At the Plaza Page 5
Opened with much fanfare on October 30, 1947, as part of The Plaza’s fortieth anniversary celebration, the Rendez-vous was an apricot-and-gold hideaway where two alternating bands—gypsy violinists and a modern orchestra—set the mood. Drama was provided by the house signature dish, shashlik Caucasian, presented at the table on flaming skewers and accompanied by a dimming of the room’s lights for full effect.
Obolensky had a following among a certain high-profile crowd, and soon the Rendez-vous counted actress Gertrude Lawrence and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor among its regulars. Its air of chic was maintained on a day-to-day basis, however, by its charismatic maître d’, Gigi Molinari. Suave and colorful, Gigi had some very modern ideas about running a nightclub, among which was having an attractive staff, who were dispatched to tanning emporiums in order to acquire year-round suntans. An oft-told anecdote concerns the supper club’s opening night, when flaming shashlik Caucasian was about to be served for the first time. The room lights dimmed. In the kitchen, two bronzed waiters eyed their flaming cargo dubiously and turned to Gigi. “Smile, you bastards!” he replied before propelling them onto the floor.
Here, a cover of the room’s menu; here, the irrepressible Gigi. Here, the restaurant, uncharacteristically deserted, showing the dance floor and bandstand.
Marlene Dietrich in Residence
In the spring of 1948, film legend Marlene Dietrich took up residence at The Plaza for an extended stay. The actress was looking forward to a rest; she had spent most of the war years entertaining Allied troops (winning the Medal of Honor for her efforts) and had just wrapped her first postwar picture, A Foreign Affair. There was a new man in her life (whose identity remains a mystery to this day) and it was he who sold her on The Plaza, and, in particular, Suite 317–325. Named after its designer, the noted interior decorator Lady Mendl, the four-room apartment came equipped with mirrored walls, an ornate red antique French clock, and bedroom murals of frolicking nymphs hand-painted by the artist Marcel Vertès. (Here, the parlor of the suite.)
Dietrich immediately banished the clock (“Too much gingerbread,” said she) and turned her attention to a more immediate matter: the birth of her first grandchild, who was due in several months. Part of the preparations for the blessed event included the construction of an elaborate wicker bassinet, which Dietrich herself helped to assemble on card tables set up in the parlor of the suite. After the birth, Life magazine photographed her by the window of Room 323 and put this picture on its cover, above the headline GRANDMOTHER DIETRICH (here), an epithet that later evolved into the title “World’s Most Glamorous Grandmother.” Although she secretly despised the sobriquet, Dietrich had no choice but to embrace it publicly.
She left The Plaza in June 1949 to meet with Christian Dior in Paris for costume fittings in preparation for her next picture, Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright. Hitchcock, too, has a history at The Plaza, but he would make his appearance several years later at the filming of North by Northwest.
The Christian Dior Suite
While most of Serge Obolensky’s celebrity suites in The Plaza honored well-established luminaries, the last to be dedicated was named for a relative newcomer to the celebrity firmament, fashion designer Christian Dior. The couturier burst onto the scene in 1947 with the introduction of his ‘New Look,’ a collection of luxurious, voluminous dresses that were a reaction to wartime fabric shortages. Immediately embraced by the fashion press as the man of the hour, Dior was a harbinger of a new trend in the culture, the instant celebrity; indeed, by 1949, the Gallup poll would rank him as one of the five most famous people in the world.
His eponymous suite, 223–225, was put together by a transatlantic team of designers based in Paris and New York. They made miniature models of their plans for his approval, and after it was granted, the suite was unveiled to the press on April 21, 1949. The bedroom (here) was done in shades of pale blue and tobacco brown; the parlor (here) incorporated beige panels of toile de Jouy on the walls, and an olive green carpet in the latest wall-to-wall style covered the floor. In keeping with an earlier Plaza tradition, no pictures were hung on the walls.
Dior occupied the suite infrequently, and it proved a short-lived experiment. A future tenant, with some very pronounced design ideas of his own, was waiting in the wings. (The following spread shows the same rooms, drastically reinterpreted.)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Suite
Early in 1953, architect Frank Lloyd Wright arrived in New York to oversee construction of the Guggenheim Museum (named after an earlier Plaza resident, art collector Solomon Guggenheim). For the next six years, Wright’s Manhattan base would be Suite 223–225 (the former Christian Dior Suite), which he had chosen after a thorough inspection of the house. His choice of The Plaza itself was more automatic: He had been stopping there for years, and he greatly admired Henry Hardenbergh’s design. “He built a skyscraper,” Wright remarked, “but not the monstrous thing a skyscraper was to become later. He still managed to keep it with a human sense.… It’s genuine. I like it almost as much as if I’d built it myself”—no small compliment from the usually acerbic critic.
The Christian Dioresque trappings were summarily removed and replaced with objects that reflected the tastes of the new tenant: a piano, drafting table, custom-designed tables and chairs, walls lined with gold Japanese paper, and windows framed by red velvet curtains and topped by circular mirrors that concealed indirect lighting fixtures (the suite’s original chandelier was retained). The parlor of Suite 223–225 (here) was used as a combination office and reception room, while the bedroom (here) was reserved for private use, becoming the domain of Wright’s wife. Over time, the suite became known as “Taliesin East,” a wry reference to the design schools Wright had founded both in Wisconsin (known simply as Taliesin) and in Arizona (Taliesin West).
After the architect’s death in 1959, the furnishings were removed and returned to his Wisconsin home. In 1989, Suite 223–225 was renamed in Wright’s honor by Donald and Ivana Trump, who furnished it with authorized reproductions from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
Photograph © 1999 Pedro E. Guerrero
Photograph © 1999 Pedro E. Guerrero
Frank Lloyd Wright Has His Picture Taken
The images here came to be taken in a rather roundabout way. In 1953, Frank Lloyd Wright was interviewed by Hugh Downs on the Today show and gave a spirited talk, punctuated with hand gestures, describing the differences between conventional architecture and “organic” architecture, his own invention. A transcript of the interview was made, then incorporated later into Wright’s book The Future of Architecture. To illustrate these remarks, the architect reenacted his hand gestures in this series of portraits, shot in the parlor of Suite 223–225 by Pedro Guerrero, Wright’s personal photographer for the last twenty years of his life.
The first six photos depict conventional architecture’s post-and-beam construction. Wright appears to disapprove, and in views seven through ten, he interlocks his fingers to demonstrate the superiority of organic architecture. In the last two shots, he describes his design concept for the Unitarian Meeting House as “reverent, without recourse to the steeple.”
Photographs © 1999 Pedro E. Guerrero
Frank Lloyd Wright … On Record
Whenever Frank Lloyd Wright was in residence in Suite 223-225, there was a flurry of activity, and 1956 proved to be a particularly busy year. Among other accomplishments, ground was broken for the Guggenheim Museum, his firm completed fourteen building projects, and Wright himself published The Story of the Tower, an account of the construction of the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Among the many visitors to the suite during this period were newlyweds Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, who came to discuss plans for a summer home. Although this project was never realized, Wright did allow afterward that “Miss Monroe’s architecture is extremely good architecture.”
In the spring of 1956, shortly before his 89th birthday, he made a recording in the suite. Thi
s came about through the efforts of Ben Raeburn, Wright’s editor at Horizon Press, his publisher. It was Raeburn who suggested that Wright pose for the photographs on the preceding pages, and Raeburn who arranged this session with Caedmon Records, a label for spoken-word recordings established in 1952. Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner were among the illustrious figures that the company recorded.
Along with Raeburn, Marianne Mantell and Barbara Holdridge of Caedmon were present at the recording of what came to be titled “Frank Lloyd Wright … On Record.” In fact, the moderators had very little to do, as Wright extemporized for nearly two hours with few pauses. Covering a wide range of topics, he began with the pronouncement that all the arts were “minor” compared to the “mother art, architecture,” and concluded that “the future of architecture is the future of the human race.”
Photograph © 1999 Pedro E. Guerrero
Henry Dreyfuss Transforms the Persian Room
Joseph Urban’s original Art Moderne style for the Persian Room had been modified several times after its 1934 opening, and as part of Conrad Hilton’s general renovation of The Plaza, it was decided to completely modernize it in 1950. Chosen for this project was the noted industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, whose firm was responsible for many icons of modern design, including the Honeywell round thermostat, the Princess and Trimline telephones, and the Polaroid Land camera. More significantly, Dreyfuss was also responsible for the luxe interiors of the 20th Century Limited supertrain as well as several ocean liner interiors. (The fact that he had been a longtime Plaza regular since the 1930s was also in his favor.)
After a thorough study of Persian motifs, a blue-and-green color scheme was decided upon. Then Dreyfuss stripped the room to its basics, installing two large screens with a white-and-gold diamond pattern as its centerpiece (here), upon which bronze figures depicting Persian hunters were mounted. A raised terrace was constructed around its perimeter, and the finishing touch consisted of metallic mesh curtains, custom-made by Dorothy Liebes. Dreyfuss also designed the china and the menu (here), which reworked the diamond pattern. The room reopened on September 28, 1950, after $200,000 had been spent on its renovation, and would undergo its next, and final, renovation in 1973.
In the Persian Room
Over its forty-one-year run, the Persian Room showcased a wide variety of talent. In addition to the performers illustrated here, the formidable list also included Eddy Duchin, Kitty Carlisle, the Mills Brothers, Bob Fosse, Jane Powell, Victor Borge, Marge and Gower Champion, Lillian Roth, Eddie Fisher, Henny Youngman, Abbe Lane and Xavier Cugat, the McGuire Sisters, the Lettermen, Connie Stevens, Dinah Shore, Leslie Gore, Shirley Bassey, Vic Damone, Florence Henderson, Doc Severinsen, Lainie Kazan, Dusty Springfield, and Liza Minnelli.
In addition to television and radio broadcasts, a number of recordings were made in the room, shown on the following pages.
Clockwise from top left: Bob Hope amusing friends onstage, Liberace with Ted Straeter (the room’s bandleader), a tent card from the fall of 1971, and Dorothy Kilgallen at a charity auction.
Tent cards from the 1950s.
Newspaper ads and record jacket art for songbirds Ethel Merman and Eartha Kitt (who also made a recording in the room).
Record jacket art from recordings made in the 1950s and 1960s.
Miss Kay Thompson
Many writers have used The Plaza as a setting in their fiction, but few are as closely identified with the place as Kay Thompson, creator of the infamous Eloise. Her wry tale about a mischievous six-year-old hotel guest has sold in the millions and become part of Plaza lore, yet Eloise was but one of Thompson’s many accomplishments.
She began her career as a singer with Fred Waring’s band, but she discovered that her talents lay in an emerging field of the music industry, vocal arranging. Signed by the Freed unit at MGM in the 1940s, she is credited with introducing jazz styling into the vocal arrangements of such stars as Judy Garland and Lena Horne during the golden age of Hollywood musicals. (Horne later called her “the best vocal coach in the world.”) When her MGM contract expired, she decided to experiment with a new kind of nightclub act, an elaborately choreographed program in which she shared the bill with a vocal quartet, the Williams Brothers. Pictured here in an ebullient publicity still, the act was a hit and toured for several years. (Trivia buffs might recognize the brother behind Thompson’s left shoulder as Andy Williams, before he embarked on a solo career.) Included in their tour were several engagements in the Persian Room; here, an advertisement for an appearance in October 1952; here, the group performing.
The act eventually broke up, and Thompson wrote Eloise, for which she is probably best remembered. Not resting on her laurels, she later appeared in several films, most notably as the Diana Vreeland–like fashion editor in Funny Face.
Eloise
Kay Thompson’s Eloise, as it is officially titled, has become something of an institution at The Plaza. Published over forty years ago and still going strong, this story of a capricious six-year-old hotel guest has taken on a mythic quality. The character was born in the late 1940s, when Thompson arrived late for a photo session and said by way of explanation, “I am Eloise. I am six.” “Talking Eloise” soon evolved into a bit of shtick with the band in her nightclub act, an in-joke that was gradually introduced to the public onstage. When the illustrator Hilary Knight rendered a drawing of the tiny minx, Thompson sensed a kindred spirit and it was decided to immortalize Eloise in print. Written in Thompson’s Plaza suite in 1954 and published by Simon and Schuster the following year, the book has remained in print—save one short hiatus—ever since.
The character quickly became a cottage industry, spawning three sequels and a slew of commercial tie-ins—dolls, recordings, children’s clothing—and proved to a marketing bonanza for The Plaza. Here, clockwise from top left, is a postcard promoting air conditioned guest rooms, Kay Thompson’s business card, and both sides of a DO NOT DISTURB sign that also doubled as a postcard. This page, flyers advertising newspaper delivery and the Rendez-vous nightclub.
Perhaps the only sour note in the Eloise saga came when a Playhouse 90 television special loosely based on the book aired on Thanksgiving Day, 1956. Despite a stellar cast that included Ethel Barrymore, Louis Jourdan, Monty Woolley, and Evelyn Rudie (here) in the title role, the show was universally proclaimed a turkey. Eloise has never been dramatized since.
Patricia Kennedy Weds Peter Lawford
Weddings have long been a Plaza tradition, and one of the more notable nuptials was celebrated in the hotel on April 24, 1954, the day Patricia Kennedy, daughter of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, married British film star Peter Lawford. The ceremony itself was performed at the Roman Catholic church of St. Thomas More on Eighty-ninth Street, followed by a lavish reception in The Plaza’s Ballroom.
The Kennedy clan had not yet made itself known as an American political dynasty, so the attendance by the bride’s brothers Jack, Bobby, and Teddy (who all served as ushers) meant little to the general public. Rather, it was the bridegroom’s Hollywood connection—and attendees like Marion Davies and Greer Garson—that drew three thousand onlookers to the church, and later to The Plaza.
Here, the happy couple. Here, the groom (at center) flanked by his new in-laws, Jacqueline, John, and Robert Kennedy. The reception proved enough of a success that the family again chose The Plaza for Jean Kennedy and Stephen Smith’s 1956 wedding reception.
Marilyn Monroe and the Broken Shoulder Strap
While The Plaza’s Terrace Room has seen its share of press conferences, few have caused the pandemonium that occurred on the afternoon of February 9, 1956, when Marilyn Monroe arrived to announce her latest film project. Interest in Monroe was high, as this was her first major appearance since leaving Hollywood for New York the year before.
She had come to promote her latest project, a film based on Terence Rattigan’s play The Sleeping Prince (released as The Prince and the Showgirl). Accompa
nying her was the playwright and her future costar, Laurence Olivier, yet no one paid either man much attention. Marilyn, clad in a snug black velvet dress with thin straps and a matching jacket, was clearly the draw. The press conference proceeded routinely enough to begin with, until the actress removed her jacket, leaned forward—and broke a shoulder strap. After a moment of stunned silence, a blaze of flashbulbs erupted. A safety pin was called for, but even after a quick repair, the strap broke again, to the accompaniment of even more flashbulbs. “Shall I take off my coat, boys?” Laurence Olivier offered feebly. “Does anybody care?”
The broken strap put Monroe on front pages across the country—times were simpler then—although it was hardly an accident. According to the designer of the star’s dress, the strap-breaking incident was prearranged and carefully engineered in advance. “Just wait and see what’s going to happen,” the actress told a photographer before making her entrance and her unique contribution to Plaza legend.
Jayne Mansfield in the Tricycle Garage
Following the rousing success of Eloise, The Plaza realized the value of cultivating the toddler set (and their indulgent parents), and thus the idea of the Tricycle Garage was born. (It came about after general manager Eugene Voit—the father of a six-year-old—discovered firsthand how difficult it was to maneuver a child and tricycle into Central Park and back for some bike riding.) Carved out of a corner of the Fifty-eighth Street loading dock and done up in jolly red-and-white candy stripes, the garage opened in May 1956 and provided bike racks and numbered license plates for a fee of fifteen cents a day or three dollars per month. Plaza guests were allowed to use it gratis and were also loaned tricycles for free. (Here, a handout card announcing the service.)