Chapter One
Where Scarlett Never Fell
Garden Week, 1978
It's really nothing more than an old, falling down, second class hotel, just about to crumble into grit. Its once pristine alabaster turrets and cornices have long since been smudged with the soot of a greedily growing city. The transients who spend the nights there are never quite sure that the bed linens have been changed or how safe they are behind the tarnished brass locks on their doors. The people who live there are denizens of a dust-ridden decadence, spending the days and minutes of their lives to descend and sit in the lobby where they cross and uncross their legs with the hope that anything - romance, scandal, hate, or humor - will hurry the hour hand around the circumference of the mezzanine clock
The dust sits heavy as the President of the Emporia Garden Club walks into the lobby and stares at the staircase for a moment. Tremulously, tentatively, with a gleam of glamour glowing in her eyes, she makes her way to the front desk and, lightly resting her perfumed hand on the mauve marble counter, asks the front desk clerk: “Is this where Scarlett fell?”
The gold garlands ringing the columns glimmer and the dust assumes its air of self-righteous esteem. The permanent residents ease back into their shabby chairs and threadbare sofas with modest grins of smug pride. I draw back into myself, for I know that this woman's illusions and the lovely aura of willing deceit will soon be shattered. I am the one to do it, as gently as I know how.
“Didn't Vivien Leigh pretend to miscarry right here on the grand staircase? Weren't there real live alligators in the reflecting pools of the court at the top of the stairs? Wasn’t the Hotel burnt to the ground and wasn't it built anew in seven days? Didn't Bette Davis break one of the huge French mirrors over the fireplaces in the Grand Franklin Street Suites in a fit of bitch frenzy? And where’s the swimming pool, the Turkish Baths, the draft of the Monroe Doctrine, the family of ducks, and the peanut soup?
I wish I knew. Shattering someone else's illusions is a terrible task but unfortunately most of the time there isn't any way around it. The Hotel shattered most of mine.
I started working here during college, to free myself at least temporarily from financial dependence on my father. It appeared the Hotel would provide me with a summer job of archetypal fantasy: front desk clerk at the Grand Old Hotel, welcoming foreigners to the city of my heritage and birth. It was almost too Dickensian to be true.
Well, that conceit didn't last long. Graciousness and good manners had only been a veneer that protected me from life. I quickly learned how alcohol incapacitates human beings from leading their own lives. I saw what happens to the fiercely independent people, the ones who never marry or assume responsibility beyond themselves and end up all alone. I became a cog in the workings of an institutional bureaucracy (“I'm sorry, I can't help you.”) For the first time in my life, I had to deal with, prostitutes and their irate johns, winos, insanity, hate, theft, wife-beating, threats on my life, complete incompetence, and a fuck-the-whole-world attitude, not to mention outright rudeness. These were the things that others chose to ignore, and mine was the task to handle them so as not to create a scene. I found what Life was like underneath the mahogany membrane and gilt wash, and all the while I was trying to keep the chipped flecks on the knotty pine beneath it.
Yet I came back for more. The Hotel Jefferson is a huge Victorian Earth Mother who simply accepts everything that happens, silently clutching at her gesso palm fronds. The Jefferson knows that this too, shall pass. It has taught the tedious lesson of patience both to me and to the elderly permanent residents.
The permanents are the second great myth of the Hotel. These people have been forgotten by reality. Unspeakable loneliness, boredom, television, and liquor reign supreme in their lives. Going downtown to the tearooms is a gala event, as is the daily pilgrimage to the Lobby where they sit and watch the hours and other people pass in the Byzantine splendor of cool golds and brazen Edwardian reds. The Lobby is a velvet and gold leaf frame for their portrait of life. It has convinced us that the whole level of human existence is somehow exalted by a little gold paint.
The silent respect of the Lobby imparts dignity if you are willing to accept it, and if you have the dignity to return to it. The lesson of the Lobby is the same one these elderly shadows of the past assert: dignity is the courage to be yourself, even if the black transvestite is wearing a silk frock from the French Room at Thalhimers Department Store and you're still wearing the same old painted columns (which really do look like marble).
Along with the dignity of years comes the great gift (other than love) that the permanents have to offer: the past. Most of them still live there and will do so until the ends of their days. They are the ones who actually hold up the mythic pillars of the Hotel, for it is only they who have known the brigades of bellboys, the alligators, and the demise of the ever-so-gracious past, the past they cling to so fervently. This is what makes the Hotel what it is.
It is a community of the past above most other things. Everyone lives together and knows where the others have come from and what they have done right and wrong in their lives. It's like living on the old family estate with the servants you have grown up with and all your fifth cousins twice-removed whom you genuinely don't care for. You have to be somewhat well-behaved or at least gracious, for if you are not, your name will be bandied about over dinner on the Mezzanine. But no matter how rude or inept you may be, the hopeful smile of redemption waits on everyone's lips; your communal dignity expects you to reclaim it, today or tomorrow, whenever you get around to it. The Hotel, like Richmond, is a city of second chances.
Now the Hotel, or at least the building itself, will get its own second chance. After a seemingly interminable creeping decadence, a new Jefferson Corporation has been formed to undertake the massive restoration of this architectural masterpiece. The sordid exterior will be bleached to its original white, and its rooms will be enlarged, modernized, and painted. Everyone presently living here, some who have resided at the big “J” for forty years, will be kindly forced to leave. Just where will these elderly legends go? If you make the sad mistake of asking them, they raise a hand to the side of their face and say, “I just don't know.” I can see them now, clinging to those faux marble columns, far too massive for even two people to encircle with their arms outstretched. There'll be some Federal “friend” who'll gently pry them off with promises of “relocation” to shag-carpeted golden years. The idiom is too true. Lost Southerners almost always depend upon the kindness of strangers.
Oh, but do excuse me, I’ve certainly rambled on. You say you're up here from Emporia, touring Richmond for Garden Week? I see. Well the story goes that David O. Selznick was a guest of the Hotel in the nineteen thirties, and when he saw the staircase, he felt it would be appropriate for Scarlett's Atlanta home. But the set designer for Gone with the Wind was in town last year and he said he'd never heard of the Hotel Jefferson, much less seen its staircase.
But just between you and me, I think Vivien Leigh really did tumble down this cascade of blood red wool. The staircase in Hollywood is probably long gone, and this is as close as any of us are ever going to get to it. It might as well be where Scarlett fell.
