THE ALGONQUIN AT 75

What is this place, any An old‐time hotel?

—CABBIE, AGE V, TO ALGONQUIN GUEST OF UNCERTAIN YEARS.

The first time I mentioned (the Algonquin) was in the 1971 edition when I explained how it came to my attention that many people following “Country Inns and Back Roads” felt the need of a place to stay in New York City. One recommended the Algonquin, and after a long visit, I agreed that it was the closest thing to a country inn I'd found yet in Fun City.

One evening this week about 200 carefully selected guests will celebrate the Algonquin's 75th anniversary at a party at the hotel. The guests will include film and theater directors, writers, editors, publishers, judges, lawyers, fashion designers, musicians, government officials. Each has received an invitation from George J. Green, president of The New Yorker, which is playing host, and the invitation, in the magazine's characteristic understatement, advises that the party will be held “at the hotel.” No address given. Equally characteristically, the Algonquin management is squeamish about the public's knowing the date and time of this celebratory event, or the composition of the guest list. Please, no advance publicity: It would only attract celebrity hunters, autograph hounds, tie up traffic on West 44th Street, disturb the guests, discommode the routine of the venerable American hotel that is still run like an English club.

Algonquin loyalists (nicely cosseted, as in any private club) look upon the hotel as an elegant anachronism in a city that has taken an overdose of rude architectural and social lumps. They like it the way it is — unpretentious, comfy, old‐shoe. Effortless, a California regular described it. By any standard it should have become, by now, a faded hasbeen, a sentimental landmark, a three‐score‐and‐15 dowager with an arthritic limp, babbling about the glittering past, buttonholing curious firsttimers with tales of the grand and wonderful people and electrifying wits who strutted and quotably mouthed the hours away amid the chandeliers and oak panels and plush. This is the Algonquin of history, of legend, of the Round Table, and for diehard nostalgists thus it shall ever remain.

Meeting informally at the Algonquin, literary talents such as Robert Benchley, Franklin P. Adams, Dorothy Parker and George S. Kaufman gathered about them a group of vibrant, talkative, witty young people who became known as the Round Table.

“The Round Table,” wrote Margaret Case Harriman,• daughter of Frank Case, in “The Vicious Circle,” “symbolized an American Renaissance . . . (although any member of it would probably have pulled a knife on me for suggesting anything so highfalutin). Its influence on American literature, drama and humor was acute, untiring and permanent for two reasons. First, the people who sat at the Round Table were interesting people whose doings and sayings caught and held public attention; and secondly, they were as brave, mentally, as any dashing medieval cavalier was physically brave. They not only encouraged everything that was shiningly good, they were ready, at the risk of losing jobs, money, or friends, to fight to the death against anything that was, according to their standards, bad.”

When Ben B. Bodne, the silver‐haired, soft‐spoken, Southern gentleman (usually found sitting quietly in the brocade wing chair at the northern end of the lounge), bought the hotel back in 1946, in fulfillment of a honeymoon promise he had made to his wife 22 years before, he vowed he would never modernize the place — he would guard its character exactly as Frank Case, the previous and longtime owner, had left it, and to hell with

keeping up with hotelier progress. In 1918, when Tallulah Bankhead came to New York from Alabama, she took a room with bath at the Algonquin for $21 a week. Since then, writes Brendan Gill, an Algonquin stalwart, “with the exception of prices and air‐conditioning, little has changed at the Hotel Algonquin. . . . The facade now has a somewhat different marquee, and the oak‐paneled lobby has wall‐towall carpeting instead of Oriental rugs on a mosaic tile floor, but otherwise the management has left well enough alone: The great carved grandfather clock still strikes the hour with a sustained force that sets seiche waves in motion on the surfaces of nearby martinis, and in the elevator one still encounters, just as Tallulah did, the celebrated actors, writers and directors of the time.”

Even the just‐refurbished lobby newsstand now looks “older” than it did several months ago, as though it had survived, unchanged, since Douglas Fairbanks Sr., an early resident, bought his newspapers there 60 years ago.

“We try to nurture and enhance the Algonquin's legendary charms,” says Andrew Anspach, a nonpracticing Columbia Law School graduate who is Ben Bodne's son‐in‐law and the hotel's managing director. Anspach is quick to point out the “delightfully contradictory” quality of the hotel. There are the shiny brass beds, old‐fashioned shoe horns, mahogany cabinets that conceal the TV and minirefrigerators in each suite, the fresh roses on the diningroom tables, the fresh flowers in the lobby, the bell service for drinks, the polished oak, the attentive doorman in brown bowler hat (hand never out for a tip). Then there are all those modern innovations:

One of the Algonquin's modern innovations: The electric card system, which has done away with old‐fashioned room he vs.

The Algonquin was among the first New York hotels to be 100 percent air‐conditioned, to have smoke detectors in every room, cable color TV, walkietalkies for the maids. It was the first hotel in New York to adopt the electric card, which did away with the old‐fashioned key. The card automatically opens a guest room, and it it is replaced by a new one when the guest leaves. On the night of the Big Blackout, when the electronic card was briefly inoperable (the battery of the backup generator system had to be replaced), Ben Bodne served drinks on the house to the guests milling cheerfully around the candlelit lobby and doing what Algonquin guests do best—talking.

Guests, as well as regular lunchers, diners and drinkers, seem comfortably indifferent to the contradictions, as long, as the hotel remains, in the fervid words of one admirer, “an island of warmth and welcome” in the chastened city. “Amusing, solid, perennial,” Joseph Hergesheimer described the Algonquin 90 years ago — and the description still snugly holds up.

Indeed, the anachronism on West 49th Street, for all its capacity to downplay itself, has a lot to be singularly cocky about: a staff of about 200 in a hotel of less than 200 rooms; a high repeat rate of guests as well as a high occupancy rate; reasonable daily, room rates (most singles are in the $40 to $46 range; doubles, $45 to $49; suites, $79 to $83); no weekend packages. it doesn't advertise as a hotel, except in the trade press, and it attracts its overnight guests usually by word of mouth. It notes on cards the individual needs and preferences of guests after their first stay, and these are attentively pursued on a repeat visit. Tender loving care. Privacy. A country‐house atmosphere. The of what a hotel is supposed to be. Women traveling alone are courteously welcome. ‘'We want them to feel comfortable and relaxed,” says Andrew Anspach. “If someone does talk to them in the lobby, we feel it will be a civilized interchange.”

The Bodne‐Anspach pride in the hotel is palpable, infectious, and the guests and the regulars share it, even bask in its ambience. The pride extends to the kitchen, which produces good American fare. The meats and vegetables are impeccably fresh, the pies home‐baked, the menus cluttered with a hundred dishes the chef is prepared to cook without argument. Not gourmet fare, but what the French, in praise, call “honest.”

Those who withhold the palm to the Algonquin complain that it is snobbish and plays up to favorites and celebrities. A hard knock, with perhaps a sting of truth in it. The reputation of the little hotel was made by writers, publishers, actors, directors, playwrights, critics, editors, who were attracted to the place first by the estimable Frank Case, later by Ben Bodne and Andrew Anspach. Bodne and Anspach like the very people the hotel still attracts. They enjoy furnishing the clubby atmosphere; they covet regulars, and they get a kick out of the fact that choice publishing parties are held in the Chinese Room and the Stratford Suite, that drama and book critics hold regular meetings here, that Playbill sits to a monthly festive luncheon in the Stratford Suite, that Casper Citron interviews authors for a taped program over WQXR . . . that the hotel, in short, has something appealing to contribute to the cultural life of the city.

An honor the Algonquin is reHarold Ross raised money for the New Yorker while playing poker at the Algonquin. Editor William Shawn, below. still dines there. ceiving, on its 75th year of service, is the first George Spelvin Award given by Playbill. Spelvin, as everybody in the theater knows, is the name given to the leading actor who also has a secondary role in a play. It seems like a rational tribute to a hotel that is at once star and modest bit player in the social and cultural hurlyburly of Manhattan.

Still, the Algonquin's not everyone's cup of tea, but then neither is The New Yorker. The Algonquin has always had a cozy relationship with The New Yorker. Harold Ross was a nonverbal member of the Round Table, and it was at a poker session of the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club on the third floor (now the Stratford Suite) that Ross borrowed the money from Raoul Fleischmann to start the magazine. Fleischmann and Ross (when they were speaking) shared the table immediately to the right inside the Rose Room at lunch, the table that is the courtly William Shawn's, by grace and favor, any day he wishes it. New Yorker writers like Brendan Gill, Roger Angell, Thomas Meehan and Ved Mehta are Algonquin regulars. When The New Yorker turned 50 several years ago, Anspach, without fuss, placed cards on the tables quietly marking the anniversary. And there was a large cake baked for the occasion, so quietly presented, cut and eaten that practically nobody was aware of the occasion.

The Rose Room retains its old‐time romantic aura.

Celebrities have gravitated toward the Algonquin like moths to a light almost from the day that Frank Case took over the place. Bob Bennett, the British‐born, unflappable maitre d'heitel, can unreel hundreds of names of the famous who have dined in the Oak and Rose Rooms; he speaks well of all of them, even as he is impressively without awe of them. Pre‐World War I, the big guns were Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (who did his macho gymnastics on the roof of the hotel) and Mary Pickford, the Atherton (who satirized the place), Paul Whiteman, Gertrude Stein, Hendrik Willem van Loon, H. L. Mencken, John Barrymore, Irvin S. Cobb and almost every actor, actress, director, producer and dramatist of note of the day. Just two minutes from Broadway, the Algonquin appealed to the theater crowd, an appeal that has not lessened with the years.

The Round Table dominated the 20's. Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, George S. Kaufman, Robert Dorothy Parker was an Algonquin habitué. So was humorist Robert Benchley (below). Sherwood, F.P.A., Ring Lardner, Heywood Broun were an accidental tribe — a fizzy, talkative lot who were full of youthful bravura and who brilliantly massaged one another's egos. The gab at the Round Table was lively, snappish, ad hominem, and frequently wounding. The sharpest remark ever made at the Algonquin, in the opinion of at least one observer, was made not by an R.T. wit, but by Frank Case. Of a certain famous miscreant of the day, he commented succinctly, “Time wounds all heels.” Not even Kaufman, the shrewdest observer of the lot ('One man's Mede is another man's Per sian') could top it. Even after the Vicious Circle was disbanded shortly after the Depression struck, students of American literature often came (and they still come) to the hotel, asked the staff to point out The Table (it used to be in the spot in the Rose Room where the bar now stands), stayed and lingered over a drink in the lounge.

As with other clubs, the Algonquin has gone through its cycles of change. The publishing crowd — authors, editors, agents, publicists, critics and reviewers — still treat the Algonquin as private turf, keeping the hotel's reputation blazingly alive as the eminent literary marching and chowder sodality of New York. (Publishers, with an exception or two, seem to prefer fancier lunch fare.) But something happened after World War H to take the hotel back a notch — back to the theatrical flavor of the Frank Case era.

The Europeans began to discover the place, and Anspach credits Sir Laurence Olivier, always involved with the upcoming young talent in England, for sending the new wave of angries to West 99th Street. John Osborne came, and Mary Ure, and Joan Littlewood, and Joan Plowright, and Tony Richardson. Anspach recalls that Richardson became a sort of Pied Piper who attracted an even larger wave of Europeans from the theater and cinema — Peter Brook, Jonathan Miller, John Dexter. Then the film people discovered the Algonquin — Eric Rohmer, Louis Malle, Marcel Ophuls, Godard, Truffaut, Costa‐Gavras. Eventually a second wave of English playwrights moved in — Tom Stoppard, Simon Gray, Trevor Griffiths, David Storey. The new actors and actresses found the hotel congenial,too

—'so European, you know” and people in the lobby were soon ogling (surreptitiously, of course) the likes of Yves Montand and Simone Signoret and Robert Shaw and Vanessa Redgrave. Today, all namedropping aside, when the theater is in full cry, or when a big film is being previewed, it is impossible not to rub elbows in the lobby, in the dining rooms, in the elevator, with half a dozen glittering names in entertainment. But never, ever, make a fuss over them. That would violate the Algonquin'.s cardinal rule: no invasion of privacy.

One Wednesday at lunch in the Rose Room, always a hectic time with the matinee ladies jammed in the dining room, two busboys, laden with trays, suddenly collided before making it to the kitchen. There was an almighty crash, as silverware, dishes, glasses cascaded to the floor. A sudden intake of breath. The room became deathly quiet and calm, and then, in unison, like the good audience they were, the diners erupted into spontaneous applause. ■