The Great American Saloon Series/The Fairfax on Embassy Row
Bakshian, Aram Jr.
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES THE FAIRFAX ON EMBASSY ROW M ost hotel bars simply do not measure up. Come to think of it, why should they? Like airport restaurants, they subsist off of a...
...And then there are the customers themselves: muttony package tourists, porcine conventioneers, vulpine traveling salesmen, and bovine bimbos do not the best of boon companions make...
...On one evening in 1990, 1 was joined for a drink by a journalist friend who had spent the entire afternoon trying to catch up with a traveling free tasting sponsored by the distributors of Cardhu scotch...
...in London, the gracious country-house ease of the St...
...Fortunately, the easier, more natural charm of Maryland and Virginia hunt country survives in the pine-paneled Fairfax Bar...
...I discovered the one I love to hate the most on a working visit to Eastern Europe in late 1989...
...in those days it was owned by the Gores, an old, propertied local family (Republicans and sufficiently distant cousins of the Tennessee Gores to obviate the need for a boycott...
...The Fairfax's clientele, besides longin-tooth (or long toothless) members of the local squirearchy, includes everything from literati to glitterati, from politicos (and even their widows, e.g., Ethel Kennedy) to visiting academicians (the Cosmos Club, which can claim more Nobel laureates than any other private club in the world, is just up the street...
...In the past year I have shared the premises with Jimmy Stewart, Bobby Short, Katharine Hepburn, Walter Matthau, and someone who looked like Jack Lemmon's father but turned out to be Jack Lemmon...
...willowy Elizabeth, an attractive, engaging English major from Pennsylvania—all offer gracious service to customers sunk into leather armchairs and deep velvet sofas...
...Nowhere did one capture the flavor of a society and an economy in flux better than in the godawful bar of the godawful Forum Hotel in downtown Warsaw...
...Any illusions Spags may have had about human nature perished at the barricades of the old Rotunda on Capitol Hill where, during several years of bar-tending, he was captive audience to the appalling eating, drinking, and mating habits of the United States Congress...
...I thought she was about as funny as Jerry Lewis in drag...
...Like airport restaurants, they subsist off of a transient and temporarily captive clientele...
...Rumors of a drastic remodeling are rife, and we all know what a mess progress can make of things...
...In Manhattan, one thinks of the old Green Bar at the Algonquin, cozily shabby but rich in literary associations...
...S ome people visit the Fairfax Bar to be seen, some to be unseen...
...In it, Revolutionary War hero Israel Putnam, a stout, florid gentleman of mature years, holds on to his hat as if his life depended on it, while his spastic steed, its limbs defying every known law of anatomy, bolts down a steep embankment, escaping a thwarted British cavalry picket (the 16th Light Dragoons, John Burgoyne's old regiment, if memory serves...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991 33...
...For one dread moment, I thought I was back at the Forum in Warsaw...
...or a publisher in search of just the sort of author you happen to be...
...that way marauding boors cannot establish eye by Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...If gossip abounds, so, too, do gossip hounds...
...On another, Klemens C. Kowalsky, a monumentally revolting defense lawyer from New Jersey (according to his card, a specialist in fraud, accident claims, and immigration cases), barged in with four shopworn ladies of the night and lost his temper when his wife declined the invitation to come down from her room and join the fun...
...Most of the women in the Forum bar had long since lost theirs...
...in Vienna, the understated elegance of the lounge at the Imperial...
...Alas, all gross things must come to an end...
...I generally prefer to stand at the bar with my back to the entrance...
...It is only in the hands of the most inspired hoteliers that a hostelry's watering hole takes on an identity of its own...
...majestic Lois, an amiable Kenyan with glowing brown eyes and a ready laugh...
...Everybody seemed to have warts...
...Maybe he really did idolize her...
...ern papers and magazines, and double-knitted American entrepreneurs hoping to make a quick killing before the newly democratized Polish government lost its economic maidenhead...
...I've also often wondered what Lee Atwater, in happier days just before the Bush inaugural, was discussing with a Reagan-appointed ambassador to a major NATO power during the siesta hour one Saturday when I happened to come by to retrieve a forgotten umbrella...
...contact from the lobby...
...The lobby itself was graced with an "Art Gallery" peddling an appalling line of recreation-roomquality daubs, mainly of nude demimondaines and overdressed Madonnas (the virgin, not the singer...
...The day before I left Warsaw, the Forum's bar was abruptly boarded up, whether for fumigation or de-fumigation I will never know...
...The place crawled with second-string stringers for obscure WestAram Bakshian, Jr., a member of the National Council on the Humanities writes and broadcasts on politics, history, and the arts...
...Seconds later nine kilted Cardhu distillers, amply stocked, entered the bar...
...Should you drop by on an off hour—on the weekend or between tea-time and the hour of the aperitif—you might be surprised...
...How different from the casual grace of Washington's Fairfax Bar, housed in the Ritz-Carlton on Massachusetts Avenue, in the heart of Embassy Row...
...He was understandably put out, and ready to call it a night when, from the lobby of the Ritz Carlton, I heard the unmistakable sound of jolly topers speaking with Scots burrs...
...he survived her by less than a year...
...Besides, from my vantage point I face the empty spot at the bar where for years the late Henry Fairlie—brilliant writer and even more accomplished wastrel—sipped scotch, did the Times crossword, and traded the occasional pleasantry (or unpleasantry) with me on topics as varied as American politicians, Scots gardeners, and the comic merits of Lucille Ball...
...Now the name survives only in the bar...
...Behind the bar hangs a High Kitsch canvas memorial to the Spirit of '76, "The Escape of General Putnam...
...There are, of course, good nights and bad nights at the Fairfax Bar...
...With its working fireplace, its creaking-under-the-carpets oak flooring and scores of sporting prints and engravings worthy of a rollicking John Surtees novel of turf and chase, the Fairfax Bar is a refreshing throwback to a time when even politicians could be gentleman farmers, and the old squirearchystill counted for more than the new oligarchy...
...A few years ago, in the wee hours after the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, I dropped in for a nightcap that turned into several rounds of scotch and sympathy with that ace chronicler of Eurotrash doings, Taki Theodoracopulos, and National Review editor John O'Sullivan...
...Despite the wintery weather and rumors of fuel shortages, the bar, a low-ceilinged, dilapidated tribute to the innate ugliness of socialism and modern architecture alike, was kept warm thanks to several days' worth of accumulated cigarette smoke and an utter lack of ventilation...
...a Savile Row tailor who turns out to be an excellent contact the next time you're shopping in London...
...Nor is the age of miracles past...
...Congeniality, kept his job...
...Clubs, pubs, local saloons, and good restaurant snuggeries are all preferable to the general run of hotel bars...
...It is executed entirely in primary colors...
...The hotel itself was originally called the Fairfax...
...On one particularly harrowing evening, the place was overrun by a contingent of award-winning cemetery plot salesmen...
...It turned out that they were staying at the Ritz-Carlton and, having finished their official rounds, had now decided to party in earnest...
...Spags may have lost his faith in the human race, but not his affection for it, as long as it plays by the bar rules...
...Taken in all, it was a Mitteleuropaisch nightmare version of the saloon scene from Star Wars I couldn't have liked it more...
...ar more typical, though, are chance I: encounters of a serendipitous sort: a beautiful, bored lady who has slipped away from a stuffy private party in the hotel...
...Adding to the fun lately is the fact that Dick, with his graying beard, spectacles, and slightly distracted look, is often mistaken for Lithuania's President Vytautas Landsbergis, thus fueling rumors of a new round of secret negotiations between Washington and Vilnius...
...The vodka was passing decent and incredibly cheap, and a corrupt waiter with the appropriately Borgian name of Cesare had laid hands on a smokable stock of contraband Havanas available for a song in hard currency...
...The younger ones looked like tubercular boys, the older ones like Roseanne Barr after a Big Mac Attack...
...Occasionally, a hotel bar is even so bad it is good...
...These include jackets for gentlemen and common courtesy all 'round...
...Nearly all were hookers, more than a few of them pre-war models at that...
...Outside, snow was falling, and illegal currency touts, driven by cold as well as greed, availed themselves of the "new openness" by following potential marks into the lobby...
...Whatever the trade-off, the am32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991 bassador, who was not everyone's idea of Mr...
...he thought she was hilarious, waxing adamant...
...Whenever there is a salute to the performing arts at the White House or the Kennedy Center, they are well represented at the Fairfax Bar...
...In recent weeks, I have been nervously greeted by a star columnist at the Washington Post and a senior editor of the Washington Times, each seated in a shady corner with a buxom lady other than his wife...
...Stylish cocktail waitresses—nimble Jasmine, an Ethiopian beauty with a tart tongue and a generous heart...
...Spags" Spagnioli has been one of the city's master dispensers for as long as most Washingtonians can remember, interrupted only by combat duty in World War II...
...E xcept at very overcrowded moments, an atmosphere of easy affability pervades his domain...
...Poor Phil would invariablyarrive at a designated bar just as the show had hit the road again...
...George Bar at Brown's...
...On most evenings, standing beneath the canvas and looking more than a little like a latter-day General Putnam in horn-rimmed glasses, you will find the Fairfax's legendary chief bartender...
...And many a happy hour have I spent at the Fairfax Bar with that least malicious of professional gossips, Diana "Ear" McLellan, and her historian husband Dick...
...Lobby, ballroom, bedrooms, and suites have all been redecorated to reflect the slightly overdone European elegance of the Ritz-Carlton chain...
...Another night to remember—or at least try to —ensued.' ^ 'Enjoy the Fairfax Bar while you can...
Vol. 24 • April 1991 • No. 4
