Drinking in a New Orleans Landmark

Drinking history is a favorite pastime of the imbibing class and few places offer the opportunity that the famed Hotel Monteleone does. It’s in New Orleans, of course.

Sliding into a seat at The Carousel Bar is no easy task during any season. Here, locals and visitors alike flock to the slowly revolving bar with its ornate circus motif. When you do manage a spot, order the Vieux Carre. I discovered this dark, brooding cocktail on my first trip to the Big Easy and have been enjoying it ever since. The drink – rye, cognac, sweet vermouth, bitters – was invented at the Monteleone by Walter Bergeron in 1938. Back then, the bar was the Swan Room and you would remain firmly fixed to terra firma. Mr. Bergeron seems to have been lost to history aside from this cocktail, but you will thank him for this seminal creation.

If you get the right bartender and he has time, you might hear tales of the hotel’s legendary founder. It’s an only-in-America in the 19^th century story, the legend of an Italian shoe factory owner who could not resist our nascent nation’s call. He arrived in New Orleans in 1880 from Sicily and, in 1886, bought a small hotel on the corner of Royal and Iberville. At that time Royal Street was a fashionable thoroughfare and in large part it remains so today, studded with antiques shops and storied restaurants like Brennan’s. The hotel took his name in 1908 and has remained family-owned to this day.

Wordsmiths and drinking have gone together since the dawn of writing. The Monteleone has certainly attracted its share of novelists, playwrights and imbibers alike, even being named an official literary landmark What brought them to the hotel? Was it the location in the heart of the French Quarter or the elegance of a graceful landmark holding fast against the rapid modernization of the world? True, the Carousel Bar was one of the first in New Orleans to have air conditioning. But that must have seemed a welcome anomaly to its guests.

Men and women of the pen were once the witty raconteurs that spun society’s tales. Who were we to question them? Capote was one of the hotel’s biggest boosters, famously telling Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show that he was born in the Monteleone. It’s possible his mother went into labor at the hotel since she was staying there, but then again, his story is better. What is likely, however, is that he did not favor the Vieux Carre. His drink of choice was the Martini.

William Faulkner has a suite in the hotel named in his honor. His novel Mosquitoes mentions the hotel by name. Of course, Faulkner’s drinking was legendary. “You see, I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach; so many ideas that I can’t remember in the morning pop into my head.” He was much more a candidate for a Vieux Carre.

Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway both stayed at the hotel often as well. Williams featured the Monteleone in his play The Rose Tattoo, while Hemingway mentioned The Carousel Bar in his short story, The Night Before Battle. Both have suites named after them, though Papa got the penthouse.

Speaking of literature, let’s face it, ghost stories are some of the very best stories. The Monteleone has had its fair share of lost spirits over the years. The International Society of Paranormal Research spent several days researching the paranormal there in 2003, finding upwards of a dozen entities including former employees and a man named William “Red” Wildemere who had died at the hotel. Perhaps most famous is the ghost of Maurice Begere, a boy who died at the hotel while his parents were at the opera. Suitably distraught, they would return frequently until the boy finally appeared to comfort his mother. To this day he is seen near the room where he died on the 14^th floor, which of course is really the 13^th if one is counting properly.

But what is the truth in the shadow of fiction? Did Hemingway really say ‘“Write drunk, edit sober?” Most likely not, if you believe the internet, as a similar quote appears in a novel by Peter De Vries and nowhere in Hemingway’s body of work. Where was Capote born? Does it matter or does the story matter more? Are there ghosts? Let me know the next time you visit the 14^th floor. I didn’t see the young lad but perhaps he is less than enthusiastic about appearing on one of today’s ubiquitous social media platforms.

Sitting at the Carousel Bar as you make a complete revolution around your bartender every 13 minutes, the bustle of the French Quarter passing outside the windows, truth dissolves away. “I’ll have another,” you’ll say, and the world will spin as it always has. Slowly but assuredly, year after year, at the Hotel Monteleone.