Hotel Elysee

The Hotel Elysee is a New York City hotel, situated on 60 East 54th Street between Madison and Park avenues. The Swiss-born Max Haering originally conceived the Elysée in 1926 as a European-style hotel for the carriage trade.

Guests

Over the years, the Elysée has been home to baseball player Joe DiMaggio, prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, coloratura Maria Callas, pianists Vladimir Horowitz and Jose Iturbi, playwrights Tennessee Williams, Ben Hecht, Charles McArthur, and producer Leland Hayward.

It is known for hosting many well-known literary guests, including James Michener, Leon Uris and Jimmy Breslin. Other writers who stayed there were Mario Puzo, Mary McCarthy, Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, James Clavell and Robert C. Ruark – the latter becoming the hotel’s self-appointed historian.

Also making their New York home at the Elysée were actors Marlon Brando, Louis Calhern, John and Ethel Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Kay Francis, Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller, Ava Gardner, Herbert Marshall, Paul Douglas, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Tallulah Bankhead, Sidney Poitier and James Caan.

After the owner’s death, his children eclectically designed every room so that no two rooms were alike. In lieu of traditional numbers, the rooms were named to reflect their personality, such as the “Sayonara” suite assigned to Marlon Brando after his starring role in "Teahouse of the August Moon". Tennessee Williams lived (for fifteen years) and died in the “Sunset” suite.

Columnist Jimmy Breslin, who regards the Elysée as “a great hotel, a genuine New York landmark,” succeeded Ruark as the hotel’s unofficial chronicler. Upon Tennessee Williams’s death at the Elysée in February 1983, Breslin recalled the story of a transient guest who called the front desk at 5:00 am complaining that someone in the next suite was keeping her awake by typing all night. “They knew right away who the culprit was, but they couldn’t very well ask Mr. Williams to stop playwriting, so we simply moved the guest to another room.”

In November 1948, Tallulah Bankhead celebrated President Harry S. Truman’s stunning victory over Thomas E. Dewey by throwing a noisy party at the hotel that ran non-stop for five days and nights.

The Monkey Bar

The Elysée is known for the Monkey Bar, a piano bar just off the lobby. Opened in the depths of the Great Depression, it became known to the cognoscenti as “the place to go where jokes die,” especially off-color jokes and double-entendre songs spun by such performers as Johnny Payne (1934-1944) and Mel Martin (1945-1983).

Starting out as just another dimly lit hotel piano bar with mirrored paneling, the tiny room was renamed in the early 1950’s when the mirrors were replaced by wraparound hand-painted mural by caricaturist Charlie Wala. The mural depicts monkeys with decidedly human features riding elephants, crouching under a Christmas tree, mixing up banana daiquiris for tough-looking monkey-like customers, etc. In successive years, other artists have added to the tableau.

= External Links =
* [http://www.elyseehotel.com/ Hotel Elysee website]