1) I went into the Athenaeum late this morning, thinking I could hunker down over a couple different ideas. But no such luck. I had only 50ish pages to go to finish This Crazy Thing Called Love, about Ann Woodward’s accidental killing of her husband Billy in 1955, and I was compelled to sweep through it. (Spoiler alert: eventually they all die, just as we all will, but it’s really all Truman Capote’s fault.)
1a) That led me back to a book I’d read some years ago, Cleveland Amory’s Who Killed Society? He had editorialized about the Woodwards at the time, considering them “Publi-ciety,” and much of that editorial ends up at the very end of Who Killed Society? Amory’s book, unjustly overshadowed by his The Proper Bostonians, examines the state of perpetual descent of American Society (with a capital S) — first by looking at America’s First Families region by region.
1a.i) The more colorful part of the book is his thorough indictment of several entities for the Killing of Society. Amory accuses almost everyone, from Murder in the First Degree (with deliberation, premeditation and malice aforethought): The Servant Problem, FDR, Hollywood, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (among others), through Manslaughter in the Second Degree (by any culpable negligence . . . ): The Newport Jazz Festival, the April in Paris Ball, and Gamble Benedict (whoever that is, among others). At least he explicitly spares John Roosevelt and Magda Gabor!
2) Last month I discovered that it costs as much for a club sandwich and a cup of coffee in the Parker House dining room as it does for a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee at the faux-Irish pub closer to the Athenaeum — and the tone is far more genteel. Indeed, since the True Ritz-Carlton (now known as the Newbury) seems to have eradicated any ghost of the original décor, this dining room might be Old Boston’s Last Stand.
2a) You know I love the Copley Plaza Bar, but after its transmogrification into the Oak Long Bar and Kitchen, it really cannot be called Old Boston.
2a.i) Of course there was a day when the Plaza was nouveau. When I was working at the Vendome in college, my friend Ken told me that in Days Gone By, his aunt, an antiques dealer, would come down for big antiques fairs at the Plaza — but she would stay at the Vendome.
3) Banned Books Week is coming to an end, which means it’s once again time to quote from Maurice Parmalee’s Nudism in Modern Life, the ban of which was overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1940: “It has taken almost eight years of litigation finally to obtain from a high court the full and complete vindication of this book against every charge of obscenity. The publishers of America know only too well that freedom of the press can only be secured by constant vigilance against every attempt in any wise to delimit or circumvent that freedom. It is the hope of the publishers that in this struggle for a basic American principle they have made a real and genuine contribution.”