Hotel clock melts back to Dali's days as guest

NEW YORK — Manhattan's famed Plaza Hotel has the fictional Eloise. The Hilton will always have Paris (the heiress not the city). And The St. Regis hotel in New York has Salvador Dali.

Few may know that the celebrity artist, instantly recognizable by the wild, waxy swoop of his upturned mustache and his hallucinatory images of melting clocks, called Suite 1501 of the posh midtown hotel his winter home for more than a decade beginning in the late 1950s, when his lavish parties drew the bold-faced names of the day.

The St. Regis this summer is celebrating its long affiliation with the flamboyant Spanish Surrealist master, who is the subject of "Dali: Painting and Film," an exhibit that opened June 29 and runs through Sept. 17 at the Museum of Modern Art, which gave Dali his first major retrospective exhibition in 1941.

For $5,000, the landmark hotel offers a package that includes tickets to and a personal tour of the MOMA exhibit; a night in the suite Dali shared with his wife and muse, Gala; a bottle of 1958 Chateau Mouton Rothschild with a Dali-designed label; and a "Bloody Spaniard," a Dali-inspired version of the Bloody Mary cocktail created by St. Regis bartender Fernand Petiot in 1934.

So far there is one taker, but that guest hasn't yet checked in, according to Scott Geraghty, general manager of the hotel, who said he has three bottles of 1958 Mouton Rothschild at the ready.

"It was not uncommon for him to draw on bar napery, something like this," said Geraghty, holding out one of the bottles to show the scrawled depiction of a ram that Dali doodled at the top of the Mouton label.

Founded in 1904, The St. Regis has hosted many notable and eccentric guests, but few more so than the gleefully outlandish Dali, who was wont to walk his pet ocelot through its marbled halls on a leash.

"The hotel has always been very colorful, and it's been very colorful not because of the bricks and mortar — certainly it's wonderfully gilded and there are over 1,000 chandeliers in the building — but it's really about the colorful people who are our guests," Geraghty said.

"We're happy to host the party. In the case with Dali, he was the party," he said of the prolific painter, writer, filmmaker and designer, who died in 1989 at age 84.

Dali frequently entertained guests and potential art patrons in his hotel suite. At 1,100 square feet, the one-bedroom corner suite is intimate and elegantly detailed with moldings and brass heating registers perforated with the St. Regis monogram. In addition to the bedroom, there were two baths and a sitting room overlooking Fifth Avenue. No artifacts remain from Dali's days, and the rooms have been renovated many times since, but the space and the view remain the same.

He often also threw large parties in the marbled gallery and salons on the hotel's second floor, many of them to display and sell his artwork. They were lively affairs, according to accounts Geraghty has heard.

"Salvador Dali would hire models, and he would put them in extremely low-backed dresses and he would paint them," he said. "They would stroll through the room and their purpose was to be living art. He did strange things." Indeed. What else might one expect from a man who once delivered a lecture wearing an old-fashioned diving suit and leading two giant wolfhounds on leashes? Or who fashioned a sofa from pink satin in the shape of a pair of lips?

While there are no records of guests complaining about Dali's promenading ocelot, Geraghty said, "I know for sure with the bear they did." The bear, which Dali paraded around the hotel on a chain, apparently terrified at least one guest when he unexpectedly popped out of an elevator.

And then, Geraghty said, there were the flies. "In a lot of his work he utilized flies, real flies," he said, which sometimes escaped from Dali's suite and buzzed around The St. Regis' hushed hallways.

In fact, flies provided a frequent motif and apparent inspiration to Dali. In a November 1962 entry in his 1964 book "Diary of a Genius," Dali wrote: "Of all the hyper-sybaritic pleasures of my life, perhaps one of the most intense and most stimulating (and even without the 'perhaps') is, and will continue to be, that of lying in the sun covered by flies." The hotel, Geraghty said, no longer allows pets of any kind, including insects.

(c) 2008, Chicago Tribune.