BROWDERBOOKS
Good News:
#1. I'm on Instagram! Just one photo now, but more to come. Go here.
#2. Fascinating New Yorkers, my latest work of nonfiction, has been announced as an award-winning finalist in the Biography category of the 2019 International Book Awards.
#1. I'm on Instagram! Just one photo now, but more to come. Go here.
#2. Fascinating New Yorkers, my latest work of nonfiction, has been announced as an award-winning finalist in the Biography category of the 2019 International Book Awards.
A story of the strangest friendship that ever was: a dapper young bank thief and the detective hired by the banks to apprehend him.
Reviews
"What a remarkable novel! Clifford Browder's The Eye That Never Sleeps is an exciting cat and mouse game between a detective and a bank thief that is simultaneously so much more. A lively, earthy stylist with a penchant for using just the right word, Browder captures a city pullulating with energy. I loved this book right down to its satisfying, poignant ending." -- Five-star Amazon review by Michael P. Hartnett.
"New York City in the mid-nineteenth century is described in vivid detail. Both the decadent activities of the wealthy and the struggles of the common working class portray the life of the city." -- Four-star NetGalley review by Nancy Long.
"Fascinating!" -- Five-star NetGalley review by Jan Tangen.
"Well written, flowing with a feeling for the time and the characters." -- Reader review by Bernt Nesje.
This is the fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York. Three more, and then the big one; stick around.
My nonfiction work Fascinating New Yorkers has been reviewed by The US Review of Books. Reviewer Gabriella Tutino says, "There's something for everyone here in this collection of profiles, and it serves as a source of inspiration for readers who love NYC." For the whole review, click on US Review.
DONALD TRUMP SOAKED IN SWEAT
AND OTHER TALES OF THE PLAZA
There are three sections of the Sunday Times that I almost never read: Sports, Styles, and Real
Estate. Imagine my surprise, then, when
on the first page of the Real Estate section of June 9, 2019, I saw an article
by Julie Satow that I absolutely had to read.
Topped by a large photo of a massive French Renaissance-style building
of circa 1907, it bore the title, “The Widows of the Plaza,” and the subtitle
“Forget Eloise. Wealthy dowagers once
held court at the luxury hotel.” In a
chapter entitled “Legendary Hotels” in my unpublished but (I hope) ultimately
forthcoming work of nonfiction, New
Yorkers: The Feisty People of a City Where Anything Goes, there is a
chapter, “Legendary Hotels,” that includes a brief account of the Plaza, a soaring
mass of a hotel at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, just
across from the southeastern corner of Central Park. There I mention its celebrity guests over the
years, and its famous Oak Room, closed in 2011 because of champagne- and
drug-ridden orgies by Lady Gaga and her rowdy pals. There too, and elsewhere in the book, I
mention the reservation of a room in 1964 for “four English gentlemen” who
turned out to be the Beatles on their first American tour. The attempts of female fans to access the Fab
Five, including two who mailed themselves in cartons to the hotel, caused the
management to vow never again to house these superstars, a privilege that they
gladly ceded to less legendary and more riot-tolerant hostelries. For the Plaza, in its heyday, was quiet, elegant,
and sedate, the perfect home for the multitude of dowagers chronicled in the Times article.
 |
The Plaza’s most famous resident never set foot there, for
she was a fictional creation. I mean, of
course, Eloise, the precocious and mischievous six-year-old featured in Kay
Thompson’s series of children’s books published in the 1950s and illustrated by
Hilary Knight. Eloise endeared herself
to readers and later appeared in a film.
But even Eloise cannot top the real-life wealthy women who, right from its
opening in 1907, resided and reigned royally amid the late Victorian splendor
and sedate elegance of the hotel. Julie
Satow’s article brings them memorably to life.
When Princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy moved into the hotel’s
largest suite in 1909, 90 percent of the hotel’s guests lived there
full-time. The Princess, who liked to be
addressed as “Your Highness,” arrived with three French maids, three attachés,
a marshal, a courier, a butler, a chef, a bodyguard sporting a tall plumed hat
and a sword, a dog, two guinea pigs, an ibis, a falcon, several owls, and a
family of alligators. Divorced twice,
she had obtained her title from her second husband, a minor Russian prince. Photos show an attractive woman with a mass
of dark hair topped by a bun.
 |
| Self-portrait of Princess Vilma. |
An artist as well as a princess, she advertised her
portraiture services and soon recruited as a client Major General Daniel E.
Sickles, who was 92 and minus a leg lost at Gettysburg. When the two attended a Ringling Brothers
circus at Madison Square Garden, she found a baby lion there so adorable that
the obliging general bought it for her.
Named for him, the lion was lodged in the bathtub of her suite, which
must have made Her Highness’s bathing awkward.
In time the lion outgrew the tub and the management’s patience, so the
Princess donated General Sickles (the lion, not the general) to the Bronx Zoo.
The source of the Princess’s wealth remained a mystery, but
when World War I broke out, her wealth vanished. Bedeviled by creditors, she decamped, leaving
behind an unpaid hotel bill for $12,000.
In 1923 she died in a cramped room on East 39th Street,
surrounded by unsold artwork and one maid, and still bedeviled by
creditors. Wikipedia, that revered
source of online facts and trivia, adds that she was Hungarian-born, did
(perhaps) a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II and one of Admiral Dewey, lived in
Berlin and Nice before coming here, and had a lifetime allowance from her
second husband, the Prince. And she is
still with us, buried among notables in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
You think Princess Vilma was the most eccentric of the dowagers
residing at the Plaza? Not necessarily,
for she had plenty of competition. How
about the recluse who hadn’t left her room in years, but called for her
chauffeur and car every day at 10 a.m.
Or the fastidious old woman who spent her days patrolling the hotel’s
perimeter, clearing the sidewalks of cigarette butts by stabbing them with her
umbrella. And then, there’s Clara Bell
Walsh.
Clara Bell Walsh arrived at the Plaza in 1907, the year it
opened, and exited horizontally a half century later. The daughter of wealthy Kentucky family, she
was a skilled horsewoman and hostess, credited with holding the first society
cocktail party. She held forth in her
suite wrapped in ermine, her nails matching the color of her dress. Her celebrity guests sat on brocade Edwardian
sofas among tables laden with Chinese lamps, costly thingamabobs, and tiny
animal figurines. One of her soirées had
the female guests dressed as poor little rich girls, and the men in little
boys’ sailor suits. This aging kindergarten crowd had to run an obstacle course
to get to the bar, where drinks were served in baby bottles. The world-famous party-giver Elsa Maxwell
urged party hosts to do the unexpected, the weird; Mme Walsh had no need of
Elsa’s advice, for she got there by herself.
No hearth-clinging homebody, she was often seen in the Persian Room, the
hotel’s nightclub, and sortied to dinner parties with fake eyes painted on her
eyelids. And to have her hair done, she
patronized the men’s barbershop in the Plaza’s lobby.
 |
| The Oak Room Jazz Guy |
The most cantankerous of the Plaza widows was Fannie
Lowenstein, a latecomer who arrived at the Plaza in 1958. A young divorcée, she promptly married a
fellow resident who had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and who lodged
her in one of the few rent-controlled apartments at the Plaza. When her husband died, she continued to live
in splendor in their three-room suite, paying $800 a month for what might have
rented for $1,250 a night – an arrangement that the city’s real estate industry
decries to this day. Since she couldn’t
be evicted, the Plaza staff treated her with deference, fearful of provoking a
tantrum. When she came down for dinner
in the evening, the musicians would serenade her with the theme song from the
Broadway musical “Fanny.” But one
Sunday, when she came to the Palm Court for brunch and was piqued by some
perceived slight by management, she is said to have relieved herself –
urinated, I assume – on the rug in front of a shocked crowd.
 |
| The Plaza in 1923. |
When Donald Trump bought the Plaza in 1988, la Lowenstein was
one of the few widows still living there.
She was soon complaining of “indoor air pollution” in her suite, insisting that it caused her curtains to shrink and her Steinway grand piano to get moldy. She called the city repeatedly to complain,
and soon inspectors were bombarding management with urgent notices. Though Trump was then divorcing his first
wife, Ivana, amid rumors that he was having an affair with Marla Maples, his
future second wife, he told The National
Enquirer that his relationships with them were “smooth as silk in comparison
to my contacts with Fannie Lowenstein.
When she’s done with me, I’m soaked in sweat!”
Though always subject to caution, online sources add a few
deft touches. A little old woman of
eighty, she walked around as if she owned the place. The staff were terrified of her, called her “the
Eloise from hell.” Failing health
finally dislodged her; she moved to the Park Lane and died there, age 85, in
1995.
Surrounded
by their dogs, diamonds, and nurses, the dowagers lived extravagantly and became known as the “39 widows of the
Plaza,” though in time they numbered over 39.
People would visit the hotel just to rub elbows with them in the
hallways, or glimpse them in the ornate downstairs lobby, where they might sit
reading the New York Times.
One manager took to walking outside to get from one end of the
building to the other, so as to avoid the lobby, where widows lolling on divans
awaited him with volleys of complaints. And
the staff, when besieged by vociferous widows, developed a secret signal: a
tugging of one ear indicated that a sudden summons elsewhere from a colleague
would be welcome. But when the
Depression of the 1930s came, and the Plaza was in dire need of paying guests,
it was the steady flow of rent from the widows that saw the hotel through.
 |
| The Plaza today, as seen from Central Park. Its Victorian elegance is overtopped by supermodern high-rises. |
As for the Donald, he has said that he “tore himself up” to
get it, paying $407 million, or a record-breaking $495,000 per room. But a few years later it went bankrupt,
though he of course did not. In real
estate, the Trump touch is lethal. As of
July 2018, the Plaza is owned by Katara Hospitality, the hotel division of the state-owned
Qatar Investment Authority of Qatar. And
is the famous Oak Room open today? Alas,
only for private events.
Coming soon: Descent into Darkness: Revelations, Fecundity, and Death.
© 2019 Clifford Browder
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