61 - Goodbye, Rose

THE PIERRE, New York;  BROWNS
and THE PARK LANE, London

Rose, at home in Pinehurst around 1958

 

        Rose was my British aunt.  She was Frances'  friend and was always an integral part of the family.

Born near London, the youngest of a number of brothers and sisters, Rose left England around the time of the First World War.  She first landed in Canada, served as a nurse in the military,  later settled in or near New York City.

Towards the end of the Second World War she was offered a good job as Head Nurse at Moore County Hospital in Pinehurst.  Whether she knew Frances before or after moving to the Sandhills, I do not know, but they always shared a duplex on Everitt Road for as long as I can remember.

As a child I thought it was somehow wonderful that Rose became such a part of the Pleasants family, but in some ways she must have regretted losing a portion of her own identity and independence in the process.  

With the twins 1953 (Dickie, Rose, Mickie and Frances)

Frances set up her own decorating business around 1950, and when she later opened an upscale gift shop, she talked Rose into leaving her hospital job to run the shop and keep the company books.

During the business'  thriving years, both Frances and Rose lived --if not in splendor-- a life of comfort far surpassing our family's rather humdrum existence three miles away in Aberdeen.  

* * * * * *

Brown's today (photo Rocco Forte Hotels)

   They once spent a month on a buying trip to London in a suite at Brown's Hotel, Frances and Rose.   It was in 1953, the year of  Queen Elizabeth's coronation, and through most of my childhood I always assumed they had actually been invited to the ceremony, which of course was not the case.

Frances mastered the art of understatement.  She never boasted or openly exaggerated, but discreetly insinuated.  So that when she spoke of having gone to London for the coronation, you just naturally assumed she must have had some direct connection with the Queen of England.

Frances in Blowing Rock, summer of 1956 (photo by Rose F.)

 When the retirement years arrived, and some of Frances' poor business decisions and overspending began to take their toll, Rose was left almost without means.  With only a minimal social security retirement and no assets of her own, she then found herself dependent on an increasingly irritable Frances who, encouraged by the ravages of alcohol, became frequently aggressive and unkind to her longstanding friend.

But like my aunt and uncle Martha and Nelson, Frances and Rose always seemed to be surrounded by friends of means and generosity, often ready to extend invitations of great bounty.

The Morlands were such friends. 

By the time Rose reached her seventies she had been diagnosed with a fatal heart malady, and as a seasoned nurse, she had no illusions about her life expectancy.  Gil and Virginia Morland proposed taking her to England for what was tacitly understood to be a last visit.

It was quite a trip.  Two days at the Pierre Hotel in New York before boarding the Queen Mary for Southampton.   In London the three friends stayed at the Morland's favorite hotel, The Park Lane.  No expense was spared, and Rose was thrilled with the attention.  

The day Rose was to visit her last surviving sister in a distant northern suburb, the Morlands arranged for a car with driver.

I cannot claim to have been a fly on the wall, and there are no witnesses to Rose's family reunion.  I can only imagine the impact  when she swept out of the limousine.  She had become increasingly grand as the years went on, though I assume from family conversations that her beginnings were on the modest side.

When Rose died several years later, she was virtually penniless, but she never had to significantly modify her lifestyle.  Frances took charge of her funeral, and she was buried with the rest of the Pleasants family in Aberdeen.  

Rose towards the end of her life

It was about a month later that Frances received a letter from England.  It was from the sister, and she wrote of bereavement for her departed Rosie.   Then in short order she inquired of the "estate."  A second letter soon followed, this one referring  more directly to the "inheritance."   

Frances replied, explaining there was neither estate nor inheritance, that Rose had died with insufficient means to cover her debts.

A London solicitor telephoned at some later point, representing the disappointed sister.   Everyone was ultimately made to understand that there would be no inheritance en route.  

Rose's life appeared (and not just to her sister) to be one of privilege, and in many ways it was.  Born before the turn of the century into a simpler milieu,  the streets of America were still thought to be paved with gold.  To the family remaining in the same London suburb, it must have looked as though Rose had struck it rich.  

But appearances can be deceiving.   Her adopted country certainly  blessed her with many generous friends and even a second family.  But no fortune. 

Aboard the Queen Mary, the captain's reception circa 1966

 Rose's last trip "home" to England (Cunard photo)

Your input is welcomed:  frank.pleasants@libertysurf.fr


[Photos are mine, unless otherwise credited]

CROSS REFERENCING … a look at other postings

Rose is mentioned in "A Date With Dephie" Musings and Meanderings No. 17;Rose and Frances were  featured in Hotel Musings No. 4, "A Two-Dollar Hamburger under a Silvery Dome" ; Frances was mentioned in blog No. 51 "A Christmas Gift"  (to access, click on highlighted titles).

60 - Gloria Vanderbilt and Some Tenuous Hotel Connections

HOTEL FOURTEEN, New York City, and INN ON THE BILTMORE ESTATE, Asheville, N.C.

Little Gloria and Mom (Google)

   Gloria Vanderbilt and her tumultuous life have always held a certain fascination for me.

She was called the richest little girl in America during the depression years, and she was probably one of the unhappiest as well.   She began life, carted around by a beautiful, often irresponsible socialite mother from one European grand hotel to another:  summer in Biarritz, winter in Mégeve, a month at the Plaza or the Sherry Netherland in New York, then back to the Ritz in Paris.

The center of one of the highest publicized and most tawdry custody trials of all time, she was ultimately removed from the full-time tutelage of her mother and awarded to the care of an aunt. 

The author of any number of books, many about her life, she has often described what became a childhood rejection of the grand hotel life.  So much so that as a teenager she hated and dreaded the obligatory Sunday lunches at the Sherry Netherlands with her Mother and maternal grandmother, Nanny Morgan (see blog No. 13, "Those silver-spooned children...").

Hotel Fourteen was where Gloria Vanderbilt’s grandmother lived in New York City during the long custody battles and after.  G.V. mentioned it frequently in her first, remarkable  book of memories “Once Upon A Time” (which I highly recommend as a particularly original approach to autobiography ). 

The Fourteen was located at 14 E. 60^th Street, next door to the Pierre, and was operational  until after the Second World War, probably into the Fifties.   It  would have certainly had a certain chic-ness about it, given the location and the clientele, but I have been unable to find much more information.  

I did spot it recently in an old Dominique Dunne novel.  In his roman à clé, “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles,” based on a famous New York society murder of the 1950’s, he described it in its waning post-war days as an address for the assignations of couples looking for a discreet hotel room. 

 I recently looked up the address, and discovered it now houses a Michelin-starred French restaurant, The Rouge Tomate, and Brenda and I and nephew Ryan tried it out on a recent trip to New York. 

The Rouge Tomate (ex-Hotel Fourteen) 2010

A big, sprawling, typically New York brasserie-style restaurant with high ceilings and lots of noise, it was good food and good value at $32 for their three-course lunch menu.

* * * * *

Fantasy oil painting of Biltmore by Thomas Kinkade

  Long before the birth of Gloria Vanderbilt, her great uncle George Washington Vanderbilt built in 1895 a palatial estate in Asheville, North Carolina, known as the Biltmore Estate. 

He died before he ever had a chance to live there, but it remained in the family,  and is still owned and operated by Vanderbilt’s great grandson.  With over 250 rooms, it remains the largest privately owned house in the United States.

Brenda and I stayed at the Biltmore a few years ago on a trip to the North Carolina mountains.

We actually got around to going there in a convoluted manner.  Brenda is very much a plant and garden person; while in South Africa, she had picked up a book on fine gardens throughout the world, which included some particularly impressive photos of the Biltmore Estate.  

I was doing some research on Pinehurst, the beautiful North Carolina village where I was born, and I discovered that the architect who laid out Pinehurst in the 1890’s was the same one who had earlier redesigned Central Park in New York City.  Then, coincidentally while looking a little closer into the Biltmore estate, I learned that Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed the other two, was equally responsible for the Asheville landmark’s 8,000 acres of landscape gardening.

So when we decided to visit said gardens, and when we discovered the existence of a hotel on the estate, we jumped at the chance of spending a night there. 

Brenda admiring the countryside 2010

I had assumed a little precipitately that the “Inn on the Biltmore Estate” was actually part of the original mansion, which would have been much more interesting.  I only realized upon arrival that the hotel, albeit a handsome building with nice, large, bedrooms and appropriately grand public rooms, was only constructed a handful of years ago.

So not so much a memorable or historic stay, it was more one of convenience and comfort.  The real joy of the hotel was its view, sitting as it is in the middle of some of the spectacular gardens, with the Blue Ridge mountains in the distance. 

In fact, it was a room with a view on a par with some of the world’s finest, of which I have seen a few.

  

Inn on the Biltmore --A room with a knockout view!

Your input is welcomed:  frank.pleasants@libertysurf.fr

[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"