Grossinger's on My Mind

MENDELSOHN, MARTHA N.

MARTHA N. MENDELSOHN Passover was my family's time at Grossin-ger's. The religious demands of the holiday enforced by my Orthodox father overwhelmed my less pious mother, so she chose to leave the...

...People can still check in on Saturdays, and the elevators will be running...
...From behind the covers of our Katy Keene comics, Sherry and I munched on candy bars we bought at the canteen—at Grossinger's there was always a place to get a "little something to eat"—as we studied Judy's every move...
...Ted also photographed the steady stream of celebrities who accepted the G.'s offer of free weekends to help shpritz some glamour Oil the festivities, and the 8 by 10 glossies he took of them graced the rustic, pine-panelled walls leading into that hub of preteen activity, the ping-pong room...
...for this, Tony was needed as partner—my father, alas, had "two left feet...
...confronted with a whole rink to skate on, I wasn't very daring...
...Unmoved by his reminders of our pleasant, erotic encounters in the mountains, I said no to that weekend, as well as to all the other meetings he would propose over the next few weeks...
...But at Crossinger's I would tly, decked out in my flesh-colored lights and short black skirt, to the rhythms of staticky tangos and waltzes, happily plotting my future figure-skating career (which would coast to an end in my teens) with each crossover, each threejump, each wobbly spiral...
...the other half languished with its pipes exposed...
...The pool lay empty and agape...
...There was so much demand the next summer that the family had to pitch large tents in the fields to accommodate everyone...
...Paul, 12 years her senior, spent his whole life working at Grossinger's...
...All the other hotels in the Cats kills patterned themselves after Grossinger's," says Etess, who is the elected president, and first woman executive, of the American Hotel and Motel Association...
...I went to college in Ithaca, and I remember driving past Liberty when I was 17 and thinking 'Who the hell would want to go there...
...Although primarily a Jewish resort because the food was strictly kosher, Grossinger's attracted people of every race and ethnicity...
...I would give French lessons, or lead a book discussion group...
...He was really just an Orthodox boy from Chicago, and he decided to train at Grossinger's since he could get kosher food there...
...Though I enjoyed some of her descriptions of wedding trivia, I was afraid my mother was beginning to sound like a character from a terrace room comic's routine, the kind of mother whose sole purpose in life was to marry off her daughters...
...I had it all mapped out...
...The hotel is scheduled to reopen late 1990, expanded and refurbished by a trio of new owners— provided the new Grossinger's surmounts its current financial crisis...
...But the land was not fertile...
...Alliteration and hyperbole were his stock in trade...
...More than anything in the world, I longed to shed my itchy sweater and puffed-sleeve dress and ankle socks, and grow up so I could dance like her...
...By 1963, my senior year at Sarah Lawrence College, I had been a bridesmaid at my roommate's no-holds-barred ceremony at a suburban New York Jewish Center...
...Their son Harry and his wife Jennie went door-to-door that first year advertising Grossinger's Boarding House, and the first summer was considered a huge success: The Grossingers made $81 profit...
...One of her sons was the president of the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City before his death in a helicopter crash in October 1989 and her other son works for the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City...
...In the summer of 1989, the hotel was undergoing a $100 million renovation...
...He looked best in his white satin choir duds...
...My parents claimed ignorance (and to this day, they stick to their story) of any knowledge of this being a "singles" weekend, one of the first of its kind...
...Ted clicked away while Janie and I, dressed in identical angora sweaters, nursed our maraschino-tinged "flamingos...
...there was too much schoolwork for me to blithely take a whole week off...
...Afterwards, if our parents weren't as vigilant as usual, we could watch die grownups and teenagers dance to Eddie Ashman's pop renditions of Broadway show tunes...
...I had difficulty seeing him, with his glossy hair and shiny suit, coming to pick me up at Wesdands House where our dates called for us in front of an intimidating, judgmental receptionist...
...I wanted Grossinger's...
...1 loved the sickly result with its pea-green flesh tones and disapproved of my mother's decision to have Janie's picture done over, once her rosy hues were restored...
...Times have changed, and we aren't going to shut the hotel down on Saturday...
...We'll have a troupe on staffalmost a Club Med type of thing—who will supplement the headline entertainment...
...Old-timers may be surprised by some of the changes, even if Lou Goldstein, Grossinger's original "Simon Sez" leader, is still on the payroll...
...At least once during our stay, Jennie Grossinger would stop by lo say hello, before moving on to the ^00 or so other tables...
...He sang with a school chorus from Brooklyn that performed al the seder services...
...They taught Latin American dances like the new mercnguc...
...Our Jewish French-speaking nanny concurred...
...A week later Bernie called me at school...
...Bernie and I would get married, and I would live at Grossinger's...
...so, too, most Passovers, was tennis...
...This bunch only booked for Passover...
...He predicted the new Grossinger's would open on schedule...
...Mrs...
...In deference to fickle weather, only half of the skating rink was iced...
...I had been taking my ice-skating seriously ever since I'd overheard Her-tha, my Teutonic-accented instructor, tell my parents I had ability, and should take lessons in the city...
...The girl continued on page 54 Grossinger's on My Mind continued from page 33 down the hall from me examined her flawless three-carat solitaire all through our James Joyce seminar, but my new roommate was applying to something called graduate school, something my parents deemed unnecessary for a girl who would get married—and what other kind was there...
...Eight days at the G. always meant the task of coming up with a different outfit to wear to the dining room each night (a task my mother met with extravagance and aplomb...
...The true dancer's dance was still the rumba, and ithere were guests who devoted each stay at the G. to fanatically perfecting its shameless bumps and grinds...
...That life is over and done.' Yet there is a resurgence of people and families looking for a place that doesn't take long to get to, that isn't crowded and that is family oriented...
...Eddie Cantor, Red Buttons, Red Skelton, Joel Grey before he had his nose fixed—we saw them all...
...My father shmearnl him good...
...But one of the other restaurants will serve steak and lobster...
...Bernie, meanwhile, spent his days in the off-lobby offices where he and a number of other employees put in a normal eight hours, undeterred by the distractions at their doorstep...
...I refused to be photographed So my picture was never painted, but Janie, younger and still compliant, was photographed on the night she came down with a stomach virus...
...At lunch, our well-meaning "First you eat" Jewish-grandmotherly waitress (the Ivy League help only came up in the .summertime) lamented my picky eating habits, urging me to try the Mat/ah Charlotte "just once...
...she wore tight, spangled sheaths and silver spikes, and her platinum hair was never free of its dark Latin roots...
...I would learn how to do the bossa nova, never have to learn to cook or ever run a load of laundry again...
...We want to be all things to everyone, and create a little city of our own...
...We shared a table with the F.'s from Larchmont Mrs...
...Nearby, Jackie Robinson played golf and Joe Louis danced the mambo, while Sonja Henie—the real one—curtsied on the ice in full-length mink, accepting a bouquet of roses...
...The effusive, burly Hy, our headwaiter at the choicely located Table :> C, always had special treats for us: 'Officially, there is no chopped herring today, but I think I can arrange it...
...F., a former Seventh Avenue model, had been told she looked like Lauren Bacall, and my mother had heard that at one time she used to make herself "throw up after meals" to stay thin...
...Barnie Ross, a great boxer, had to train for a big fight," remembers Etess...
...We want to attract singles, families, grandma— everyone," Chwatt says...
...My parents now sent me to a private school where spring break never seemed to coincide with the holiday...
...My parents belonged to a loyal band of "regulars" who booked a year in advance to be assured of spacious adjoining rooms in the large, hamische-Tudor Main House...
...Elocution lessons had left her with a stilted way of speaking, but within minutes, after an ethnic joke or two from my father, the old dcntalizcd D's and Vs would escape, unchecked...
...Before we bought the hotel, one of my partners, Larry Frankel, lit a cigarette in the lounge on a Saturday morning...
...at Grossinger's and memorabilia from those days, so people can go there and remember the past...
...He suggested what would have been our first civilian date: a weekend at Motel on the Mountain, not far from Bronxville...
...Many of the performers lived at Grossinger's," says Etess, "but traveled to other hotels in the area to perform...
...It was always a family business—our children participated in it, but none of them wanted to continue running it, so we decided to sell it," says Etess...
...my mother pointed out...
...I had met many boys by then, some of them eminently eligible candidates for marriage, boys who were active in Hillels at places like Cornell or Brown (or who told their parents they were), future doctors, future lawyers—veritable Jewish Mothers' Dreams...
...She also practiced the triple-lindy with her friends, but we knew she danced with boys too, late at night in the terrace room...
...Once my sister and 1 were in college, my parents resumed going to Grossinger's, now with my four-year-old brother Ricky in tow...
...That Passover the first seder was more stupendous than any I remembered: The choir outdid itself, and the women's dresses seemed to shimmer more brightly and plunge deeper than ever before...
...Even though people know we're closed, we get 40 to 50 calls a day from people who are eager to make reservations...
...My parents saved those papers as though they were real ones, as if we'd been written up in the Herald Tribune, sending them lo our grandparents with our names circled, with lots of extra copies for our "brass barrel" of souvenirs at home...
...Passover after Passover, Joel faced the challenge of finding new ways to exult over our arrival, for we were back every year, and so was he...
...In the safe, self-contained world of the hotel, nobody stopped me from stalking the vast premises, unsupervised...
...Once a star reporter on the City College daily, he had taken a summer job at Crossinger's and never left...
...Mealtimes were also when Joel Pomer-artB stopped by to gather his scoops for the 'tauter...
...He even ate lunch at his desk...
...The publicity department at Grossinger's began to invite celebrities for weekends...
...The new Grossinger's will have seven restaurants on the premises," explains Chwatt, "and one of them—the main dining room—will be kosher, with the former Grossinger's mashgiach (supervisor of Jewish dietary laws) still in charge of the dining room...
...For my mother, this meant alternating her ermine stole and raccoon "sport jacket" with her cashmere sweater sets...
...After the ritualistic, gargantuan meal, I would return to the truncated skating rink to practice...
...Her husband Harry did the behind-the-scenes work, constructing new facilities and shopping for meat and produce every week in New York City, while Jennie took care of the guests...
...My brother Ricky asked the "Four Questions," joined by some 100 other children...
...her name was synonymous with immigrant pluck and ingenuity...
...In those days, major comedians From Boarding House to Gem of the Borsht Belt "My earliest memory of Grossinger's is sitting on the front porch in the evening, watching the ladies in their formal gowns and their long white gloves going in to dinner," remembers Elaine Grossinger Etess, who grew tip at her family's hotel in Liberty, New York, She and her brother Paul, who died in 1989, sold the hotel four years ago...
...Children like me weren't expected to sit still for that long, so lie usually worked from color snapshots taken beforehand...
...Grossinger's new owners are not old-timers...
...Forsythia preened next to charcoal patches of snow...
...In addition to the card rooms, swimming pools, lakefront activities, skating rink, skiing facilities, bowling alleys, golf course and toboggan slide that the old Grossinger's offered, the new Grossinger's will have more nightclubs, a world-class spa, yoga classes, bocchi ball, a tennis stadium, racquet ball and squash courts and snowmobile trails...
...This knowledge Sherry had, this intimacy with death, suuck me as infinitely tragic and sophisticated...
...There was something very wrong with that picture...
...She was a confident dancer...
...The hotel's official location was Liberty, New York...
...That spring, for the first time in years, Passover corresponded, day for day, with my vacation, and I would be joining the family—and Bernie—at Grossinger's...
...One winter my father did take me to Rockfeller Center every Sunday morning...
...Malka was a good cook—kosher food, of course—so they hoped for the best," Etess says...
...But the fantasy had begun to wane...
...By 1957, after ten straight seasons of faithful attendance, we had to stop spending Passover at Grossinger's...
...A location in one of the quaint, outlying "cottages" could wreak havoc on bouffant hairdos and peau de soie pumps caught in the rain...
...Her daughter was overweight, and there would be a daily argument about dessert—Judy always wanted the parfait, but her mother shamed her into the fruit salad...
...I did meet a single that weekend, but it wasn't on the ski slope, and he wasn't the sort of single my parents had in mind...
...The three new owners plan to reopen a bigger, modernized Grossinger's [see box, p. 32), but the heyday of Grossinger's is long gone...
...Will old-timers be disappointed when and if they return...
...But running hotels still runs in the family...
...Frankel is a tax securities attorney, and Murray Silver, the third partner, is a real estate broker...
...When my grandparents started out, they were one of the first hotels in the area...
...On the Crossinger's rink is where Lenny, the shy, red-headed choirboy spied me, later declaring his admiration in a hand-delivered missive wedged beneath the door of my room...
...I still do...
...In April the Catskill climate is at its most capricious: a frosty day followed by a day of precocious warmth...
...They will also offer amenities like helicopter service from New York City...
...We'll still offer the kind of entertainment that made Hie Catskills famous...
...That farm became Grossinger's resort, and over time the family bought out small farms and properties in the immediate area, expanding as their popularity grew...
...In this hotel, where one paid for three meals of any size, legends about overeating abounded...
...Finally, since this was "the country," guests took strolls beneath the arbor, all the way to the pool and playhouse and lake...
...The religious demands of the holiday enforced by my Orthodox father overwhelmed my less pious mother, so she chose to leave the requisite overhaul of the kitchen to Grossin-ger's...
...We've torn down a lot of the old structures,'' says Chwatt...
...There were people who never made it into that world, and he was determined not to be one of them...
...In the 1960s, Sarah Lawrence girls were expected to date preppy Ivy Leaguers or civil rights workers or beat poets, but not slick Borscht Belt accountants...
...So three weeks later, armed with several black dresses and my annotated, unexpurgated Ulysses, I was back at Grossinger's...
...And 1 thought you were good," he said in a tone that indicated things were definitely over between us...
...Grossinger's changed all the dishes, throwing two lavish seders into the bargain...
...Everyone loved her...
...Meanwhile, my world was changing too...
...other groups had their own times...
...Unlike other holidays, Passover fell at a meteorologically ambivalent time of the year...
...This is your Life" had just done her life on TV...
...A fat cousin was said to have pointed to the menu one night, instructing his waitress, "See this potted chicken lierer That's the only thing I don't want...
...At the services held on the last morning of Passover in the terrace room, Sherry had to stay for yizkor, the memorial service, because her mother was dead...
...Ralph Edwards once did a This Is Your Life' show for my mother, and all kinds of celebrities came, like Jackie Robinson," remembers Etess...
...My parents said he was wasting himself, "stuck at Crossinger's...
...I can still see him, crouched by my chair, wearing granny glasses before they werte fashionable, genuinely reportorial with his steno pad...
...On non-seder nights, of course, there was the "show...
...By early 1990, however, all building had stopped and its new owners had filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S...
...Their mothers let them wear stockings and Pap-pagallo one-inchers...
...But I yearned for someone different, off-the-beaten track, foreign perhaps, significantly older, even non Jewish (though that was probably going too far...
...We're going to have a Hall of Memories," says Chwatt, "with old films playing, photographs of the old days 'A filing under Chapter 11 of the U.S...
...But Grossinger's is different from the others—it has a certain aura about it...
...I met Bernie Roth, the hotel's 36-year-old live-in accountant, in the Terrace Room that Saturday night after a tortuous day on the beginners' ski slope, spent trying to learn how to snow-plow from a blonde instructor named Kurt (or was it Karl...
...I missed Grossinger's at the impersonal synagogue seders we now attended, eating overcooked capons and mat/oh farfel off paper plates...
...That whole week, it was Ulysses by day and Bernie by night...
...There were the Fourth of July people—"where do you spend the 4th...
...No more mixers, no more blind dates...
...As he drew closer, I noticed his swarthy 'Jewish" good looks, and overlooked the patent leather sheen of the hair, the undassy pompadour, the jazzy European-style shoes polished to perfection—not at all what my parents had in mind when they suggested, "Try the cocktail party...
...In the world of amorphous single faces that was the Terrace Room bar that night, Bernie loomed as a tall, even-featured man with gleaming black hair and a shiny suit...
...Sylvia S. was dying to get married, but her sister Diane was "too fussy," claimed my mother...
...with its risque innuendoes it wasn't for children anyway), ('aria, the hotel "hostess," arranged card foursomes for the unattached...
...It was Jennie Grossinger, who died in 1972, whom people associated with the hotel...
...She was so warm, they were enchanted with her...
...The truth was, I didn't want Bernie...
...Sherry was as socially backward as I thought I was, even if she did come from Rockville Centre, Long Island...
...We know it's going to be a success when we open...
...One of the main attractions at Grossinger's was the entertainment...
...disrobed," he lost some of his allure, and 1 lost my allure for him after an ice show in which professional children skaters performed...
...Journalists followed him to the hotel to write their stories about him, but then they met my mother, Jennie, and they wrote about her and the hotel instead...
...By George Washington's Birthday weekend of my senior year, the prospect of an engagement ring at graduation seemed dim indeed...
...He was told by his doctor to leave the city, so he and his wife, Malka, bought a small farm in Ferndale...
...In bad weather I hung around the ping-pong room with a group of girls who were more knowing than 1. Somehow girls from Long Island's Five Towns (Lawrence, Ce-darhurst, Woodmere, Hewlett and In wood) where, in Tattle)- parlance, most of these girls "hailed from," seemed to have been teenagers from birth...
...there was Carroll Baker on the arm of her Jewish director/husband...
...The New Grossinger's: An Elegant Lodge—Santa Fe Style Comedian Jackie Mason closed Grossinger's with a goodbye show on New Year's Eve 1986...
...He was almost mauled and killed by the patrons for smoking on the Sabbath," says Chwatt, a real estate financier and developer...
...In cha-cha after cha-cha, Tony sent Lucille spinning...
...After the second summer, they had made enough money to buy a bigger farm, six miles down the road in Liberty...
...But it was Sylvia S., that "wiry Woodmere dynamo, "who snagged the trophy year after year in the Champagne Hour, with her frenetic Charleston...
...So in a break with tradition, my parents booked two Main House rooms at Grossinger's...
...The borscht circuit became a place for performers to hone their skills...
...1 was too superstitious to even glance at the words of the service in my siddur (prayer book...
...he took many...
...It had also become clear to me (on the last night of Passover, in the staff quarters at Grossinger's) that Bernie had a different agenda: he wanted to marry me, too, but he viewed me as his entree into the outside world, his passport to life after Grossinger's...
...But the repertoire was always the same—joke after joke about excessive eating, meddlesome mothers-in-law and matchmaking mothers—no matter who held the floor, it was the repertoire of Grossinger's...
...And you know what...
...My mother, a natural dancer, could execute an authentic samba...
...After "Chad Gadya," it was back to Bernie's lair with the king-size bed with sheets changed daily by a chambermaid...
...Now his journalistic talents produced copy like, "Oob-la-la, those franftfis-fl a tinting Neustadter jtBa are up again...
...You can find Martha cutting a fine figure eight—our future Sonja Heme...
...Hadn't I always wanted to learn how to ski...
...The new Grossinger's is not for the ultra-Orthodox...
...But I didn't want to be part of the journey out...
...Bankruptcy Code.* Glenn Chwatt, one of the new owners said that he considered this a temporary setback...
...Not my virginity, as Bernie observed later that night, after we clambered over the ice in a perilous, secret journey to his well-appointed room in the staff quarters for our tryst...
...At the G., of course...
...1 wasn't a Grossinger's person myself, but my grandparents honeymooned here," says Chwatt...
...Past the dance floor was the alcove where a portrait artist sorted out his pastels, preparing to paint tin recognizably flattering likenesses of organdy- or velvet-clad paragons...
...F.'s parents liked to sit at our table too, flanking their handsome bachelor son ("his mother lakes loo good care of him," my mother clucked), 1 wis heartbroken the year Sam appeared with a wife—a brash, magenta-lipped blonde—but then, the next vear, when I couldn't have cared less, the word "divorce" was whispered, and he came up alone...
...Actually, the ruse worked...
...On my exclusions I often ran into Ted Howard, the hotel photographer, our resident paparazzo, Ted would stoop to anything to gel the right shot: Wearing ice skates (in which his ankles buckled), he captured budding Sonja Henies on the rink, and, risking decapitation, he ventured onto the golf course and tennis courts in the midst of heated play...
...In daily phone reports, my mother would give me the latest between Judy F. and Leonard Stern—a marriage that would end three children and three houses later...
...and it's a scene I haven't forgotten: those blonde grandmothers in zigzag formation, faking the "lame leg" required of the dance...
...Etess's grandfather Selig Grossinger had worked in the sweatshops on the Lower East Side until his health began to fail...
...I would wander out to the flagstone patio to watch I.ou Goldstein conduct his rapid-fire "Simon Set" game (I never got up the courage to join...
...The only other thing they could do to survive was to open a boarding house...
...needless to say...
...The next day, with Passover a mere three weeks away, I left the hotel in a state of giddy excitement...
...New York...
...We watched her work on her box step...
...As hotel accountant, Bernie led a hermetic life, "commuting" to a small suite of offices just off the lobby, rarely participating in scheduled guest activities, athletic or otherwise...
...Back at college, in my tiny room with the eaves and the burlap curtains and the radiator painted purple, I brought the index cards I would need for the research on my senior paper about "Conscience and Consciousness in James Joyce's Ulysses," and planned my outfits for Grossinger's...
...like Joey Bishop, Buddy Hackett, Alan King and Phil Silvers—some of whom had made their debut at Grossinger's—could be counted on to come up, even in the middle of the week...
...Growing up at the vacation resort was excellent training for Etess, who has her own consulting firm for the industry...
...We listened lo Tony Bennett belt out "San Francisco" and Eddie Fisher croon "My Yiddische Mama"—the same Eddie Fisher who had made his debut in the Terrace Room, then had the temerity to marry that shiksa, Debbie Reynolds...
...I would refurbish the lobby, as Jackie Kennedy had done at the White House (of course, I would be careful to preserve the copper accents, the hotel's homey, country flavor...
...as one ad read—and the "summer people" who took dips in the Olympic-size swimming pool and went rowing on the lake...
...When and if it opens, the new Grossinger's will reflect the tastes and ambitions of its new owners...
...Grossinger's began as a family business in 1911...
...By commencement Bernie had stopped calling, and it would be a long time before I remembered my plans of becoming a latter-day Eloise of the Borscht Belt...
...Surely the absence of a mother accounted for her mismatched, unstylish clothes...
...There on the wall was Milton Berle leering at his showgirl shiksa wife...
...In the downstairs Grossinger's On My Mind lounge, I would stop to watch the group dance lesson led by Tony and Lucille, that graceful Cuban pair...
...While 29-year-old Chwatt apppredates what Grossinger's was to the previous generation, he sees the new Grossinger's attracting more guests of more diverse backgrounds...
...We've given it a southwestern feel, the elegant lodge concept, like you would find in Santa Fe...
...Eleanor Bergstein wrote Dirty Dancing, which became a movie, based on her experiences at Grossinger's...
...Golf was playable...
...Liberty was indeed what Grossinger's meant to an overprotected city child like me who wouldn't be allowed to cross streets alone until I was 12...
...There was the High Holiday crowd—a congenial bunch, no doubt, but we never crossed paths...
...Bankruptcy Code allows a company to continue operating while it restructures its finances under court supervision...
...After all, he lived at Grossinger's, called it home...
...During the entire service and all four courses of the meal, I squinted in the direction of the dais, where Bernie, as hotel accountant, was the only non-family member sitting with the Grossin-gers...
...Together we hummed our favorites—"Oh.weain'tgot a barrel of money/ Maybe we're ragged and funny," although the truth is we all had more than enough money, and not one ofus qualified as ragged...
...The decor includes a lot of slate and marble and we've maximized some of the spectacular views...
...After the one scheduled activity of a figure-skating lesson (on non-yomtov days, that is), I went on the prowl...
...We are trying to bring it back to the splendor and glory of what it used to be, but in a modern way...
...What have you got to lose...
...The "developed" Judy F. (not to be confused with my chubby ta-blemate), a "born leader," got the boys because she knew "all the tricks of the trade," as my good friend Sherry explained...
...The new hotel will have 1,700 rooms, says Chwatt, who expects Grossinger's to become a major convention center for the New York area...
...Popularity was the elusive goal as dicy harnessed their breasts in pointy bras, dressed in billowing felt skirts nipped in by cinch belts and buoyed by crinolines, and criss-crossed pincurls on their foreheads at bedtime to create a sinuous "dip...
...My father bought all the pictures he ever took of us...

Vol. 15 • April 1990 • No. 2


 
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