ACT III

Almost every hotel in New York has experienced a death; therefore, it is no surprise that most hotels in New York have had reports of spectral activity.

In 1934, the Hopewell Hotel on the Upper East Side was well-known among the Broadway set. Its small size and au courant design made it an elegant enclave—and it was considerably more affordable than The Waldorf-Astoria or The St. Regis (where the Bloody Mary was invented in the King Cole Bar that very same year). Performers desiring decent accommodation and a friendly atmosphere kept the hotel going during the Depression. (It was also helpful that the hotel’s owner tended to turn a blind eye to room sharing. A room filled with too many guests was better than one with no guests at all.)

In June of that year, a would-be actress named Antoinette Hemmings moved into a room in the Hopewell called the Orchid Suite, which she shared with a theatrical secretary named Betty Spooner. Though Antoinette had done many chorus roles, she had greater aspirations. It looked like she was on the verge of her first big break when she auditioned for the role of Hope Harcourt in the new Cole Porter musical, Anything Goes. A summer cold and a sudden attack of laryngitis derailed Antoinette’s dreams on the day of her final, critical audition.

Antoinette was crushed to miss such a massive opportunity. She was determined to get noticed some other way. She returned to the Hopewell and wrote a long note of instruction to Betty, including the name of the closest hospital and the phone number of a friendly newspaper reporter who covered the theater beat. After dressing herself in her diaphanous, pink, feather-edged dressing gown, she took a handful of sleeping pills, and washed them down with champagne…timing the entire event carefully to coincide with Betty’s return from work.

Unfortunately for Antoinette, the normally timely Betty was delayed. Instead of finding the elegant but still very much alive Antoinette draped elegantly over the bed, ready to be carried off to the hospital in her pink gown…she found the very dead body of Antoinette by the door. She had apparently realized in her last moments of consciousness that Betty was not going to be able to save her and made an attempt to get help.

In 1974, a guest in the Orchid Suite reported that a young woman in a pink gown knocked on his door. She asked if Mr. Cole Porter had called for her. The man was about to ask her who she was or why the longdead Cole Porter would have called her when he said she “vanished before my very eyes, like a lifting fog.”

—FROM 81 BIG APPLE GHOST TALES, CHAPTER 8, “HOTEL GHOSTS: THE GUESTS WHO NEVER CHECK OUT”

PUNCH IN A VELVET GLOVE

It should have been one of the best weeks of Scarlett’s life.

Mrs. Amberson was more or less out of Scarlett’s hair entirely. She had forgotten all about the book, and was spending the majority of her time running around the city doing what she called “social PR” for the show. She sent Scarlett in her place to watch and help with costumes. This meant that Scarlett had a full six hours a day to hang out with Spencer and watch Eric.