One of our neighbours is headed Down Under on holiday for a month, spring in the southern hemisphere being an ideal time to visit. This, and the news of King Charles' current visit to Australia—and being heckled in their Parliament House— brought to mind my own first trip to the country, during which I witnessed two unforgettable events. The first involved the entire nation. The second involved a partly naked man in an elevator.
The first unforgettable event was a nationwide referendum on whether to get divorced from Britain. Similar to the Canadian system, Australia was a constitutional monarchy, with a Governor General representing the monarch. Anti-royalist sentiment bubbled up now and again, yet the monarchy remained popular, particularly in the form of Queen Elizabeth II and a certain Princess of Wales.
Even so, by the early '90s a fresh push for a break from the Mother Country arose, becoming a political Aussie-rules football usually tossed by the left. A constitutional convention was held in 1998, and after much unpleasant dickering a proposal was finally hammered out—the sort of half-baked compromise that pleases no one and is guaranteed to fail. Against the odds, though, on the eve of the referendum opinion polls suggested that Australia was about to become a republic—bye-bye Westminster system, hello...weirdly hybrid-appointed-president system. It was put to a nationwide vote in mid-November 1999, in the middle of our trip.
The polls were wrong.
Monarchists won the day decisively, defeating the republicans by about 2-to-1.
My wife and I sat in a hotel bar watching the election returns on television. We’d been touring the country for the better part of a month, starting on the west coast in Perth, where she had gone to university. We were now in Sydney, resting in the lap of luxury.
It was here, in an elevator, where the second unforgettable event happened.
We were staying at the Park Hyatt Sydney, arguably the finest hotel in the country, wonderfully situated on the waterfront, walking distance from both the iconic opera house and Sydney Harbour Bridge. It’s the sort of hotel that most of us experience only through Hollywood movies. Even back then rooms went for a few hundred bucks a night, and we were in a huge upper-floor suite.
We had airline miles to thank for it—rather, the airlines had us to thank for flying so often that we’d earned enough to take this trip, and to nestle in these luxurious laps along the way.
We decided to go out for a late afternoon stroll with a friend. My wife and he chatted while we waited for the elevator, and they continued talking as the doors closed and we dropped down a couple of floors. We came to a stop. The doors opened.
It was the spa floor. On the wall opposite were signs pointing to saunas and massage rooms.
A man of about our age stood before us, wearing only a thick, white, terrycloth robe, and bright white hotel slippers.
He looked at me, glanced at my wife and our friend, and, clearly regretting his choice, joined us anyway. He had particular hairy, pale legs.
The doors closed. He pressed the button for a floor about halfway down.
The man kept his back to us and stood absurdly close to the doors, while we three stood along the back wall.
The doors closed. He pressed the button for a floor about halfway down
My wife and our friend were still chatting away, so it was no surprise that the two of them hadn’t clocked the tousled hair and puppy-dog face.
They hadn’t been pierced by those cornflower-blue eyes that melted hearts around the world.
Clearly it was left to me to inform them. But I had to be subtle.
Less discreetly than I would have liked, I elbowed my wife and jerked my head in the man’s direction.
“What,” she said.
“Hoognt,” I mouthed silently.
“What?” she said again, a touch less patiently.
I nodded my head some more. Hoognt.
She was about to mutter another "what?" when all three of us glanced at the man simultaneously.
I had forgotten about the elevator doors.
They were reflective—not just shiny steel, say, but literally plated with gold-tinted mirror glass. We could all see each other perfectly. We saw him seeing us seeing him.
Inside his comfy terrycloth bathrobe, the man watched us with increasing alarm.
The man was Hugh Grant.
We continued descending.
We reached Hugh Grant's floor. The doors opened. Hugh Grant did not move.
Nor did he push the CLOSE button and neither did we. We all waited for the doors to shut themselves, which took about a hundred years.
In a flash I understood his reasoning.
Grant’s notorious Los Angeles arrest for soliciting a sex worker—the divinely named Divine Brown— was still relatively recent. The film Notting Hill had been released just a few months before and was an even bigger hit than Four Weddings and a Funeral. Grant was then in his prime as tabloid fodder.
For all he knew, we were paparazzi pretending to be guests, ready to trail him right to his room, snapping photos of those pale, hairy legs all the way. So he stayed put.
Hugh stayed put all the way down to the lobby. Even at the time this struck me as a whole lot riskier than just jumping off on a random floor and making a break for it.
When the doors opened he scuttled over to the far left corner and was already jabbing the CLOSE button as we scampered out.
A day later a centrespread ran in one of the national papers—Hugh Grant interviewed at the Park Hyatt Sydney, plenty of lush colour photos. He and his partner of a decade-plus, Elizabeth Hurley, were doing their own Down Under tour, partly to promote his latest film, Mickey Blue Eyes, a mob-themed comedy.
In short order both the film and the relationship tanked. Within six months, Grant and Hurley had split for good. Mickey Blue Eyes was panned, and all these years later enjoys but a dismal 45 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Those blue eyes, though. My heart still skips a beat.
