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" Picture: Yvan Cohen/Getty Images I have spent half my life in hotels. In recent years I have been horrified as all my favourite second homes have been disembowelled in the name of progress and fashion. The first victim was the beautiful H\u00F4tel Lancaster in Paris, where I lived for five years during the Eighties in a cream wood-panelled suite with pale-blue carpets and old chintz curtains overlooking a delightful courtyard. The bathroom, unchanged since the war, had a mosaic floor, a tub on claws and old white tiles on the walls. There was a bell by the bed to ring for service, and a Portuguese fairy called Seraphim would appear instantaneously. The foyer was elegant, with huge lamps of blown glass on gilded tables. Up a couple of steps was a strange lemon-yellow bar with murals. The dining-room was simple and understated, the sort of place to lunch with a mistress, an elderly aunt or your Swiss bank manager. It worked for every kind of encounter. I dined there regularly with a transsexual prostitute on her way to work in the Bois de Boulogne, and she was treated with the same polite indifference as the incontinent duchess from the fourth floor. The interior of the lift was made of padded red leather. Around it coiled a stone staircase covered with blue carpet. The whole place was chic and discreet, a home away from home for Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich and me. Today it looks like the set of a Broadway musical. One half-expects dancing girls to appear from the kitchen. The garden, once\u00A0one of the prettiest in Paris, now wrestles with a Japanese theme: red\u00A0lacquered screens and stuffed peacocks. \u00A0 Elsewhere in Europe, other hotels are suffering a similar fate, but one establishment perching still at the edge of the old world, combining luxury with simplicity, is the Hotel Tennerhof at Kitz-b\u00FChel in the Austrian Tyrol \u2013 Hitler country during the war \u2013 a beautifully preserved part of the most sophisticated and successful socialist state in Europe. The hotel \u2013 an old farmhouse discreetly enlarged \u2013 is tucked into the low slopes of the mountain overlooking the town. Picturesque lanes curl through the hills behind it, past wooden farmhouses with cuckoo-clock roofs. Their adjoining barns are the winter quarters for cows. On my evening walk, through the open doors I can see them lactating as the snow swirls outside in the mauve dusk. (Most of the human cows are milked of their money in the town itself, in purple barns full of high-backed armchairs in petrol-coloured damasks straight from the Mad Hatter\u2019s tea party.) Jesus features everywhere \u2013 freezing his nuts off on wooden crucifixes by the sides of the roads and on the walls of almost every home. Picture: Everett&amp;#039;s room at the Hotel Tennerhof, \u00A9 Evi Lemberger \u00A0 The Tennerhof started life as a guesthouse after the war. Ian Fleming used to visit, and in a way it has hardly changed. There are 39 rooms. Mine is straight out of Heidi, all wood panels and a beautiful painted bed. The windows peek out from under the eaves at the town below, a church in a sea of rooftops with a Wicked Witch tower and the Hahnenkamm mountain beyond, dotted with skiers, some in apprehensive clusters, others alone and reckless, zigzagging across the slopes. I observe them from under a rug and a fur hat during my morning meditation on the balcony. We are all heading the same way \u2013 down \u2013 looking faintly ridiculous against the majesty of nature. \u00A0 My room creaks with heat and smells of pine. The white curtains feature blue-etched ladies at spinning wheels laughing under trees in tightly packed groups. They are looking at boys in lederhosen with mandolins. The drawers in the painted chest are lined with pretty wallpaper and the duvet covers are the palest pink, while the sheets, for some reason, are white. Along with the soft, square pillows, the whole thing can be folded and built into a towering pink-and-white cloud of feathers upon which one floats over the dreamscape to oblivion. \u00A0 The corridors squeak and undulate with red carpets over parquet floors and old pictures and prints on the walls, and you can smell the log fire from the hall. The best time for a snoop is when the chambermaids are cleaning. Everyone\u2019s left for the slopes and I am alone to develop special relations with the staff \u2013 who are infinitely preferable to the guests in most hotels. The girls wear beautiful dirndls (is it because I\u2019m gay that I find these dresses terribly alluring?). The boys wear Captain von Trapp outfits. They are all charming and polite without being crawly and two-faced. Initially there is slight friction between me and the flat-footed hall porter from Poland who delivers the newspapers before dawn, clomping around the hotel like Quasimodo. But even he is charming and, with a few simple deportment tips (ie: bursting from my room screaming in my underwear at 5am), I have solved the problem. Now he delivers the papers en pointe. \u00A0 In the mornings I write my book in the emerald-green dining-room after a delicious breakfast. Normally, I don\u2019t like breakfast spreads at hotels; they are disease traps. But here at the Tennerhof the presentation and the fare are irresistible, and anyway, I am the first up, so there are no dirty fingers to infect the virgin bread knife. It is still dark when the church bell chimes in the valley. Yoghurt and milk have just arrived from a local farm. Different loaves of bread \u2013 brown, black and white, all shapes and sizes, sprinkled with seeds \u2013 are baked each morning in the village. Local eggs and all those delicious Germanic things like ham and cheese, tomatoes and cucumbers, salmon and salami, nuts and seeds complete the best breakfast I have ever had. Picture: the Tennerhof&amp;#039;s indoor pool, \u00A9 Evi Lemberger \u00A0 I am an off-season queen. I hate crowds and high prices in equal measure, so when I arrive at the Tennerhof, the place is a tomb. Just the staff and me \u2013 the perfect combination. On the other hand, it is early January and conditions are at their most depressing. It is neither summer nor winter, but that undead period in between. A phantom spring has declared itself, and the locals are beginning to panic. The first snow of the season has melted. Vast streaks of dead grass enlarge every day while the dirty white patches of slush recede into themselves. It\u2019s like watching disease take hold of an animal, an old brown-and-white cow, collapsed and steaming. Helicopters buzz around the corpse, poisonous insects hysterically dumping snow from the high passes onto the slopes below in giant buckets. The forests are still sprayed with white, but it\u2019s more like dandruff than snow. In the town, naked without its winter coat, smoke twists in coils from an ugly patchwork of grey and green rooftops. The noise of the main road is tinnitus to my ears, and the whole picture is tired and dog-eared and exactly how I feel after a harrowing Christmas at home gripped by endless flu. I nearly head back. \u00A0 But then it snows. All day and night it flutters past the windows, covering the hills, trees and rooftops in thick white wedges, and shrouding the valley in an uncanny silence. The noise of the road recedes to a murmur. The hotel staff smile with relief. The helicopters go back to Salzburg, and I am transported into the same ecstatic state I remember as a child, encountering snow for the first time. I am literally breathless with excitement. The sky is white. Each twig balances three inches of snow right to its tip, and Jesus wears a high white hat over his crown of thorns. As night falls, lights from the houses spill onto the snowy ground and the mountains are luminous in the dark. \u00A0 There is only one other couple in the hotel. They sit at the other end of the restaurant at dinner, and it is only a matter of time before we are chatting. He is in his mid-eighties with white hair and a\u00A0kind, ruddy face. She is much younger, petite and pretty with vivacious eyes and loosely knotted silk scarves around her neck. They speak perfect English. They have come from Schleswig-Holstein in the north of Germany. They have an abundance of old-world charm and aristocratic manners. Five years ago, he had a terrible car crash and was in a coma for months. His wife \u2013 \u2018My angel,\u2019 he says, holding her hand while we drink schnapps around the fire \u2013 nursed him back to health with the help of an amazing doctor who is joining them next week. They ski in slow motion every day and tell wonderful stories of the past: of the Russians rampaging through Prussia in 1945; of a cousin who shot his whole family rather than surrender to them; and of an English soldier who asked for shelter one freezing night shortly after the war and with whom they have remained friends. They are going to visit him in Somerset next month. This story \u2013 I\u2019m reeling on schnapps, admittedly \u2013 brings tears to my eyes. The man is not unlike my own dead father, and it is strange to think of them fighting each other. Tonight the old divisions have completely melted away. \u00A0 A good alpine walk must have a restaurant in view. My favourite one ends at a farm called Hagsville, high up on the mountain, where I drink tomato soup and eat black bread in another deserted wooden dining-room. Through the tiny windows the mountains seem to be projected, unreal in their beauty, framed by gingham curtains. Piped yodels accompany my dreams about Austria during the war, and, as if by magic, the universe presents me with the last member of the famous Krupp family \u2013 Hetti von Bohlen und Halbach \u2013 produced at lunch by my friend the writer John Seilern. She is in fact the widow of the last Krupp \u2013 the infamous Arndt, immortalised by Helmut Berger in Visconti\u2019s film The Damned. HG Wells described the Krupp dynasty as being \u2018at the very core of evil\u2019. They were Germany\u2019s richest industrialists, their fortune made in steel and arms. The fearsome \u2018Big Bertha\u2019 howi\u00ADtzer used to such devastating effect in World War I was named after Frau Krupp. Their foundries were appropriated by the Nazis during World War II, after which Arndt\u2019s father was sentenced to 12 years in prison at the Nuremberg trials for crimes against hum\u00ADanity \u2013 only to be released by the Americans. To make up for the inconvenience of incarceration, the Americans decreed that the Krupps need never pay tax again. Picture: Arndt von Bohlen und Halbach at a Krupp corporate ball, \u00A9 Stan Wayman/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images \u00A0 By the 1960s, Arndt was the only one left. In my gallery of historical oddities, he holds a special place. He is a thrilling character, the patron saint of all deranged queens. He may have been twisted and addicted, a decadent, cross-dressing, sex-obsessed fairy of the first water, but he was also a marvellous rebel, the exclamation mark at the end of a long, blood-curdling sentence. He was an infamous character in the nascent post-war German jet-set, cruising the streets of Munich in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith crammed with trade, the only man, according to Keith Richards, more decadent than he \u2013 and in the words of Nicky Haslam, \u2018a thousand times camper than Truman Capote\u2019. He married Hetti in 1969 in a lavish ceremony, fully made up and glittering with counterfeit medals. It was a famous event, a throwback to the glorious days of empire, although according to the wagging tongues of the day, the marriage itself was rather less successful than the fairy-tale wedding. After a vague attempt at domestic boredom, Arndt found that he was not, after all, very much inclined to sacrifice his caravan of gigolos for the more dreary nightlife of nanny and nursery tea. The couple (and the caravan) moved between mansions in Palm Beach, Marrakesh and Munich, or cruised on their yacht Antinous II (named after the boyfriend of the Emperor Hadrian), and pretty soon Arndt had spir\u00ADalled out of control. If Hetti had been looking forward to putting her feet up when he died young (of cancer of the jaw), the German government had other plans. They went after her for the back tax owed by the entire Krupp family since the end of the war, and she was left more or less penniless. She fled to Morocco, where she was already the patron saint of all gentlemen who preferred gentlemen, and now she has retired to Kitzb\u00FChel, arriving at lunch on an electric buggy. She is 81 years old, but you wouldn\u2019t know it. She has a strange charisma, combining all the poise and grandeur of the Austro-Hungarian aristocrat with the gossipy langour of the Kasbah Queen. She is pretty, with X-ray eyes \u2013 blue and liberally mascaraed \u2013 under honey-\u00A0coloured hair, worn up. A retrieved dog peeks out from various shawls of beige cashmere, a tiny thing with an enquiring snout that she simply calls Dog. \u2018He is always licking me everywhere,\u2019 she says, in marvellous English. \u2018I don\u2019t know what his last owners made him do. One shudders to think.\u2019 She is extremely funny in four languages, an extraordinary living link to an unimaginable past, and I immediately adore her. After lunch she disappears into the swirling snow on her electric tractor like a receding dream. \u00A0 The next day a fleet of Bentleys pulls up at the hotel and a family of Russians gets out. High season is upon us again. As if by magic, the hotel is suddenly crammed with models and tycoons, their families and fiends. The old German couple wave sadly from the other side of the restaurant. It\u2019s time to go home.Hotel Tennerhof, from about \u00A3450 a room a night B&amp;amp;amp;B. Book with Relais &amp;amp;amp; Chateaux. *** MORE TRAVEL Courchevel, FranceGstaad, SwitzerlandMorzine, France \u00A0 "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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