The Last Hotel: The Baroness Josephine DuMonde

Saturday, December 15, 2007

The Baroness Josephine DuMonde

Beatrice Elizabeth Bonner was born into a prosperous Midwestern family who built their fortune in the early days of the oil industry boom. She studied dance at the best schools in Europe, making frequent academic trips to examine the dance customs of Asia and Micronesia, and while visiting Sydney, she fell in love with a young Australian anthropologist. In a strange twist of fate, he abandoned her during an excursion to Pitcairn's Island--where she was subsequently introduced to the Baron DuMonde.
At 23, Beatrice was a wealthy socialite and a serious student of dance, and the Baron was 50, an erudite, educated man of the world, a generous patron of the arts (and a covert financier of the American Communist Party) who had owned the original Troubador and later opened the Troubador Hotel, which eventually became the Hotel Ticonderoga. Beatrice sailed with the Baron to South America and they were married in Buenos Aires (where she was familiar to President and Mrs. Peron as "Josephine".) The DuMondes returned to the US and the Baroness (who was infertile) became involved with several children's charities. After the Baron's assassination by the CIA in 1957, the bereaved Baroness found solace in the arms of her deceased husband's younger half-brother, and a minor media frenzy ensued when they were married. Their union was brief and tragic; Michel St. Gerard was a womanizing, gambling drunkard and a reckless pilot who crashed his small airplane into a mountainside after squandering most of his wife's fortune away on the tables at Monte Carlo. In a state of shock (and mourning both husbands) the Baroness moved into the top floor of the Ticonderoga (one of her few remaining assets) to acquaint herself with the spirit and history the Baron had embraced there. She divested the family petroleum business, established an arts charity league for underpriveleged youth, and is today recognized as one of our city's most beloved patrons.

A Brief History

The legendary Hotel Ticonderoga emerged in the post-WWII 1940s and early 1950s, when she was regarded as a premier lodging for revolutionaries, artists and writers seeking refuge in the city. Prior to that storied era when the famous (and infamous) called her home as she served as a cradle to the innumerable creative--and frequently incendiary--works conceived within her rooms, the Ticonderoga's legacy was already renowned.

After the brazenly conspicuous Troubador speakeasy--better-known to her regulars as "The 4-V" (a play on the anagram for "In vino veritas")--burned down under mysterious circumstances in late 1925, the 4-V's owners opened "The Troubador Hotel" (affectionately known as "The New True") as a 4-star hotel one block and a half from her namesake's location in mid-October 1929 mere days before the stock market collapse.
Due to considerable secret foreign investments (via the American Communist Party) she stayed afloat through the Depression, opening her own bistro behind the lobby at the end of WWII (which took over the Troubador name and thus the hotel was re-christened "The Hotel Ticonderoga", in homage to the small town which the French-Canadian DuMondes--the Troubador's original owners--called home.)
Through the 1950s, the Ticonderoga's reputation as a bohemian 'romper room' for artists and writers remained unsullied. But gracing her guestbook's yellowed pages are the signatures of well-known pseudonyms for several (potentially-disgraced) FBI agency chiefs, whose scrutiny during the McCarthy-era Communist witch hunts, the Ticonderoga's most radical personnel and guests rarely, if ever, encountered. Coincidence?
The Hotel Ticonderoga is notorious for its conundrums.

The Muses

Perhaps the most singularly well-known, albeit infinitely horrific, event in the Ticonderoga's history concerns the tragic fate of the Muse Family, wherein the talented young singer, Bolivia Muse, and her husband, the trumpeter/composer Gabriel, died with their twins, Oliver and Juniper, in Room 214 (aka "The Suite Valentine"), victims of a still-shocking multiple murder-suicide.
Though several key facts have never been established, the story that has been passed down (courtesy of the Baroness DuMonde, long-time resident and widow to both of the original hotel proprietors) places the blame squarely upon the shoulders of the mischievous young Muse son, Oliver, who was apparently in love with his twin sister and waiting for an opportunity to justify murdering his parents in order to be left alone with her. We know from his correspondence with Juniper and from Bolivia's journal that the tormented boy witnessed the rape of his mother by his father's best friend; Bolivia's shame and failure to disclose the sexual attack to her husband was subsequently interpreted by the boy as evidence of her infidelity.
On the afternoon of February 12, 1937, after composing Bolivia's epitaph (along with several sexually-explicit poems to his sister, who apparently did nothing to dissuade his obsessions and most likely encouraged them) Oliver gassed his mother, and--inadvertently--Juniper, and himself in their large suite. Later that evening, Gabriel returned home to the terrible discovery of his dead family and hanged himself above their bodies.
Of course, Muse "sightings" in the Ticonderoga have never been uncommon. Sometimes the family appears together, pleasantly engaged in one another's company; separately, they bear ghastly tidings. Oliver's maleficence is always ominous, though rarely fatal to hotel guests; Juniper is usually accompanied by a tangible melancholy, but she has been known to bound playfully across passageways from one room into the next, calling out to her brother; Bolivia has been heard singing in empty corridors or rooms from opposite ends of the hotel; Gabriel's lifeless silhouette often appears at night, hanging from ceiling beams in darkened guest rooms above the beds of the most happily married couples.

The Muses tale is merely one among countless others woven into the fascinating human tapestry of the Hotel Ticonderoga's inimitable legacy.

The Last Hotel

Pages

Saturday, December 15, 2007

The Baroness Josephine DuMonde

A Brief History

The Muses

Blog Archive