| 30 December 2005 A Dry Martini“I like to have a martini; The dark lobby bar was filled with holiday merrymakers. Elegant wood paneling crept tree-quarters of the way up to the high ceiling. An odd mural of Asian motif ran around the top, interrupted by pillars cloaked in oak that supported the bulk of the building above. I was sitting in a chair that was too firm for Alexander Woolcott to have ever crushed it under his bulk, and probably too new for James Thurber to have used. I was vaguely thankful for that. The people at the table across from me was exchanging gifts, using the old hotel as a central meeting point. At the table next to be a portly gentleman with wild unkempt hair peered into a computer screen, pecking occasionally at the keyboard. He must be proofing something, I thought, a work of art or perhaps a soap bubble of opinion. Next to his elbow was a plate with two small hamburgers on it, and some listless French fries. He took periodic sips of what might have been a White Russian from a short cocktail glass. The back-light from the screen illuminated his face, and made his eyes glow in the dim. Mad writers have been a part of this lobby for a hundred years, just like the current incarnation of Matilda, the lobby cat. The Algonquin opened its doors in 1902, as mid-town Manhattan was emerging as the most fashionable area of the most fashionable city on the continent. Five years later, legendary manager Frank Case arrived, and he enjoyed the hotel so much that he bought it outright in 1927. Frank enjoyed the company of actors and writers, and he was instrumental in drawing the lions of the world's literary and theatrical life. Booth Tarkington, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., John Barrymore and H.L. Mencken all stayed at the Algonquin. Mencken once called the place “the most comfortable hotel in America .” Harold Ross, the founder of the New Yorker magazine, secured funding for the magazine from the Thanatopsis Pleasure and Inside Straight Poker Club that met in the basement. The name of the club was an inside reference to the poem by William Cullen Bryant, which was famous in its time. The last stanza could be referring to the Alonquin: “So live, that when thy summons comes to join The Vanderbilts kept their trotting horses in the stables next door, when Mid-Town Manhattan was the Mecca for riders across the city. The stable was ripped down to expand the hotel, but there is a commemorative plaque where the horses were kept. I read it before I turned off the street and through the tall doors and into the lobby. A white cat sat sphinx-like on the reception desk, and as it turned out, the transit strike meant that my room was available immediately. Mike-the-bellman showed me up to the suite. He is an Irishman of a certain age, and has watery blue eyes the color of seawater. He has been with the hotel for over forty years. “Did you know them?” I asked, after the tour of the room was complete. He knew who I meant. “No, I'm not that old. But I do remember James Thurber holding court down in the lobby bar.” He paused, thinking back. “He was blind, then.” “And incontinent,” I responded. Mike grimaced. “A bit of a problem,” he said, tactfully. Thurber was one of the figures that linked the generations of ghosts together. The Algonquin was the first hotel to welcome ladies traveling alone. Tallulah Bankhead, Angela Lansbury, Jackie Kennedy and Gertrude Stein were just some of them. William Faulkner wrote his acceptance speech for the 1950 Nobel prize in his suite upstairs. The brochure doesn't say which one, and I would have to find Mike to find out for sure. Alan Lerner and Frederick Lowe wrote the lyrics for “My Fair Lady” in their suite upstairs. I think Faulkner was done with the room. Douglas Fairbanks and Orson Welles both honeymooned here, presumably seperately. According to the brochure in my room, Noel Coward, Diana Rigg, Jeremy Irons, Charles Laughton Graham Greene and Lawrence Olivier stopped here when they were on this side of the pond. That is when I decided to go down to the bar and keep my eyes peeled, just in case any of them popped in. Manager Frank Case was a showman, and that was how the Algonquin became a legend. There is a story from the 1930s of a dowager matron who moved in and stayed for 27 years. After a couple decades, she decided she needed a change of scene, and changed hotels. She reported that she very much enjoyed the new view of the park, but missed her old room. Case summoned his chief bellman, had him hire a truck, and take the contents of her old suite to the new hotel. She was back in room #811 in three weeks. The Algonquin is just west of what had been the center of the publishing universeKitty-corner across the street were the original editorial offices of the New Yorker Magazine, convenient to Sherry's and Delmonico's, and almost next to the Hippodrome, home of the Ziegfeld Follies. Ziggy and the girls were long gone when I got there. The Hippo appeared to be a car park when I trudged up the street. The lovely belle arts building that had been Charles Scribner and Sons Publishing Company is just up the street. It is a breathtaking building, and it must have been intimidating for an author to march in their, manuscript in hand. It has been a couple things since it was home to a publishing concern. It is a trendy clothes store now. The New Yorker and the Algonquin have a symbiotic relationship. Ross got the money to found it in a poker game there, and it went on to be the best and snootiest magazine in the world. Enfant Terrible Tina Brown took it over in 1994. She slew dragons and installed new talents like David Remnick and Joe Klein. Remnick is now the chief editor, and I enjoy his magazine. He doesn't have to worry about the past, since Tina liberated the magazine from itself. Tom Wolf skewered the “tiny mummies” that defined literary society in New York in the 1960s, and it was on my very first trip to the city, near this hotel, that I saw the young author, resplendent in his vanilla ice cream suit, contemplating the city-scape. I did not approach him, since I was star-struck, but he had recently been profiled in Esquire magazine, and I knew him immediately. Chance, perhaps, but the moment lives in my mind still. Tina Brown was dealing with the colleagues of the ghosts in the very lobby where I was sitting. The New Yorker was famous for its tenured pets, writers who were allowed to stay on years beyond their time. And there were unashamed partisans of the regimes of William Shawn (1952-1987) and Robert Gottlieb (1987-1922) who had to be driven out. Tina Brown may have been the ultimate New Yorker, even though she comes from the U.K. This city lives through immigration and change, waves of immigrants sweeping over neighborhoods, re-crafting them to their own needs. Little Italy is now mostly Chinese; Hell's Kitchen is now fashionable, and they speak Spanish where Yiddish once was heard. New York is about metamorphosis and the cheerful adoption of the new. At the foot of the island workers on the new Port Authority tunnel in Battery Park, not far from Castle Clinton. They may have excavated a length of the original battery wall, on which the original Dutch settlers had mounted their guns. It was a remarkable discovery, since nothing was thought to remain from those times. In order to not delay progress on the tunnel, the discovery was noted and the wall destroyed before preservationists could raise a fuss. The Algonquin Hotel was lucky. Where dragons had to be slain elsewhere, the connection to them enables the hotel to make a living from them still. If the New Yorker eventually stood for snobbery, pretension and self-indulgence (consider a 25,000-word article about soybeans!) it was precisely that quality that connected it back to Harold Ross and the Algonquin Round Table. The thing I was looking for when I arrived was an unassuming circular table in the restaurant area at the back of the lobby. The Round Table at the Algonquin was the magnet of style and wit for a decade. Beginning in 1919, the daily lunch meetings of a pride of literary lions spun off bon mots that are cruel almost beyond belief. Lioness Dorothy Parker is said to have quipped on hearing of the death of President Calvin Coolidge; "How could you tell?" I liked her line: "Men don't make passes/at girls who wear glasses," better. It wasn't so cruel, or catty. But they all were, in one way or another: George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley and Alexander Woolcott. Frank Case wrote a cook-book about the glory day with recipes from the Algonquin kitchen. He called it "Feeding the Lions." I saw Mike-the-bellman before he went off shift. He told me the table was not where it is now. Current management has it at the front of the dining room. I thought it might have been there because the lions wanted to be seen, but Mike told me it was further back, where a portrait now hangs with the famous wits assembled. On Sundays you can pay a $40 minimum and see actors impersonate the ghosts. Benchley is now remembered for his quip “I'd like to get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.” He really said that at the Garden of Alla in Hollywood ., which was ripped down long ago for a strip-mall anchored by a CVS Pharmacy. So the Algonquin is quite unique. There was so much that was said here, cruel and cruelly funny. So much that the epigrams are printed and on the door of each of the rooms. It was a near thing. The hotel could have passed away, or not survived a Tina Brown-style intervention like the New Yorker. When Frank Case passed away in 1946, Charleston oilman Ben Bodne bought the place as a gift for his wife. He lovingly restored it, the first of two major face-lifts required to keep the old lady going. Bodne had great deference for the Edwardian luster that guests cherished. He did not cut corners on comfort or convenience. In addition to being the oldest operating hotel in the City, the Algonquin was the first hotel to introduce electronic key cards, smoke detectors and air conditioning. The second restoration, which included hand-selected antique furniture and soothing soaking tubs, was completed in 1998. I was tired from the trip and the hike from Penn Station. The Subway and Buses were not running due to the transit strike. I asked who was singing in the Oak Room that night. Diana Krall and Harry Connick, Junior, started their careers there. I never completely got over the fact that Diana married Elvis Costello without even giving me a shot. Mike told me the current occupant of the Oak Room is a dark-eyed woman with a swan's neck named Andrea Marcovicci. She is singing love songs from World War II. The cover is $60, with a $20 minimum, for $40 for a light dinner. It was too rich for me. I was really only here for the ghosts. And of course, I needed to get out of my wet clothes and into a Gray Goose martini in the lobby bar. Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |