This department's annual tour of inspection of the champagne circuit of the United States began, unforeseeably enough, in Boston this year. Family business reared itself, and we tossed our luggage aboard the New Haven's Yankee Clipper at one o'clock, the celebrated departure hour of the still-remembered Knickerbocker. Limited in the old days, and rolled tranquilly east along the Connecticut shore, much of the ride in view of the Sound, incredibly blue and piling up with summer cumulus clouds on the Long Island horizon.
The Yankee Clipper is not, let it be said at the outset, the train the Knickerbocker was, or the Merchants' Limited at five o'clock still is. It is no longer an extra-fare, all-Pullman luxury run with two formal diners and two spacious club cars, but carries coaches and is powered by one of the lamentable Diesel-electric cement mixers which are robbing train travel everywhere of its charm and which are bankrupting the railroads so shortsighted as to purchase them in quantity. Quite aside from its aesthetic offensiveness, every Diesel locomotive ever delivered has been obsolete the day it went into service by reason of the continual change to which its design is subject, and most astute railroaders believe its day will be over when a truly nonreciprocating type of motive power is satisfactorily perfected. Nor is the New Haven's dining-car service all it once was. Formerly a gratifying roll call of fat chops and generous steaks, the menu now offers two or three readymade, steam-table meals featuring fish, eggs, entrails, and other anatomical animal oddments better suited to the shortages of wartime than to the spacious tradition of the New Haven Railroad.
In Boston, however, as we dressed for dinner, the view from our apartment at the Ritz-Carlton, the gem of all the Ritzes of the world, was enchantingly cool and reassuringly tranquil. It was mid-July and below us the Public Gardens were superbly green spaced with a color photographer's dream of formal flower beds, and on the distant escarpment of Beacon Hill it was, again reassuringly, apparent that the dome of the Statehouse was being regilded after its covering of wartime black, a gesture of preservation indulged in by the Commonwealth every time a musket has exploded since the time of the Spanish War. The incomparable serenity of Boston is never so satisfyingly tangible as on a cool evening in early summer when the trees are almost chemically green in Commonwealth Avenue and the bar of the Ritz is peopled with Marie Laurencin women in pastel dresses and gentlemen in Harvard 1905 moustaches and white linen waistcoats.
Locke-Ober's Winter Place Wine Rooms, immemorially mellow and fragrant with memories of more than sixty years of lobster Savannah and double bottles of incomparable Bollinger, for which S. S. Pierce is agent, was agog at having that day been photographed, and consequently once again glamorized, for Ted Patrick's Holiday magazine. The sales of the fabled Ward Eight, which had its origin in these archetypally Bostonian premises, have fallen off to practically nothing with the change of public taste, the management informed us, but that was the merest incident in the long chronicle of glories that stem from Winter Place. Only the week before, Jimmy Melton, an inveterate collector of Americana and atmospheric antiquities, had attempted to buy the solid-silver, counterbalanced free-lunch dishes from the solid mahogany bar, imported with civic rejoicing from San Domingo in 1886, and had been politely told the crown jewels of Locke's were not for sale. All was well in Winter Place, and the filet with béarnaise sauce was, inevitably, superb.
Three days out from the Public Gardens and the Statehouse dome, lunch on the terrace overlooking the Embarcadero at the Telegraph Hill home of Paul Smith, publisher of San Francisco's Chronicle, was also filled with mature satisfactions and, of course, the fantastic and ever-changing melodrama of San Francisco harbor, but was characterized by somewhat less tranquility than Boston. San Francisco itself is full of phrenetic urgencies, and nobody has ever yet described Paul Smith as anything but a major West Coast excitement. Between the crabs' legs in cold mustard sauce and California champagne and chocolate soufflé, Smith mentioned the atom bomb, a matter which on no other terms would find mention in this department. “The explosion of the thing is the merest incidental and trivial consideration,” he said. “It is the terrible danger of human irritability and bad temper which may act as its detonator that is frightening. Better manners everywhere on the part of everyone from prime ministers to garage attendants with the inevitably resultant better feeling in the world would make everybody a damnsite safer in his bed.”
Smith, who is generally regarded as San Francisco's most eligible bachelor,lives in simple masculine state in a modest mansion staffed by beautifully mannered butlers and houseboys and designed, internally, that is, with sea-going fittings so that Smith sleeps in a nautical bunk and looks out over the Golden Gate through weather-tight, brassbound portholes. Next to the Palace, Smith's home is the stopping-off place of the world's great when passing through San Francisco, and anybody from Admiral Halsey and ex-President Hoover to J. Edgar Hoover and Eve Curie may turn up there among the foiled bottles and cut flowers, the auto- graphed photographs and junior executives of the Chronicle, at noontime.
The seagoing sleeping arrangements mentioned above invariably bring to mind the time when the late DeWolf Hopper put up for the night at Saratoga Springs at the United States Hotel of fragrant memory. His room was at the rear of one of the hotel's illimitable wings, right over the yards of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, where a switch engine spent the night panting and hooting among the carloads of dairy products of the region, clattering over the switch points, and sending a gentle soot through the actor's windows. At length Hopper climbed from a restless bed, tottered to the wall telephone, and demanded of the night clerk on duty: “Young man, can you tell me what time this hotel gets to Chicago?”
Under ordinary conditions, no San Francisco dispatch can appear in the space occupied by this department's lexicon of superlatives but must have a report, however brief, on the Palace Hotel and the wonderments current in this spacious and opulent souvenir of the Old West. This is being typed in our old familiar and favorite apartment above the junction of Market and Montgomery Streets where the noise of the four trolley lanes eight floors below is deafening, and a hospitable carafe of forty-year Hennessy is at hand with the compliments of Edmond Rieder, the incomparable general manager of the Palace.
The big news of the Palace is various. The management is installing new electric elevators to supplant the hydraulic lifts which date from 1907, and there is opposition from everyone but the aged and faithful servitors charged with their maintenance and operation. The Palace barber-shop, too, is suffering from the mutations of time and financial expediency, and is being leased to a syndicate of modern and presumably “sanitary” wholesale tonsors. The ancients who, for decades, have shaved and singed the beards of the best San Franciscans, are removing a short distance up Montgomery Street to a shop all their own where, as the Chronicle's zany paragrapher, Herb Caen, remarks, they can continue to dispense deplorable haircuts in the most agreeable old-time atmosphere. They are likely to take a substantial patronage with them.
Elsewhere the Palace is as it should be: classic, decorous, and unbelievably part of the grand manner under the Rieder management, which by now is something of a San Francisco institution in itself. From the Palace's own greenhouses, erected for the first Palace in south San Francisco by Senator Sharon in the seventies, entire truckloads of shrubs and flowers come daily for the Palm Court and other public apartments, and the day we arrived those spacious premises were transformed into a bower of twelve-foot lemon and maple trees in alternating pots around its borders and at other vantage points. On the luncheon menu there now appears a superb crème Colony, a potage flavored with curry and apples whose great original in the New York Colony Restaurant is called crème Waterbury and whose formula was generously supplied by Gene Cavallero. Among the luncheon revelers were the venerable Dudley Field Malone, now a confirmed Californian, and the ubiquitous Dwight Fiske who, although the town's night life is in a state that can only be described in a burst of charity as “moribund,” is packing the customers in nightly by wartime hundreds in the House of Harris with new and hilarious ballads of quadruple entendre and, of course, the old standby, “Mrs. Pettibone.”
That the Palace's major-domo, Adolph Bach, is still in his fullest stride was convincingly demonstrated by a dinner served by Mr. Rieder and his Baroness in honor of the birthday of Chuck Clegg, this department's photographic accomplice. For the occasion, the Wells Fargo Bank was persuaded to surrender a proper complement of the Palace's legendary solid-gold plate and a table in the Palm Court was laid around a small pagoda or gazebo of orchids, nothing showy, just the tiny, very expensive brown and gold ones. Caviar arrived on the backs of three-foot-high, ice-carved dolphins; incredible roulades of California sand dabs vanished in a polite deluge of ice-cold Chablis; filets from Kansas City under thick blankets of Strasbourg foie gras strengthened the guests to cope with the various Niagaras of champagne which kept arriving, identified as Mumm's '29 in magnums, Louis Roederer '34 in magnums, and Bollinger sans année in magnums. Dessert was a pyromaniac's dream of brandied peaches in ices festooned with spun sugar, the cognac was from the Café de Paris of Monte Carlo, 1865, and the De Marcos, imported from the adjacent Rose Room where they were performing, danced during the coffee. Nobody felt that the cuisine of the Palace was slipping, and even Senator Sharon, himself a notable opener of foil-topped bottles, would, we felt, have been satisfied.
An eminently satisfactory aspect of this department's survey of the gilded traps of the countryside was the widespread revival of Victorian plush and ormolu as the decorative scheme for saloons, restaurants, and gaming houses throughout the Far West. The Happy Valley Bar at San Francisco's Palace has always been a model of this mannered style in which love seats, tiny divans, red velvets, and tasseled cords have been judiciously synthesized with oldtime playbills and cheerful items of Californiana, while up in Reno the Bonanza Club, the town's swellest roulette and bankruptcy parlors, is a wonderful midst of rococo Victorianism with tufted banquettes and velour drapes all the hell and gone, gold frame mirrors ten feet tall, and elaborately floriated electroliers on every hand.
Now Denver, which in modern times has been possessed of no more exotic premises than the eminently severe Ship's Bar in the Brown Palace Hotel, has flowered into spectacular Victorian effulgence with an Imperial Room at the Cosmopolitan Hotel which is a veritable explosion of looped and fringed curtains, brocaded bar stools, gold-backed mirrors, and elegant flourishes of every imaginable sort. The place is big enough to accommodate a thirsty regiment, and Denver is flocking to it in regiments. There is an oval bar of irregular outline surmounted by a cloud-shaped hung ceiling in pastel colors, and with a professor discoursing sweet music from a piano strategically located among the cash registers on a central platform. The whole shebang is a madhouse of 1850 ornamentation with lush, soft blues and pinks all over, and mahogany and cloisonné present in stupefying quantities, all of which must have cost, as the phrase goes, a pretty penny. If the cocktail-hour rush and later evening rioting for space there when this department passed through are any index of future grosses, the Imperial Room is Denver's ascendent institution of the moment and by long odds the gayest and handsomest bar in the Columbine Commonwealth.