Carefully chosen for the perfection of their figures, they were all the same height, with long shapely legs. Their laughter was punctuated by the clicking of their high-heeled shoes and the swishing of their daringly short skirts. A piano was playing and someone was singing.
A bellhop wove through the pockets of guests with a silver salver. ‘Madame Arpeggio,’ he called loudly. ‘Madame Arpeggio.’ The air smelled of brass polish, cigar smoke, and the lush, overripe sweetness of fresh-cut tiger lilies.
Eva watched as a small, round woman dressed entirely in black, her head crowned with a velvet turban fastened with a large ruby brooch, entered with a pair of enormous shaggy grey Irish wolfhounds. Their black leather collars were studded with pearls.
Instantly one of the doormen brought them water in china bowls, which they lapped loudly, creating puddles on the marble floor, while their mistress paused to light a cigarette and check her messages at reception.
‘Who’s that?’ Eva was so fascinated, she forgot about her resolution not to speak.
‘No one really.’ Sis sniffed. ‘Some filthy Prussian countess. Never bathes and doesn’t take those dogs out nearly as much as she ought to. Her room smells like a zoo. They’ve already changed the carpet once.’
The girls watched as she turned, and proceeded at a regal pace towards the elevator.
‘Thing is,’ Sis confided, ‘all the important people here look ordinary and the really fancy ones are usually broke or on the make. I’ll tell you, you’re in an upside-down world now,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Takes a while, but you’ll get used to it.’
Eva shared a room with Sis in the attic eaves of the building; it had a basin in one corner, a shallow closet and two narrow single beds. The window looked into the light well of the tall building opposite and the alleyway below. There was no view of the sky.
Not that it mattered. Both girls were up at six and eating in the lower kitchen, which also served as a staff canteen, by six-thirty. Then they stood in line waiting for Mrs Ronald to inspect their uniforms and appearance.
Eva had successfully managed to take her uniform in; however, the gauzy white apron and cap were still too big, bordering on ridiculous. It was a fine line between hiring girls who would not excite notice among the guests and making sure that they matched Mrs Ronald’s inner vision of the overall chic of the establishment. So Eva was assigned the less desirable lower floors, in the hopes that she would grow another few inches over the summer.
After inspecting the girls’ hair and nails, Mrs Ronald briefed them as to which guests were checking in and which were checking out that day, along with any special preferences.
These included the actress who required black velvet curtains hung in her suite so that she could sleep during the day and whose room must only be serviced at night, when she was on stage at the Ziegfeld Follies a block away. And the movie producer who had a horror of anything which had been used by other people; his bed, mattress and bedclothes had to be replaced, new each time he came and the sheets were to be washed separately from those of the other guests, a duty which he only trusted Mrs Ronald to perform (but which she regularly passed off to one of the other girls).
Then there were the more common requests: extra ice buckets, satin sheets, special requests for certain types of flowers – hothouse roses and gardenias were the most popular. Some guests requested that there be no paintings or artwork in their rooms while others couldn’t bear certain colours and had them banished from sight. Imported foods were provided at vast expense – chocolates from Paris, fresh pineapples from Mexico, black tea from India, and thick, long Cuban cigars. Extra pianos were delivered almost daily, as were exotic pets, new automobiles and hunting guns; and police guarded vans carrying jewellery, which was stored in the vaulted hotel safe.
Dance floors were installed so that stage stars could practise their routines, furniture removed, massage tables and exercise equipment set up. One week the entire Grand Ballroom was turned into a championship boxing ring when Jack Dempsey was fighting Jack Sharkey at Yankee Stadium.
Guests frequently brought their own staff as well. Extra valets and ladies’ maids hovered on the edges of the lobby, unsure of their place outside the dominion of their home-land. Not quite guests and yet not quite servants when their employers departed for the day, they were often both suspicious of and intoxicated by their new-found freedom.
The city itself had a dangerous effect on their normally restrained personalities. More than once they lost not only their heads, but their positions as well.
There was the valet who was found to be posing as his employer, the Prince of Wales, who ran up enormous gambling debts in Harlem before being discovered in flagrante with a black prostitute in his master’s bed. And the lady’s maid who had never tasted alcohol before and yielded to temptation, only to wake up somewhere near the waterfront next to an Italian dock worker who politely informed her, in broken English, that they were married and he would like to claim his conjugal rights.