Great Britain: Requiem for Rosa’s

Though the signs outside identified it as a hotel, the Cavendish was no place for the unsuspecting tourist. Most strangers who ventured into the dim, cluttered lobby at 82 Jermyn Street were sternly told to try elsewhere. Others, if they were lucky enough to remind the proprietress of some long-vanished Victorian buck or Bostonian pooh-bah, would be clasped to her shapely bosom and regaled with surrealistic reminiscences about old Lord Droopy Drawers and Lady You-Know-‘Oo, or “the time we went to Ireland on roller skates.”

Rosa Lewis, the cockney genie who conjured up the Cavendish and presided for half a century over its revels, liked to think it was “not an ‘otel but an ‘ome away from ‘ome for my friends.” To addicts, “Rosa’s” was not so much home as a Mad Hatter’s champagne party. They called Rosa the Duchess of Jermyn Street, and rated her and the Cavendish itself as two of the three most rewarding landmarks in London (with the Tower, which has not taken many boarders since the 16 century). The mid-Mayfair hotel remained for decades one of the last places in all England where, as Evelyn Waugh wrote of it in Vile Bodies, “one can still draw up, cool and uncontaminated, great, healing draughts of Edwardian certainty.”

Gewgaws & Cherrybums. Last week, ten years after Rosa’s death, the Cavendish was meeting the ignominious end that has overtaken many of London’s best-loved structures in the postwar building boom. In September it will be torn down to make way for a gleaming new (and conventional) hotel. Through the plain, brick-pointed door opposite famed Fortnum & Mason, movers wrestled a seemingly inexhaustible argosy of odd treasures.

Over the years, the 100-room Cavendish had become Mayfair’s best-stocked curiosity shop. It was crammed with mauve and red plush sofas, chairs, beds and chests, mostly of vast age and hideousness, and almost all associated with the ancient indiscretions of the illustrious that flowed from Rosa’s memory like champagne from “cherrybums,” as she called the Jeroboams that were consumed by the case. Her walls, lined with signed pictures, were a ‘Oo Was ‘Oo of her times.

King Edward VII refused to dine at friends’ houses unless Rosa was there to cook the bland, boiled food that, in her words, “would not spill down is shirt front.” Edward was an ardent patron of the hotel, which had a private entrance around the corner for merry monarchs and squires on the spree; as Prince of Wales he reputedly bankrolled his blonde, blue-eyed friend when she bought the Cavendish in 1902. “One king leads to another,” she used to say. Soon the Kaiser became one of her best customers, and grew so fond of her cuisine that he presented her with a portrait of himself that in World War I was ostentatiously hung behind the toilet in the men’s room.

Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill often stayed there with “Copper Top,” as Rosa called young Winston. Other cherished guests were Lord Northcliffe, General Kitchener and the Duke of Windsor, upper bohemians such as Ellen Terry, G. B. Shaw, Isadora Duncan, Artists John Singer Sargent and Augustus John (who both painted Rosa), and “all the American aristocrats.”

Try the Ritz. Between the wars, the Cavendish became the favorite haunt of London’s gilded youth. Rosa smiled benignly on their amours, and could always provide a trusted young guardsman or undergraduate with a compliant partner. “All luxuries are overused,” she said, “but sexual immorality is sometimes the least dangerous.” She was also famed as hotel-dom’s Robin Hood, from her habit of loading penurious guests’ bills onto the richest resident, who for years was a meek, abstemious millionaire she called Froggy.

The hotel, run since the Duchess’ death by her old and Rosaesque friend, Edith Jeffrey, never fully recovered from World War II, when a German bomb wrecked the front of the four-story building. Rosa, who refused to take shelter, was pulled out of the wreckage, but her precious stocks of champagne were gravely depleted. “Don’t ever die,” the Duchess of Jermyn Street told a friend when she recovered. “I’ve just been right up to the gates of heaven and ‘ell, and they’re both bloody.” The fabled food and demented dialogue were never the same after Rosa finally made it through the gates at the age of 85, going on 90. But little else changed. Not long ago, Successor Jeffrey coldly advised an American tourist to try “a nice little place round the corner called the Ritz.” When he had left, she confided: “He is a Mr. Tennessee Williams, and I understand he has written a rather nasty play.”