An Empty Room and the Right Kind of People: Banqueting at the Waldorf-Astoria in the 1930s

 

Salvatore Dellaria, sad262@cornell.edu

PhD program, History of Architecture and Urban Development

 

On a Friday evening in early October 1936, the Waldorf-Astoria threw itself a birthday party. A program of music and dancing drew the hotel’s employees—its porters, waiters, stewards, housekeepers, engineers, clerks, operators, food checkers, accountants, cooks, bartenders, valets, and so on—to the Grand Ballroom on the third floor where Shep Fields and Hugo Mariani led their respective orchestras in celebrating the Waldorf’s fifth year in its new building on Park Avenue in New York City.[1] Ground broke for the hotel in October 1929, just as demolition of the original Waldorf on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Third Street was beginning, and just days before the Black Tuesday stock market collapse sent the US economy into depression. When construction finished in 1931, the hotel opened its doors to a still-worsening employment crisis; jobless rates would continue climbing for two or three years more, passing twenty percent by mid-decade. And so when revelers at the Waldorf party were trading toasts in honor of the company’s profitability, they must have offered toasts also—if only silently—to their own good fortune at finding work when so much of the country’s labor force could not. In fact, the “Five Year Service Badges,” pinned that night to the lapels of those three- or four-hundred employees who had been with the Waldorf since opening day,[2] might be most suggestive in this regard. Did these insignia, carry the hotel’s gratitude or the employees’? Were they marks of the workers’ continuous loyal service, or of their anxiety as jobholders hired and retained during a half-decade of unprecedented joblessness, homelessness, and poverty?

 

It was, then, a stroke of either luck or genius that the film supplied by Universal Pictures to be screened at the birthday gala was Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, a newly premiered rags-to-riches comedy (and frog-to-prince romance) with William Powell in the titular role. Indeed, Godfrey is unique among Depression-era screwballs for casting a cinematic eye toward the decade’s “forgotten men”—a faddish euphemism for the unemployed and homeless that Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced into the Great Depression’s lexicon with his April 7, 1932, fireside chat. “These unhappy times call for the building of plans,” FDR insisted, “that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”[3] In Godfrey, Carole Lombard’s character, Irene Bullock, searches for one such forgotten man in order to win a scavenger hunt sponsored by the fictional “Waldorf-Ritz” hotel. She finds the homeless Godfrey Smith living in the city dump, he helps her win the hunt, and Irene, in return, hires him on as her butler. The film’s social satire is thick, particularly in the tactless treatment of Godfrey’s poverty by the idle rich gathered in the “Waldorf-Ritz” ballroom, and in the invective that he delivers in response: “I was curious to see how a bunch of empty-headed nitwits conducted themselves. My curiosity is satisfied.”[4] Presumably, it is on account of anti-elitist sentiments like these that the film today, when it plays in revival or art-house cinemas, often passes as “a marginally Marxist exercise in class confusion.”[5]

 

However, it is difficult to identify anything politically radical or economically progressive at work in the normative project of Godfrey’s narrative. As if his Mid-Atlantic accent had not already disclosed the truth of the butler’s identity, Godfrey Smith, as it turns out, is actually Godfrey Parkes, a Harvard graduate and a member of the Boston aristocracy. He gave up his fortune after a soured love affair and found solace for his despair in the camaraderie of the forgotten men. Godfrey, in other words, unlike his friends, is not himself a victim of the market crash; unlike theirs, his poverty is voluntarily; and unlike them, he has the cultural capital—the diction, the poise, the business savvy—necessary to rebuild his fortune in time for the film’s dénouement. So, if My Man Godfrey begins by positing a certain classless egalitarianism among the Depression’s homeless poor, it ends by reasserting class differences precisely where they seemed to be dissolving: Godfrey clears the city dump, builds a nightclub (named, fittingly, “The Dump”) in its place, and hires there its forgotten former residents as liveried valets, attendants, and waiters. That is to say, at “The Dump” Godfrey raises, literally and figuratively, an architecture of capitalism in order to reabsorb an abandoned underclass back into this economy. Or, in other words, at “The Dump” he reconstructs in microcosm capitalism’s “economic pyramid,” never mind the fact that the Depression seemed to be proving such a structure unsustainable.

 

Screened for the Waldorf’s own service workers, the allegorical symmetry between the film’s architecture and the hotel’s cannot be overlooked. In neither can space operate without being structured by social distinctions—management and labor, waiter and patron, staff and crew—that appear, ultimately, as avatars for class inequality. But more significantly, both Godfrey and the Waldorf maintain and reproduce these distinctions, steadfastly, against their seemingly imminent dissolution. As Eric Hobsbawm has noted, the Great Depression was “the most traumatic episode in the history of capitalism,” a trauma “underlined by the fact that the one country that had clamorously broken with capitalism appeared to be immune to it: the Soviet Union.”[6] In short, the Waldorf’s birthday party—and, indeed, its architecture in general—ought to be read against a backdrop not only of a Depression-era employment crisis, but also of the threat that the Depression’s joblessness and poverty posed to the viability of capitalism itself. In the 1930s, while western economies stagnated or declined, the putatively classless USSR was, under Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, succeeding at a rapid, if brutal and repressive, industrialization and modernization program. And with the USSR apparently modeling a successful economic alternative, the mass unemployment in the capitalist west “was believed to be politically and socially explosive.”[7] So if, like Godfrey, the Waldorf reasserted in microcosm the capitalist structures that the crises of the Depression were exposing and challenging, then at its birthday party, the hotel performed or spectacularized its own solvency as a counterproof to that challenge. For the Waldorf, class and class difference were key operators, but difference was redescribed here always as theater, as architecture, as pedagogy—as all three simultaneously.

 

For the cover of the evening’s program, the Waldorf licensed a newswire image of the LZ129 Hindenburg passing, five months prior, behind the hotel’s twin spires on its maiden transatlantic voyage from Friedrichshafen to the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey (Figure 1).[8] It is hard to imagine any illustration better registering the specificity of the historical juncture commemorated by that birthday. Before the hotel could celebrate its sixth, the airship, of course, would crash into its Lakehurst mooring mast. But the economy, too, would crash again within the year, sliding the US back into depression and postponing liberal capitalism’s recovery, as rehearsed that night at the Waldorf, until the outbreak of the Second World War.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On October 28, 1933, the hotel reopened its formal dining hall—the Empire Room—for a third season of dinner and supper dancing with performances by Xavier Cugat and his Orchestra, a group that, the Waldorf promised, “established itself in New York’s favor on the Starlight Roof during the summer season,” and by Enric Madriguera and his Orchestra, “Stylist of a new school of modern dance rhythms, for a limited engagement direct from the Casino at Monte Carlo, Monaco.” Cugat was accompanied on the bandstand by “Margo,” an “inimitable Spanish Dancer,” and by “Carmen,” a “noted singer of Spanish Lyrics.”[9] There was an Empire Room in the old Waldorf too, but the new hall was “distinguished by a more modern interpretation of the Empire period style. Its wainscoting and pilasters are of Serpentine green marble. The walls are of harewood stained and finished a light grey. The hangings, of specially woven silk damask, are based on designs taken from old documents of the Empire Period, worked in gold against an Empire green background. Lighting, of course, is indirect, from sconce and ceiling torchons”[10] (Figure 2). Cugat, however, inaugurating that night a sixteen year stand as leader of the

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waldorf’s house band, was to be as much a fixture of the new Empire Room as its marble, harewood, or silk damask appointments—a fixture as architectural as any of these others. That is to say, from the other way around, in the 1930s, the Empire Room’s architecture was inseparable from its theater.

 

Naturally, then, the question becomes: what was the nature of the Waldorf’s architectural dramaturgy? A provisional answer ought to be suggested by the overt way that the hotel highlighted—indeed, banked on the appeal of—Cugat’s and his accompaniments’ Spanish-ness, or the exoticism that references to “modern dance rhythms” implied. But this question, in fact, has two valences. As Irving Goffman proposed in 1959, a process of “mystification” motivates the vest-pocket dramas of microsociological interaction; performance is accompanied by concealment, or at least by the sense that something has been withheld from an audience. And it is this promise of undisclosed secrets or mystery, even more than performance itself, that keeps an audience in awe and at a distance. Mystification, in other words, is the appearance of a differential—between performed and unperformed, seen and hidden—that maintains theatrical space.[11] Goffman, thus, also distinguished between front and back regions of social theater: the former as the site where interactions like those between the Waldorf, its employees, and its patrons are staged; the latter as the site where the “illusions and impressions” performed out front “are openly constructed,” where “the vital secrets of a show are visible.”[12]

 

Thus, speaking planimetrically, the Waldorf’s “front stage” clubs were embedded in a matrix of “back stage” service spaces. For example, on the eighteenth floor, the Starlight Roof, the Palm Room, and the Canadian Club were connected by a tissue of kitchens, pantries, store rooms, corridors, and elevators—all of which were invisible to patrons dining “out front” (Figure 3).[13]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moreover, these “back-stage” spaces were structured according to a rigid organizational hierarchy comporting to and reproducing differences in class, income, and education: bus boys, chief bus boys, and waiters reporting to captains; captains, assistant headwaiters, and waiter secretaries reporting to headwaiters; these, in turn, reporting to the restaurant and club manager and from there on up the chain to the hotel’s senior management.[14] And Goffman was correct: for its 1930s patrons, the hotel would never stage this structure directly. That hierarchy—that “economic pyramid”— would be, rather, the “vital secret” animating a play of other, perhaps more ambiguous, genres of difference. On the hotel’s “front-stage,” in other words, it was alterity in general, and foreignness or exoticism more particularly, that was mapped (although never straightforwardly) onto all of those inequalities built, by necessity, into the hotel’s “back-stage” architecture—onto the inequalities that the hotel’s theater mystified but that it always failed to fully conceal. So, on the Empire Room’s bandstand as on the rest of hotel’s stages—literal or metaphorical—the mystery signaled by the performance of otherness hid from patrons no secret deeper than class difference itself; as Goffman wrote, “often the real secret behind the mystery is that there really is no mystery.”[15]

 

Indeed, throughout the decade, the Waldorf squandered no opportunity to conjure images of the foreign or the exotic. The satisfaction it took, for example, in its well-stocked wine cellar, “countless thousands of bottles,” followed just as obviously from the breadth and diversity of the collection’s origins as from its quality: French, Italian, Chilean, Alsatian, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Austrian, and so on. As if the bottles were keys to some far-flung, wine-soaked arcadia, the hotel’s 1935 wine list was illustrated with drawings of dark-complexioned Mediterraneans laboring in vineyards or stomping grapes in wooden barrels; its epigraph—four lines of verse from the eleventh-century Persian polymath, Omar Khayyám—accompanied a drawing of an even darker-complexioned man in a turban, sitting cross-legged in a patch of grass with a jug of wine, a thick book, and a pretty girl strumming an oud (Figure 4).[16] Likewise, even if most of the food prepared in Waldorf kitchens was sourced from

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

local markets, even if most of the requests from diners were for simple and familiar hashes and stews, still the prides of its menus were always imported or exotic delicacies: “English sole, English mutton, and Scotch grouse; olive oil, lemons, and cheese from Italy; pâté de foie gras and truffles from France; caviar from Russia and hors d'oeuvres from Holland and the Scandinavian countries.”[17]

 

Of course, by the 1930s, “French cuisine” had long been internationally synonymous with “haute cuisine,” and, indeed, it was at the Waldorf in 1936 that the society of Les Amis d'Escoffier—a fraternity of epicures, many of whom had been students of Auguste Escoffier—was first gathered.[18] So it is no surprise to find the Waldorf serving, in 1934, dishes like Sweetbreads a la Financière and Tournedos of Beef Chasseur to members of the New York Archdiocese, honoring the consecration of “the Most Reverend Stephen J. Donahue, D. D., Titular Bishop of Medea, Auxiliary Bishop of New York”; or serving, in 1938, dishes like Consommé Marjolaine and Lobster Thermidor to members of the 41°-74° Club, “for women engaged in the sale of passenger travel,” at their second-annual supper dance.[19] It is, perhaps, a little more tellingly incongruous to find that the 1935 “Dinner Commemorating the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Mark Twain” included, on the one hand, a musical program comprising staples from the Americana songbook—standards like “Oh! Susannah,” “Camp Town Races,” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—and on the other hand, a menu comprising staples from French gastronomy: Filet de Striped Bass Armenonville, Petits Pois Nouvaux, and Pommes Lorette.[20]

 

In either case, much as the reality of vineyard labor was, simultaneously, invoked by the hotel’s wine list and concealed by its romanticizing exoticism, behind its menus, a small army of mostly foreign-born workers labored anonymously; in the 1930s, the Waldorf needed, on average, “eight hundred employees for receiving, storing, preparation, service, distribution, washing, cleaning, and supervision in the departments handling catering operations.”[21] However, if the winery imagery was pre-industrial and pastoral, Waldorf labor, in fact, had more in common with the routinized and specialized logics of high-volume Fordist production. For instance, between its restaurants, dining rooms, banquet halls, and apartments, there were, in 1938, more than one million meals prepared for patrons by eighty-six cooks and twenty-four undercooks.[22] Certainly, a high degree of specialization regarding roles and responsibilities was to be expected given these output demands, but at the Waldorf, the division of “back-stage” labor was, most often, a direct reinscription of existing ethnic differences: “Most of the cooks are French­—the butchers, the sauce and pastry cooks, and the garde-mangers. Other cooks are Italian. The steady and sturdy men who keep the copper pots gleaming are also Italian. The bakers are Austrian. Spaniards, Portuguese, and Filipinos take care of the china and the silver.”[23]

 

The division of “front-stage” labor, then, in a sense, mirrored and re-performed “back-stage” differences. For both, in other words, ethnic difference was taken as an indicator of status, skill, or education, but out front these differences were put on display—were made to participate in the architecture’s theater. For example, in the late 1930s, almost half of the Empire Room’s thirty-six waiters were Italian; only four were German. Whereas in the Scandinavian-themed Norse Grill, the proportions were reversed. Almost half of its crew was German; only two waiters were Italian.[24] It would seem, from the Waldorf’s perspective, that a German wait staff was a better thematic fit for the Norse Grill than an Italian one (it was, of course, a tenet of the then-contemporary Nazi ideology that Germanic ubermenschen were descended from and heirs to a proto-Aryan Nordic “master race”). Italians and Germans, thus, were cast as waiters and staged in restaurants and dining halls according to their ethnicity, much as French employees were cast as chefs and staged in the Waldorf’s kitchens.

 

In fact, both the Norse Grill and the Empire Room employed only one French waiter each, despite the fact that knowledge of French was a requisite qualification for the position.[25] There was a higher proportion of French among headwaiters and captains, but most suggestively, of the Empire Room’s fifty-five employees, only nine were American, and six of these were bus boys, even though the Waldorf’s stated preference was for bus boys of a “foreign background or ancestry.”[26] “American youth,” it believed “resists systematic training; or having received it, goes into other work.”[27] The only non-Europeans or non-Americans employed in the hall were an Argentine waiter, G. Brondolo; and a Persian brewer and server of Turkish Coffee, H. Assatour—both “first paper” immigrants.[28] But Assatour’s job was only trivially related to coffee service. His role, rather, as the only Middle Eastern employee in the room, was to exoticize an otherwise familiar component of a patron’s meal—to authenticate it’s foreignness—just as the Waldorf depended on the French-ness of its Executive Chef, Gabriel Lugot, a bona fide “war hero of the French Army, with 51 months’ service in the World War to his credit,”[29] to authenticate the provenance of its menus.

 

Thus, from wine to food to staff and crew themselves, an exoticized or theatricalized ethnic other was always at least peripherally visible to the Waldorf’s patrons, but when the performance of alterity moved from these margins onto center-stage, the full stakes of Waldorf’s dramaturgy were articulated most explicitly. In November 1938, the Sing-Sow Nin Opera Company, “an all star troupe selected from thirty-seven opera companies of Canton,” performed at the Starlight Roof for a dinner sponsored by the Crowell Publishing Company in celebration of the Automobile Show at that year’s New York World’s Fair. As the evening’s program announced, this was to be “their first and only appearance before an Occidental audience” (Figure 5). The menu, ten courses long and prepared under the direction of Chinese chefs hired specially for the occasion by the

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waldorf, began with Sharksfins Soup and Roast Mandarin Duck, and ended with Oolong tea and Crimson Rice Wine. What is noteworthy, however, is the distinct significance it attached to the fact that such a meal was to be served in the Waldorf’s eighteenth-floor, sky-lit club: “In China, eating houses have five floors. The first floor is for low caste diners, the second for a higher caste, and so on. The top floor is reserved for very important people. We use the Starlight Roof.”[30] The rhetoric could hardly be clearer. With this, in one gesture, the Waldorf verified the privilege that its architecture (the Starlight Roof, the Empire Room, or whichever other of its dining halls) was presumed to signal or confer, and at the same time mystified, by exoticizing, the inequalities upon which that privilege necessarily was built.

 

In 1976, Dean MacCannell offered an important refinement to the distinction that Goffman made between the front and back regions of social theater. For MacCannell, front and back were to “be treated as ideal poles of a continuum, poles linked by a series of front regions decorated to appear as back regions, and back regions set up to accommodate outsiders.”[31] The front, in other words, is not the sole arena of performance, nor can an exposure of the back regions be assumed to demystify secrets of that performance. Backs are often just as staged as fonts, and so a putative “behind the scenes” look is less valuable as an accounting of back-of-house operations than as an alternative register of performance. “The idea is that a false back is more insidious and dangerous than a false front, or an inauthentic demystification of social life is not merely a lie but a superlie, the kind that drips with sincerity.”[32] The falseness of the front is self-evident, but back-stage, under the pretext of authenticity, mystifications can pass more insidiously. Indeed, the Waldorf published a number of such “false back” views in the 1930s (into the ‘40s and 50s as well), appearing first as aboveboard and transparent disclosures of otherwise internal processes and procedures, and, upon a second look, as further displacements of the hotel’s secrets. “Behind the scenes” at the Waldorf was, no less than on its front-stage, a theater of otherness and inequality. And so the questions to be asked of its back-stage texts, no different than of its front-stage performances, are: how was otherness marked, which differences were preformed in these marks and which were mystified?

 

Horace Sutton’s Confessions of a Grand Hotel was archetypical among the hotel’s back-stage tell-alls, drawing anecdotes from “scores of Waldorf employees, guests, backers, builders, and alumni.”[33] Here, again, as in its food and wine service or its talent booking, appears the hotel’s preoccupation with ethnic difference—particularly in the way that Sutton, when quoting stories relayed by hotel employees, emphasized accented English by reproducing it phonetically. Max Schreier, for example, ran the Waldorf’s wine cellar, Sutton wrote, “with Teutonic discipline in slight Teutonic overtones.” When asked how the cellar is kept warm in winter, Schreier’s response (as recorded by Sutton) was: “we add a little shteam.”[34] Or Mischa Borr, who had been performing for Waldorf audiences since the hotel’s opening—Sutton described Borr as an “ultra-patriotic violinist with a mellow Russian accent,” underlining his tendency to say “Dotch’ss” instead of “Duchess” and “Constinople” instead of  “Constantinople.”[35] Or Ernest Treyvaud, who was First Assistant to Executive Chef Lugot and a French Swiss immigrant from Geneva—Treyvaud spoke, Sutton reported, “with a slight French intonation,” and slight though it may have been, that intonation is transcribed so assiduously that it is nearly illegible: “The telephone,” Treyvaud said, “eet ees always reengeeng. Othair pee-pul eat for an owair, but we . . . we are the only peepul in the hotel ‘oo ‘ave no time to eat.”[36]

 

If, however, the phonetic transcription of accents appears first as a clear marker of ethnic difference, what it actually signifies is more ambiguous. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf’s legendary maître d'hôtel, too was a French Swiss immigrant, having emigrated as a teenager to New York from La Chaux-de-Fonds, and spoke, like Treyvaud, with accented English. There is, however, no textual trace of this accent when he is quoted by Sutton in Confessions. This mark of otherness was erased (or, more properly, never registered), despite the fact that Tschirky still identified with his European roots. For the Waldorf employee’s Third Annual Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1938, Tschirky submitted (and won a special grand prize for) a model of a Swiss chalet, hand-carved from cigar-box wood leftover from banquet services (Figure 6).[37] If it is significant that, at age seventy-two, Tschirky turned to a boyhood hobby and to the chalet itself

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

as a metonymic image of his birthplace, it is significant also that the Waldorf  insisted on still marking him in “behind the scenes” texts like Sutton’s as “American”—particularly when considering that his countryman, Treyvaud, was there so unmistakably marked as “foreign.” Thus, insofar as these signs of ethnicity do not reliably comport to origins or self-identifications, what, other than status itself, could foreignness signify in the “false back” the Waldorf? Tschirky and Treyvaud (or Tschirky and Schreier or Borr) held different—indeed unequal—positions in the hotel’s institutional hierarchy. To call out, with the “dripping sincerity” of a back-of-house exposé, this differential as ethnic- rather than status-based not only mystifies but now also naturalizes the very structures that hotel itself had installed as operative.

 

Ironically, the sardonic insight that My Man Godfrey offered into the fictional space of the film’s “Waldorf-Ritz” is likely a more authentic peek behind the capitalist curtain than any offered (or authorized) by the real Waldorf into its own service spaces. Early in the narrative, as scavenger hunt participants pour into the hotel lobby, A tuxedoed man sidles up to the hotel’s bar and observes: “The place slightly resembles an insane asylum.” The patriarch of the Bullock family—played by the frog-voiced character actor, Eugene Pallette—responds with a verity disguised as a punch-line: “Well, all you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people.”[38] At the risk of spoiling the joke, what Bullock perceives—and what the Waldorf’s spaces verify—is that the better part of any architecture is the particular brand of microsociology that sustains it. Bullock upsets the positivist notion that patients are subjectified as patients by a prior asylum architecture, and proposes instead that architecture is the provisional, contingent outcome of the social structures that it contains—that architecture is nothing more than empty space saturated with relationships. From this perspective, the prerequisite for an understanding of, for example, the 1930s Empire Room qua architecture is an understanding of the sociological theater that it contained—an understanding, not only of what the Waldorf there performed, but what it mystified, both front-of-house and back. If the hotel’s architecture, in other words, was indeed spectacularized as capitalist at the very moment when capitalism had lost its ideological legitimacy, evidence will not be found in the particularities of its form as much as in the modalities of difference that maintained, simultaneously, the Waldorf’s spaces and its economies—in the inequalities that it, in a single move, both put on stage and kept hidden from view.

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Behind the Scenes at the Waldorf-Astoria. New York: Waldorf-Astoria, 1939.

Fougner, Selmer. “Food and Wine.” In The Unofficial Palace of New York: A Tribute to the Waldorf-Astoria, edited by Frank Crowninshield, 68–76. New York: Waldorf-Astoria, 1939.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1959.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Kehr, Dave. “My Man Godfrey.” Chicago Reader. June 26, 2014.

La Cava, Gregory. My Man Godfrey. DVD. Criterion Collection, 1936.

Lent, Henry Bolles. The Waldorf-Astoria: A Brief Chronicle of a Unique Institution Now Entering Its Fifth Decade. New York: Waldorf-Astoria, 1934.

MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken, 1976.

Nestle Library Menu Collection, #6674 . Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca.

Oscar Tschirky Papers, #3990. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca.

Roosevelt, Franklin D. “The ‘Forgotten Man’ Speech.” In The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1:624–27. New York: Random House, 1938.

Sutton, Horace. Confessions of a Grand Hotel: The Waldorf-Astoria. New York: Holt, 1953.

The Waldorf-Astoria Manuals. Vol. III, Restaurants & Room Service. Stamford: Dahl, 1949.

 

 

 

End Notes 

 

[1] “The Waldorf-Astoria: Fifth Annual Birthday Celebration,” program, 2 October 1936, folder 5, box 11, Oscar Tschirky Papers, #3990, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca.

 

[2] “The Waldorf-Astoria: Sixth Annual Birthday Celebration,” program, 30 September 1937, folder 5, box 11, Oscar Tschirky Papers, #3990, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca.

 

[3] Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The ‘Forgotten Man’ Speech,” in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1938), 625.

 

[4] My Man Godfrey, directed by Gregory La Cava (1936; [Irvington, NY]: Criterion Collection, 2001), DVD.

 

[5] Dave Kehr, review of My Man Godfrey, Chicago Reader, 26 June 2014, 93.

 

[6] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 94, 96.

 

[7] Ibid., 95.

 

[8] “The Waldorf-Astoria: Fifth Annual Birthday Celebration.”

 

[9] “The Waldorf-Astoria: The Empire Room Reopens for Dinner and Supper Dancing,” announcement, 28 October 1933, folder 8, box 11, Oscar Tschirky Papers, #3990, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca.

 

[10] Henry Bolles Lent, The Waldorf-Astoria: A Brief Chronicle of a Unique Institution Now Entering Its Fifth Decade (New York: Waldorf-Astoria, 1934), 48.

 

[11] Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 67–70.

 

[12] Ibid., 112–113.

 

[13] The Waldorf-Astoria Manuals, vol. III, Restaurants & Room Service (Stamford: Dahl, 1949), 113.

 

[14] Ibid., 1.

 

[15] Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 70.

 

[16] “Miniature Wine List: The Waldorf-Astoria,” 1935, folder 16, box 45, Nestle Library Menu Collection, #6674, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca.

 

[17] Selmer Fougner, “Food and Wine,” in The Unofficial Palace of New York: A Tribute to the Waldorf-Astoria, ed. Frank Crowninshield (New York: Waldorf-Astoria, 1939), 71–73.

 

[18] Ibid., 74.

 

[19] “A Dinner Given by the Laity of the Archdiocese of New York in Honor of the Most Reverend Stephen J. Donahue D.D.,” menu, 2 May 1935, folder 15, box 45, Nestle Library Menu Collection, #6674, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca; “Second Annual Supper Dance,” menu, 21 February 1939, folder 16, box 45, Nestle Library Menu Collection, #6674, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca.

 

[20] “Dinner Commemorating the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Mark Twain,” menu, 19 November 1935, folder 15, box 45, Nestle Library Menu Collection, #6674, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca.

 

[21] Fougner, “Food and Wine,” 70.

 

[22] Ibid.

 

[23] Ibid., 69–70.

 

[24] “Empire Room Crew,” memo, September 1935, folder 5, box 9, Oscar Tschirky Papers, #3990, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca; “Norse Grill Crew,” memo, September 1935, folder 5, box 9, Oscar Tschirky Papers, #3990, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca.

 

[25] “Empire Room Crew”; “Norse Grill Crew”; The Waldorf-Astoria Manuals, 29.

 

[26] “Restaurant Staff,” memo, September 1935, folder 5, box 9, Oscar Tschirky Papers, #3990, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca; “Empire Room Crew”; The Waldorf-Astoria Manuals, 39.

 

[27] The Waldorf-Astoria Manuals, 39.

 

[28] “Empire Room Crew.”

 

[29] Behind the Scenes at the Waldorf-Astoria [New York: Waldorf-Astoria, 1939?], 11.

 

[30] “Welcome! Jung Gwons of Progress!” menu, 11 November 1938, folder 16, box 45, Nestle Library Menu Collection, #6674, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca.

 

[31] Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976), 105.

 

[32] Ibid., 103.

 

[33] Horace Sutton, Confessions of a Grand Hotel: The Waldorf-Astoria (New York: Holt, 1953), vii.

 

[34] Ibid., 106.

 

[35] Ibid., 132, 134, 135.

 

[36] Ibid., 172, 172.

 

[37] “Oscar’s Swiss Chalet,” photograph, September 1938, folder 3, box 11, Oscar Tschirky Papers, #3990, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca.

 

[38] La Cava, My Man Godfrey.