UNITED STATES—Celebrity sightings proliferated at the Mayflower, with politicians, movie stars, and professional athletes regularly spotted inside. Was that the movie cowboy? The blond bombshell? I thought I saw Nixon and Muhammad Ali. A Vice President Charles Curtis resided in the building for several years, as did the famous Louisiana Senator Willy Long. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover often dined for lunch at the hotel’s Rib Room, in which he had the same meal every day—chicken soup, salad, and a helping of grapefruit. Even royals like King Mohammed V of Morocco and Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom traveled to the Mayflower Hotel!
U.S. Presidents have had a storied connection to the Mayflower Hotel. Starting with an inaugural ball held to honor President Calvin Coolidge’s second term, sewed up by Bernard Lukasey’s genius manipulation of “silent Cal.” The supporters of Coolidge in the 1924 election had invited a group of show people to the White House, chaperoned by Lukasey, for a star-studded to showcase the Presidents “warm and inviting personality.” Mrs. Coolidge know these people from across the footlights in New York. Her husband did not.
Coolidge remained stiff and stone faced as Al Jolson sang, ‘Keep Coolidge.” Ed Wynn and the Dolly Sisters were there to keep things light. “The President was almost totally inarticulate and grim,“ Bernie reflected afterward. Photos taken after the breakfast show a bare half smiling President. Still, the photos plastered on front pages of the country did the trick. The adman manipulator extraordinaire has conveyed to the public “a warm and inviting personality,” and he was voted in for another term.
Nearly every president since Coolidge have made it a point to visit the Mayflower at one point or another. Herbert Hoover established his White House transition team within the hotel after his election in 1928. Che Guevara and Findel Castro stayed there during a Good Neighbor youth conference held in the Capitol. In fact Castro, as a child, wrote Franklin Roosevelt a letter in pencil asking for a picture of Alexander Hamilton on a dollar bill. President Roosevelt first arrived at the hotel in the eve of his first inauguration in March of 1932.
Mr. Franklin Roosevelt
President of the United States:
My good friend Roosevelt:
I don’t know very English, but I know as much as write to you.
I like to hear the radio, and I am very happy, because I heard in it, that you will be President for a new (periodo).
I am twelve years old. I am a boy but I think very much, but I do not think that I am writing to the President of the United States.
If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american in the letter, because never, I have not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them.
My address is:
Sr. Fidel Castro
Colegio de Dolores
Santiago de Cuba
Oriente Cuba
I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you don’t know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American.
Thank you very much
Good by. Your friend, Castro (signed)
Fidel Castro
If you want iron to make your ships I will show to you the bigest (minas) of iron in the land. They are in Mayorí, Oriente, Cuba.
Before the Mayflower floats off into the Beltway twilight. Let us remember it was there that, checking into Suite 776, Roosevelt penned his historic “Four Freedoms” speech, designed to neutralize the fears many Americans felt as they experienced the Great Depression. Freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear.”
To be continued…
