To the considered judgment of this department, one of the most fascinating manifestations of the American hotel and restaurant scene has always been the incredible Ernie Byfield, Chicago's caliph of caviar, fabricator of fiery foodstuffs, confidant of celebrities, and overlord of the Ambassador Hotels and their equally legendary restaurants, the Pump Room and the Buttery.
Ernie has not been without his prophets and heralds. He has occupied double-truck layouts in Life magazine, the Pump has for years been a paragrapher's paradise, Ben Hecht and Charlie MacArthur long ago insinuated plugs for him in the script of The Front Page, and, as this is being written, the incomparable Alva Johnston has recently completed a full-length portrait for the august, if of late somewhat diffused and disorganized, pages of the Saturday Evening Post.
It is hard to determine just when this department's admiration for Byfield had its source and inception. It might have been when we first discovered that he had come by a shipment of tolerably fine Beluga caviar, which through some purely fortuitous circumstance of its handling and salting, had turned a rather startling shade of fumed oak without, in any appreciable way, impairing its flavor or palatable qualities. Instead of returning it to his caviar jobber, Byfield had listed it on the menu at the Pump Room as “Golden Caviar, Formerly a Monopoly of the Russian Czars,” and was serving it with shredded pheasant meat at five dollars a teaspoonful to the enchanted Hollywood trade. Or it may have been when Ethel Barrymore actually took with her, when she checked out of the Ambassador East, a basket of fancy fruit which had been sent her with Byfield's card, an utterly unprecedented action and one which struck the management as verging on the larcenous. “Why,” exclaimed Byfield in tones of outrage, “that basket of fruit would have lasted for at least another dozen important guests with careful handling!”
The important guests at the Ambassador have not always, however, been the most decorous. The late Alexander Woollcott, a zany character whose cut-ups affected various people in various ways, some of them with acute misgivings, made a practice of taking a bite out of each piece of fruit in the management's offering, thus, in theory, rendering it unfit for further circulation. In the early days of the Ambassador, Charlie MacArthur was so favorably disposed toward the design and decoration of one of its intimate, Frenchified elevators, that he was discovered early one morning attempting with the aid of a screw driver to insinuate it from its guides with an eye to taking it home to Nyack. The aforementioned Miss Barrymore was, long ago, presented with an early bottle or two of College Inn Tomato Juice Cocktail, then a Byfield product and new to the market, which, being imperfectly processed, exploded all over her bathroom while she was at the theater. “Send a number of police at once,” she breathed into the telephone upon her return that evening, “there have been several persons slaughtered in my apartment.”
But Byfield's most secure and certainly most spectacular fame has been based on the Pump Room, its clientele of notables, and its gustatory conflagrations.
When on one occasion one of his guests remarked with surprise upon the number of combustible and incendiary dishes being paraded back and forth across his restaurant and seemed amazed to note that practically one out of three diners was wreathed in flames from shashlik or cerises jubilé or café diable, Byfield replied grandly: “Oh, the customers seem to like it and it doesn't do the food much harm!”
The fame of Byfield and the Pump Room in the Ambassador East, beyond any question the most beautiful restaurant in the United States, even including the celebrated Adam Oval Room in New York's Ritz-Carlton, rests on other things than Paine's Fireworks gastronomy and a genius for serving everything on fire without violating the municipal fire regulations, but the crêpes Louise and the crêpes Suzette and the crêpes à l'orange are important factors, and it has been Byfield's sense of exquisite showmanship as well as a sincere devotion to the principles of Brillat-Savarin that have made him one of the three or four most famous de luxe restaurateurs in the land. So luxurious, in fact, is the décor of the Pump Room, so upholstered the guests, and so regal the menu, that a Hollywood millionaire-actor with a fine urge for communist gestures once wrote in the guestbook: “There isn't anything wrong with the Pump Room that a good revolution wouldn't fix!”
It has long been a lament of the traveling public that an established racket, sponsored by all Chicago and abetted by the railroads of America, has, ever since the completion of the Pacific Railroad in 1869, made it necessary for every transcontinental voyager to stop over for at least a brief period in Chicago. Only by the elaborate stratagem of going by way of Saint Louis or New Orleans was it possible to avoid spending time and money in Chicago en route from one coast to the other, and the railroads and the municipalities contrived the same sharp practice in both of those cities, so that the traveler gained little in satisfaction and nothing at all in time by going to California over the Southern Pacific across Texas, or by way of the Wabash and Denver and Rio Grande Western across Missouri and Colorado. Chicago is a form of highway robbery, and there all travelers must dismount and deliver.
It seemed, therefore, not improbable that the custom of notables to break their transcontinental journey by coming up to lunch in Booth 1 with Ernie might diminish appreciably with the inauguration of Mr. Young's through Pullmans. It shortly appeared, however, that although Mr. Young's now celebrated pig might occupy the same drawing room from Grand Central to the Oakland Mole, he still would have to spend time in Chicago. The complexity of train movements through the metropolitan area and the departing schedules east and west to which through cars must accommodate themselves still required a stopover liberally in excess of the time requirements for a businessman's lunch, and, in the end, Mr. Young's pig had a chance to be watered or, indeed, sluiced with as much Dom Perignon Cuvée as his taste and means might indicate.
The Pump Room, however, stands as evidence that robbery, like dentistry, can be made painless, and there are even those who make special pilgrimages to Chicago for the sole reason of visiting Byfield's pavilion of gustatory wonders and gastronomic firehouse, much as pious British imperialists in the eighties and nineties headed straight for Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo when the opportunity offered. It is, in a very real sense, the social and professional crossroads of the United States, and film celebrities en route from Hollywood to the Waldorf, and shipping executives and lieutenant generals laying a course out of Washington for San Diego or Seattle ease their way happily onto its tall, leather-topped bar stools and wax lyric over its menu replete with “Fishes From the Seas and Rivers,” Welsh rabbits and roulades, Kansas City cuts of beef, Lake Superior whitefish, Indian curries and Greek-fire desserts. Lieutenant Colonel Serge Obolensky, ranking Russian royal exile in the United States and a person whose tastes in company may not be qualified as precisely democratic, has remarked to this reporter that he never yet has failed to encounter friends on stepping into the Pump Room, and the premises are a reunion ground for names that make news everywhere. It is possible at a single luncheon sitting to observe the presence of such an assortment of notables as Gertrude Lawrence, William M. Jeffers, Gladys Swarthout, Frank Chapman, Bruce Cabot, Averell Harriman, Mrs. Potter Palmer, Gloria Swanson, Bill Hearst, Jr., Mrs. Byron Harvey, Marshall Field, Frank Sinatra, or Helen Hayes with or without MacArthur.
The Byfield legend around Chicago is older than most folk are apt to believe. His first job was in the old Sherman House, an immemorial Midwestern institution owned by Byfield's father, Joseph, where Ernie went to work as a cashier in 1905. The Sherman was the scene of the College Inn, one of the first night restaurants in a hotel in the land and which survived into recent years when it split itself up by a process of binary fission into the Malaya and the Panther Rooms. The College Inn, which started young Ernie off on a career of expensive gestures whose end is not yet, was the scene of early triumphs for such headliners as Ruth Etting, Kate Smith, Ted Healy, Maurice and Walton, and Rigo, the gypsy violinist. The first Ambassador was opened on the west side of State Street in 1929, the year of the Charlot Revue, and the presence in its lounges and apartments of Beatrice Lillie, not yet Lady Peel, of Jack Donahue and Gertrude Lawrence, established the Ambassador, instanter, as the Algonquin of the Middle West. It also saw the commencement of a mutual admiration entente between Byfield and Miss Lawrence which has endured faithfully and in full flower to this day. Whether or not she may be in Chicago, London, or Antofagasta, the first table directly opposite the entrance to the Pump Room is permanently reserved for Miss Lawrence, and there is a gold plaque there for all the world to know. There is also a state suite upstairs with her name on the door, and this is maintained in a condition of expectancy whenever she is reported in the hemisphere, much as the beds were turned down and the tables laid in the various residences of the late J. P. Morgan whenever he was known to be at sea or otherwise in transit.
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.