Along the Boulevards

It appears that close at hand and even as this is being written there is coming a day of reckoning for which several million beat-up Americans have been waiting since Pearl Harbor Day. It is the wonderful time when once more the customer is right and the purchaser, a person of consequence. This is a time when elephant memories are to be cultivated and a long succession of in- famies, endured in the spurious name of patriotism and bogus necessity, are to be revenged. There are markdown sales advertised in the newspapers; merchants are cutting prices right and left while their customers are deserting them in millions; the demand for motorcars is beginning to be satisfied, so that it is no longer necessary to bribe and corrupt to get a new hack; restaurants and night clubs are putting their snooty manners on ice; and even hotels, although filled everywhere to capacity, are beginning once more to circularize old patrons by mail against the inevitable day, not now distant, when their premises shall be vacant floor on floor at a time, and the casual, unannounced patron can have the imperial suite at the minimum rate and welcome. Ready money is drying up; folk are shopping for what they want instead of buying what they can get.

The American public will have deserved the trimming and beating it got from supercilious hotel clerks, insolent dining-car servants, and filling-station attendants, the swindling it received at the hands of restaurateurs and tailors and garage proprietors unless, now that its innings are at hand, it turns the tables. The guy with a dollar to spend is right now King of the United States, and he'll be a damneder fool than anyone supposes unless he throws his weight around from now on to get what he wants.

Parenthetically, too, it should be added that now is when virtue should have its reward and when the public should remember in its judicious spending and its favors the honest restaurateurs who didn't hike filet mignon to ＄5 while the hiking was good, the conscientious hotelier who still had a room for old patrons despite the importunities of money-crazed spenders, and the corner cabby (if any such can indeed be found) who in 1945 foresaw the eventual return of the dime tip and said “thank you” for a fare. Not everyone was a small-time profiteer, but this department has in mind a make of car it will never buy again and a railroad on whose diners it will never eat again, and the cause lies no further away than in the arrogance of their managements when all that the innocent customer wanted was the service that had been advertised.

Glimpses of the great:

The graying Maurice Maeterlinck, once celebrated as the author of The Bluebird, shuffling out of the Oak Room of the Plaza in a pair of gleaming white moccasins, evidently worn to favor his ailing dogs. … In Jack Bleeck's Artísts and Writers restaurant: Gene Fowler in noisy reminiscence with Dick Maney, two of the most emphatic and articulate characters in the land, joined in a sort of beery Field of the Cloth of Gold. … In the Starlight Roof at the Waldorf, an animated mountain of summer furs and cloth of gold proving, on investigation, to be Maggie McNellis, the gilded thrush in a solid gold cage. … In the Ritz-Carlton Garden, that supreme diplomat, Silvani, dissuading Norman Bel Geddes from feeding the little ducks in the pool on a diet of bread pellets soaked in Martini cocktails. … In the steam room of the Biltmore Turkish Baths, John Ringling North telling this department that he has the best mobile chef in the land on his private business car with the Circus, and please to come on tour with him sometime. … Emerging from Leslie House in West Fifty-sixth Street, decorator Franklin Hughes, remarking that despite the times his business is booming and that this pavilion of pleasure boasts the most elaborate bar he has ever devised. … At Jack and Charlie's, John O'Hara who has just nominated Jack Kriendler for membership in The Players, which is only fair since most of the membership of this august posse of mummers has spent the better part of the last twenty years around the premises of Mr. Kriendler's Twenty One Club. … At Margaret and Brock Pemberton's final cocktail party for the season at Beekman Terrace, all the Pemberton regulars, which is everyone of top-notch Broadway account, splashing around in the biggest Martinis and hating the thought of leaving town for the summer. … At National Distillers' rout in the Matchabelli Crown Room for Jeanne Owen's Lejon Cook Book handsomely laid out by Henry Stahlhut, everybody ditto in the top bracket food rackets, enchanted that a thunderstorm outside made it impossible to leave the shindig at the time suggested by good manners. …