Oscar of the Waldorf

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Text originally published in 1943 under the same title.

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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OSCAR OF THE WALDORF

BY

KARL SCHRIFTGIESSER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

FOREWORD 5

INTRODUCTION 7

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 12

CHAPTER ONE 13

CHAPTER TWO 18

CHAPTER THREE 30

CHAPTER FOUR 40

CHAPTER FIVE 45

CHAPTER SIX 51

CHAPTER SEVEN 59

CHAPTER EIGHT 63

CHAPTER NINE 73

CHAPTER TEN 80

CHAPTER ELEVEN 88

CHAPTER TWELVE 93

CHAPTER THIRTEEN 100

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 111

CHAPTER FIFTEEN 118

CHAPTER SIXTEEN 124

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 129

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 138

CHAPTER NINETEEN 147

CHAPTER TWENTY 153

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 157

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 164

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 167

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR 170

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE 178

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 184

FOREWORD

By

OSCAR TSCHIRKY

I CAN’T for the life of me recall when it was first suggested to me, Oscar, you should write a book. It must have been years and years ago.

I did write a book once, and it had strange consequences. It was a cook book which I compiled about forty years ago from the recipes of some of the most famous chefs New York has ever known. I was looking at it the other day. Sometime, when the world is again at peace and rationing is a thing of the past, I think that many an amateur cook might find it of value. But the result of that book has been that for years and years people who didn’t know me thought me to be a chef. Not that being a chef isn’t something to be proud of, but it did give me a title I never really earned.

While I may have been instrumental in adding a little of this and a little of that to a dish to make it more palatable, I’ve actually never cooked anything more difficult to prepare than a plate of scrambled eggs. Well, maybe I’ve grilled a steak or made a kidney stew up in the country occasionally. For more than fifty years I have served the masterpieces of some of the best chefs in the world and I have planned many feasts truly fit for the gods. But I’ve never really cooked any part of them.

What I have done from the day of my arrival in this great country, is to be a hotel man. That’s title enough for me and one that I am very proud to hold. My life has been one continuous trek between the chef, the kitchen, and the dining room, with many a detour to the other parts of the house. If you must have a word for it, the best I can offer is maître d’hôtel.

Being a hotel man has been more than my job. It has been my profession. My work in the old Hoffman House, at Delmonico’s, in the old Waldorf, and in the Waldorf-Astoria, ever since the hyphen was inserted, has been my life. I have enjoyed—perhaps I should say, loved—every single minute of it.

Now that the story of my life is in your hands and you have been let in on the secret that I’ve never really been a chef, I wonder if this book, as happened with the cook book, is going to result in my acquiring some new undeserved title.

I hesitated a long time before I allowed this story to be written, but I realize that this is not so much a story of my life as of the good old days and the people and events that made those days so good. And, as such, I hope it brings you pleasure.

I believe I have seen as much of life as almost anyone of my generation. Elsewhere in these pages you will read of those I have seen and known and watched and served and loved. Some are people long forgotten. Some are people never well known. Others were famous—are still famous. When I started gathering the material for this book, sat down and put my mind to the past, I fully realized what a great panorama of history has actually passed before me.

I came to this country as a very young man and became a citizen almost overnight. I love the America I have known, the America that for fifty years has made New York the center of its life. I have actually seen it grow up. Of course, America had been here a long time—but not the America you see today.

The physical changes, the political changes, the shifts in moral values—all these I have observed from perhaps as good a spot as any man. I have had the advantage of standing at an international crossroad where men from all lands came to exchange goods and ideas and plan the world changes which I have later seen come to pass. All this has not only been exciting living but has in itself been a liberal education and a great privilege given to few men to enjoy.

Here I will not dwell on details. Here I will not talk of the Bradley Martin Ball, the luscious feasts, the great receptions, the historic speeches which I have witnessed. Here I won’t speak of the great builders of America, the soldiers, the financiers, the statesmen, the presidents I have known and admired. They are in the following pages. They are there because they were in the hotels with which I have so long been associated and which have been my home and my world so long. Some I knew well, better than their own associates. Others were to me, as to you or your father, just public figures. But at least I saw them and served them, a humble man doing his job and trying, twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, to do it as best I knew how and as I was encouraged to do by George C. Boldt.

I have seen many good years go by since I first stepped ashore in New York and was led, gaping, to my first American home. I know that Lillian Russell, John W. Gates, Diamond Jim Brady, Ned Stokes are only names today. I know that better times will come again, but in terms of the past, I think that I have seen the best. New York has changed. America has changed. Even I have changed, for I am now able to go to my farm every Thursday, and, for the first time in my life, relax and enjoy a weekend of rest.

I like to look back—yes—back on the best; on years when life was gay and happy. People then had more time and they loved to eat and drink and enjoy themselves; they came to me, because they knew that my name meant that they would have the best there was to be had.

If this story recalls the years that I regard as the best and the men and women, great and small, whom I have known, then perhaps it wasn’t a bad idea at long last to follow the advice of a friend who said; Oscar, you should write a book.

INTRODUCTION

By

FRANK CROWNINSHIELD

THE FIGURE which we now know as ‘Oscar," has seemingly assumed proportions beyond those of a mortal man; those not of a demi-god, perhaps, but certainly of a national symbol, a personage representing, and recalling, a happier, richer and, alas, bygone day.

That Oscar’s fame has become so pronounced is due, in part, to the fact that he stands as a bridge between the fragrant and romantic Nineties—days of charm and almost Arcadian simplicity—and the present, war-swept Forties, a period not only confused, but tragical and full of the most disquieting implications.

But Oscar’s prestige also rests on qualities that are wholly within himself; that is to say, upon his tact, respect for order, incredible industry, sense of fair play and never changing good nature. He has, similarly, achieved renown because of his long and intimate connection with the Waldorf-Astoria, a hotel which, more than any other in history, managed to influence the manners, even the pattern of life of a goodly proportion of an entire people.

He has, of course, known everyone of consequence during the past fifty years; all the notables who have lived in, or visited, New York; writers, ambassadors, presidents, potentates, fashionable women and upstart millionaires. He has seen the rise and decline of many a portentous hostess, of fashionable clubs, rich collections of art, extravagant racing stables, and an infinite number of swollen private fortunes. He can well and justifiably look back over his long career and declare that he had not only witnessed but helped direct the début of America into the great world.

Readers of this biography will do well to remember that, in 1891, when the building of the Waldorf actually began, and when Oscar received his first overtures from William Waldorf (later, Viscount) Astor, there was not, in all America, such a thing as a motor car, a radio, an airplane, a wireless telegraph, a motion-picture theatre, a golf course, a fashionable cabaret, or a game of bridge. Nor were cocktails ever seen in private homes; or divorces tolerated in society; nor did women smoke, or wear dresses above their ankles.

We might remember, too, that, in those far-off days, Tiffany’s was on Union Square and Park Avenue, a noisy, narrow, smoke-laden and unfashionable thoroughfare known as Fourth Avenue; and that cotillions, mazourkas, the lancers, and even an occasional quadrille, were features of the smartest balls. Also that there were only ten theatres in the city that were patronized by well-bred people.

Furthermore—and this is a significant point—the best hotels of that period—the Hoffman House, at 25th Street, (where Oscar had begun his career) and the other hotels with which the Waldorf was so soon to do battle—the Cambridge, the Albemarle, the Fifth Avenue, the Victoria, the Holland House, the Brunswick and the Buckingham, had never been thought of as social centers at all; hotels, in those days, being regarded only as convenient and orderly places in which to eat and find lodgings. There was never a thought of giving a smart dinner party in them, a late supper, a dance, a concert, or an elaborate reception. Indeed, the hotels of that time were not in any way equipped to render that kind of service.

But Waldorf Astor, in planning and completing his hotel, must certainly have guessed that the nineties were to usher in an altogether new social era; that an extraordinary growth was to take place in the ranks of society itself; that a quicker tempo would infect it; that the two smartest clubs in New York—the Knickerbocker, at 32nd Street, and the Union, at 21st Street—would soon be challenged by many rivals; that the opera would take on added importance; that footmen in knee breeches would appear on the scene, along with gold dinner plates, golf links, coaching parades, tigers in livery, and a goodly group of new theatres, jewelers, private stables, restaurants, art galleries, race tracks, and country dubs. Furthermore, he must have foreseen that a horde of new millionaires—bankers, railroaders, miners from the West, magnates in oil, copper and steel—springing up on all sides, like mushrooms after rain, would demand a place in New York where they could entertain on something like a princely scale.

By the end of 1896 (before its sister hotel, the Astoria, had opened its doors) the Waldorf had become the smartest hotel in America; a place where the most important people in New York habitually foregathered. It had not only managed to house a great variety of foreign dignitaries, but had been generally accepted as the most authentic arena for fashionable concerts, suppers, and entertainments of an elaborate order.

To accomplish all that, it had been forced, with Oscar’s friendly aid, to break down many prejudices against hotels in general, particularly as places in which to feast and dance. (The same prejudices had existed in all the capitals of Europe until César Ritz finally overcame them at the old Savoy, in London.)

As early as the autumn of 1893, indubitably smart ladies in New York were gathering daily for luncheon in the Waldorf’s famous Palm Room, a glassed-in chamber zealously watched over by Oscar—fifty years younger then than now. Such ladies were aided and abetted in their efforts by such popular and attractive bachelors as Elisha Dyer, Harry Lehr, Worthington Whitehouse, Center Hitchcock, Woodbury Kane, Richard Peters, James Cutting, Edward Bulkeley, and Winthrop Rutherford, all of whom played their part in making the Palm Room (with its famous red plush rope, to bar out the unworthy—the first such device to be seen in America) the most fashionable luncheon rendezvous in America.

But the social advances of the Waldorf went further. Ladies of the austerest social order soon began giving their dinners there; as for example, hostesses like Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Ogden Mills, Mrs. J. J. Astor, Mrs. Ogden Goelet, Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont, and, very particularly, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, a lady who was destined to knock what was left of Ward McAllister’s ceremonials into a cocked hat, and to do away with most of Mrs. William Astor’s pomps and flummeries. At the beginning, those exalted hostesses dined in formal hats and somewhat severe dresses, usually before going to the theatre, but as time went on, they appeared in the two Palm Rooms (the Astoria had at once copied the Waldorf’s example), in low-neck dresses, without a sign of hats, and even, on occasions, wearing refulgent tiaras.

The Waldorf’s close relationship to fashionable society was completed when ladies of New York, who had no ballrooms of their own, began giving their cotillions there rather than at Delmonico’s, on 26th Street, or at the old Madison Square Garden. The vogue for such elaborate dances and suppers reached its height in New York, on February 19, 1897, when Mrs. Bradley Martin gave her memorable and widely criticized fancy dress ball in a great suite of rooms in the then newly erected Astoria.

It was that memorable dance, with its extravagant cotillion favors, its quadrille d’honneur, its spectacular and elaborate costumes, its great display of jewels, three bands of music, supper of terrapin and canvasback duck, and a breakfast served in the roseate light of dawn, that so set the moralists, preachers, and social commentators by the ears that they did not stop discoursing upon it for years.

When the old Waldorf was enjoying its greatest prestige, the smart men’s clubs were all below 34th Street. Few men had fortunes of more than a million dollars. Fifth Avenue and Central Park were dotted with smart coupés, victorias, landaus, and cabriolets. Any bachelor who went out persistently could drop in at the opera and know practically every woman in the boxes. Worth was the only French dressmaker one seemed to hear about Champagne—even the famous and incomparable vintage of 1884—sold for thirty-nine dollars a case. Club dues were a third of what they are today. On New Year’s Day, old ladies on Fifth Avenue hung out little baskets on their door-bells in which their friends could deposit cards of salutation. The farmers from Long Island still weighed their hay on the scales in front of Cooper Union. A good seven-room apartment near Fifth Avenue rented for a hundred a month, while a butler’s monthly wages hovered around seventy dollars.

But that happy period, so full of beauty and colour, even of substance and dignity, is, alas, no more. It has vanished along with the hansom cab, the horses in tandem, the old ports and Madeiras, the gilded cotillion favors, the Chopin waltzes, the satin dresses with long trains, the orris-scented sachets, and the clattering parades of four-in-hands along the entire reach of Fifth Avenue.

Let us remember that over that entire and now regrettably vanished period, as well as over the forty less glamourous years that were to follow it, Oscar Tschirky—still en evidence though but three years short of eighty—presided with tact and dignity. From the day he landed in America—which was the day he got his first job—he has proved himself a citizen of worth, honour and usefulness.

The golden age of America would have lost much of its glamour if Oscar had not been there to decorate it.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Oscar of the Waldorf, by Paul Trebilcock. This painting hangs in the Waldorf-Astoria

Oscar’s mother

Oscar and his future wife, at the time they met

Oscar and Sophie Bertisch at the time of their marriage

A picture of their two sons, Leopold (left) and August

Site of the original Waldorf, 1894

The Waldorf in the spring of 1893

The Waldorf in May, 1929

Men’s Cafe of the Waldorf, 1893

Easter parade on Fifth Avenue, 1905

Roof garden of the Waldorf, 1911

Four generations of Oscar’s family

Oscar at the time of the Waldorf’s twenty-fifth anniversary, 1918

Oscar greeting President Harding

Auguste Escoffier, king of chefs, visits Oscar

Sampling the first shipment of beer after repeal, 1933

Drinking a toast to repeal in the Waldorf’s kitchens

Oscar greeting Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald, 1933

Oscar as he celebrated the hotel’s fortieth anniversary, 1933

Oscar shaking hands with Viscount William Waldorf Astor

Mrs. Roosevelt at the Waldorf

Unveiling of Paul Trebilcock’s portrait of Oscar, 1936

The Tschirkys and Dr. John Finley at the golden wedding banquet

Oscar leads Crown Princess Louise of Sweden and G. Hilmer Lundbeck

Oscar and Gloria Swanson at the birth of the Gloria Swanson cocktail

Oscar escorts Crown Prince Olav and Crown Princess Martha of Norway Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Ingrid of Denmark and Iceland

George McManus and Bugs Baer present Oscar with a cake

Oscar assists Mrs. Sarah Delano Roosevelt at the President’s Birthday Ball, 1941

Oscar escorts Dr. Manuel Prado, President of Peru

The Men’s Bar in the Waldorf-Astoria of today

Peacock Alley today

Oscar looks over menus with Chef Gabriel Lugot

Lucius Boomer, Waldorf president, presents Oscar with a silver service

Oscar as he looked on his seventy-fifth birthday, September 28, 1941

CHAPTER ONE

ONE DAY early in the spring of 1883 Father Tschirky came home from his office in the ancient Swiss town of Chaux-de-Fonds and, after he had had his supper and the lamps were lit in the little stone house where he lived with his wife and younger son, Oscar, he drew a letter from the depths of his Prince Albert coat.

The woman and boy watching him knew at once it was from Brutus, Oscar’s brother ten years his senior, who had left the old clock-making center of Chaux-de-Fonds some seven years before. They were excited. Down in the village, whenever America was mentioned, it was spoken of as a land where the streets were paved with gold. Brutus did not exactly confirm this rumor, but what he had to say had a profound effect upon the little gathering. There was money for everybody in that land across the sea, he wrote, and a wonderful life for everyone who crowded the great city of New York.

As Oscar remembers that night—and what immigrant ever forgets the moment when so portentous a decision is made?—it was his mother, a kindly woman with an artist’s imagination, who first spoke the thought uppermost in the minds of all three. They were seated at the marble-topped table in the little room. She rose, walked to the window, stared out at the lights being lit in the purple twilight of the Alpine village. Then, turning to her husband, she said: Father, I think we too should go to America.

He looked at her a moment and then a slow smile spread over his face.

I am glad you think so, he said, for that’s exactly what I decided we were going to do as soon as affairs can be arranged. You and Oscar will go first, and I shall follow as soon as I can.

Oscar, who was pretending to study his English grammar while this brief but fateful conversation took place, ran to his mother across the small room, incredulity written on his fresh, seventeen-year-old face.

Mother-Father! Do you mean that? We are going to America? Just like Brutus?

His mother smiled and nodded.

Yes, Oscar, we’re going to go to America and live with your brother in that great land of plenty where we can have everything we’ve always wanted.

That night was the beginning of Oscar’s career as beloved servitor and counselor to the great and near great of this world.

Oscar was not born in the bustling village of Chaux-de-Fonds, where industrious Swiss artisans have made clocks and watches ever since Jean Richard put the first clock together in 1605. His birth occurred in the smaller