That Paul was first of all a newspaperman and reporter who through the agency of almost limitless industry contrived to impress his concept of society on reluctant managing editors and the cliff-dwellers of Manhattan alike, is also admirably delineated by Miss Brown. Paul was in the habit of making his notes in a gold-backed notebook with a platinum pencil mounted in cabochon rubies, but his facts were as well authenticated and painfully come by as the notes of any district reporter scribbled in Municipal Court on a sheaf of rumpled copy paper.
Perhaps it is as well that the mold was broken after God made Maury Paul. His successors and imitators have demonstrated him to be unique and beyond the pale of successful duplication. The foreign phonies of spurious pretensions now on the town would have dismayed him.
In any event, Miss Brown has done proud by the Master. With her own good sense as a reporter, she has mentioned everyone of account in uppercase society by name, and the better names several times, indexed them copiously, and added a generous amount of pillage and insult to her copy. It constitutes the only reliable, full-dress chronicle of the bon ton follies of our times, and it's a safe bet that if a name doesn't appear in the index of Champagne Cholly, it never appeared in the columns of Maury Paul and, on that basis, is of no slightest importance whatsoever.
Boulevard Memorand:
- Reliable reports indicate that part of the Elbridge Gerry Estate collection of Madeiras, many of them dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and collector's items of Button Gwinnett proportions, is about to be available to connoisseurs, a wine note which would be comparable to, say, the announcement of the public sale of the British crown jewels. The last great private cellar of Madeiras included the combined treasures of J. P. Morgan and Mrs. Henry Walters, and was sold by Greig, Lawrence, and Hoyt with splendid promotional fanfare during the recent wars.
- Amateurs of New York institutions, as well as dudes like Roy Howard and Louis Sobol who like a brave and boisterous shirt on their back, will rejoice to learn that Walter McCrory, the mad shirt carpenter of Forty-sixth Street and for years shirtmaker to such notables as Winston Churchill and the late Odd McIntyre, is back in business again at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-sixth a few yards from the old stand. Friends and individualists feared, when he was moved from his former premises a few months ago by a rent raise, that he might retire for keeps.
- A few weeks ago a local newspaper paragrapher remarked, in hyperbole, that the barber shop at the Ritz Tower was getting so exclusive that it practically required letters of introduction from new patrons before it would give them a haircut or beard trim. Imagine the surprise of John, the head barber, when two delegates to the United Nations turned up with letters of identification from their ambassadors in Washington!
- Raymond Andrieux, former proprietor of the Caviar, is this year running Cobb's Mill Inn (“by the water-fall”) at Weston, Connecticut, and old friends are driving out for his celebrated chow which includes special délices de foie gras, homard à l'américaine and escargots bourguignonne. Raymond also has twelve bedrooms for overnight guests, and there are tennis and swimming.
- The annual opera festival at Central City, Colorado, will open this year on the Fourth of July, and for four weeks all roads will lead to Denver for this classic combination of bon ton life and frontier hurrah in the West's most glamorous ghost town.
- A number of unfamiliar horse cabs, some of them painted in bright and fetching color designs for summer trade, are turning up on the Plaza cab rank at Central Park. Investigation reveals they are old-time New York carriages which, with the advent of the motorcar, went to Bermuda, and which, with the invasion of Bermuda by auto-taxis and the tremendous revival of the vogue for horse cabs in New York, have returned to the city of their origin many decades ago.
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