[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 42 (Thursday, April 6, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Page S2344]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                        IN MEMORY OF MARY BODNE

 Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, last month a former Charleston, 
SC resident and longtime friend, Mary Bodne, passed away at the age of 
93. She and her husband, Ben, a Charleston native, owned and operated 
the Algonquin Hotel in New York City for over 41 years. In honor of 
their dedication to historic preservation and their service to all of 
those who had the pleasure of staying at the Algonquin, I ask that the 
attached article from the New York Times be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

                [From the New York Times, Mar. 4, 2000]

          Mary Bodne, Ex-Owner of Algonquin Hotel, Dies at 93

                          (By Douglas Martin)

       Mary Bodne, who with her husband, Ben, fell in love with 
     the Algonquin Hotel on their honeymoon and later owned it for 
     41 years, died on Monday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. 
     She was 93.
       She lived at the elegant Midtown hotel, the literary 
     hangout of the Jazz Age, from 1946 until her death, spending 
     most afternoons in her lobby armchair greeting regulars.
       It all began when the Bodnes, newly married, lunched at the 
     Algonquin in the early 1920's and sighted Will Rogers, whom 
     they had seen the night before at the Ziegfeld Follies; 
     Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Sinclair Lewis, Eddie Cantor, Gertrude 
     Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie. The bride joked to her husband, 
     an oil distributor in Charleston, S.C., that after he bought 
     the baseball team he dreamed about, he should get her the 
     hotel.
       Although Mr. Bodne toyed with buying the Pittsburgh 
     Pirates, he never bought a ball club. But in 1946 he paid 
     around $1 million for the 200-room hotel at 59 West 44th 
     Street, between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas. 
     The couple promptly moved in.
       For the former Mary Mazo, the Algonquin was the final 
     address in an odyssey that began in Odessa, Ukraine, where 
     she was the second child in a large Jewish family that fled 
     the pogroms when she was an infant. A family story has it 
     that the baby Mary began to cry in an attic while Cossacks 
     rampaged below, but that she miraculously hushed up before it 
     was too late. It is said that Mrs. Bodne's later 
     loquaciousness was compensation for that momentary silence.
       The Mazo family immigrated to Charleston, where the father, 
     Elihu, opened the city's first Jewish delicatessen. When 
     George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward were working on ``Porgy 
     and Bess,'' they were frequent customers. They would also 
     discuss the creation of the show at dinners in the Mazo 
     family home.
       Decades later, the Mazo tradition of hospitality would 
     continue at the Algonquin. Mrs. Bodne cooked chicken soup for 
     an ailing Laurence Olivier. She baby-sat for Simone Signoret, 
     who called her ``one of my three truest friends.''
       Mrs. Bodne had a gift for acquiring house seats for sold-
     out Broadway shows for desperate friends. Ella Fitzgerald was 
     so grateful that she regularly sang to Mrs. Bodne whenever 
     she stayed at the hotel.
       The Irish writer Brendan Behan was so touched by a courtesy 
     that he declared, ``Mary, your son will live to be pope,'' 
     even though Mrs. Bodne was Jewish and had two daughters.
       The daughters, Renee Colby Chubet and Barbara Anspach, both 
     live in Manhattan. Mrs. Bodne is also survived by four 
     sisters: Annie Rabin and Celie Weissman, both of Manhattan, 
     and Minnie Meislin and Norma Mazo, both of Charleston.
       The Bodnes bought the Algonquin, built in 1902 in the 
     French Renaissance style, from Frank Case, who had catered to 
     writers and editors from The New Yorker and other nearby 
     publications. Among them were Dorothy Parker, Robert 
     Benchley, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber and Alexander 
     Woollcott. They gathered around several tables before 
     settling on the round one that became famous, not least 
     because of Mr. Case's knack for publicity.
       When he bought the hotel, Mr. Bodne, who enjoyed promoting 
     boxing matches, said he would not attempt to recreate Mr. 
     Case's role as boniface of the literati. But he said he 
     regarded the Algonquin as an investment and, as such, had no 
     intention of changing its essential character. So he kept the 
     mahogany panels and deep-pile carpeting, while adding such 
     amenities as color television and air-conditioning.
       The Bodnes ended up playing host to a new generation of 
     literary and show business celebrities, like the writer John 
     Henry Faulk when he was blacklisted and exiled from 
     Hollywood. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe made so much 
     noise working on a musical that the other guests complained; 
     the show was the hugely successful ``My Fair Lady.''
       Mr. Bodne, who died in 1992, had vowed that he would sell 
     the charmingly dowager hotel the day it needed self-service 
     elevators. He sold it in 1987 to the Aoki Corporation, the 
     Brazilian subsidiary of a Japanese corporation, which in a 
     1991 renovation installed self-service elevators.
       In 1997, Aoki sold the hotel to the Camberley Hotel 
     Company, which promptly did its own $4 million renovation, 
     promising no major changes. In an article in The New York 
     Times, Julie V. Iovine noted that the newsstand had been 
     sacrificed for space to sell coffee mugs, and that door 
     numbers had been replaced by plaques featuring remarks by the 
     famed Algonquin wits. The impression, she wrote, was ``self-
     consciousness verging on kitsch.''
       At a party celebrating the makeover, Mrs. Bodne sat on the 
     new velvet chair that had replaced her beloved old sagging 
     one. ``What I've seen looks very nice, but it will never look 
     like my old Algonquin now,'' she said. ``No, darling, I know 
     it will never be the same.''
       Except for the cat. Each owner of the Algonquin, including 
     the Bodnes, has kept a lobby cat. The current one is named 
     Matilda.

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