.

Burros still wander the streets of Oatman, once a gold mining town, with less than 150 residents. It hasn't changed much since that March night when the screen legends decided Oatman was their best shot at any degree of privacy.

Lombard, who died three years later in a plane crash, never returned to Oatman. Gable visited several times to play poker with the miners.

Nowadays, the Gable and Lombard Room is the Oatman Hotel's most expensive accommodation. Still, hopeless romantics brave the desert heat to make whoopee where one of the most famous Hollywood marriages was consummated.

For an extra $2, you can get a souvenir copy of the movie stars' marriage license, and all the guests get a bag of animal feed to indulge the town's local, four-legged celebrities.

The other is the Trade Winds Courtyard Inn in Clinton, Okla. (ABC News has it listed as a Best Western, but it lost its franchise recently.) Room 215 was where Elvis Presley slept several times during road trips from Memphis to Las Vegas or Hollywood.

…His room at the Best Western (sic) remains a shrine — with fans now paying $80 — rather than the usual $46 rate — to sleep in the same king-sized bed as the King himself. 

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.