The ice buckets of the stars seem smaller because my main acquaintance with them has been in motels (the ice buckets, not the stars), where they promise kingly convenience for the weary. Ice was amenity, granted by a huge machine, and the size of your bucket was the measure of generosity and value. In a 1963 interview, the president of the TraveLodge chain explained that the way to tell a hotel from a motel was whether “the guest is obligated to pay something more than the actual price of his room.” The scholarly authors of The Motel in America extrapolate: “If a guest had to pay for a garage or tip a bellboy for a bucket of ice, then he or she was not in a motel.”