by Roger Ebert
18 EYRIE MANSION
IN 2009 I learned that they tore down 22 Jermyn Street in London. The whole block went. Bates’s hat shop, Trumper the barber, Getti the Italian restaurant, the Jermyn Street Theatre, Sergios café, the lot. Jermyn Street was my street in London. My neighborhood. There, on a corner near the Lower Regent Street end, I found a time capsule where the eccentricity and charm of an earlier time was preserved. It was called the Eyrie Mansion. When I stayed there I considered myself to be living there. I always wanted to live in London, and that was the closest I ever got.
Many years ago I was in London and cramped into a hotel room so small they had to store my empty luggage elsewhere on the premises. I could sit on the bed and rest my forehead against the wall opposite. Fed up, I walked out one fine Sunday morning to find a better hotel, but just as inexpensive. Nostalgically I returned to Russell Square, where I had gone on my first visit to the great city in 1961, steered by Europe on $5 a Day. On the first trip I found a room and full English breakfast for £2.50 a night. You might think it a shabby hovel. I was deliriously happy. I stayed up half the night writing a letter to Edna O’Brien, an Irish novelist I had a crush on. “Here I am in a cheap hotel near Russell Square,” I wrote, “writing this letter in the middle of the night.” Those words alone would convince her of my romantic genius. Alas, that long-ago hotel had been replaced by a monstrosity. I skulked around the square at a loss about where to look next and recalled that Suzanne Craig, a Chicago friend of mine, once informed me, “If you like London so much, you should stay at the Eyrie Mansion in Jermyn Street.”
“A haunted house?”
“No, stupid. Spelled like an eagle’s nest. And Jermyn isn’t spelled like the country, either.”
I took the Tube from Russell Square to Piccadilly and surfaced to find backpackers sprawled on the steps of Eros, still asleep after their Saturday night revels. One block down Regent and right on Jermyn and I found a small sign over the sidewalk above a doorway. It opened upon a marble corridor pointing me to a man who regarded me from a horribly scarred face. The gatekeeper of the Eyrie. He disappeared. When I drew abreast I found he was now behind a wooden counter protecting an old-fashioned switchboard, a thick ledger, and a wall of pigeonholes.
“How may I help you, sir?”
“Is this… a hotel?”
“Since 1685, I believe. And you require a room?” He spoke in a Spanish accent.
“How much are your rates?”
He consulted a card tacked to the wall.
“For you, sir, thirty-five pounds. That includes full English breakfast, parlor and bedroom, own gas fire and maid service. Bath en suite.”
The rate was half of what I was paying. I asked to be shown a room. He locked the street door. We ascended in an open ironwork elevator and I was let into 3-A. The living room had tall old windows overlooking Jermyn Street, a dark antique sideboard, a desk, a chest of drawers, a sofa facing the fireplace, two low easy chairs, tall mirrors above the fire and the sideboard. He used a wooden match to light the gas under artificial logs.
A short hallway led to a bedroom in which space had been found for two single beds, a bedside table between them, an armoire, a chest, a small vanity table, and another gas fireplace. In the bathroom was enthroned the largest bathtub I had ever seen, even in the movies. The fixtures were not modern; the water closet had an overhead tank with a pull-chain.
“This is larger than I expected,” I said. “How many rooms does the hotel have in all?”
“Sixteen.”
When I’d moved my luggage in, it was still only ten o’clock and I rang down for the full English breakfast. The Spaniard said he would prepare it himself as soon as possible “because Bob is indisposed.” He appeared with two fried eggs, a rasher of bacon, four slices of toast in an upright warmer, butter, strawberry jam, a pot of brewed tea, and orange juice. I sat at my table, regarded my fire, poured my tea, turned on Radio 3, and read my Sunday Telegraph. For twenty-five years I was to come to 22 Jermyn Street time and again. Now I can never return. Some obscene architectural extrusion will rise upon the sacred land, some eyesore of retail and condos. Piece by piece, this is how a city dies. How many cities can spare a hotel built in 1685, the year James II took the crown?
I will barely be able to bring myself to return to Jermyn Street, which is, shop for shop, the finest street in London. When I approach it again I will have to enter from Piccadilly by walking down through the Piccadilly Arcade and not from Lower Regent Street. I can still attend a lunchtime concert at St. James’s, or call in at Turnbull & Asser the haberdashers, Paxton & Whitfield the cheesemongers, Wiltons the restaurant, and Waterstone’s the bookstore, but I cannot and will not ever again walk past 22 Jermyn Street. The address will be dead.
That first morning I walked down Regent to St. James’s Park, strolled around the ponds, came up by Prince Charles’s residence, climbed St. James’s Street, and returned the full length of Jermyn. I ordered tea. It consisted of tomato, cucumber, and butter sandwiches, which the English are unreasonably fond of; ham and butter sandwiches with Colman’s English Mustard; and biscuits. The tea was freshly brewed. I never saw a tea bag on the premises. I’d ordered Lapsang souchong, which has the aroma of a freshly tarred road at one hundred yards. I find this aroma indescribably stirring. When I smell it I am walking through the twilight in Cape Town to visit my friend Brigid Erin Bates.
I had settled in my easy chair when a key turned in the lock and a nattily dressed man in his sixties let himself in. He held a bottle of Teacher’s scotch under his arm. He walked to the sideboard, took a glass, poured a shot, and while filling it with soda from the siphon, asked me, “Fancy a spot?”
“I’m afraid I don’t drink,” I said.
“Oh, my.”
This man sat on my sofa, lit a cigarette, and said, “I’m Henry.”
“Am I… in your room?”
“Oh, no, no, old boy! I’m only the owner. I dropped in to say hello.”
This was Henry Togna Sr. He appears in a Dickens novel I haven’t yet read. He had a drink in my room almost every afternoon when I stayed at the Eyrie Mansion. It was not difficult to learn his story. Henry and his wife, Doddy, lived in the roof-top flat. He may have been the only man ever to live all of his life within a block of Piccadilly Circus. The Mansion was originally purchased in 1915 by his parents, who came from Italy, and Doddy’s parents, who were English. The two children grew up together, married, and fathered Henry Jr., “who keeps his irons in a lot of fires.” He asked me how I learned of the Eyrie Mansion. “Oh, yes! Suzanne! A lovely girl!” He discovered I worked for the Chicago Sun-Times. “You must be joking. Tom Buck stays here. He’s from the Tribune, you know.” Henry told me that the Spaghetti House on Jermyn served a sole meunière not to be equaled.
I was usually in London three times a year: in midwinter, in May after Cannes, and in summer. Henry was naturally confiding and cheerfully indiscreet. That first day he lamented that Bob had gone missing when I wanted my breakfast. “Bob is a great trouble to me,” he said. “He gets drunk every eighth day. I have implored him to make out a seven-day schedule and stick to it, but no. He will not be content unless he is throwing us off.”
“I was well taken care of by the man who checked me in,” I said.
“Poor fellow. He was a famous jockey in Spain. His face was burned in a stable fire while he tried to help his horses. He was one of those handsome Spanish boys. He was in a movie once by Buñuel. A film critic like yourself must have heard of him.”
“Oh, I have,” I said. “I wonder which film?”
“You’ll never get that out of him,” Henry said. “Nor will he tell you his real name. He says he’s hiding out here, working overnights, when there’s so little traffic because we lock the street door at midnight. He doesn’t want to be seen or allow anyone in Spain to learn where he’s gone.”
I began to think of Jermyn Street as Ampersand Street. On Jermyn Street you will find Turnbull & A
sser, where Saul Bellow bought his shirts. You will find Paxton & Whitfield, with its window stacked with cheeses. Ian Nairn, in his Nairn’s London, lists only one shop in London, and that is the shop. You will also find Fortnum & Mason, where you can lunch at the Fountain or wander in the food hall, stacked to the ceiling with anchovies, rare coffees, Oxford marmalade, Scottish shortbreads, caviar, Westphalian ham, and tins of inedible imported biscuits. Down the street are Sims, Reed & Fogg, the antiquarian booksellers. And of course Hilditch & Key, Harvie & Hudson, Russell & Bromley, Crockett & Jones, New & Lingwood, Thomas Pink, all shirt sellers. In the UK Jermyn Street is synonymous with shirts and shoes.
There are shops without ampersands as well. Until it was replaced by Waterstone’s the booksellers, there was Simpsons of Piccadilly, where they held a sale every January and marked down everything but the umbrellas. Dunhill, where they never have a sale on anything. Church’s English shoes. DAKS and the Burberry store, which always had its impeccably restored 1920s delivery truck parked at the curb. Floris the perfumers. Davidoff the tobacconist, where Churchill and James Bond stored their Cubans in the locked humidor. Next door to the hotel, there is Bates Gentlemen’s Hatter, with a big top hat hanging over the sidewalk. This was one place where you knew for sure you could find a bowler, a deerstalker, or a collapsible opera topper. They have had the same cat for fifty years (although it has been stuffed and with a cigar in its mouth for most of that time). Next to Bates is Geo. F. Trumper, the men’s hairdressers.
I make it a practice to get my hair cut in every city where possible. Near the Eyrie I went first to Georgio’s, a one-chair Greek barbershop in a mews off Duke Street. One day I followed the archbishop of Canterbury into his chair. In the basement of Simpsons, I had my hair cut in the chair next to the former prime minister Edward Heath. Jermyn is that kind of street. Finally I graduated to Trumper, a magnificent haven of brass and leather, wood and mirrors, and the aroma of hair tonics with exotic spices. An aged retainer knelt at my feet unbidden to shine my shoes. He discovered I was from Chicago.
“Chicago!” he said. “Do you know Barbra Streisand, sir?”
I said I did not.
“Do you like the way she sings? I do!”
I said I did as well.
“Can you sing like her? Could you? Do you think you would?”
Around the corner from Jermyn on St. James’s is D. R. Harris the chemist, the oldest chemist in London, by appointment to H.R.H. the Prince of Wales. Miss Brown has been there for years, and I have always wanted to ask her for tea. There I buy a pot of their Arlington shaving cream, Wilberg’s Pine Bath Essence, Eucryl Freshmint Toothpowder, and a transparent bar of Pears soap. I remain suspicious of D. R. Harris’s famous Pick-Me-Up, an elixir still prepared from the 1850 recipe.
Long ago I read a book called The Toys of a Lifetime, by Arnold Gingrich, the founder of Esquire. In it he writes of his acquired tastes in clothing, automobiles, furniture, music, books, gloves, ties, aftershaves, and on and on. He spent a great deal of time on the ritual of shaving. All I had ever used was lime Barbasol from a can and a Gillette blade. But some Gingrichian impulse came stealing forward in Trumper’s and Harris’s. In their windows were elaborate displays of razors, brushes, and creams. No foam. They sold traditional hard shaving soaps, which my father always used, favoring Mennen. And tubes and pots of soft creams. “You put just a little dab on your hand, wet it, and apply it,” Miss Brown explained. “All that foam in a can holds the blade too far off the skin.” She had so many flavors to choose from. Rose, lavender, lime, hazelwood, almond, and Harris’s signature Arlington. I bought a pot and shaved myself while sitting in the Wilberg’s bright green pine water in my tub at the Mansion, with Radio 3 floating in from the living room. Miss Brown had spoken the truth. I’d never had a closer shave. One pot lasted me for months. It came in tubes for traveling. This was the beginning of my life as a toiletries fetishist. I came home with Harris’s After Shaving Milk, a proper styptic pencil, a pot of their shampoo, which would do me for weeks, their Scalp Tonic, their bone-handled razors, and their Arlington bar soaps, which came in large, larger, and big enough to break a toe.
A block from the Eyrie was the Red Lion, reckoned by Nairn to be the last pub in London he could do without, with the best pub interior, crystal and cut glass everywhere, thrown back on itself by the mirrored walls. If you turn off Jermyn and stroll down Duke or Old Bond Street, you will be in the heart of a district that has harbored art galleries since the eighteenth century; Spink’s is down that way, and Peter Nahum, and the Appleby Bros., and Chris Beetles the watercolor expert with his muttonchops. I especially liked walking down Jermyn Street during cold and rainy January days. In the early dusk the lights from the shop windows reflected on the pavement. If the weather grew too foul, I could step into the Piccadilly Arcade, which runs from Jermyn Street up to Piccadilly. Nearby there was always a welcome at Christopher Wren’s St. James’s Piccadilly, which has the midday classical music concerts and usually has a jumble sale under way in its courtyard. The Wren at St. James was a coffee shop with excellent soups and breads, baked potatoes, and chocolate cake. It is a most wholesome place, almost next door to Tramp, the infamous private club.
Wiltons was the most elegant place on the street to have lunch. If you came in alone, you could sit at the counter and watch how thinly they could slice the Parma ham. On my first visit I ordered cold turkey and peaches. Cheap food and drink were to be found at Sergios, a hole-in-the-wall in Eagle Court, which served a perfect cappuccino with cinnamon sprinkled on top. Jules’ Bar was a popular place for Sloane Rangers and Hooray Henrys, who ordered expensive champagnes with their plates of baked beans on toast or bangers and mash. The bar at the Cavendish Hotel was dark and discreet, as it should be, since the original Cavendish witnessed the indiscretions of Rosa Lewis, the duchess of Duke Street.
“Did you know the duchess?” I asked Henry one day. Chaz and I had been honored by an invitation to have tea with Henry and Doddy, whose top-floor flat had a flowery veranda commanding a view all the way down to Westminster. “Everyone knew the duchess,” Henry said. “She was to be seen every day in St. James’s Square, walking her dogs, dressed in exquisite Edwardian fashions. Pity about the old Cavendish. The Germans got it with a bomb. During the war, it was well known that the Cavendish was the one place in London where you could find a girl or a drink any hour of the night.”
“Henry!” Doddy said. “You make it sound like a brothel!”
“Sex for cash, m’dear. That’s m’definition.”
Henry was an enthusiast on ribald matters. One day when I was single, he poured himself a drink and said, “Roger, my boy, I have the girl for you! Have you in your comings and goings seen the elegant brunette staying in 1-A, who is usually dressed in red? Rita Hayworth hair? High heels?”
“I don’t believe I have,” I said.
“Our countess from Argentina,” he said. “I want you to ask her out,” he said. “Theater, a nice dinner… she’s rich as Croesus, you know. You could do worse.”
“Is she looking for someone?”
“She must be. She comes here twice a year, always alone, never any company. What she needs is a young man to take her out, show her a good time. Never know what it might lead to. She has masses of time on her hands. She hardly leaves 1-A except to go to Harley Street for her shock treatments.”
Sometimes in walking about the area I would happen upon Henry, who knew everyone of any interest, from the maître d’ at Wiltons to the man with the Evening Standard kiosk behind St. James’s Piccadilly. I never saw Henry in a pub, however, and despite the visiting bottle of Teacher’s I never saw him tipsy. One day he invited me to lunch. We walked to a cozy French restaurant in a byway near Leicester Square. Customers waiting in line were ignored as we were seated immediately. We were shown to our banquette by a handsome Frenchwoman of a certain age, whose hand, I observed, lingered longer on his shoulder than one might have expected. Henry saw me notice, and his ey
es twinkled. He said nothing, but his eyebrows lifted to a minute degree, and if you hadn’t been looking for it, you would have missed the almost imperceptible nod of his head.
“Henry!” I said.
“My dear boy,” he said, “if you don’t flush out the pipes, they’ll run brown.”
Henry was much concerned about the future of the Mansion. “Our landlady is the queen,” he told me. “The Crown Estate agents have always tried to keep the lease terms reasonable, but the price of property is making alarming advances. I’ve raised my prices as much as I dare. Henry Junior wants to take over and make this a luxury hotel. Well, it’s in the blood. But it frightens me. What kinds of loans will he have to take out? How will he make the payments?” He brought Henry Junior around to meet me. This was a pleasant young man, friendly, confiding. He said he hoped to keep the charm of the Eyrie Mansion. “But at the prices I’ll be forced to charge, the public won’t stand for this,” he said, regarding the carpets frayed at the edges and the nicked furniture and staring balefully at the gas fireplace.
As it happened, the gas fire was one of my favorite features at the Eyrie. In jet-lagged winter mornings before dawn I’d awaken in a bone-cold flat, pull on warm clothes, and walk up to the newsagent on Piccadilly. I’d buy the Telegraph, Independent, Guardian, and Times, and a large cup of hot coffee from an all-night shop around the corner. With these I would return to the Mansion, tune in Radio 3, sit in my low easy chair before the fire, and dream wistfully that such was my life. The fire was never left to burn when unneeded; the maids saw to that. But it held promise of warmth after a brisk walk. Fires, I decided, were a source of heat, not merely, like central heating, its presence. There must be something deep within our memory as a species that is pleased by being able to look at what is making us warm.