MIDTOWN BASKS IN LITERARY GLOW -- HOTEL Elysée: Bastion of Privacy; Home of Legends
As we are bibliophiles at Whom You Know, we are incredibly enthused that Hotel Elysee has a literary history. In the annals of New York’s literary life, few places can hold a candle to the Hotel Elysée. What other landmark can claim to have been home and hearth to literary luminaries as diverse as playwright extraordinaire Tennessee Williams and blockbuster novelist Harold Robins? Or, for that matter, to have sheltered such undisputed talents as James Michener, Leon Uris, Robert C. Ruark, James Clavell and Jimmy Breslin?
Location and Value
Standing mid-block on East 54th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, the Hotel Elysée’s low-key graciousness could be the explanation for its popularity among writers. In addition to its amenities, one-of-a-kind guest rooms (some with terraces, solariums or kitchens) and beautiful
appointments throughout, the Hotel Elysée offers its guests perhaps the most outstanding and desirable location in New York City. Situated on 54th Street, it is within walking distance of the world’s best shopping, many mid-town corporate headquarters, cultural landmarks and some of the most outstanding restaurants in New York.
The hotel’s multi-lingual staff offers personalized assistance for every need including airline reservations, baby-sitting, sightseeing, current attraction tickets, business services and much more. Rates at the Hotel Elysée are extremely equitable. Room rates include a continental breakfast every morning, coffee, tea, cookies and fruit all day long, and wine and hors d’oeuvres each weekday evening.
Guests may also enjoy complimentary membership at the New York Sports Club during their stay. The Swiss-born Max Haering originally conceived the Elysée in 1926 as a European-style hotel for the carriage trade. The concept of the hotel was to offer the same “discreet and uncompromising” personalized service. Over the years, the Elysée has been home to baseball immortal Joe DiMaggio, prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, coloratura Maria Callas, pianists Vladimir Horowitz and Jose Iturbi, playwrights Tennessee Williams, Ben Hecht, Charles McArthur, and producer Leland Hayward.
Also making their New York home at the Elysée were actors Marlon Brando, Louis Calhern, John and Ethel Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Kay Francis, Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller, Ava Gardner, Herbert Marshall, Paul Douglas, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Tallulah Bankhead, Sidney Poitier and James Caan. Mario Puzo, Mary McCarthy, Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, James Clavell and Robert C. Ruark – the latter becoming the hotel’s self-appointed historian.
After the owner’s death his children eclectically designed every room so that no two rooms were alike and each had a unique and whimsical personality. In lieu of traditional numbers, the rooms were named to reflect their personality such as “Sayonara” suite assigned to Marlon Brando after his starring role in Teahouse of the August Moon, Tennessee Williams lived (for fifteen years) and died in the “Sunset” suite.
Columnist Jimmy Breslin, who regards the Elysée as “a great hotel, a genuine New York landmark,” succeeded Ruark as the hotel’s unofficial chronicler. Upon Tennessee Williams’s death at the Elysée in February 1983, Breslin recalled the story of a transient guest who called the front desk at 5:00 am complaining that someone in the next suite was keeping her awake by typing all night.
“They knew right away who the culprit was, but they couldn’t very well ask Mr. Williams to stop playwriting, so we simply moved the guest to another room.” There are countless stories of Tallulah Bankheads’s often-outrageous antics, none of them apocryphal. For example, in November 1948, she celebrated President Harry S. Truman’s stunning victory over Thomas E. Dewey by throwing a noisy party that ran non-stop for five days and nights.
But more than anything else, the Elysée is known for the Monkey Bar, its intimate piano bar just off the lobby. Opened in the depths of the Great Depression, it became known to the cognoscent as “the place to go where jokes die,” especially off-color jokes and double-entendre songs spun by such performers as Johnny Payne (1934-1944) and Mel Martin (1945-1983). Starting out as just another dimly lit hotel piano bar with mirrored paneling, encouraging early patrons to mimic one another (“monkey see, monkey do”), the tiny room was renamed in the early 1950’s when the mirrors came down and were replaced by wraparound hand-painted mural by caricaturist Charlie Wala. The mural depicts monkeys with decidedly human features riding elephants, crouching under a Christmas tree, mixing up banana daiquiris for tough looking monkey-like customers, etc. In successive years, other artists have added to the tableau, keeping the Monkey Bar as polished as it was in days gone by.
