Byfield, who regards his greatest contribution to hotel business to be the abolition of floor clerks in his houses and who, at this writing, is laying what will probably turn out to be the greatest cellar of Burgundies ever assembled in the United States (he distrusts the current price of claret and the staying qualities of the 1941 champagnes) is not himself immune to folly.
Last summer he let himself in for trouble when he promised to appear for a film travelogue of Chicago in the wig and period costume of Beau Nash, patron and founder of the original Pump Room at Bath. The costume has been hanging around for several years, ever since the time of a projected appearance at a fête in the Pump Room of a then current professional hostess, Miss Elsa Maxwell, at which Byfield also promised to show up in fancy attire. The day before her scheduled appearance, Miss Maxwell had sent word through her agent that she wanted ＄500 in advance to sit in Booth 1, and Byfield had sent back his abrupt refusal in terms appropriate to the offer.
For the films Ernie had expected that the shooting would be done with reasonable privacy but, to his horror, found that it was scheduled to take place at the lunch hour in front of three hundred of his best patrons and that the arrangement was irrevocable because of the extensive use of props, lighting fixtures, technicians, cameramen, and extras. In an elaborate wig and buckled shoes he was pushed on a bar stool into the center of the floor to the impious enchantment of the customers, who had expeced no such dividend with their cutlets and Martinis; Ruth Gordon sent him a note to the effect that he looked like Lillian Russell. “I lost every girl I had a bowing acquaintance with,” he said afterward, “and one of my children went to court to change his name.”
The memories of a hotel man, according to Byfield, are necessarily blurred, a combination of montage and palimpsest: Chaliapin drinking two flasks of Chianti and a bottle of anisette nightly, and telling stories about Russian peasants to Gregory Ratoff and Judith Anderson; a supper at which Claudette Colbert, in some way certain of her future, as yet unattained, refused to be impressed by Jeanne Eagels, Louis Wolheim, and John Barrymore; Dorothy Parker and Charles MacArthur meeting unexpectedly at the bar just after their famous romance; J. M. Kerrigan singing Irish comallyes and ballads for Beatrice Lillie at the bar; MacArthur attempting to purloin the elevator.
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