The Secret Life of the Savoy by Olivia Williams

Author:Olivia Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

These days London hotels are not so popular among Londoners themselves, but plenty of locals back then used the Savoy habitually. Many were angling to bump into people they knew. As old members of staff reminisce, it was more of a club than a hotel. The sociable founder of a venerable accountancy firm, William McLintock, knew how to network, as we would now call it. Accordingly, he ‘loved the limelight’ and ‘held court’ at the Savoy, hovering about on the lookout for clients or potential employees. McLintock and other businessmen brokering deals over lunch, earned the Grill Room the nickname of the ‘bosses’ canteen’.5 One shareholders’ meeting ventured that the nickname should be ‘the brain exchange’, for all of the ideas, agreements and enterprises being discussed.6

Other patrons were far less productive but just as regular. Twenty-two-year-old Richard Beaumont, whose family were the hereditary rulers of the tiny Channel Island of Sark, explained his routine in the 1930s: ‘You get up at twelve, breakfast on a champagne cocktail. There’s a cocktail party at six, then dinner, a theatre, supper and a night club. You go to bed about three.’ Beaumont added that his friends ‘live on credit. They are always borrowing, always in debt’.7 The idle rich were good for the hotel – as long as their cheques did not bounce, as Beaumont’s often did.

Wealthy actor-director Sir Gerald du Maurier and his wife, actress Muriel Beaumont (no relation of Richard Beaumont), treated it as a change of scene from their mansion in Hampstead. They brought their daughters, Angela, Jeanne and future novelist Daphne, to eat out with their thespian friends. At the Savoy and Claridge’s, Daphne and her sisters enjoyed dances, first night parties, lunches and dinners, interspersed with their holidays abroad. However, Sir Gerald’s back taxes caught up with him and by 1929 the Inland Revenue were in hot pursuit. Although he did not smoke them himself, as he preferred his unfiltered, to pay his monster tax bill, he lent his distinctive surname to Du Maurier cigarettes. The company partly chose him for his name but also for his on-stage smoking.

According to Daphne, if an actor approached a scene energetically, her father would immediately direct him to tone it down. He would ask, ‘Must you kiss her as though you were having steak and onions for lunch? It may be what you feel but it’s damned unattractive from the front row of the stalls. Can’t you just say, “I love you”, and yawn, and light a cigarette and walk away?’ This nonchalance was how Du Maurier approached all of his plays. His languid signature cigarette at moments of high emotional tension made him an ideal brand ambassador.

For every Evelyn Waugh, H. G. Wells, Alfred Hitchcock or Presidents Wilson or Eisenhower, there were hundreds of hangers-on angling to be in their aura. In the Restaurant, clientele were unkindly described by one magazine as ‘a few truly smart people and a crowd of well-dressed non-entities’.8 As well as non-entities there were also hacks.

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