“This doesn’t happen at the Holiday Inn”

The Algonquin Hotel continues to amaze with recollections on celebrities and warm stories. Frank Case turned it into a showbiz and cultural focal point by subsidizing struggling actors and writers in the early 1900s. Forty years later, a southern millionaire named Ben Bodne bought it from Case, and miraculously not only didn’t ruin it, but improved it.

Not to belabor the point, the Algonquin was the place where untold numbers of books, plays and songs were written. “At night, when you walked down the halls, all you heard was typewriters,” according to Tony Cichielo, lifelong Bell Captain.

Now imagine Ben Bodne is your grandfather. That is the essence of Algonquin Kid, the latest in a long line of Algonquin memoirs that started with Case and then his daughter, Margaret, and now the Bodne era. The new hosts welcomed an even more intensely cultural clientele, becoming personal friends with many, often visiting them at their homes. For Colby, it meant a personal network like no other: help, advice, recommendations and referrals to die for. The name dropping is intense, but the book is a gratifying, inspirational and joyful romp of comings and goings, and theater. Lots of theater. Both personal and professional.

I can tell you that the Algonquin positively reeked of vibes. I stayed there every time I had to come to New York over a 20 year period. I petted the cat, used the narrow stairs to check out the artwork on every floor, and ate at the same tables as my heros, the Round Tablers. (I have every book written on or by Robert Benchley, in first editions, for example, along with an entire shelf on the hotel and its luminaries.) I stopped staying when, after years as an Aoki hotel and then a Starwood, the old elevator and its operator were suddenly replaced by a new self serve unit. The hallways had been redone, and ….. it seemed to me to have become quite ordinary. Shortly thereafter, it was named both a historic and literary landmark, never to be altered again. Too late.

Algonquin Kid fills in a gap, fitting more recent playwrights, musicians, authors and stars in a continuing appreciation and love affair with the hotel from 1946-2000. They visited there, lived there, even rehearsed their new plays. As Colby aptly sums it up” Every day was a day to remember.”

David Wineberg ( )