Quentin Fottrellwas a soap-opera junkie in the 1980s. So how can he resist a trip to see where his favourite US shows were made?
IN THE 1980S I religiously watched every prime-time American soap opera going. Soap sirens reigned amid creaky plots and soft-focus lenses. Nobody grew old or showed signs of excessive drinking. If characters were dead and buried they turned up six months later with a makeover, which almost never happens in real life. Every rule of nature, art, science, suspended disbelief and studio lighting was broken.
Between my time at a grim Christian Brothers school, hiding in the cubicles during the slow set at Old Wesley's Friday-night disco and hanging out with Cure heads in Burger King on Grafton Street, the soaps provided a much-needed fantasy world to escape to.
Fast-forward more years than I care to remember and Aer Lingus is flying to San Francisco, home to Hotel and Dynasty, created by Aaron Spelling, and Falcon Crest, from Earl Hamner, the man who created The Waltons. So I head for the US west coast, on the soap trail.
My first stop is the St Gregory, a fictional New Orleans establishment that was transplanted to San Francisco for Hotel, using the Fairmont, on swanky Nob Hill, for exterior shots. Will stepping into this real-life location reignite the fantasy or destroy it?
An ailing Bette Davis starred as the matriarch in the 1983 pilot of Hotel. (She was later replaced by Anne Baxter.) It's important to hum the soap's syrupy theme, written by the Oscar-winning Henry Mancini, as you pass through the entrance, with the flags of many nations fluttering above your head. Without the music the place is just another bunch of bricks and mortar.
I stay in the hotel's tower, with a glittering view of the city. All the mansions on Nob Hill bar the Fairmont and the sandstone Flood Mansion, at 1000 California Street, just opposite, were destroyed during the 1906 earthquake. James C Flood made his fortune from Nevada's Comstock Lode, among the richest silver mines in history. Horse-drawn carriages could not easily climb the hill, but when cable cars did it in the 1870s the area became fashionable for families that had made fortunes in mining, railroads and other businesses.
I replay Mancini's theme on YouTube to set the scene . . . and then what? Where are the stars of silver screen with their chinchillas and peccadilloes? Where is Elizabeth Taylor, playing a version of herself as an ageing film star, with Roddy McDowell as her loyal assistant?
They are long gone. But the corridors from the tower to the bar are lined with photographs from Hollywood's golden age, scenes from Hotel with Connie Sellecca and James Brolin, plus Nancy and Ronald Reagan.
In keeping with melodrama, music and conflict, I meet my friend Dennis McElligott, of Ballymacelligott, Co Kerry, in the triple-domed Laurel Court cocktail bar and decide to pick a fight.
Actually, it's quiet, so we decamp to the Mark Hopkins InterContinental. The Top of the Mark bar in the penthouse is swinging. During the second World War, servicemen would buy and leave a bottle with the bartender for the next soldier from their squadron. This is my Hotel sound stage.
The illusion of faded grandeur is all very well, but it soon becomes cheaper to move to my friend's house and stay for free.
At the weekend we drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, dramatic when it's bathed in blobs of fog, to Napa Valley, where the contrast between its Mediterranean climate and San Francisco's cool, temperamental weather makes it seem as if we are entering a different continent.
Angela Channing, played by the late Jane Wyman, ruled the roost at Falcon Crest, in Tuscany Valley - or, as the property is known in real life, Spring Mountain Vineyard, in St Helena.
Spring Mountain has left behind the tourism of the Falcon Crest years and, by gradually buying up swathes of neighbouring land, more than doubled its size to become a 350-hectare (850-acre) boutique winery. The estate bottles its wine in the blue buildings used as exteriors in the TV series.
The winery is now owned by Jacob E Safra, nephew of the billionaire banker Edmond Safra, who was killed at his home in Monaco in a fire started by his male nurse in 1999.
Villa Miravelle, the blue Victorian Gothic house familiar from the series, emerges from behind the palm trees and steals the show. It's small, with the same square hallway and study accessed by sliding doors, with a dining and reception room, as re-created in the series. The oak panels on the stairwell are carved with vines.
Tourists are not allowed upstairs, whose screen version became increasingly Tardis-like and labyrinthine in later seasons of Falcon Crest. We taste the estate's wines in the dining room, and, in the absence of real cheese, toast Wyman.
The three-hour pilot for Dynasty was shot about 50km south of San Francisco, at a 260-hectare (650-acre) estate named Filoli. In the soap, Blake Carrington, played by John Forsythe, married his secretary, Krystle, played by Linda Evans. At one point, in the mansion's vast ballroom, a snobbish wedding planner asked Krystle what version of the Wedding March she would like at the ceremony. The stairwell was switched to the right of the hallway in the posh television version, which pales in comparison to this beautiful country estate.
Post-gold-rush mansions were torn down all over the US, but Filoli abides. Unlike Villa Miravalle, the house was lived in for most of the 20th century. Donated to the National Trust in 1975, it was built for William Bowers Bourn II and his wife, Agnes Moody Bourn. In 1937 it was sold to William P Roth and his wife. It is now open to visitors, who can also enjoy six and a half hectares (16 acres) of impressive formal gardens that were first planted in 1917.
The house is modified Georgian, but the entrance has French doors, the exterior is brick laid in Flemish bond, with trim from the Stuart period, and the tiled roof is in the Spanish tradition - all of which represents the freewheeling US architecture of the period. It has 43 rooms and 17 grand fireplaces.
Bourn, whose main source of wealth was the Empire hardrock gold mine in California, named it Filoli after the first letters of the key words in his motto: "Fight for a just cause; Love your fellow man; Live a good life."
I may yet hang this entreaty in a sign over the front door of my three-up, three-down - or, better still, commission my very own doormat.
The best of the bay
Where to stay
The Fairmont. 950 Mason Street, San Francisco, 00-1-415-7725000, www.fairmont.com/ sanfrancisco. Rooms start at about $250 a night, but you might get better rates on hotel accommodation websites.
Where to eat
Top of the Mark. InterContinental Mark Hopkins, 1 Nob Hill, 999 California Street, 00-1-415-6166916, www.topofthemark.com. Good for cocktails, sunset dinners and brunch.
Enrico's. 504 Broadway, 00-1-415-9826223, www.enricossf.com. Executive chef Seamus Cronin hails from Co Kerry. There was a quake that was 5.4 on the Richter scale when I was there, but with his modern cuisine I didn't feel a thing.
Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen. 1327 Railroad Avenue, St Helena, 00-1-707-9631200, www.cindysbackstreetkitchen.com. Owned by the writer and chef Cindy Pawlcyn. Expect to find ladies who lunch and construction workers.
What to do
Visit the Napa Valley vineyards.
Spring Mountain Vineyard. 2805 Spring Mountain Road,
St Helena. 00-1-877-7694637 or 00-1-707-9674188, www.springmountainvineyard.com. You can book private tours.
Filoli. 86 Canada Road, Woodside, 00-1-650-364-8300, www.filoli.org. This is one of the United States' finest country estates. It will have a flower show on May 8th, a twilight stroll on June 26th and jazz from June to September.
San Francisco Helicopters, www.sfhelicopters.com. When there's no fog, the pilot will fly over and under the Golden Gate Bridge, so you experience in full this stunning piece of engineering, which was completed in 1937.
Go there
Aer Lingus offers the only direct Irish flights to San Francisco. Tickets can cost anything from €200 to about €500 each way, depending on whether it's high or low season, but try booking two one-way flights, with your return in dollars, and you might save a few euro.