Mary Bodne, Ex-Owner of Algonquin Hotel, Dies at 93

Mary Bodne, who with her husband, Ben, fell in love with the Algonquin Hotel on their honeymoon and later owned it for 41 years, died on Monday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 93.

She lived at the elegant Midtown hotel, the literary hangout of the Jazz Age, from 1946 until her death, spending most afternoons in her lobby armchair greeting regulars.

It all began when the Bodnes, newly married, lunched at the Algonquin in the early 1920's and sighted Will Rogers, whom they had seen the night before at the Ziegfeld Follies; Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Sinclair Lewis, Eddie Cantor, Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie. The bride joked to her husband, an oil distributor in Charleston, S.C., that after he bought the baseball team he dreamed about, he should get her the hotel.

Although Mr. Bodne toyed with buying the Pittsburgh Pirates, he never bought a ball club. But in 1946 he paid around $1 million for the 200-room hotel at 59 West 44th Street, between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas. The couple promptly moved in.

For the former Mary Mazo, the Algonquin was the final address in an odyssey that began in Odessa, Ukraine, where she was the second child in a large Jewish family that fled the pogroms when she was an infant. A family story has it that the baby Mary began to cry in an attic while Cossacks rampaged below, but that she miraculously hushed up before it was too late. It is said that Mrs. Bodne's later loquaciousness was compensation for that momentary silence.

The Mazo family immigrated to Charleston, where the father, Elihu, opened the city's first Jewish delicatessen. When George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward were working on ''Porgy and Bess,'' they were frequent customers. They would also discuss the creation of the show at dinners in the Mazo family home.

Decades later, the Mazo tradition of hospitality would continue at the Algonquin. Mrs. Bodne cooked chicken soup for an ailing Laurence Olivier. She baby-sat for Simone Signoret, who called her ''one of my three truest friends.''

Mrs. Bodne had a gift for acquiring house seats for sold-out Broadway shows for desperate friends. Ella Fitzgerald was so grateful that she regularly sang to Mrs. Bodne whenever she stayed at the hotel.

The Irish writer Brendan Behan was so touched by a courtesy that he declared, ''Mary, your son will live to be pope,'' even though Mrs. Bodne was Jewish and had two daughters.

The daughters, Renee Colby Chubet and Barbara Anspach, both live in Manhattan. Mrs. Bodne is also survived by four sisters: Annie Rabin and Celie Weissman, both of Manhattan, and Minnie Meislin and Norma Mazo, both of Charleston.

The Bodnes bought the Algonquin, built in 1902 in the French Renaissance style, from Frank Case, who had catered to writers and editors from The New Yorker and other nearby publications. Among them were Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber and Alexander Woollcott. They gathered around several tables before settling on the round one that became famous, not least because of Mr. Case's knack for publicity.

When he bought the hotel, Mr. Bodne, who enjoyed promoting boxing matches, said he would not attempt to recreate Mr. Case's role as boniface of the literati. But he said he regarded the Algonquin as an investment and, as such, had no intention of changing its essential character. So he kept the mahogany panels and deep-pile carpeting, while adding such amenities as color television and air-conditioning.

The Bodnes ended up playing host to a new generation of literary and show business celebrities, like the writer John Henry Falk when he was blacklisted and exiled from Hollywood. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe made so much noise working on a musical that the other guests complained; the show was the hugely successful ''My Fair Lady.''

Mr. Bodne, who died in 1992, had vowed that he would sell the charmingly dowager hotel the day it needed self-service elevators. He sold it in 1987 to the Aoki Corporation, the Brazilian subsidiary of a Japanese corporation, which in a 1991 renovation installed self-service elevators.

In 1997, Aoki sold the hotel to the Camberley Hotel Company, which promptly did its own $4 million renovation, promising no major changes. In an article in The New York Times, Julie V. Iovine noted that the newsstand had been sacrificed for space to sell coffee mugs, and that door numbers had been replaced by plaques featuring remarks by the famed Algonquin wits. The impression, she wrote, was ''self-consciousness verging on kitsch.''

At a party celebrating the makeover, Mrs. Bodne sat on the new velvet chair that had replaced her beloved old sagging one. ''What I've seen looks very nice, but it will never look like my old Algonquin now,'' she said. ''No, darling, I know it will never be the same.''

Except for the cat. Each owner of the Algonquin, including the Bodnes, has kept a lobby cat. The current one is named Matilda.