Why do they do this? Why check into a hotel under a false name?
If you are Bono, for example, and you check into a hotel, everyone is obviously going to know who you are and that you are staying in the hotel. Using a false name seems futile…
Why do they do this? Why check into a hotel under a false name?
If you are Bono, for example, and you check into a hotel, everyone is obviously going to know who you are and that you are staying in the hotel. Using a false name seems futile…
Perhaps so people who can get a hold of lists of hotel guests and airline reservations don’t know where they’ll be. Obviously at least a few staff members must know if a celeb guest is staying at their hotel, but depending on the status and desire of the celeb, I wouldn’t think its common knowledge to the entire staff they are there.
Just a WAG, but I imagine that it protects their privacy as much as possible.
If, say, Bono checks in to a hotel as “Henry T. Fielding,” but doesn’t tell anybody except his own staff and friends, then it’s going to be very hard for anybody he doesn’t want to find him (fans, reporters, etc.), to get through to him. Hotel telephone operators would find themselves saying, “I’m sorry, but no ‘Bono’ is listed as a guest,” while front desk clerks would say the same thing to those who showed up in person. Of course, Bono’s staff and friends, who have been told of his alias, won’t have a problem at all: “Thank you, I’ll connect you with Mr. Fielding’s room now.”
Hotel staff, I’ve found, are very good at protecting their guests’ privacy. As long as the billing details are worked out to their satisfaction, they don’t seem to care what name you use.
My favorite was Brad Pitt’s preferred moniker during Oceans 11 or 12, ‘Abe Froman, the sausage King of Chicago’.
You’ve kind of answered your own question here, the false name is used precisely because everyone is obviously going to know who you are and that you are staying in the hotel.
Spoons hit the nail on the head. Bono doesn’t want everyone who calls the hotel asking for Bono to be connected to the room, but there are people who Bono would want to be able to get connected.
Now, I actually worked in a Hotel in Beverly Hills that attracted some celebrity guests and, truth be told, I never had any of them use psuedonyms. Anytime there was a famous person who was travelling with a non-famous spouse or boy/girlfriend, they almost always had the reservation under the name of the non-famous significant other.
Most often, they just didn’t take calls- everyone who needed to get in touch with them would have their cell phone number, an arrangement that I think has been pretty standard for quite some time.
You also have to realize that with a ball cap and a pair of big sunglasses, celebrities can go incognito if they want to.
I will travel under the name Larry Underhill.
I travel under the name Brad Pitt.
The service is amazing.
Is that the service or the “service”?
Yes.
This backfires if the pseudonym is leaked, or if someone is able to guess it. If you call and give the fake name, the Gatekeeper assumes you are on the inner circle.
The leaking of Madonna’s fake name to some Toronto radio DJs in 1994 led to them ordering a platter of Italian sausage, whole zucchinis, and other items in the same juvenile vein, from room service to be sent up to her.
The implication there was: “Regardless of whether or not the star uses their real name”
I didn’t get that implication at all.
When I lived in Hawaii, a friend of my wife’s called up the hotel Stevie Wonder was staying in, and asked to be connected to Steveland Morris’s room. He wound up spending the morning in a music store with Stevie, test-driving synthesizers.
So sometimes celebrities check into hotels using their own names, and take on an assumed name when they’re performing…
Exactly right above: so that fans won’t be able to get through to them and their friends and family will. It’s as much a password as a protection.
Since I’m presuming that they’ve changed their pseudonyms in the past 12-18 years or so since they used these, here are some I remember celebrities using at the hotels where I worked:
Whoopi Goldberg : Willie Survive
James Earl Jones : Flynn Robertson (the name’s a family tree almost: Flynn is the name of JEJ’s son, Robert Earl Jones is his father)
Dwight Schulz (bka Murdock from A-Team) : Grant Cary
Gallagher (obnoxious asshat, incidentally) : Vic Vaporub
Roddy McDowall : Michael Lester (no idea)
Tony Randall : Lenny Rosenberg (his birth name, though Tony Randall was on his credit card so it was evidently his legal name)
Greg Allman : John Q. Public (how original- he got furious at me because I wouldn’t let him into his room; he didn’t have ID, I didn’t recognize him, and he couldn’t remember what name the room was in)
Jeff Foxworthy : Bass Masterson
Sissy Spacek : Sissy Spacek (and as down to earth as that would imply)
Mary Steenbergen : Charlotte Bronte
Walter Matthau : Walter Matthau (with a “Hold all calls I don’t care who it is I’ll call them and if it’s an emergency they can call my son who’s in the next room” order)
Edward Furlong, Jack Lemmon, and Charles Durning all booked under their assistant’s names, and Piper Laurie shared a suite with and then moved into the house rented for Sissy Spacek, who’s evidently a friend since Carrie [in which they were mother and daughter, though in this movie Spacek played the older sister])
Now that is cool.
Whoopi Goldberg’s real name is Caryn Johnson - why would she use one unlikely fake name to conceal her more well known unlikely fake name?
My guess is that some of these celebrities like calling attention to the way they’re supposedly trying to avoid attention.
I could swear I heard of one celeb who checked into hotels using the name “Jim Shorts”, but I can’t remember who it is…
I dunno, If I were famous as Troy McClure SF, I could use my real name, but it’d be more fun to make up something ridiculous like Mortimer J. Snead (or Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabadoo, if I wanted to keep the theme). It amuses me, it might amuse the staff that was in on it, and it might amuse my fans who found out after the fact (like in threads like this).
Obviously, the perfect name keeping with the same theme would be “Guy Incognito”.
That’s handy for filling out web forms, too. Personally, I use “Garfield W. Falsename.”