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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Salvador Dalí once asked room service at Le Meurice in Paris to send him up a flock of sheep. When they were brought to his room he pulled out a gun and fired blanks at them. George Bernard Shaw tried to learn the tango at Reid's Palace in Madeira, and the details of India's independence were worked out in the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Delhi. The world's grandest hotels have provided glamorous backgrounds for some of the most momentous – and most bizarre – events in history. Adrian Mourby is a distinguished hotel historian and travel journalist – and a lover of great hotels. Here he tells the stories of 50 of the world's most magnificent, among them the Adlon in Berlin, the Hotel de Russie in Rome, the Continental in Saigon, Raffles in Singapore, the Dorchester in London, Pera Palace in Istanbul and New York's Plaza, as well as some lesser known grand hotels like the Bristol in Warsaw, the Londra Palace in Venice and the Midland in Morecambe Bay. All human life is to be found in a great hotel, only in a more entertaining form.
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Rooms with a View
The Secret Life of Grand Hotels
ADRIAN MOURBY
To my mother Margaret ‘Peggy’ Mourby who loved a good hotel
CONTENTS
NOTE
Hotels have always changed their names on a frequent basis and continue to do so. In the contents above I have given the name by which a hotel was first known, or its most common name over the years. At the top of each chapter, however, I also give the most recent name of those hotels that are continuing to reinvent or rebrand themselves.
In each of the fourteen sections hotels are arranged in chronological order rather than by country as the timeline tells a better story.
INTRODUCTION
Each grand hotel has its own story. It might be the life of the remarkable person who built or ran it, or the people who designed it, or the famous people who have stayed there. Sometimes it’s the story of events – usually wars and revolutions – that happened around the hotel and even inside.
In this book I set out to tell the unique stories of 50 different grand hotels that can still be visited today. I like them all; I hope you will too.
Over many years of travelling I’ve tried to discover what makes each grand hotel the place it is. It would have been far too easy to write about 50 hotels where Hemingway drank, Noël Coward quipped, Churchill smoked, Josephine Baker danced in very few clothes, and Marlene Dietrich was paid a small fortune to mumble into a microphone.
Stories like those can be heard all round the world. They are beguiling hotel gossip – and hotels are as full of gossip, myths and ghosts as theatres. I’ve tried to weigh these anecdotes and only report on those that can be substantiated. Many cannot. Hotels and hyperbole have long gone hand in hand.
Inevitably a book like this poses the question: What actually is a grand hotel?
Although the first hotel to call itself ‘grand’ in the English language opened in London’s Covent Garden in 1774, the grand hotel is a nineteenth-century concept. The aspiration to grandeur allowed the commercial hotel to become respectable – and then positively regal.
In this book you will read about the visionaries who transformed the city hotel from a dowdy refuge for those who lacked a townhouse of their own – or friends and family nearby – to a residence that exceeded even the expectations of royalty. Many hotels in this book were where kings and aristocrats chose to live or accommodate their visitors because their own apartments could not compete with such levels of comfort and service.
In a short space of time in the second half of the nineteenth century the idea of hotels as a lifestyle choice – rather than a necessity – took root. Not all existing hotels, in fact very few, made that transformation. Many new hotels were built to that purpose but failed. However, those that did achieve grandeur were able to offer a wholly different perspective on the world. The only contemporary parallel to this phenomenon that I can suggest is if a few overambitious monomaniacs today decided that the airport terminal was no longer going to be a function of travel but become a place so comfortable and with such exemplary levels of service we would all aspire to live in it. That was the ambition of the men – and occasionally women – who pioneered the grand hotel concept across the world.
In writing this book I’ve found that grand hotels begin life in varied circumstances but end up – if they survive – leading very similar lives today. Their exciting stories lie at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth century when extravagant deeds were done and great challenges overcome. Setbacks at this time took the form of natural disasters, fires and floods, bankruptcies and revolutions, plus major political upheavals and the First World War. The hotels that are with us today survived such dramatic disruptions.
Then in the interwar years most grand hotels became lucrative and glamorous havens from the financial crashes and the rise of totalitarianism. Politicians, heads of state, movie stars, and celebrity writers flocked to them. Often Edward, the playboy Prince of Wales, put in an appearance (with or without Mrs Simpson), Josephine Baker danced and Hemingway drank at the bar.
But then came the Second World War. Although the Great War (1914–18) had some impact on some hotels, its sequel (1939–45) affected just about every grand hotel in the world, even in the Americas, where Miami’s glamorous Biltmore was turned into a hospital and couples were arrested in front of the Copacabana Palace for indecency during the blackout. During the Second World War people partied all night at grand hotels as if there were no tomorrow (sometimes there wasn’t). As Europe and Asia went up in flames, hotels were bombed out or disappeared behind sandbags and barbed wire. During this time many hotels played host to the major protagonists, everyone from Winston Churchill to Hitler, from Eisenhower to Rommel, and all the writers and artists who covered the war.
What happened to those grand hotels that survived depended on which side of the Iron Curtain the property found itself. The process of recovery in Eastern Europe lagged behind the West by a good 40 years. Under Communism in Europe and Asia, grand hotels fared as badly as the human populations whose lives were blighted by these regimes.
But then the drama fades – it evaporates – and for the best reasons. Those grand hotels that were not demolished or modernised beyond recognition in the period post-1945 entered upon a time of gradual recovery. There were some embarrassingly gaudy flirtations with 1960s makeovers and lowered ceilings, but eventually we all learned lessons about respecting the authenticity of historic buildings. For the grand hotel this was the era of the jet-set, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor passing through, with Danny Kaye, Roger Moore, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Joan Collins, and a handful of minor royals in their wake. Hotel archives, sparse indeed when covering the early days, now become crammed with fading colour photographs of forgotten general managers standing next to celebrities no one can remember at all.
Then in the 1980s and 90s those grand hotels that survived intact were rediscovered for their unique qualities, often returning to the vision of the nineteenth-century pioneers who brought them into existence.
It takes a huge amount of money to build a truly great hotel and it takes pretty much the same amount periodically to maintain it. We have to be grateful therefore that there are people in this world who pour their profits into supporting these grand hotels. Their reasons for doing so may be financial, vainglorious or even sentimental, but thank goodness they do. Maybe they simply love grand hotels.
All the hotels in Rooms with a View are very successful now. Many of them are much-loved national and international institutions. My interest lies in the drama of their earlier days, however, because that is where their individuality was forged. Fortunately hotels no longer live in ‘interesting’ times. They live in wonderful times. Never have our grand hotels looked so good. Never has so much money been pumped into them nor have they been so popular with visitors.
It goes without saying that I have visited all the hotels featured in this book because I wanted to write about ones that still function as hotels today. Unfortunately this meant excluding several great hotels which at the time of writing were undergoing lengthy refurbishments. All the hotels in this book – bar one – have been very cooperative in helping me with my research. A few, however, would rather their myths go uninvestigated.
Sadly, many of the world’s greatest monuments to hospitality have not survived. So I’d like to take a moment to remember the many grand hotels that were lost in the twentieth century, lost to bombs and to debts and to the simple arrogance of architects and destructive developers who thought they knew better.
After the Second World War, the Carlton in London was demolished to make way for the loathsome New Zealand House, one of the most acontextual buildings in a beautiful city. The Grand Hôtel du Louvre in Paris was first turned into a shopping mall and then eviscerated when an RAF plane crashed on it in 1943. The Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, which burned down within days of opening in 1875, burned down again for good during the Second World War. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was demolished in 1967 following earthquakes. The Belmont in New York, the tallest building in the world when it opened in 1908, was torn down in 1939 to build the low-rise Art Deco Airlines Building (which in turn was demolished in 1977).
I would love to have visited all those hotels and many more like them. This book is not a lament, however. It is a celebration and a thank you letter to the lovely, crazy people out there who restore grand hotels and keep them going regardless of the cost. And there is so much to celebrate because the grand hotel is one of the great achievements of the nineteenth century which – despite the destructive tendencies of the twentieth – went on to achieve its apotheosis today.
We may live in difficult times but our grand hotels have never been grander.
Adrian Mourby, 2017
ROOMS WITH A VIEW
THE AMERICAS
PARKER HOUSE HOTEL, BOSTON (1855)
OMNI PARKER HOUSE
The Parker House Hotel we see today is a polished granite Neoclassical building that would border on the severe were it not for some Art Deco flourishes and a gaudy showbiz awning of lightbulbs. It wouldn’t look out of place in Gershwin’s Manhattan. Inside, however, it seems older, having retained some of the detail from the original 1855 hotel opened here by Harvey D. Parker. As a nineteen-year-old farm boy looking to make his fortune, Parker arrived in Boston from Maine in 1825 with very little money but a huge amount of ambition – and great attention to detail. He died a millionaire in 1884.
The first Parker House was a five-storey hotel occupying the same site just off Boston Common. It stood squarely opposite the old City Hall and close to the stately, seventeenth-century King’s Chapel. Hotels were not necessarily respectable places in the 1850s but Mr Parker offered his guests many gentlemanly innovations, including what became known as the European Plan for meals. From earliest times US hotels had included all meals in the cost of a room, and only provided them at set times. Parker House was one of the first to charge only for the room, with meals billed as extra and provided whenever the guest wanted them.
Mr Parker worked himself and his staff hard and the hotel quickly became popular with politicians, lawyers and businessmen who frequented Tremont Street. In the 1860s Parker had to repeatedly expand his hotel, both horizontally and vertically, to keep pace with demand. In 1884, the year of Harvey Parker’s death, the façade was given a Neo-Gothic makeover. In 1927 it was reworked again and raised to fourteen towering floors.
Because of its historic location, excellent food and uncommon levels of comfort, Parker House became a noted meeting place, especially for writers, who have always had a particular affinity with the best hotels. Longfellow first read out his poem Paul Revere’s Ride here in 1860 and Dickens gave a reading of A Christmas Carol in the hotel in 1867. The audience on both occasions was the Saturday Club which consisted – among other American literati – of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James Snr, Longfellow himself, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Snr. These gentlemen met for dinner on the fourth Saturday of every month, except during July, August and September. Their meetings at Parker House led to the setting up of the Atlantic Monthly magazine (still published today as The Atlantic but now edited in Washington).
Dickens based himself at the hotel for much of his five-month second American tour which ran from December 1867 to April 1868. Jacques Offenbach also stayed at the hotel during his 1876 New England tour. He claimed to have come up with a tune – later used in his final operetta Tales of Hoffmann – that was inspired by the famously soft Parker House rolls. The following year Mark Twain was interviewed in his bedroom at Parker House, and told the reporter: ‘You see for yourself that I’m pretty near heaven – not theologically, of course, but by the hotel standard.’
One guest of whom the hotel is less proud was John Wilkes Booth, who stayed at the Parker House ten days before assassinating Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Unfortunately no one thought it remarkable that Booth spent so much time practising shooting with pistols during his time at the hotel.
In the following century two members of the Parker House staff would go on to have an even bigger influence on American politics. Ho Chi Minh maintained that he worked at the hotel as a pastry chef in 1912 and Malcolm X (then known as Malcolm Little) worked as a busboy, refilling water glasses in the 1940s. Also in the 1940s John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for congress at Parker House, and in 1953 he staged his bachelor party here before marrying Jaqueline Bouvier.
As North America’s longest-running commercial hotel, the Parker House has had far more than its fair share of history, but it has retained surprisingly few artefacts to show for it. One exception is on the mezzanine, not far from the old Victorian reading library (now Parker’s Bar) where a corridor ends abruptly, blocked by a desk and a huge mirror. A plaque nearby records that it was in front of this mirror that Charles Dickens rehearsed during his second American reading tour. This tour earned him over £19,000, a colossal sum for the time and more than he was bringing in from his published works.
Not surprisingly, a building about which so many tales have been told has also found its way into fiction. In Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) Newland Archer is in Newport, Rhode Island when he learns that the woman he has fallen in love with, Countess Ellen Olenska, is staying at Parker House. Newland rushes off to see her, an event that nearly destroys his marriage.
In 1969 Parker House was acquired by the Dunfey family, who later purchased Omni Hotels and Resorts. They renamed their Boston property Omni Parker as the flagship of the group. It is sometimes said, however, that Harvey Parker never entirely relinquished his hotel. On the tenth floor the ghost of an old man with a black moustache has been seen by guests and staff, answering to the description of Parker. A perfectionist when it came to his hotel, it makes sense that Mr Parker still hasn’t entirely left the premises.
PARKER FOOD
The hotel’s historic restaurant, now known as Parker’s, is a dark-panelled room on the ground floor with low lighting and the ambience of a gentleman’s club. In his memoir, Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), Henry James recalled how much he enjoyed eating there while a student at Harvard Law School.
A number of famous Boston dishes have their origins in Parker’s, not only the folded Parker House roll, coated in melted butter and salt and much beloved of Offenbach, but the chocolate-coated Boston cream pie, created in 1856 and officially the state dessert of Massachusetts.
The restaurant also coined the word ‘scrod’ for its fish menu. Scrod is not a kind of fish, but a Boston term for the freshest white fish of the day. Its derivation is mysterious, and may be an abbreviation of ‘sacred cod’.
HOTEL MONTELEONE, NEW ORLEANS (1886)
With its imposing Beaux-Arts lines, the Monteleone looks like a piece of New York hotel real estate towering over this most European of US cities on the banks of the Mississippi.
The hotel was founded by Antonio Monteleone, an Italian immigrant shoemaker whose family still owns this 600-bedroom block in the French Quarter. In 1880 Antonio sold his shoe factory in Sicily and made his way to New Orleans, joining his uncle in working as a cobbler on Royal Street. From these humble beginnings he had by 1886 earned enough money to buy a 64-room hotel on the corner of Royal and Iberville streets (currently the site of the hotel’s Carousel Bar).
Like so many hoteliers Antonio was hugely ambitious. Soon he was merging his small hotel with the nearby Commercial Hotel, under whose name both buildings traded until 1908. That year the hotel expanded to a massive 400 rooms at a cost of $260,000. Antonio brought in the New Orleans architects Albert Toledano and Victor Wogan to completely rebuild what had become known locally as the Monteleone. To crown this achievement Antonio angled a giant illuminated neon sign on the rooftop, with the hotel’s name emblazoned in red. It can still be seen there today.
Part of the hotel’s early success lay in old Antonio’s cheap room rates. He had a policy of always having some rooms available for one dollar a night. Antonio was also benevolent towards his staff and encouraged unionised labour. He created a loyal workforce. Even today, employees have long careers at the Monteleone.
In 1913 after Antonio’s death, his son Frank took over and modernised the Monteleone. By 1926 there were radios and electric ceiling fans in each of the bedrooms, and air conditioning in the lobby, although he didn’t move Antonio’s grandfather clock, which has always stood in the lobby, and is still in situ today.
The Monteleone did sufficiently good business in the 1920s and 30s to be able to stay open following the stock market crash of 1929 which closed most of New Orleans’s hotels.
Over the years the hotel has always passed from father to son, from Frank to Bill in 1958, and from Bill to William Junior in 2011. These days, with its ballrooms, cocktail lounges, sky terrace and swimming pools, the Monteleone is a byword for luxury in a city that brought loucheness to the United States. But it is the Monteleone’s literary connections over the decades that make its story so worth telling.
At the last count there are at least 173 novels and short stories of significance that are set in some way or other at the Monteleone. In June 1999, the hotel was designated an official literary landmark by the Friends of the Library Association, an honour it shares with only two other hotels, the Plaza and Algonquin, both in New York.
Among the literary greats now commemorated in the hotel’s five celebrity suites is Truman Capote, who was a regular visitor and who claimed that in 1924 he was born at the Monteleone. Lillie Mae, Truman’s mother, was indeed a guest at the hotel when she went into labour, but she was rushed to Touro Hospital in time. Tennessee Williams also wasn’t born at the Monteleone but, as a child in Columbus, Mississippi, he used to visit his beloved grandfather, Reverend Walter Dakin, at the Monteleone. Tennessee (who also has a suite named after him) later trumped Truman by claiming to have been conceived at the hotel. He subsequently included references to it in two of his plays, The Rose Tattoo (1951) and Orpheus Descending (1957).
Another suite commemorates William Faulkner, who in 1929 spent his honeymoon at the hotel – it being the only one open at the time because of the financial crash. A fourth commemorates the ubiquitous Ernest Hemingway who was a frequent visitor with his second wife Pauline when they had a home in Florida during the 1930s. On one occasion in 1937 the Hemingways arrived at the Monteleone with his sons and Pauline’s sister for what was described as a ‘week of heavy partying’. In 1938 Hemingway wrote a short story about the Spanish Civil War, Night Before Battle, in which his fictional cameraman and tank commander recall drinking at the hotel. Sherwood Anderson, Eudora Welty and John Grisham have also stayed here, and the Louisiana authors Anne Rice and Rebecca Wells have referenced the hotel in their fiction.
Not all writers have been happily associated with the Monteleone. In 1942 New Orleans-born author Innis Patterson Truman jumped to her death from the twelfth floor, adding herself to the numerous ghosts who are said to congregate on the hotel’s thirteenth floor, which – despite being cautiously designated the fourteenth – has had an unusual amount of paranormal activity reported.
By the 1950s the hotel was showing its age. Mary, the fourth Mrs Hemingway, wrote in 1953 that she and her husband were ‘staying at a hotel of frayed glories in Royal Street’. The following year Antonio’s son, Frank Monteleone, rebuilt much of his hotel while preserving special features like the gaudy Carousel Bar.
This 25-seater merry-go-round for alcoholics and bon viveurs was installed in 1949 and rotates on 2,000 large steel rollers. It is pulled almost imperceptibly by a chain powered by a one-quarter horsepower engine, completing its 360-degree revolution every fifteen minutes. Patrons sit on painted seats and the canopy of the bar is straight out of a fairground. In the 1950s Tennessee Williams once spent two weeks at the hotel, listening to conversations at the bar which he claimed gave him material for his plays. Apparently Frank Monteleone picked up the monumental tab as a thank you to Williams for bringing New Orleans and Hotel Monteleone worldwide attention.
Why the Monteleone is so popular with writers is difficult to define but that kind of gesture definitely helps.
EUDORA WELTY
The Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Eudora Welty (1909–2001) featured the Monteleone in her short story ‘A Curtain of Green’ and claimed to have written ‘The Purple Hat’ while sitting in its Carousel Bar. She stayed at the hotel a number of times. One early visit was in her late twenties in the company of an old college classmate, Migs Schmerhorn. In order to save money the pair gave up their en suite room, ‘changing to a cheaper room with the privilege of using the ladies room down hall’.
A sports team were staying with their coach in the next-door room. ‘And when we would take a bath they would look over the partition and comment. We reported them in huffy manner and [a] house dick was sent up to sit down hall with grey fedora over knee and black cigar, nodding to us every trip. But [the] team got in and wrote on one door “Ladies” and on the other “Gents” and on [the] bath “Both Sex”. We fetched house dick who clutched towel and rubbed it off blushing like fire.’ In 2003 the Monteleone named a new suite after Eudora Welty. It has a fine granite bath with jacuzzi tub and a glass shower – and nothing inappropriate written on the door.
LE CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC, QUÉBEC CITY (1893)
FAIRMONT LE CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC
Château Frontenac is one of those hotels that is so well known that it’s become the image of the city that it serves. More than that, its quasi-medieval turrets, monolithic great tower and steep Loire-style roofs are often used as a symbol for Canada itself.
The hotel we see today was the work of three architects over some 30 years. If the building is uniquely arresting, however, its location is remarkable too: a cliff-top overlooking a bend in the mighty, often ice-laden St Lawrence River.
Château St Louis, the first fortress built up here, was for the use of the seventeenth-century explorer and ‘Father of New France’ Samuel de Champlain after whom the Petit Champlain quarter on the quayside below is now named. Over the next hundred years British troops frequently burned down the residence of the French governor, eventually replacing it with Château Haldimand, named after the first governor of British Québec who was appointed in 1778.
By the late nineteenth century, Château Haldimand was too ancient to be of use and its commanding position seemed an obvious place for a new hotel. Canadian Pacific Railways had reached Québec in 1885 and in 1890 they commissioned Eugène-Étienne Taché to design a ‘Fortress Hotel’ in keeping with their chosen location.
Taché had already designed Québec’s parliament building but in the end his plans were passed over in favour of an American architect, Bruce Price, the pioneer of US Shingle style. Canadian Pacific commissioned Price to create a different kind of building, a modern hotel whose name would be Château Frontenac after an early governor of French Québec, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac et de Palluau.
Despite his modernist brief, Price drew on the work of Taché and others to design a hotel that looked like a castle of the Loire – where Comte de Frontenac had had his home – but built on a massive scale. ‘The hotel is placed in the centre of a big landscape,’ he wrote. ‘And hence needs every advantage of bigness, both from the materials and the simplicity of its designs.’
Price’s chateau was built in a horseshoe shape surrounding a huge courtyard facing away from the river. Its steep green copper roofs contrasted with red Scottish brick and local grey La Chevrotière stone quarried for the foundations and casements.
The new hotel was opened on 18 December 1893 but such was its popularity with travellers that Price was soon asked to add an extra wing along Rue Mont Carmel. This addition, opened in 1899, effectively closed off the horseshoe-shaped courtyard. It was called the Citadel Wing because it faced south towards the nineteenth-century fortress that guarded the river. Price’s original design had been deliberately asymmetrical, suggesting a castle that had grown over the centuries, so further accretions fitted in well.
The interior design under Price was full of oak furniture and sixteenth-century-style panelling, deliberately harking back to old France but with wide modern hallways and modern amenities such as glass postal chutes on the landings, allowing letters from any floor to drop down into the lobby for collection.
The British novelist and dandy, Sir Max Pemberton, described the hotel a ‘a great hostelry like no other one can name – majestic in the fashion of a medieval fortress, yet as up-to-date as any hotel in America and more comfortable than most.’ Pemberton added with his customary extravagance: ‘See Naples and then die? Rather see Québec and find a new inspiration to live.’
There were 170 rooms initially, 93 of which had private bathrooms, and all with fireplaces, making a huge demand on staff who would be tending them through the long winters.
Canadian Pacific’s plan had been to appeal primarily to wealthy tourists in Canada and the United States, but the quality of their many railway hotels brought in Europeans too and Château Frontenac kept expanding. Price died in 1903 at the age of 47, so Walter S. Painter was commissioned to design the next new wing, named Mont Carmel after the opposite shore of the St Lawrence. This opened in 1910 but then in 1915 a turret to link the Citadel and Carmel Wings was added, and then finally in 1924 came the massive finishing touch. Montreal architect Edward Maxwell, who had spent the last fifteen years designing stations for Canadian Pacific Railways, was called in with his brother William. They were told to double the hotel’s current capacity by adding 658 new rooms and sixteen suites.
Rather than extending further into the city, the brothers designed a gargantuan tower that would fill in the courtyard and gather all the wings to it, thereby linking them. It would have bedrooms on seventeen floors and a steeply pitched roof to dwarf all the roofs below. The undertaking was daring and made all the more impressive because its foundations could not be blasted out since the existing hotel surrounded the building site. Slowly a great crater was excavated to support the massive tower.
Edward Maxwell died during the building process, leaving William to work, like Price, on both the exterior and interior design. Through the Director-General of Historical Monuments in Paris, Maxwell was able to get historic items of French furniture copied in bulk for the Frontenac.
By the early 1920s the building as we recognise it today from the St Lawrence River was nearing completion. However, in January 1926 Price’s original Riverview Wing caught fire. The water used to douse the flames froze on the ruins, creating a tangled and fantastic ice palace overlooking Petit Champlain. The directors immediately ordered for it to be rebuilt exactly as it had been before. Posters pinned up across North America and Europe had fixed the design in the public imagination and that design was proving lucrative.
GUEST BOOK
Inevitably such a magnificent building has had far more than its fair share of dignitaries and celebrities. During the Second World War Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King chose it for two strategy conferences.
Just about every visiting royal person has stayed at the Frontenac. Queen Elizabeth II’s first visit was in 1951 as Duchess of Edinburgh. World leaders have included Charles de Gaulle, Princess Grace of Monaco, Chiang Kai-shek, Ronald Reagan, and François Mitterrand. In 1953 Alfred Hitchcock based his film I Confess (with Montgomery Clift and Anne Baxter) at the hotel. The list of stars from America, Britain and France who have taken rooms at the Frontenac is as impressive as it is predictable, but anyone who stays at Château Frontenac is always going to eclipsed by the building itself. No roster of famous names can tell its story better than its appearance. It is a star among hotels.
In the 1990s a new extension was added at the back of the Mont Carmel Wing, but subtly and in the hotel’s own style. Having become a national symbol, all changes at the hotel now have to be invisible. As hotel bedrooms grew bigger in the twentieth century, the hotel’s capacity shrank to a mere 611 rooms but the management continue to prove themselves resourceful in finding attic spaces left in those great roofs to create more bedrooms when they can.
Today Château Frontenac is said to be the most photographed hotel in the world. That’s certainly a believable boast.
THE ALGONQUIN, NEW YORK (1902)
Poor Albert Foster has gone down in history as a footnote even though he founded one of the most famous hotels in New York. In 1902, as the owner of the brand-new Puritan Hotel in Manhattan he hired a manager. Foster had named this skinny 174-room French Renaissance-style hotel after his Puritan Realty Company but the eager 31-year-old new manager, Frank Case, thought it a bad choice. He informed Foster the name was ‘cold, forbidding and grim’. ‘You think yourself so smart,’ replied the owner. ‘Suppose you find a better name?’ As the Iroquois Hotel had recently opened further along West 44th Street, Case chose the name of a more local native tribe: the Algonquin.
Albert Foster’s hotel did very well under Frank Case, who pretty much treated it as his own from the beginning, before taking over the lease in 1907 and raising the money to buy it outright in 1927. It was Frank Case’s hospitality and flair for publicity that made the ‘Gonk’ such a popular place among the literati of Manhattan’s theatreland. By 1919 the mob of voluble writers who were squeezing in together to eat in the hotel’s Pergola Room had grown so large that Case moved them into the Rose Room next door. He then thoughtfully provided a large round table where they could all be seated.
So the Algonquin Round Table (also known to its members as the Vicious Circle) was formed. For over a decade journalists and authors like Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, Robert E. Sherwood, and Dorothy Parker took long lunches there, often six days a week. Harpo Marx, a friend of Woollcott’s, came along too, later explaining his presence with the words: ‘Somebody had to listen.’
At the age of 25, drama critic Dorothy Parker was the youngest of the group and has since become the poster girl for the Algonquin. In New York she became famous as a writer and wit, and as the prototype for other people’s wisecracking characters.
Philip Barry created a ‘Dottie’ clone in Hotel Universe (1932), as did George Oppenheimer in Here Today (1932), and George S. Kaufman in Merrily We Roll Along (1934). Kaufman’s representation of Mrs Parker as the heavy-drinking, acerbic and unfashionably dressed Julia Glenn precipitated a breach between Dorothy and her former Round Table comrade. She was avenged in the end, however, outstripping him in fame, with Kaufman admitting wearily: ‘Everything I’ve ever said will be credited to Dorothy Parker.’
Mrs Parker also lived intermittently at the Algonquin. In 1924 after she split – for the second time – from her husband, stockbroker Eddie Pond Parker, she moved into a furnished suite on the second floor. She lived there again after the Vicious Circle began to disband in 1929 and again in 1932, when she attempted suicide in her room.
Frank Case was unperturbed as his most famous guests went their separate ways. ‘What became of the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street?’ he wrote. ‘These things do not last forever. The Round Table lasted longer than any unorganised group that I know of.’ In any case, a new Algonquin tradition was under way in 1930. Case had just adopted a stray cat that the actor John Barrymore christened ‘Hamlet’. Hamlet was Barrymore’s last great theatrical success before becoming a movie star.
Since then there has always been a hotel cat, to date seven toms named Hamlet and three queens named Matilda. The heavy-drinking Barrymore inspired another hotel tradition when in 1933 he convinced Frank Case to put blue gels over the lighting in what became known as the Blue Bar. Barrymore was convinced the colour improved one’s appearance. Even though the Algonquin created a new cocktail bar in 2013, it is still lit by blue light.
Frank Case died in 1946 and the hotel was bought by a couple from Charleston who had previously stayed there 22 years ago on their honeymoon. Ben and Mary Bodne were impressed during that first sojourn at the Algonquin when they realised who else was in residence: the actors Tom Mix and Douglas Fairbanks Snr, the singer Eddie Cantor, and Sinclair Lewis, who would go on to be the first US writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1946 the Bodnes paid $1,000,000 for their new home and found the hotel a perfect fit for them. The ebullient Mary once made her chicken soup for ailing theatrical knight, Laurence Olivier. On another occasion she found herself in one of the creaky old hotel lifts with the writers William Faulkner and Thornton Wilder. ‘Surely you boys know each other?’ she asked. As they didn’t, she introduced them.
For decade upon decade the Algonquin attracted celebrity visitors who would be welcomed by Mary from her armchair in the lobby-lounge.
MUSIC AT THE GONK
Noël Coward often stayed while performing in New York and once spilled Tallulah Bankhead’s bourbon over the Algonquin’s carpet. Lerner and Loewe made so much noise composing ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ for My Fair Lady in the suite below Ben Bodne’s that he threatened to throw their grand piano out of the window. Rob Reiner discovered the eighteen-year-old Harry Connick Jnr singing cabaret at the hotel and brought him in for the When Harry Met Sally soundtrack. The movie won Connick his first Grammy Award.
In 1987 Ben Bodne sold the hotel to investors rather than have to install new lifts. He died soon after but Mary lived on in her apartment until 2000, dying at the age of 93. She saw several different owners make refurbishments in that time and after one revamp commented: ‘What I’ve seen looks very nice but it will never look like my old Algonquin.’
The most recent makeover was completed in 2013 at a cost of $100 million. The Round Table Room (formerly Frank Case’s Oak Room) was restored to a clubland style of dark wood panelling but sadly no large round table was installed. Instead a busy and slightly demonic painting by twenty-first-century artist Natalie Ascencios presides. Vicious Circle depicts Harold Ross in the foreground, reading his NewYorker magazine, with Alexander Woollcott leaning over his shoulder while Dorothy Parker sits, poised but brittle, to the left of the picture.
So many famous names have been associated with this remarkable hotel, including those great hoteliers Frank Case and Mary Bodne, that it seems a shame that Albert Foster, the man who built Manhattan’s original Puritan Hotel, is a footnote now, remembered just for hiring Frank Case and letting him make the Algonquin his own.
PLAZA HOTEL, NEW YORK (1907)
The Plaza is a New York hotel that cannot help generating headlines.
The current building is the second hotel of that name on the south-east edge of Central Park. The first was a blunt, square eight-storey brick building constructed on the site of the headquarters of the Skating Club of New York (founded 1863).
In the 1880s the invention of refrigerated surfaces enabled the club to relocate to an indoor space and the first Plaza Hotel was built, opening in 1890. That was demolished in 1905. It was replaced by a white brick hotel that adopted the French château style then so popular in Europe, stretching it to nineteen storeys high. The new Plaza opened in October 1907. It had been designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh who had planned both the original Waldorf (1893) and Astoria (1897). Those hotels were later joined together to make the Waldorf-Astoria and then demolished in 1929 to make way for the Empire State Building. New York at the beginning of the twentieth century was continually demolishing itself to build higher and higher.
The men behind the new Plaza were the hotelier Fred Sterry, financier Bernhard Beinecke and Harry S. Black, president of the Fuller Construction Company who also constructed the Flatiron Building and in due course turned a suite on the eighteenth floor of the Plaza into his own private duplex.
