The Plaza review: Gilded Age opulence beloved by Fitzgerald, The Beatles and a lion called Goldfleck
Carla Passino reviews New York's most impressive grande dame.
On February 7, 1964, mass hysteria gripped New York. The Beatles had landed and their American fans couldn’t get enough of them. When the band arrived at their hotel, The Plaza, A Fairmont Hotel, on the south-eastern corner of Central Park, some 50 policemen had to be posted outside to keep the crowds in check. The following days brought more chaos and rumour has it that the exasperated hotel management banned The Beatles from ever staying there again.
If so, it was a greater loss for the band than The Plaza, which, as the grande dame of New York hotels, has never been short on distinguished guests. The very first was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, scion of the business dynasty, who came to stay when the turreted French château lookalike, gleaming in its marble livery, (re-)opened in 1907, the 1890 original having quickly been deemed too small.
A large group of Beatles fans escaped the control of policeman on horseback and ran against traffic back to The Plaza — where their idols were staying.
The hotel's lavish Gatsby suite has one bedroom and a separate sitting room.
As the tempo of the Jazz Age began beating, The Plaza became a favourite haunt of Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Some reports suggest that, one evening, dead drunk or, worse, dead sober, they jumped into the Pulitzer Fountain outside. Unsurprisingly, it was in a ‘large and stifling’ Plaza suite that Tom Buchanan shattered Jay Gatsby’s dreams — and, fittingly, the hotel now has a suite named after the book.
When the Fitzgeralds were up to their fountain antics, the hotel’s Grand Ballroom, a triumph of columns, cherubs and chandeliers, didn’t yet exist. Added in 1929, it became the venue for New York society. It’s there that Truman Capote held, in 1966, his Black and White masquerade ball, where everyone who was anyone, from Frank Sinatra to Andy Warhol, congregated. The men wore tuxedos, the women black or white dresses and both genders sported a mask — except Warhol, who, ever the publicity maven, turned up bare-faced.
I looked (in vain) for the ghosts of literary giants and Old Hollywood royalty in the plush suite where I stayed earlier this year. The size of a large London flat, it dazzled with Louis XV-style gilding and, in the master bathroom, 24-carat-gold-plated fixtures. That glittering abundance prompted the fanciful notion this could have been the room that portraitist Princess Elisabeth Lwoff-Parlaghy, who kept her title far longer than the husband to whom she owed it, rented in the early 20th century for her pet lion, Goldfleck (the hotel is still pet-friendly, although I wouldn’t recommend bringing along a lion).
I wonder what The Plaza fed Goldfleck for breakfast: slabs of raw prime beef, presumably? For guests of the human variety, I can testify that, no, having fresh fruit and creamy Greek yogurt after a gluttony of flaky pastries doesn’t make the whole thing ‘healthy’.
Hard as it is to tear oneself away from the breakfast table for the exertions of the day, the effort is well rewarded in the evening with a glass of Sancerre or a Boulevardier cocktail and truffle fries, at once crispy and succulent, under the stained-glass ceiling of the Palm Court. In 1907, this glorious ‘year-round garden’ was the backdrop for Hungarian count László Széchenyi’s marriage proposal to heiress Gladys Vanderbilt — a society engagement only second to that of her cousin Consuelo with the Duke of Marlborough.
Granted, not all the Plaza’s illustrious guests always paid their bills. Lwoff-Parlaghy stiffed the hotel to the tune of $12,000, albeit leaving behind some paintings. Cabaret performer and author Kay Thompson topped that, staying rent-free for seven years, but paying it all back in (even more) literary fame.
Thompson wrote the hugely successful children’s series Eloise, centred on an irrepressible six year old who lives at The Plaza with her English nanny, a dog and a turtle, and spends her days ‘helping’ everyone and causing jams in the lift. The hotel now has an Eloise ‘portrait’ in the lobby, an Eloise afternoon tea and an Eloise suite, a pink affair with sparkly headboard, zebra carpet and a flashy neon sign that says — what else — Eloise. Next time, that’s where I hope to stay.
Visit The Plaza's website for more information and to book.
