The very last room completed in the Hopewell refurbishment of 1929 was the Empire Suite. J. Allen Raumenberg worked for weeks on its composition. It was perhaps here, in this hotel room, that he developed his concept of “bringing down the moon”—the principle that would guide the hundreds of Broadway and film sets he would design over the next twenty years.
Raumenberg felt that the most magical time of day was twilight, when the moon hung low and the sky split with color. He had his glassworks create a spectacular moonlike mirror, and he carefully manipulated shades of light and dark in all aspects of the design so that the room would “constantly appear to be suspended in that magical hour when the night is about to bloom and the curtains on every stage rise.”
Fittingly, the room’s first inhabitant was Clara Hooper, a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, and the mistress of a wealthy Wall Street banker. She was sitting at the dressing table in the Empire Suite looking into the moon mirror when she got a call saying that the stock market had just crashed. Hours later, her boyfriend vanished, never to return. She realized that the six dollars and forty-seven cents she had in front of her could now be the only money she had in the world. She certainly couldn’t pay the twelve dollars a night the room cost. She tossed her things out of the fourth-story window to a friend who waited in the street below, and then slipped out quietly during the night.
So from the start, the Empire Suite had a strong (if somewhat dubious) connection to the theater world…
—J. ALLEN RAUMENBERG: DESIGNER FOR AN AGE
THE INHABITANT
“How do you write a life?” Mrs. Amberson asked from the window of the Empire Suite. “The tangled web. So many stories…”
She blew some smoke up. It floated back down and settled around her head, like a halo of smog.
“I feel like we’re missing something,” she said.
Words, Scarlett thought. Words, on a page, written by you. That’s what we’re missing.
But she sighed to herself and said nothing. She just absently read her e-mails from her friends. It looked like work—not that there was any work to do.
There were lots of updates, as usual.
Dakota’s French was good enough now that she got through an entire day in Paris speaking no English at all. Chloe had accidentally backhanded one of her ten-year-olds in the head with a tennis racket…but otherwise she was good. She had stopped dating the first guy and moved on to another, and already had eyes on a third. Hunter had gone to LA for the day and had gotten to go on the Paramount lot. Josh had about twenty new English friends, and they tended to spend their weekends partying in London or going off to the country to push each other off small boats called “punts” into shallow water.
Two weeks. That’s how long it had been. Two weeks, and they all had new lives and impressive achievements. And she’d been here with Mrs. Amberson, waiting for her to get one cohesive thought together for this book.
There had been plenty of writing preparation. They’d gone shopping at the Montblanc store on Madison Avenue, where Mrs. Amberson spent several hundred dollars on two pens—one fountain, one ballpoint—and a pot of ink. They’d gone and spent a few hundred more on notebooks from some imported Parisian papermaker. There was the ergonomic yoga support pillow that was supposed to induce creativity. The multiple trips to various health food and Asian grocery stores for teas, herbs, dried plums, some seaweed in a bag, organic coffee, special water…
In fact, Scarlett had never been so busy doing so much nothing. Between the shopping, the endless walks Mrs. Amberson needed to “feel out the city again,” the days spent in bookstores picking up books on how to write, the lunches, locating all of the services Mrs. Amberson required…Scarlett had had almost no time to herself.
“It’s hard to know where to begin,” Mrs. Amberson mused.
Scarlett could take it no more.
“What did you do?” she finally snapped.
“Do? What? For money?”
Scarlett nodded. That was a good start. This direct questioning was effective.
“My very first job was at the Round the Clock Diner,” Mrs. Amberson said. “I got that by lying and saying I had been a waitress for three years in Cleveland. I suppose that you could call that my first role. I played a New York waitress. I definitely didn’t know how to do the job when I started. I copied the walk, the way of speaking. After a few weeks, I was the toughest waitress they had. In fact, I was a little too good at being a New York waitress. I scared some people. So I refined it a bit and took the act uptown, to the All Hours Diner. And while I was there, I started picking up shifts at the Ticktock.”