The Great American Saloon Series
Grant, James
his mysterious beats that made him as feared as he was respected. On two separate occasions Franklin D. Roosevelt, who hated Arthur's '~hooks and barbs," tried to get him fired. Krock made...
...Arthur himself was saved from backsliding by virtue of his roots in an America that younger fry could know only to be hearsay...
...Snow swirled down Fortyfourth Street, driving before it hats, newspapers, and theater-goers...
...Mencken attributed his literary genius to long waits for the hotel lift...
...In fact, he seems to feel that Aaron Burr was about the only good thing that happened to young America...
...I belong to the company of deep thinkers who daily congregate and wait for the Algonquin elevator," the sage of Baltimore deadpanned...
...Thirsty, and hungry only for more voices, I repaired to the Blue Bar...
...The clerk promised immediate action...
...Tom Wicker had better meditate on the career of his predecessor...
...The hotel must specially commission each new lobby chair...
...Perhaps that is why Alternative types like Banfield, Campaign, Grant, Kristol, and Tyrrell never come to New York without putting in an appearance at the Blue Bar or in the lobby's elegant lounge...
...Fresh orchids grace the lobby and rose buds beam at guests over breakfast...
...Like the Mohammdean, it climbs to its tower and makes strange noises and we below can only wait and pray...
...I worry about these lamps," the young man far to my right, in wire frame glasses and a white pullover sweater emblazoned with the letter "T" did himself no harm sitting here...
...Posts that rise from floor to ceiling are also paneled, and on them are mounted lights shaded by curved, opaque glass...
...He never forgot the lesson...
...A pewter chandelier, depicting the majesty of eighteenth-century British sea power, dispenses quiet light...
...The Do-Gooders of the thirties, who destroyed the old rural South by an agricultural policy that speeded the substitution of machinery for field hands on a smaller permitted acreage, set in motion an internal migration that, by the time of the nineteen sixties, had really created some slums (Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York, for example) that are frightful beyond belief...
...The hotel placed a final order and seven extra pieces are packed away upstairs...
...The bartender guessed that the thief was pretty smart...
...The tempo was unexpectedly fast, a parody on the clock's stately presence...
...Civilized," Mr...
...The business of Burr is to debunk national R iew Burr by Gore Vidal Random House $8.95 leaders, and Vidal's theme is that they've always been rotten...
...The nice thing about Arthur Krock is that he can't hate his old friends even when they are backsliders from a most obvious common sense...
...The nineties, in some literature, was the decade of Coxey's Army and the Depression of 1893...
...Skeptical of government intervention, Arthur Krock is in a position to say "I told you so" to his journalistic successors...
...The room had filled with buffet clients, clutching their evening's Play Bills...
...I read and eavesdropped that evening in an open English armchair, "Hepplewhite in feeling," as a friend later noted...
...For a fuller view of its gorgeous past read Margaret Case Harriman's Vicious Circle, a history of the Round Table group...
...It was 6:00 P.M...
...Anspach is entirely right...
...So woould my the lobby on the arms of men who might acquaintances, the dowagers...
...But in those days the country could still save the city if only by providing a self-sufficient refuge...
...When I took my place at the bar that night, a man in a gray sharkskin suit, red shirt, and suede vest was talking to the bartender...
...Margaret Case Harriman, the daughter of one-time Algonquin owner Frank Case, wrote that H.L...
...But the realist in Arthur Krock insists on pointing out to the likes of Tom Wicker that the quarter in Glasgow, Kentucky, known as the Kingdom, where the blacks lived, was better kept than the nearby poor white purlieus...
...The lobby's chairs, sofas, and lamps might have been plucked from the living room of someone's one-eyed aunt...
...The cat, meanwhile, had done its duty...
...The Algonquin elevator is the muezzin of Forty-fourth street...
...From the corner of her eye, she saw a dark animal streak out of the closet and across the room...
...Only a slightly distended belly suggested the gore of the battle...
...Schooling was hit or miss, but there were good books around, and Arthur knew more about London (from Thackeray and Dickens) than anyone would get from the "social studies" favored today: Depression kept him from completing his courses at Princeton, but newspaper work in Louisville did for him what newspaper work in Baltimore did for H.L...
...Besides, it sounded like the kind of thing that leads to the White House...
...A black spot on our history...
...An antique Chinese porcelein lamp shone gently to my right...
...She peeked inside to confront a pair of glowing eyes perched atop the television set...
...every chair in the lobby has survived a dozen fads in interior decorating...
...My wife had just checked into the hotel and was up in her room unpacking...
...We may freely grant that Southern treatment of Negroes, even in border state Kentucky, was not precisely in accord with the world of the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment...
...Neither did the buxom middle-aged woman off yonder, who wore her glasses propped up on top of her head...
...Anspach decided...
...He squinted into his cigarette smoke...
...A cat...
...It concerns, rather, a mouse and a cat, and dignity, which is the moral of the tale...
...In this edition of the Great American Saloon Series we see the Algonquin as it is today--as it has endured...
...He doesn't raise the issue directly in the gentle pages of Myself When Young...
...The lobby suggests a fine men's club that was redone by a sensible woman...
...The lobby, which an hour earlier was full of talk and people, had emptied of both...
...The germ of the mood was there a few years back...
...And besides he had huge high buttocks and besoms like a woman...
...His unpretentious memoir of his Kentucky boyhood and newspaper novitiate, Myself When Young, deftly exposes roots that still keep the sap rising in octogenarian arteries...
...Letter T had disappeared, perhaps with the lady with the glasses on top of her head...
...The bar is tucked in a paneled recess just a few steps inside the hotel...
...Yes, the house cat, for your . . ." The bellhop finished the sentence with a wave of his hand, glancing uneasily from my wife to the second guest...
...George Washington, for instance, was mean, stupid, dull, incompetent, and nastily cunning...
...Her father, Frank Case, has a full account of the Algonquin in Tales of a Wayward Inn...
...His mother, blind for six years after his birth, had to pass him over to grandparents and uncles for rearing, but it was still "family...
...Two dowagers sat in Victorian wing chairs and talked of horses and tax accountants...
...Returning to her room an hour later, my wife stealthily unlocked the door...
...It's a cat," he said...
...There's something in my room...
...But the have been putting them through college...
...I checked my watch (it was 11:00 P.M...
...A few years ago, the world's only maker of the shades notified hilt...
...Arthur remembers the graciousness of a tree-filled lawn in semirural Kentucky, but away from the lawn, in utilitarian array, stood the pump, the lye hopper, the springhouse, the icehouse, the smokehouse, the melon patch, and the privy...
...Whatever it may have been, the Kingdom was not Glasgow's slum...
...You have to be smart to steal $280 million, buddy," the other replied...
...She slammed the door and rushed to a bellhop, who was showing another new arrival to his room...
...K] IF THERE IS SUCH a thing as woman's intuition, Gore Vidal has it in abundance...
...The room is paneled in oak...
...By now it has settled heavily over the countryside, and Burr is the sort of book that our more breathless critics would call "breathtakingly contemporary...
...It was a forbidding day...
...Julie Christie, Dustin Hoffman, or Peter Ustinov, of course--all of them regulars at the hotel ("and Gore Vidal, be sure and mention him because he loves to be mentioned," Mr...
...There is room for six on stools at the bar and for a dozen more along a winding leather couch...
...Krock made Steve Early, the President's press secretary, miserable on more than one occasion, but Arthur Sulzberger, with a grit that was unexpected in a son-in-law successor to the job of publisher, stood by his Washington man even though the editorial page stance in New York and Krock's '2n the Nation" columns from the capital often diverged at ninety degree angles...
...When voices don't gang up on it, the refrigerating equipment behind the bar sends up a soothing hum...
...he decorous relationship with his wife Martha," we are told by Burr, who narrates a good deal of the plot, "was simply an alliance between properties, and typical of Washington's ambition, of his cold serpent nature...
...They were the time of the front porch, the genial local-color artist, the pleasant magazine draftsmanship of A.B...
...Frost, Frederick Remington, and Charles Dana Gibson...
...If I could use only one word to describe the lobby, it would be 'civilized.' The room is warm and sophisticated, too, of course, but I suppose that all that is understood when you say civilized...
...Whether they exude that quality themselves or absorb it from the paneling has never been explained...
...We had a working decentralization then...
...His ancestry, mostly German-Jewish coming from Prussia, Silesia, and Alsace-Lorraine, trusted to family solidarity for social security...
...John Chamberlain The Great American Saloon Series by James Grant Hotel Algonquin and the Blue Bar In the twenties the Hotel Algonquin became a sort of haven for the famed Round Table, a group that included Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. S h e ~ , Alexander Woolcott, George S. Kaufman, and some of the staff from the New Yorker magazine...
...I was sitting in the lobby of the Algonquin not long ago, drinking beer and perusing the morning's T/mes...
...Arthur Krock, in his old age, has become that decentralization's laureate...
...Modern tastes have also robbed the Algonquin of commercially produced furniture...
...the con game in the New Deal period was still the con game, even when practiced by supposedly selfless creatures who talked about a passion for anonymity...
...The Gb-80 really isn't us...
...I ought to know," he added with a little smile...
...what was left had already assumed the brownish hue of discarded chewing tobacco...
...Now shrouded in an illustrious literary heritage, the Algonquin has never been more popular or profitable...
...But the only thing that saved the student from banl~uptcy was his heavy hand with prose and the attendant scarcity of his triumphs...
...Fur-swathed women in high leather boots, snow still hotel manager, Andrew A. Anspach, confessed to me the next day...
...He spoke with grudging admiration of a thief who had stolen a large sum of money...
...It was a workaday world, and Arthur remembers stuffing geese with corn to fatten them for Christmas...
...The portrait of Washington is acidly etched in sharp bitchy tones, the relationship between the General and Hamilton coyly hinted at: '~rhe slow solemn general 22 The Alternative May 1974...
...P.D...
...The good reporters (Catledge, Reston) who had worked for Krock in New and Fair Deal times became the bad theoreticians of a later era (how do you beat the Zeitgeist...
...Time passes quickly at the Blue Bar...
...Waiters hovered over candle-lit tables loaded with silver chafing dishes...
...Not so, insists Vidal...
...Arthur Krock grew up away from the big cities, where the Depression was really felt...
...And in Years with Ross James Thurber recollects his association with Harold Ross, founder and editor of the New Yorker...
...Arthur Krock had to work for what he got, He was bred to self,sufficiency in a world that was still half-frontier and halfimmigrant will-to-scrabble...
...and they were destined to get a hurts-memore-than-ithurts-you spanking in Arthur's memoiristic writing...
...There is plenty of time for contemplation in between...
...Tyrrell (Nzw Yom0--The hotel's worthy past notwithstanding, my favorite Algonquin story has nothing to do with Robert Benchley or Harold Ross...
...But the land helped too...
...A graduate student I knew used to drink beer at the Blue Bar (which even then wasn't blue, except for a few cocktail tables) to celebrate anything that resembled literary success...
...and guests still wait for the single, man-steered Algonquin elevator...
...I would relate more of this story, but brandy had dulled my perception...
...The snow had stopped and begun to melt...
...Anspach said)--would look interesting in the lobby of the Port clinging to their lashes, walked through Authority Bus Terminal...
...Mencken in the same period...
...I walked through the lobby to the elevator...
...They were also the Gay Nineties, when "gay" had a more wholesome connotation than is currently attached to the word...
...The celebrations were invariably sober, owing to the high price of beer...
...There was simply no way of knowing when this novel was conceived that events --the disgrace of a vice president, the culpability of a whole gang of former officials of a national administration--would evoke an obligatory snicker when any prominent political figure of any period was mentioned...
...The murrain of the New Age has yet to infest the place, and the lilt of the more graceful era still lingers...
...Anspach that it was going out of business...
...As a "back-up" political reporter on the Louisville Herald, which strove to keep up with the be~er-heeled Times and Courier-Journal, Arthur discovered at a quite impressionable age that politics was "art, profession and con game" in subtly varying proportions...
...My dowagers were putting on their furs for the ride to the Shubert Theater...
...It was ten minutes past seven...
...But anyone who knows a hawk from a handsaw can read between Arthur Krock's pleasantly brooding lines...
...While confessing ignorance of the facts, I am willing to bet that the following has occurred: A hotel supply company that markets a remote-control, electromagnetic mousetrap--perhaps called the Gb-80 DeMouse-- sent a salesman to the Algonquin, but the hotel informed the man that "The The Alternative May 1 9 7 4 2 1 cat has been with us for ages and the present arrangement has worked out quite well...
...Waiters appea, red, vanished, and then reappeared, summoned by table-mounted brass bells...
...My wife vows eternal gratitude to the animal from refraining from outward displays of surfeit...
...I followed the son of a bitch halfway around the world...
...It all looked so good that when the elevator finally arrived I had decided to stick around and get some dinner...
...Oh, for m y . . . problem," my wife suggested, returning the gesture...
...When it comes down again we go about our business as usual...
...Mortified, she rushed to the lobby and informed the clerk that she had seen a mouse...
...Burr is our number-one best selling novel, and as anyone who is at all interested knows by now, it tells the story of Aaron Burr (1756-1836), Thomas Jefferson's first vice president--the fellow who shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel and later got himself charged with treason...
...But I do...
...Evidently, the hotel has offered no more encouragement to salesmen of artificial flowers, contemporary furniture, or selfservice elevators...
...He lit a cigarette, inhaled, and stared at himself in the mirror that arches above the cash register...
...The thief had fled to Brazil and then to Europe before returning to New York '%o face it voluntarily," the man in sharkskin said...
...Oh, I know I shouldn't--they've been here for 60 or 70 years...
...People who sit in the lobby of the Hotel Algonquin look interesting...
...A grandfather's clock struck the hour at a brisk allegro vivace...
...and signed my check...
...The bellhop smiled with relief...
...she exclaimed...
...The bellhop regarded her calmly...
Vol. 7 • May 1974 • No. 8
