The Great American Saloon Series/A New York Couple
Brookhiser, Richard
A New York Couple by Richard Brookhiser Adrink in the lounge of the Algonquin Hotel was the setup for the best birthday present I ever got my wife. I am terrible at presents, especially birthday...
...T hey recently finished renovating the Algonquin...
...The Blue Bar, a little nook that used to be on your right as you walked in the front door, has been moved and enlarged...
...Mistresses only get frills...
...The new improved Royalton opened in October 1988...
...The old Blue Bar was small, snug, dark, perfect for the kind of intimate drinking that fuels male camaraderie and pick-ups...
...The reason I picked the Algonquin for my venue is that it's one of the few hotels in New York, or anywhere, with a lounge attractive enough to have served as bait...
...Other years, remembering at the last minute, I've grabbed presents that were cheesy or drab...
...I am terrible at presents, especially birthday presents...
...At least they would have been room was conical, and the pencil on the wearing the right colors...
...Compared room urinal is worth a detour...
...A few of them helped now and then, with left hand, and tongue in cheek...
...I insisted...
...At one end is a green, bottom-lit basin full of marbles...
...The Algonquin Round Table met there, and the New Yorker used to be located in a building that had a rear exit across the street...
...though I 62 The American Spectator November 1992 wonder if its editors ever made the pilgrimage here after they moved to new digs...
...Every decoration, from bannisters to bud vases, has the shape of a rounded point, or a pointed curve...
...so do the columns, more numerous than seem structurally necessary, which split the space into pools of privacy...
...The bright shining mark in the credit column was the year I took her for an evening drink at the Algonquin...
...Whereupon, I played my lifetime ace of trumps, by tossing a room key on the table before her...
...Time has adjusted that balance: I can't recall offhand any members of the Round Table, except Dorothy Parker, but the New Yorker is still with us...
...Wives need the basics, too...
...The men's nightstand had a black eraser...
...Some of the chairs have fringe...
...Think of its presence before you as part of the dress code...
...Wouldn't it be fun to stay here some night...
...Yes, style is not everything, and a lot of people in the eighties spent too much of their time on it, but in periods of high style there is at least a chance that some of the effusions of the moment will be genuinely stylish...
...The details begin before the moment you enter the door...
...James Thurber wrote that Harold Ross's famous and busy friends of the Algonquin Round Table and its fringes took his fond enterprise lightly...
...Christmas comes the same day every year, that I can plan for...
...I have forgotten my wife's altogether...
...They all hope to be in Playbill...
...Drink of choice...
...If you're the kind of person who's always being blackballed, it is the next best thing to a club...
...I said, as if to humor her, "Let's go out for a drink...
...The buzz here comes from the furniture...
...There was a rumor that someone on the staff, later reprimanded, once asked some Hasids who had dropped in from the nearby diamond district to leave because their eighteenth-century Polish garb clashed with the decor...
...Until quite recently, the Royalton was a rat's nest...
...I couldn't make the trick a surprise across the street from each other, like the second time around, but the staff bookends...
...When you tire of the past, make the pilgrimage across the street for the future, to the Royalton...
...But the effort of remembering any birthday except my own, combined with the burden of picking an appropriate present, makes the birthdays of my loved ones botched and dreaded occasions...
...In the room to which the key belonged, I had pre-positioned a dozen roses, a box of Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer...
...so far that day, there had been no present, not even a card, so she was cranky, too...
...I'd even remembered her hairdryer...
...Then the place was turned over to the Belgian designer Philippe Starck for a makeover...
...The hairdryer was to show the maid, if she was curious, that we were really married...
...There you could bare your soul or pat a woman's knee...
...The bar at the back has an undulating footrest and a blue neon stripe running down the stone top...
...Dark wood trim makes the high-ceilinged room cozy...
...The ability to do so may not compensated by writing HAPPY be as important as schools without crimiANNIVERSARY in chocolate around the nals or subways without beggars, but it is rim of her dessert plate...
...If you're a to our night at the Algonquin, it was like woman, get your escort to guard the door visiting a not-parallel universe...
...I offered...
...Since this is a hotel, most of the guests are the opposite of soigne...
...The bellboys wear black shirts and jackets, and of course no neckties...
...Literally—I know two people who heard vermin rustling in the walls when they stayed there...
...In time, her mood improved to the point where she might have admitted that I wasn't such a bad catch after all...
...were the same—and New York, which I have checked my wife into the can supply two perfect-of-their kind, but Royalton, too, to celebrate an anniver- completely different, rentable stage sets, sary...
...She demurred...
...The Algonquin has a literary reputation—better say, a literary past...
...When I reminded Ross of this line years later, all he said was, "God knows I had both kinds...
...the door itself is dark, solid wood, as if it belonged to a speakeasy...
...Reluctantly, she allowed herself to be persuaded...
...Easter lilies preen on the walls like voguers...
...chocolates, and a bottle of champagne...
...The next time someone tells you the eighties were years of pointless greed, point to this place...
...The door is flanked by two solemn pillars, like a bank's or a library's...
...Only we for you so you can look...
...We took a cab to 44th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and settled in for a drink...
...I once saw three buds chaperoned by a young man wearing a tail coat, an earring, and a ponytail...
...so do some of the lampshades...
...She agreed...
...This is one of them...
...For general conversation or romancing with a dash of gentility, you went to the lounge, which looks untouched...
...The part-time help of wits is no better than the full-time help of half-wits," Herman Mankiewicz is reported to have said at the time...
...Inside, the lobby is long and narrow, like a corridor in an ocean liner...
...My wife, if she chose, could ponder a long ledger of my failings...
...White wine...
...My wife was tired from work...
...One year I repeated the gift I'd gotten her the last Christmas...
...But many of the young women wear slips as blouses...
...The sink in our something...
...They look as if they should be threadbare, but they aren't...
...When a waiter does pass by, the arriere-garde atmosphere of the place practically requires you to order a cocktail, preferably a martini...
...Starck achieved it by maniacal attention to detail...
...The runner is imperial blue, with a border of white, possibly animate, figures...
...Each table has a bell fastened to the top, for summoning a waiter, though I've never rung: when the after-theater crowd is here, it couldn't be heard, and at quieter times you'd feel as if you were disturbing the peace...
...the year before, they were at the Coffee Shop in tube dresses...
Vol. 25 • November 1992 • No. 11
