By Lauren Highland

updated 1:45 p.m. ET Aug. 27, 2008

Thank goodness for famous divas and rock ’n’ roll train wrecks. They're the sort of hotel clients who make us feel better about ourselves after we've pestered the concierge for last-minute Broadway tickets or complained about too-firm pillows. You see, we're not high maintenance: The brouhaha brought to London's Dorchester Hotel by Christian Bale and his family affair — that's high maintenance. Or how about Diana Ross, who has reportedly demanded that no hotel staff member make eye contact with her? Or perhaps the paradigm of bizarre hotel conduct, the baby-dangler better known as Wacko Jacko. (This game's fun, right?)

Here are 15 examples of hotel hedonism and bad boudoir behavior to help keep your guilt in check the next time you leave your hotel room a mess.

For a slideshow of the World’s Worst Hotel Guests, click here.

1. Amy Winehouse
We all know Amy is a mess, but housekeeping at London's Riverbank Plaza Hotel still must have freaked when they entered her room last February. According to the Sun, it was littered with bottles and cigarette butts, liquor had seeped into the upholstery and dirty underwear covered the floor. And the bath had turned black after Winehouse dyed her hair in it. The newspaper also reported that last September, staff at St. Lucia's Jade Mountain Resort searched Winehouse's room on a daily basis for contraband after fellow guests complained of "funny smells" emanating from her suite, despite the fact that she arrived there a mere day after checking out of rehab. Only a week earlier she and her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, had emerged bloodied and bruised from their room at the Sanderson Hotel, after other guests heard loud crashes and bangs (Winehouse denied they fought). Most memorably, though, just before her messy performance at the 2007 MTV Europe Music Awards, she tossed a plate of pasta Bolognese at the wall of her Munich hotel room and then cut up the carpet while members of her entourage — and the usually unflappable Snoop Dogg, who had come by to say hello at this very inopportune moment — watched in horror.

2. Salvador Dalí
To the staff of Le Meurice hotel in Paris, where he was a frequent guest during his later years, Dalí's obsession with animals was a bit of a nuisance, to say the least. The father of surrealism, who died in 1989 at the age of 84, often brought two pet ocelots along to the pricey landmark, and the wildcats' tendency to use the walls and floors of the Suite Royal as a scratching post left the room in tatters. That's not all: He once demanded a horse be delivered to his room, and on another occasion ordered up a herd of sheep. Upon their arrival (yes, the hotel was that accommodating), Dalí shot at the little lambs with a gun containing blanks. He also had the hotel staff catch flies for him in the Tuileries garden, paying them per fly. But at least Dalí knew he was a difficult guest: He tipped his favorite staff each Christmas with autographed lithographs of his work, some of which could now be worth up to $12,000.

3. Britney Spears
In general, the publicity that celebs bring to hotels is worth the nuisance. Not when it comes to Britney. Despite being a resident of Los Angeles, she's spent the last several years checking in and out of upscale joints in the city like the Viceroy, Beverly Hills, Mondrian, and Bel-Air hotels — generally wreaking havoc and wearing out her welcome. (In fact, the rumor around town is that at least one has banned her permanently.) It's not just the problem of the attendant paparazzi, either: Britney is a notorious slob. A former bodyguard told News of the World that he once rescued her from a trashed room where she'd been hanging with musician Howie Day only days after exiting a rehab program. Other hotels have suffered financial consequences from hosting Spears: The U.K.'s Sunday Mirror reported in 2004 that Spears demanded that Glasgow's swank One Devonshire Gardens cancel the reservations of all the other guests while Spears and entourage were staying there. Which we hear they did, though the hotel prefers not to comment.

4. Axl Rose
The lead singer of Guns N' Roses spent the late 1980s and early 1990s fulfilling the rock star credo of sex, drugs and ill treatment of hotel suites, tales of which his bandmate, Slash, detailed in the autobiography he released last year. (Yes, Slash wrote a book.) But while most rockers get more subdued with old age, Rose's lunacy is the gift that keeps on giving. As recently as 2006, he was arrested in Stockholm after drunkenly breaking a mirror at Berns Hotel, getting into an argument with a woman in its lobby, and then biting the leg of a hotel security guard who tried to break up the brawl. All at eight o'clock in the morning. Welcome to the jungle, indeed.

5. Mariah Carey
Sure, Jennifer Lopez requires all-white decor and truckloads of Diptyque candles, but the wise hotelier would take her over Mariah Carey any day. As the New York Post first reported in 2005, Mimi allegedly asks that suites be outfitted with gold faucets and that all toilet seats be replaced with brand-new ones before her arrival. Mineral water is required not only for her own bath, but for her dog's as well. And she wants two DVD players in her suite — which, of course, should be set to play nothing other than her own music videos. In 2005, she made London's Baglioni Hotel literally roll out a red carpet and line it with white candles before she would exit her limo and enter the premises. And on another London jaunt to promote her latest album, she had a $20,000 fitness facility installed adjacent to her penthouse at Claridge's, where one imagines she Stairmastered in stilettos.

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