HE’S GOT NO RESERVATIONS
Michael Colby grew up at famed NYC hotel and has tales to tell of stars who stayed there
‘MARILYN Monroe used to come in at lunchtime and get a Beefeater martini,” says Michael Colby, striding past the bar in the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street. And it was just down the street, on Fifth Avenue, that his grandmother once spotted Monroe wearing a white mink coat.
“If you think that’s something,” the actress told her, perhaps after a few too many martinis, “you should see what’s underneath!”
Yes, Colby tells The Post, leaning against a portrait of hotel regular Tallulah Bankhead — his granny got flashed by Monroe. Then again, his grandma wasn’t just anyone: She was Mary Bodne, who, with her husband, Ben, owned the Algonquin from 1946 to 1987. For the future lyricist, now 66 and living in New Jersey, heaven was that hotel, where he spent his wonder years mingling with stars and the people who worked with them.
A few — a woman who was always freezing, a nefarious manager — inspired the characters in his 1982 musical, “Charlotte Sweet,” which is being revived for one night only, Tuesday, at Feinstein’s/54 Below.
Just don’t expect to find any mention of Matilda, the hotel’s famous feline.
“I’m allergic to cats,” Colby explains. But he does have a good reptile story.
Back when his father managed the hotel, he says, a maid heard a hissing sound coming from a guest’s suitcase. When she opened it, she found it filled with snakes. Terrified, she ran into the bathroom and there, in the bathtub, was an alligator. The guest and his menagerie were sent packing.
Another kind of snake inspired a character in “Charlotte Sweet”: producer Jed Harris, whom the Bodnes booted from their hotel for not paying his bills. “He was not a nice man,” Colby says. George S. Kaufman felt the same way. “When I die,” the playwright said, “I want to be cremated and have my ashes thrown in [his] face.”
But Harris seemed to be an exception. As Colby recalls now and in his 2015 memoir, “The Algonquin Kid,” many of the hotel’s writers, artists and actors were not only gracious but encouraging. He remembers Thornton Wilder as a kind of Santa Claus, so generous was he with his praise. Generous, but absentminded: The “Our Town” playwright once got into a cab someone hailed for him, only to realize his car was parked nearby.
Another family favorite was Ella Fitzgerald, who’d bring Chinese food back for the hotel staff after gigs, loved watching “All My Children” and, to young Michael’s delight, once burst into a song she’d heard from “that new show, ‘Chicago.’ ”
Long before Leonard Cohen became a Buddhist monk for a few years, Colby recalls how the late “Hallelujah” singer used to celebrate Hanukkah in his hotel room, with his children.
And then there was that other Alqonquin regular, Dorothy Hart. The sister-in-law and biographer of Lorenz Hart, the lyricist half of Broadway’s Rodgers and Hart, she was “a finicky woman” who, like a character in “Charlotte Sweet,” was constantly cold. “They once brought her a drink with two ice cubes,” Colby recalls. “She came down with double pneumonia!”