Hotel Stories [antikvár]

The Algonquin is everything a literary hotel should be. Snug, discreet, cozily retro, the perfect rendezvous for the creme de la creme of the literary and publishing worlds, as well as theater lovers, with armchairs so welcomingly comfortable that they are taken by storm every evening at cocktail time. You will often find the Algonquin cat sleeping between magazines left in the foyer and if you catch sight of Michael Lyons, the Bell Captain, bustling around, then all is well. This friendly athletic-looking guy might look young but he certainly knows what he is doing he's been at the Algonquin for nearly forty years. Sir John Gielgud, Sir Laurence Olivier, the Redgrave clan, Peter Ustinov, Jonathan Price, Angela Lansburv and Anthony Hopkins have all been seduced by the Bohemian 1930s atmosphere and those famous armchairs. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote My Fair Lady in Loewe's room, and many a Broadway playwright has memories of contracts signed in the Oak Room restaurant. The artist Duffy published the first caricature in 1920 of what everyone would later refer to as the Round Table of the Algonquin, composed of around 30 editorsand journalists who greatly influenced the style of American literature by their debates and discussions, hang-ups and obsessions, bitter judgements and witty "sound-bites." Dorothy Parker, former dancing school pianist, recently hired by Vanity Fair after the publication of her first poem Any Porch, was the most ferocious, going wild about injustice or brutality. She was in fact called Dorothy Rothschild and had arrived in New York after a rather sad upbringing in New Jersey. She lost her mother when she was five years old, her mother-in-law shortly after, and her brother disappeared with the Titanic. She wanted to live in New York and soon became famous for her caustic retorts and good lineage. She met Robert Benchley in Vanity Fair offices and they founded the Round Table of the Algonquin. She referred to it as the Vicious Circle. This circle of wits met every day for lunch in the Rose Room and became so famous that the then hotel owner, Mr. Case,0%tqouQuitvTnewyork