We interrupt Hotel Week Pt. 2 to say that CHANEL BONFIRE has been nominated for the 2013 Goodreads Choice Awards in the Debut Author category! I am very honored and grateful for this acknowledgement and if you’re a Goodreads member, I’d like to ask for you vote. The Opening Round of voting runs from November 4th – 9th.
And while you’re there, sign up for the Chanel Bonfire Goodreads Giveaway and get a chance to win a free paperback copy of the book for yourself or to give to someone you love! The paperback will be published on November 12, 2013 and I’m giving 5 copies away so sign up now!
Thank you! Tomorrow we will return with stories of the The Ritz in Paris and later in the week, the one, the only, the fabulous Howard Johnson’s! Stay tuned.
The Westin Paris-Vendome built as the Hotel Continental in 1878 and known to us in the 70s as the Inter-Continental.
My daughter Grace on the same balcony overlooking the Tuileries that Robbie and I shared.
When our fairy ex-stepfather materialized at the Hotel Sydney Opera to rescue us from the horrors of two star accomodations, the Inter-Continental is where he took us. Opened in April of 1878 as the Hotel Continental it occupied a full block at the intersection of the rue de Rivoli and the rue de Castiglione over looking the Tuileries Gardens. It was the largest and most luxurious hotel in Paris for decades. Renamed the Inter-Continental in 1969, It became the Westin Paris in 2005 and the Westin Paris – Vendome in 2010. It was for Grace and I, as it had been for Robbie and I a wonderful and enchanting place in which to flop on the beds, drink Coca Colas and race across the street to the gardens.
The Mamounia Hotel in Marrakech, Morocco or La Mamounia as it’s commonly known sits at the heart of the old section of the city facing the Atlas Mountains.
We stayed here while our step-father was scounting locations for a new resort in Morocco. It was a wonderful, mystical-feeling place in which a couple of young girls could have a lot of adventures. Mother and Oliver’s version of the trip had it’s own kind of magic but sadly it’s own very grown-up kind of sorrow.
The Marbella Club on Spain’s Costa del Sol was, at first, a large old farm purchased in the late 40s by Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburg and his father Prince Max as a family retreat. But their hospitality was so generous and their guest list so long that by 1954 Alfonso had converted the place into a super swanky exclusive resort hosting the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Lawrence Olivier and Ava Gardner.
When we were living in London in the early 70s, Mother would ship us off to camp in Switzerland for the entire summer and then go hang out at the Marbella Club. She once judged a bull fight in town. After camp one year, Prince Juan Carlos (later King Juan Carlos) of Spain taught me how to play backgammon at the club’s pool. He was incredibly dashing and funny and kind to give away his afternoon to a sunburned American tween while her mother cruised the bar for bigger game.
The London Hilton on Park Lane was not a hotel we ever lived in. But we did spend a fair amount of time there for two reasons: Mother’s best new friend in London, Mary Broomfield, was the hotel’s upper class consierge and Trader Vic’s was in the basement.
The hotel was built in 1963 in the swanky Mayfair section of London and towers over Hyde Park (it remains the tallest hotel in London). In 1967 the Beatles met the Mararishi Mahesh Yogi there and in 1975 the IRA bombed the place killing two and injuring 63 including Mary who lost hearing in one ear. Trader Vic’s was the faux Polynesian bar chain (which originated in San Francisco, I believe) whose big, colorful, fruit-garnished drinks and Tiki mugs were an irresistible draw for teen expat wanna be grown-ups like me and Robbie and our crew from ASL (The American School in London).
After Mother had our place on Park Avenue packed up and before she announced we were moving to London, we lived at the Croyden Hotel at 12 East 86th Street just off 5th Avenue for a few months. This little newstand (and its candy) was the hotel’s highlight for Robbie and me. We bought Tiger Beats and Chunky Candy bars and tried to avoid troubling questions like why did we leave our old house and where were we going from here.
I used to say, after my mother divorced my step-father, that we changed addresses the way other people changed storm windows. An important part of this peripatetic lifestyle–sublet flats and leased apartments and houses from Park Avenue in New York to Sloane Square in London to Fresh Pond Parkway in Cambridge–was the hotel. Hotels were a bridge into new cities and countries, between addresses within cities. Sometimes they would serves us as an address or home and other times as a reminder of what a home could be–an oasis in an unfamiliar, often foreign, world. I sometimes feel that I feel more at home in hotels than homes because no matter where they are–Morocco or Omaha–or what kind of place–four star luxury or Best Western–they have, at a minimum, a bed, a bath and clean towels.
The original Ritz Hotel in Paris–the cornerstone of what would become the Ritz-Carlton chain–was founded by Swiss hotelier Cesar Ritz and chef August Escoffier in 1898 overlooking the Place Vendome in Paris. Proust, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Edward VII, Coco Chanel and Marie of Roumania were just a few of the wealthy, royal and famous who stayed there. The chain (named also for the Carlton Hotel in London) expanded into the United States (New York, Philadelphia and Atlantic City) in the early 1900s. My step-father Oliver Rea was born at the Ritz-Carlton in New York in the twenties. The Ritz-Carlton in Boston (overlooking the Boston Common) was not originally a part of the chain’s expansion. It was a 1926 real estate development that was originally begun as the luxury Mayflower apartment building but was finished, thanks to the persuasiver personality of Boston’s mayor James Michael Curly, as the 300 room Ritz-Carlton hotel and opened in 1927.
We did not live at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, but we spent a fair amount of time there. Mother would meet “ladies” there for tea or beaus for cocktails. Our fairy-ex-stepfather would stay there when he came to town to get us settled or “fix” some problem (before the final fall-out) and sometimes we would just go for supper or tea to feel at home in a strange new city.
We used to see an old woman there dressed in Victorian mourning clothes. She lived in the hotel and ate supper by herself every night. I imagined that, like me, she felt that even living by yourself in a hotel you are never alone–a comforting thought. I’ll be talking about hotels all week this week but I’ve already posted about one special hotel in which a fun scene from Chanel Bonfire was set: The Hotel Sydney Opera. Here’s a link to that March 11th post! http://chanelbonfire.blogspot.com/2013/03/hotel-sydney-opera-in-pairs.html
Another of Mother’s London clothing obsessions was Jaeger knitwear. Already a classic English brand founded in 1884 by Lewis Tomalin and named after German zoologist Dr. Gustav Jaeger who advocated the benefits of clothes made from animal fibers, Jaeger became chic on the same late 60s knitwear craze (some say begun by Arthur Penn’s 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde”) that influenced Ossie Clark’s reimagining of Chanel’s 1930s suits. Mother couldn’t get enough of it — the classic lines and form-fitting cut of Jaeger’s sweaters looked fabulous on her–sexy not stuffy and perfect for everyday.
Ossie Clark (left) with his wife Celia Birtwell and Royal College of Art friend David Hockney (right)
When Mother moved us to London and she began her wacky expat divorcee phase, her wardrobe expanded and in some ways exploded with the flamboyant free flowing fabrics and radical cuts of Enlgish designer Ossie Clark (The King of King’s Road) and his wife, textile designer Celia Britwell. She may have seen his clothes at Henry Bendel in New York (they bought his first collection) but she fell in love with them in London.
His work came of age in the 60s and became the look and style of the 70s influencing Yves Saint Laurent, Anna Sui and Tom Ford among others. His classic lines done for Radley are still worn by Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell and, of course, by me and Robbie and our friends in the Chanel Bonfire party.
The record that introduced the voice of Astrud Gilberto
The last icon of my New York City childhood is not a visual icon but a vocal one. Astrud Gilberto, a young Brazilian woman, came to the United States in the early sixties with her husband the guitarist Joao Gilberto and legendary songwriter, arranger and bossa nova stylist Antonio Carlos Jobim at the invitation of sax player Stan Getz to record an album of new jazz samba that would sell millions of copies and become one of the most well known jazz albums of all time and an iconic sound of the 60s. Astrud had never sung professionally but was pressed into service to sing “The Girl From Ipanema” because she was the only one of the Brazilians who could speak English. The low affect of her voice was the perfect counter-point the emotional inflection of her husband’s guitar and Getz’s hushed sexy-voiced saxophone. The record resonated from tropical wood stereo speakers in living rooms lit by the soft green lights of Harmon/Kardon receivers all over America. Astrud became the female voice of the 60s of my mother’s generation — the epitome of cool, adult sophistication. She left Gilberto for Getz in the mid-sixties and continued to record and sing until an unofficial retirement in 2002. Mother saw her in the late 60s in New York and I can still remember falling to sleep on Park Avenue to the clinking of classes, the laughter of grown up conversation and the soft voice of Astrud singing.
