At the Plaza Read online

  Here, the Playbill for the Broadway show picturing George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton; here, the rather overwrought poster for the film.

  Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor Meet the Press

  The Terrace Room, Monday, February 5, 1968, 11:30 A.M. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the most famous couple in the world at that moment, meet the press to promote their latest film, Doctor Faustus. Despite Miss Taylor’s chinchilla bonnet and coat, the Burtons had not ventured outdoors for this appearance; they had been in residence on the fourteenth floor for three days, having arrived in true movie star fashion—via motorcade—with four assistants and over sixty pieces of luggage. Preparation for their visit had prompted a flurry of interhotel memos, including instructions to “reserve the best suite available.… Arrange to hold our largest safe deposit box.… Only address Elizabeth Taylor as ‘Mrs. Burton.’… Contact Mr. Burton’s assistant and diplomatically point out that men’s polo neck sweaters and ladies’ high fashion silk trousers are not permitted in Plaza restaurants.…”

  The Terrace Room was built during the enlargement of the hotel in 1921, and it has witnessed many a press conference, among them those of Marlene Dietrich (who admitted to being fifty-three years old) and Woody Allen (who declared his love for his former companion’s daughter). In the photos shown here, the curtains behind the Burtons hide doors to the Palm Court, which are sometimes opened to combine the two rooms into one very large multileveled space.

  Julie Nixon Weds David Eisenhower

  Although her father had been elected president the previous month, First Daughter—elect Julie Nixon did not care to wait until January for a White House wedding. Her engagement to David Dwight Eisenhower II, grandson of another U.S. president, had been announced the year before and the wedding set for December 22, 1968, and that it would be. She wanted a traditional, private wedding: the ceremony at Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church, conducted by the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, and the reception in The Plaza’s Ballroom.

  The bride had been equally vehement about barring the press from the wedding and reception, so a compromise was worked out. After the ceremony, the wedding party would repair to The Plaza’s Persian Room, where maroon curtains had been hung as a backdrop for picture taking. Photographs were taken according to plan (here, the bride and groom kiss) and then the press was dismissed and the wedding party repaired to the Ballroom.

  The reception was low-key, with the Ballroom lightly adorned with holly, and seating was equally casual, with no reserved tables. The five hundred guests included the future vice president Spiro Agnew, the president-elect’s future cabinet, and various well-connected Republicans, such as Thomas Dewey, the former governor of New York, Clare Boothe Luce, the former U.S. ambassador to Italy, and J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI. (The bridegroom’s grandparents had been hospitalized and were therefore unable to attend.) Tricia Nixon, sister of the bride and maid of honor, caught the bouquet; Richard Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo snagged the garter.

  Press reports also noted that despite the auspiciousness of the occasion, The Plaza managed to host wedding receptions for six other couples on the same day.

  NOW Stages a Protest

  Women’s liberation arrived at The Plaza on February 12, 1969, the day the National Organization for Women (more commonly known as NOW) staged a sit-in. Their target was the Oak Room, in protest of its men-only policy at lunch, a target that had been shrewdly selected: NOW, founded in 1966, was trying to make a name for itself, and its president, Betty Friedan, very deliberately picked The Plaza for the kind of upscale publicity it would lend to the cause. And since the protest came in the wake of a blizzard, she urged demonstrators to wear fur coats, not only for warmth but also to convey their respectability—and to differentiate NOW from the radical feminists who had recently caused an uproar by burning their brassieres at the Miss America Pageant.

  The protest at the Fifth Avenue entrance began on schedule (here), but Friedan arrived late, clad in a black mink and sunglasses. (The sunglasses were not part of the political agenda; Friedan’s husband, upon hearing of the protest, had blackened her eye in an unsuccessful effort to keep her from attending.) Upon her arrival, the group proceeded to the Oak Room, swept past the maître d’ and settled at a round table in the center of the room. There they waited—and waited—until four waiters appeared, hoisted the table up, and removed it from the room, leaving the women sitting awkwardly in a circle. A man at a nearby booth offered bread sticks, which were declined. Finally, Friedan announced to the reporters (who outnumbered the protestors), “It looks like we are not going to be served.”With that, the group departed.

  As anticipated, the protest garnered a lot of press coverage, and the incident proved instrumental in NOW’s ascendancy to the front ranks of the American feminist movement. Nor was it in vain: Four months later, the Oak Room’s lunchtime men-only policy was rescinded without fanfare, around the same time that Betty Friedan got a divorce.

  Mrs. Aristotle Onassis

  Four days after the NOW protest, the snow still lay on the ground as Mrs. Aristotle Onassis, followed by her son and husband, exited Trader Vic’s. The Onassises, newlyweds of four months, were the most famous couple in the world at the time. While most people portrayed at The Plaza were quite happy to have their picture taken there, this couple proved to be unwilling subjects, due to a new kind of photography—the paparazzi shot—which had come into being in the fifties. In this picture, Mrs. Onassis has donned her protective armor (oversize sunglasses, turned head, rueful half smile), but her husband appears not to have spotted the interloper yet. (Perhaps he is thinking of his own connection to The Plaza—he met his first wife, Tina Livanos, at a bridge game in one of the hotel’s suites in 1943.)

  The Easter Island tiki heads positioned under the far marquee, just above the snowball-toting John F. Kennedy, Jr., were installed when Trader Vic’s opened in The Plaza’s basement in 1965. Unpopular with Plaza regulars from the start, who felt that they weren’t in keeping with the hotel’s dignity—and put into place before the hotel became a designated landmark—the heads were removed without protest after Trader Vic’s closed in 1993.

  Clockwise from top left: Jane Fonda and Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park, Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee, and Tom Hanks in Joe Versus the Volcano.

  The Movies and The Plaza

  As public fascination with the world of moviemaking and moviemakers grew over the century, filming at The Plaza kept pace. The hotel’s popularity as a location is easily understood, for it served as shorthand for a certain kind of upscale urbanity; placing fictional characters in its environs made audiences immediately aware that the characters had style, sophistication, and money—or at least aspired to having those things.

  Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were.

  Indeed, so many films were made on-site that The Plaza has inspired its own set of movie trivia. Some examples: Most appearances by an actor: Robert Redford (Barefoot in the Park, The Way We Were, The Great Gatsby). Most appearances by an actress: Whoopi Goldberg (Soapdish, Eddie, The Associate). Most appearances by a director: Sidney Lumet (Network, Just Tell Me What You Want, Prince of the City). Most appearances by a studio: Paramount (with eight films to date). Most common Plaza location shot: the Fifth Avenue entrance (with twenty-two appearances to date). Movies in which the hotel serves as the central setting: Plaza Suite, Brewster’s Millions, Big Business, Home Alone 2. Movie that opens with scenes at the hotel: Soapdish. Movies that close at the hotel: Plaza Suite, The Way We Were.

  George Hamilton in Love at First Bite.

  Ironically enough, The Plaza doesn’t appear at all in 1978’s I Wanna Hold Your Hand, a dramatization of the Beatles’ notorious first visit to the United States. The hotel refused the production company permission to shoot on-site (perhaps remembering all too well the tumult that the real event had caused), and the movie was shot instead with Boston’s Copley Plaza standing in for The Plaza, an
apt enough choice, as both buildings were designed by Henry Hardenbergh.

  For a detailed filmography, see here.

  Dudley Moore and Anne De Salvo in Arthur.

  The Green Tulip Debacle

  One of The Plaza’s few missteps over the years occurred in October 1971 when the Edwardian Room was closed and remade into the Green Tulip restaurant. And so, unbelievably, the stately room was redone in a color scheme of hot-pink and lime green, ersatz Tiffany lamps were installed, the dark wood paneling was painted over in a lighter shade, and potted plants and trees were added. Waitresses were hired for the first time, strolling folksingers roamed the floor, and after 10:00 P.M. the room was transformed into the Hot House at the Green Tulip, complete with disco dancing.

  It was a disaster from the start. The potted trees died and were repeatedly replaced, the discotheque experiment drew few dancers, and angry mail began to arrive from aghast regular patrons. It all came to a head when New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable published a scathing review of the room: “It adulterates the Plaza,” she wrote, “to look and feel like any number of other older, big city hotels with residual grandeur, cheapened with tricksy restaurants full of familiar and rather loathsome design gimmicks and arch menus and publicity to match. This is meant to appeal, I assume, to a clientele that equates style with novelty and foolish elaboration, and wit with turgid coyness, and for whom the artifacts of the Edwardian era are less familiar than the surface of the moon.”

  The hotel got the message and the experiment was abandoned in May 1974. Here, the mock-funeral announcement sent out to mark its closing. Here, patrons sample a seventies staple, fondue, served by a waiter wearing a Donald Brooks—designed uniform.

  John and Yoko in the Oyster Bar

  The Oyster Bar at The Plaza, as it is officially known, opened on December 17, 1969, in the space that was originally a staff dining room and later the Hitchcock Pharmacy, the in-house drugstore. Designed in the style of an English seaside pub, with the liberal use of mahogany and etched glass, the Oyster Bar was the least formal of the hotel’s dining rooms (that is, no jacket required), reflecting the casual era that had spawned it. Its relaxed ambience made it the preferred Plaza hangout for the latest breed of American celebrity, the rock star.

  One of the most famed rockers, former Beatle John Lennon and his wife, the artist Yoko Ono, were among the room’s regular patrons. In the fall of 1980, photographer Lilo Raymond was engaged to take pictures of the famed couple, who had emigrated to New York a few years earlier and were in the process of making a collaborative recording, later released as Double Fantasy. Raymond spent a day wandering the city with them, and just before repairing to the recording studio, she photographed them having lunch in a favorite haunt.

  The inescapable poignance of this picture comes with hindsight, for John Lennon had only several months to live. He would be murdered in front of the Dakota apartment building on December 8, 1980.

  Donald Trump Buys The Plaza

  The Plaza’s tradition of colorful, larger-than-life owners continued when real estate tycoon Donald Trump purchased the hotel in July 1988 for the sum of $390 million. Young, rich, and brash, Trump was one of the most visible millionaires in town, and reaction to his purchase echoed the reception given Conrad Hilton forty-five years earlier: general coolness from the old guard, who braced themselves for a lowering of standards. These fears proved groundless, however; like Hilton, Trump revitalized the hotel, and his tenure marked a rebirth for the property.

  From the onset, Trump admitted to having paid too much for The Plaza. “This isn’t just a building,” he told the press. “It’s the ultimate work of art—it’s the Mona Lisa. I’m in love with it.” In partnership with his wife, Ivana (who was named hotel president at a salary of “one dollar per year and all the dresses she can buy”), Trump undertook a meticulous, costly renovation of the lobby and banquet areas. In addition, six specialty suites—luxe echoes of Serge Obolensky’s earlier celebrity versions—were created, as well as Gauguin, a restaurant-cum-discotheque that took over the space (and much of the decor) of the former Trader Vic’s.

  The heady atmosphere of the Trump era was short-lived, however, rocked by a stock market crash that forced the tycoon to pull in his reins, followed by a very public divorce from his wife (indeed, the breakup of the marriage was tabloid fodder for months, with The Plaza’s name (here) lending a glamorous frisson to the proceedings). Trump eventually relinquished his interest in the property in 1995 to Prince Alwalid bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Saud, owner of the Fairmont Hotels, and CDL Hotels, a Singapore-based group, for $325 million.

  Here, the Trumps during happier days at the Pulitzer Fountain. Here, a card that accompanied amenities sent by the owner.

  Home Alone 2

  Movie sequels have long been a lucrative part of the motion picture business, and the 1990s sleeper hit Home Alone was a perfect candidate for a sequel. The original version recounted the misadventures of a youngster unintentionally left behind when his family went on vacation. After some complicated negotiations with The Plaza, the sequel repeated the formula with the boy at large, unchaperoned, in the world’s most famous hotel.

  The picture proved to be a marketing bonanza for the hotel (the actual telephone number for room reservations was announced twice in the dialogue), but the windfall came at no small price. Among other things, the Fifty-ninth Street lobby was shut down for several weeks, with check-in and other services relocated to the Fifth Avenue side for the duration of filming. Guests were still allowed the use of the Fifty-ninth Street elevators between takes, however, and many a surprised visitor alighted on the ground floor, only to find himself smack in the middle of a movie set.

  Oddly enough, Home Alone 2 was inadvertently responsible for a change in the lobby’s overall appearance, which came about during the shooting of a sequence that required actor Macaulay Culkin to slide across the floor into a waiting elevator (shown here). To make the stunt possible, the film crew had been given permission to remove the wall-to-wall carpeting, in place at that time for about twenty-five years. When owner Donald Trump saw the exquisite mosaic-tile floor that lay underneath, he was so taken by it that wall-to-wall carpeting was banned thereafter, in favor of area rugs that allowed the mosaics to be seen again.

  Here, Macaulay Culkin checks in; Here, the actor relaxes between takes.

  Red Grooms at The Plaza

  The work of American artist Red Grooms is not easily categorized—part burlesque and part opera, his multimedia assemblages are a mix of both Pop Art and Expressionist themes. Ruckus Manhattan, his most well-known piece, was completed in 1976. Here, his whimsical 1995 take on the hotel, naturally titled The Plaza, from Grooms’s series of Fifth Avenue landmarks, New York Stories.

  Photographs fail to convey Grooms’s art very well; this work’s three-dimensional effects and large scale (six feet by seven and a half) are somewhat diminished when reproduced on paper.

  The Plaza Lighted for a Lingerie Show

  As the twentieth century came to an end, The Plaza endured, more renowned than ever due to a very high-profile movie career. Both the celebrated and the unsung continued to wed and be feted there, to dine and spend the night, to mark occasions both auspicious and inauspicious. Through it all, one of the most pervasive twentieth-century innovations—advertising—continued its ongoing association with the hotel.

  To wit, the 1994 illumination of the building (here) to promote a fashion show sponsored by the lingerie manufacturer Victoria’s Secret. The first runway show undertaken by the company, it quickly became a phenomenon when supermodels (the latest addition to the celebrity firmament) were engaged to model the lingerie. At once, the show was a hot ticket among power brokers, and indeed, the buzz reached such giddy heights that the show evolved into a full-blown media event, complete with televised coverage. Thus, the bathing of The Plaza in violet light to supply the press with a good visual lead-in to the story.

  The last time
the hotel had been so memorably illuminated was for the 1909 Hudson-Fulton celebration. One wonders what the next occasion will signify.

  Time Line

  The Plaza has been New York’s most celebrated hotel for nearly a century. Designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh in the French Renaissance style, it opened on October 1, 1907. The hotel stands nineteen stories high, with over eight hundred guest rooms fitted with carved marble fireplaces, crystal chandeliers, ornamental plaster moldings, and mahogany doors. It currently houses four restaurants: the Oak Room, the Oak Bar, the Palm Court, and the Oyster Bar.

  1863

  • The Plaza’s future site is a pond, the winter headquarters of the elite New York Skating Club.

  1883–1889

  • Construction begins on first Plaza Hotel, on former site of the New York Skating Club; builders fail to raise funds to complete hotel and New York Life Insurance Company forecloses, hiring architects McKim, Mead and White to complete the hotel and redesign the interior.