Along the Boulevards

Shirt-cuff jottings:

The bobbysoxers and autograph-hyenas have added a new wrinkle to their technique of terror at first nights along Broadway. They now pursue their victims, who have, heaven knows, invited this disaster with their own availability to a cretin public, with dimestore cameras fitted with speed guns. It is a safe bet that film celebrities won't gain in glamour from this type of promotion when the results begin to circulate…A firm of men's-tie manufacturers named D. D. and Leslie Tillett, which sounds like something out of the New Yorker, has undertaken the promotion of a “limited editions” club for neckware: a year's subscription to the tie-of-the-month for ＄100, and no more than fifty patrons to receive the same pattern each month…As might be expected, the first trans-Atlantic airline to undertake exploitation of their services on a gastronomical basis is Air France, an organization offering seven-course dinners at 10,000 feet with hors d'oeuvres, cocktails, and all the wine, including champagne, on the house that the thirstiest customer can absorb. In the United States where meals are getting stingier and restaurateurs more avaricious by the minute, instead of vice versa as they should be, this ought to set some sort of example.…The Monon Railroad, between Indianapolis and Chicago, has restored the celebrated “Monon Five O'clock” train between these cities as a result of widespread protest against its abandonment. The Monon's diner with its Hoosier food was an institution in the Midwest, and the threat of its discontinuance raised an avalanche of public resentment and dismay…The one and only Major Gray's Chutney is back in availability, for which hooray…A very sound idea originated by the Los Angeles Biltmore, that might well be universally copied, is reported by Melville Cooper—that of making all drinks sent up by room service doubles without special order or instruction. Saves a lot of reordering since nobody who goes to the trouble of having drinks sent upstairs ever wants a single, anyhow… Bennett Cerf's new desk at his Random House offices is reported to be the biggest and gaudiest of any executive in town. The Theater Guild is having a stage carpenter build a facsimile for use in future productions requiring office magnificence of a Cecil de Mille order… Victor Gilbert, for years known as the Manager at No. One Fifth Avenue, has, like so many once urban hoteliers, gone into the country innkeeping business with his Stonehenge, “an inn in the early Connecticut tradition” at Ridgefield. There are sixty-five acres, a swimming pool, a restaurant seating fifty, seven guest rooms, and a tiny bar, all sounding agreeable and expensive, which is no hindrance to any project nowadays…The Little Old Mansion, Katharine Brush's favorite eating place in Manhattan, run in an expansive and upholstered southern manner by Gladys Wilcox, has opened a branch in Cobina Wright's old home in East Fifty-first Street for dinner only. The house is famed for its fried chicken cooked without batter, its wonderful cheese cakes and pecan pie which cause Greta Garbo to go into a Swedish sort of swoon, and various other secrets of Randolph, Miss Wilcox's veteran chef. Southerners nostalgic for their native Peachtree Street and stately homes dating from before the Yankee War, think the Little Old Mansion is the best thing in New York…