5 - Room Without Bath …

HOTEL TIMEO, Taormina, Sicily

 

Taormina (photo Google archives)

     I took a package trip in the Spring of 1978, where I found myself at a modern resort built into the rocks on the Ionian Sea along the northern coast of Sicily.  Taormina was located about a mile’s walk up the mountainside.

While exploring the village, next to the magnificent ancient Greek theatre with Mount Etna in the distance, I stumbled across a discreet and beautiful hotel called the Timeo, almost hidden down a little tree-lined walkway.   At that time it was the most exquisite place I had ever seen, entirely surrounded by its lush Mediterranean gardens with a memorable smell of flowers and tangerines.

Rocco 1978

I went there for dinner, and was blown away by its Italian kind of understated elegance.   The tablecloths were pink, and Rocco, the maître d’hôtel, and his waiters were dashing around as though their life’s mission was to see that I was comfortable and contented.  There was no air conditioning, and the overhead fans complemented a warm evening breeze.

Italy was still cheap in those days.  Only now do I realize to what extent that dinner was a kind of awakening to the accessibility of some of the finer things in life.

This was in May, and I came back to Paris with such enthusiasm for Taormina and the Timëo that I began immediately preparing a trip there for the following Christmas.   

My friend, Ann, who started out briefly with me in the art business (and later committed suicide), wrote to the hotel for us months in advance.   She called one day, crestfallen, to tell me there were no rooms available except two connecting garden (i.e. semi-basement) singles without private bath.

I thank my lucky stars that we did not flinch.  Actually, we did flinch, but private bath or not, we ultimately decided to go ahead.

 Entrance to the Timeo today (photo G. Dall Orto)

 As it turned out, the adjoining rooms were delightful, opening directly onto a private terrace in the garden, brimming over with the aforementioned aromatic tangerine trees.

The absolute cherry on the cake was the bathroom, located directly across the hall about two and a half feet from my door, reserved for our exclusive use.  For that matter, the entire little hall was for our private use, as ours were the only rooms on it.

When we wanted a bath, we had a special cord to pull, and the chambermaid came literally running with an armful of plush towels and various little linen things which she placed strategically so our bare feet would never have to touch the magnificent, chilly marble floor. 

 And, yes, she ran my bath for me every day. 
  

Anne, Paris 1972

   [photos are mine unless otherwise credited]

SIDEBAR:  TRAVELING THROUGH ITALY ON THE TRAIN

Vintage train poster, Paris' Gare St Lazare circa 1948

      With the meager earnings from our first art show, Ann and I set out on the trip to Taormina in 1978.  It started a kind of tradition of making the 1500-mile trek by train every Christmas for the next few years.

En route for Venice (photo A. Gazères)

The second year to Sicily was the most exceptional, when we graduated to the rather pampered environment of the Italian rail’s wagone letto, the luxuriously old fashioned private sleepers still in vogue on long distance Italian trains at that time.

Simplon Express poster

We would invariably make the three-day journey in several stages, usually beginning with an overnight trip from Paris to Venice.  In those days there was still a formal dining room with two dinner services best booked in advance.  I have a memory of the whitest and most beautifully starched linen, and though the food was not magnificent, it was never less than a taste of special luxury.

After a couple of nights in Venice, we set out on the day trip south to Florence or Rome, or both.  From there, we would embark a few days later for Sicily on the Bellini Express.   Sometime around dawn, the sleeping cars would board directly onto a ferry boat at the Strait of Messina without our even having to awaken, let alone get out of bed. 

Coffee was served in our compartment a few minutes before pulling into the old fashioned Taormina station.  My most pronounced memory of that yearly trip is of the almost overpowering early-morning aroma of tangerine blossoms, even before leaving the train.  

Taormina Station today (Photo Google)

                                                                                                  

The trips were not always without incident.  On the notoriously lawless Simplon Express connecting Venice with Paris, robberies occurred weekly if not daily (particularly in a sort of legal no-man's land on the edges of both countries’ borders where police jurisdiction was hazy), and we were once dispossessed of our entire vacation funds. 

But even that bit of non-violent drama added another zest of adventure to our holiday, and a trip to the Venetian police station, located within the Santa Lucia train station, remains an exciting memory.

We naturally never recuperated our stolen money, but considered ourselves lucky to have sold enough paintings that year to reimburse ourselves.  It was before the time of withdrawing cash with credit cards, and we had to rely on friends to wire new funds.  And as future trips loomed on the horizon, it gave us an extra incentive to succeed in our new hobby-business.  

Night Train, painting by Belgian artist Paul Delvaux

Your input is welcomed:  hotel-musings@hotmail.fr

[Photos are mine, unless otherwise credited]


Next Friday:  "Traveling On My Own, The Piccadilly"
 (and back to the Timeo next month)

  CROSS REFERENCING … a look at other postings

Ann is also featured in blog No. 33 "Breakfast in the 70's," 19 April, 2013.  The Timeo was also featured in blog No. 7, "Clementina, Still Lady of the Manor" Oct. 12, 2012; and No. 13, "The Beginning and the End of Duncan" Nov. 16, 2012 (to access, click on titles).

4 - A Two-Dollar Hamburger Under a Silvery Dome

THE WEYLIN and THE BERKSHIRE, New York City

Viennese postcard circa 1925

      My first real hotel memory springs from a trip to New York in 1954 with my Aunt Frances, her British friend Rose, and Grandmother Pleasants.

 I had just turned twelve, and we took the overnight Silver Star from Southern Pines the day after Christmas.   Frances and Grandmother Pleasants shared one of those enormous double bedrooms (there was usually only one per train), while Rose and I slept in berth beds which looked directly onto the sleeping car corridor like Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe in “Some like it Hot.”  

 

Rose, circa 1955, with Dickie and Mickie

 (Rose, no less an aunt to me and my brothers than Frances, is buried in Aberdeen with the rest of the family.  Her place in the family remains somewhat of an enigma.)

 

Weylin Hotel (Google)

We stayed at the Weylin at the corner of 54th and Madison.  Built in 1921, the 16-story luxury hotel (unbeknownst then to anyone in our party)  was just about at the end of its life.  It would be converted into an office building in January of 1956.  At any rate,  I remember little about the hotel itself.

   We must have had a two-bedroom suite, with my foldaway bed set up in the living room.  What most sticks in my mind is the room service which Frances ordered for me as soon as we arrived.    I vividly remember the bellboy in his bright green jacket, setting up a special table onto which he reverently placed my late-morning treat.   He then ceremoniously  whisked away the silvery dome, unveiling the most elegant hamburger I could have  ever imagined (and a subject of family conversation for years to follow).

Frances grandly signed the check for a whopping two dollars, representing about ten times the cost of a hamburger back in Aberdeen. 

Today, I frequently have difficulty remembering a film or book from last week.  Yet, I recall in detail what must have been an exhausting Saturday for Frances those many years ago:  morning at FAO Schwartz (the biggest toy store in the world!) and the Empire State Building; lunch at Longchamps with banana split for dessert; matinee at the original Cinerama; and a memorable evening at Radio City Music Hall.  

This Is Cinerama 1954

  

I had made a thorough wish list of which only Coney Island (closed for the winter)  and the Stork Club (!) went unfulfilled (See sidebar:  Dorothy Ann at the Stork Club).

 * * * * * * *

  I didn’t return to New York with Frances again  until 1968, when I was on my way to relocate in Europe.  It’s hard to imagine that only 14 years had elapsed between those two trips. 

Frances with unidentified gentleman, at a Colorado Dude Ranch

The days of innocence had long passed.  Dickie, my younger brother, joined us, and it was a time in our lives of excess and reckless carousing.   Dickie was just beginning, I had been going full throttle for quite awhile, and Frances was a veteran.

Angry young man (photo Walt Howerton)

We all chipped in financially, but Frances paid the lion’s share for another two-bedroom suite, this time at the Berkshire on 52^nd Street.  I remember thinking, naively, this must be exactly the sort of place where one might run into the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

I’ve never stayed there again, but a few years ago I took a stroll through the lobby of what is now the Omni Berkshire, and I could partially re-feel the thrill of the first time at quite such an elegant place. 

The good-time Windsors

SIDEBAR:  Miss VFW 1951 at the Stork Club

The Stork Club 1949

       My wish to go to the Stork Club was not as idiotic as it might appear.  I did read Walter Wintchell’s column, and he was supposed to go there every evening.  Ditto Earl Wilson. 

With Dorothy Ann 1970

 My real connection, however, was my beloved cousin, Dorothy Ann, who had won a national beauty contest in the summer of 1951 which had temporarily thrown her, and by ricochet the rest of the family, into the outer fringes of celebrityism.  This was long before Andy Warhol coined the 15-minutes-of-fame expression, but it was precisely what he was talking about before he said it.

If I tell you the contest was Miss U.S. Veterans of Foreign Wars, you’ll undoubtedly think I am making a big to-do of nothing.  However, to get a sense of the event’s importance, you have to go back into the context of the recently-ended World War and the just-beginning one in Korea.  Not to mention the all pervasive, intoxicating national patriotism of the day.

Dorothy Ann was my favorite cousin, and I spent many weekends with her and her step-mom who was my great-aunt Ruth. 

When she was crowned, the VFW organization staged a full scale military parade down 5^th Avenue, led by Dorothy Ann, sitting on the rear of the back seat of an open-top Cadillac convertible.  Heady stuff, I’d say.

This was nothing compared to the announcement the following day that Dorothy Ann would appear on the CBS television program “Live from the Stork Club,” an early talk show in which the owner circulated among the tables of his illustrious nightclub and paused to chat with the more recognizable patrons. 

Google photo circa 1951

As almost no one in Aberdeen had yet acquired a television set, our family arranged to see the event elsewhere.  I recollect  the house and the street, but not the owners.  I just remember my mother and me and Ethel, our maid, along with various neighbors crowded on the floor of a little living room on Poplar Street watching the fifteen minute program.

Ethel with the twins

I was only eight years old that summer.  But.  I always remembered the Stork Club, and I never forgot the excitement of seeing Sherman Billingsley stopping by Dorothy Ann’s table, however briefly.

Dorothy Ann and her little cousin

Click here for a visit back to the Stork Club

Your input is welcomed:  hotel-musings@hotmail.fr

  Next Friday:  "Room Without Bath ..."

3 - Peggy’s Trip to Paris 1972

HOTEL MEURICE, Paris

Restaurant Dali, Hotel Meurice 2012

   
        I had another encounter with the Hotel Meurice in those early days.  There remain only a few memory fragments, it was so long ago.  I think the reason I haven’t completely forgotten is that making my life and learning about life in Paris was of inordinate importance to me at that time.  My dream from the earliest moments here was to somehow become a Parisian.

Martha circa 1970

 Aunt Martha (true to my father’s grim predictions about squandering money) had somewhat fallen on hard times by the 1970’s.  Having reached retirement age, she found herself sufficiently in need of money to go back to work in the accounting department of a local gift soap emporium where she befriended Peggy, a college student working there during summer vacation.

Soon afterwards, Peggy decided on a trip to Paris, and Martha insisted she look me up.

She was traveling with an older woman as sort of a traveling companion.  I didn’t quite understand their relationship, other than Peggy had a strong, loudish, not very appealing personality, and it was clear that the other lady was footing the bills. I wasn't very taken with either of them.   I was invited for drinks at the Meurice where they were staying, a world I was still singularly unused to, but no longer intimidated by either.

We had a drink at the Meurice’s rooftop bar.  I’m glad I went, because that open-air terrace no longer exists --except, I believe, in one of the presidential penthouse suites-- and I fondly remember the impressive view of the Tuileries Gardens and the Place de la Concorde.

Painting of the Tuileries Gardens by Jules Herve

I was still quite poor.  I had moved from my Champs Elysées room to a minuscule studio apartment with toilet on the landing; I was young, and I had  friends who were equally poor, and life in my adopted city seemed close to perfect. 

 (It’s odd how many times over the years bits and pieces of Peggy and of that evening have passed through my mind, even though I hardly remember her face anymore.) 

She suddenly announced she was so smitten with Paris that she, too, was going to find a way to move here.

Yours Truly, 1971 (photo Ann Gazères)

In the decades I’ve lived in France, I have seen so many Americans arrive to make their lives here, only to throw up their arms in exasperation or anger a few months or a few years later.  It is not easy to learn a new language and understand another culture, and accept such a different way of life all at the same time.  

I was just about to warn her that life might not be quite so glamorous in a more humble neighborhood far from the Meurice.  She pre-empted my comments, by adding:  “And I wouldn’t dream of living in any other neighborhood than right here on the rue de Rivoli, and I would need at least 1000 square feet to house my furniture, and …."

You can fill in the blanks.   I have forgotten the details, but she continued to list just about everything that would make  living comfortable in, say, Palm Beach, and assuming Paris would naturally have to accommodate all of those American necessities.

I realized I would never have to worry about seeing Peggy settle in Paris, and of course she never did. 

The Meurice Reception Staff 2012

* * * * * * *

 

SIDEBAR:  PARIS’ BEST HAMBURGER 

The New York Times last year decreed the hamburger at the Meurice Hotel’s Dali Restaurant the best in Paris.

I did try it, and I did enjoy it.

If not absolutely the best in the world (Brenda and I find unbeatable  the more modestly priced cheeseburger at P.J. Clarke’s on 3rd Avenue in NYC), it is nevertheless very tasty, albeit among the most expensive. 

  

 Next week I’ll be talking about another memorable hamburger, one from the Weylin Hotel in New York in 1954.  That one cost at least ten times the price back in Aberdeen.  Today’s prize winning burger at the Meurice goes for just about ten times the price at a French MacDonald’s.    Not that the two are comparable.

In addition to Salvador Dali, who elected winter residence in the old royal suite for the last thirty years of his life, the hotel has boasted guests ranging from Mata Hari to the Shah of Iran to Franklin D. Roosevelt, though not at the same time.  More comtemporary patrons include pop icons Madonna and Beyonce.

After many years of discreet decline, The Meurice is today back in tip-top form and a model of European elegance.  Already in 1935, the French poet Léon-Paul Fargue, known for his bon mots, divided Parisian hotels into three categories:  “poor, good and the Meurice!”

(photo:  The Sunday Herald Sun)

 

... When Salvador Dali reigned supreme

My friend Joel Fletcher, art dealer in Fredricksburg, Virginia, author and grand raconteur, tells an amusing story situated in the Meurice at just about the same time that I discovered it. 

He recounted it beautifully in his blog “Beating Austerity in the Kitchen” (beatingausterity.blogspot.com).   It’s about Salvador Dali and the Countess von Oldekop-Auberjonois.  If you are curious, here is a link to his blog (but don’t forget to come back to mine next week): 

http://beatingausterity.blogspot.fr/search?q=Meurice

Your input is welcomed:  hotel-musings@hotmail.fr

Next Friday:  "A Two-Dollar Hamburger Under A Silvery Dome"

[photos are mine unless otherwise credited] 


 

2 - Sunday Lunch with Grandmother Pleasants and Mrs. Kennedy

THE CARTHAGE HOTEL, Carthage, N.C.

The Carthage Hotel circa 1930

      I was a precocious kid in some oddly frivolous ways.  When I was about ten, I loved looking through my Aunt Martha’s old New Yorkers, always enjoying “Talk of the Town”, even though I surely didn’t understand the half of it. 

I imagined my more sophisticated relatives in the grandest of hotels (though now realize my imagination was working overtime), and I longed to be there, too.

My father with aunts Martha (l) and Frances (r), 1960's

My immediate family had none of the urban glamor of Uncle Nelson, the publisher-journalist, his wife Martha, nor of Aunt Frances, the Pinehurst decorator.  In fact, my father always poked fun at them for squandering their own money, spending other people’s, and generally putting on airs. 

Grandmother Pleasants, Frances and me, 1964   

The closest my family came to what I perceived as a sophisticated lifestyle was Sunday lunch at the Carthage Hotel.  It was a down-home, county seat hotel on the courthouse square boasting a family restaurant with those short-life plastic tablecloths with which I would amuse myself, stretching and otherwise damaging them underneath the table. 

China from the Carthage Hotel

My interest in cuisine came much later, and I was fairly indifferent then to what was widely considered the finest home cooked food in the county. The hotel particularly prided itself on its country biscuits.

No shrimp cocktail, 1951

 I don’t remember so much the food we ate as that which we didn’t.   It was strictly forbidden in our family for the children to order shrimp cocktail, a delicacy not included on the special luncheon menu, and which of course I dearly longed to order.  

Even today, when returning to the U.S., it is a particular comfort-food pleasure to eat shrimp cocktail with its uniquely American horseradish-ketchup sauce.

* * * *

click for more infomation

  The Statler family, owner of New York’s Roosevelt Hotel and many others, spent a number of golfing vacations in nearby Pinehurst. Mrs. Statler, it turned out, always urged the family to drive up to the Carthage Hotel, insisting it was the only place around where you could get a decent lunch. (I discovered this little titbit in a recent, rather fascinating book, “Death of a Pinehurst Princess.”)

At the time the Statlers were coming to lunch in the 1930’s, the Carthage Hotel was owned by a local family called Kennedy.  At some point the Kennedys sold their property to the Womack family.

Mrs. Kennedy in younger days

In the years I remember going there,  Mrs. Kennedy, who was certainly a rather old lady by then, had returned (or perhaps she had never really left), and worked with great dignity as a waitress.  She lived in a room at the hotel and was ultimately adopted as an extra grandmother by the new owner’s children.


 She had been a friend of my grandmother in her youth, and she always gave us a special, joyful welcome, even more so when Grandmother Pleasants was in our party.
    
After more than 50 years as Carthage’s premier inn and restaurant, the hotel definitively shut its doors in 1972.  It was razed several years later to make room for a new courthouse.

-o-

SIDEBAR : THE GREEN BOOK AND THE CARTHAGE HOTEL

1949 edition of the Green Book

 The Green Book is an almost forgotten guidebook that served a large minority during the decades of the 20^th century when unrelenting segregation was the law in the South and widespread discrimination against blacks rampant elsewhere. 

“The Negro Motorist Green Book” was published regularly from the 1930’s until the enactment of civil rights laws made it not quite so necessary by the mid-1960’s.  It listed, state by state, hotels which were welcoming to Afro-American guests.

  "The Negro traveler's inconveniences are many," wrote Wendell  Alston in a master of understatement  in the 1949 Green Book, "and they are increasing because today so many more are traveling."
 

Julian Bond, civil rights activist and long head of the NAACP, spoke of the guide in an interview last year on National Public Radio. 

“Segregation was practiced almost everywhere, North and South,” he said.  “and black travelers needed this guide badly.”  Bond says he remembers traveling with his family as a child growing up in the 1950’s, and using the book to plan their trips.

Most of the hotels and guest homes listed in the southern states were black-owned.  A few were not, and the Carthage Hotel was among these.

Given the spirit of the times, it seems more than unlikely that blacks would have been welcomed as “front door” hotel guests at the time I found it listed in 1949.  

 I spoke to Jane Womack Thomas, the daughter of the last hotel owners, who grew up on the premises, but she knew nothing about the Green Book.  She said there were many black employees with whom her family maintained exceptionally close bonds. 

Julian Bond 1968 (photo AP)

Whatever the explanation, the Carthage Hotel was the only listing in the Green Book for Moore County and one of the rare hotels cited in North Carolina.  Its inclusion remains somewhat of a mystery.  

I can only surmise there must have been some sort of referral service for Afro-American travelers, with  hotel personnel possibly offering rooms in their own homes.

Your input is welcomed:  hotel-musings@hotmail.fr

 Next Friday:  "Peggy's Trip to Paris 1972"