with them hard.
Château Frontenac in Quebec City is one of the Fairmont chain’s grand old railway hotels. In the foreground is Auberge Saint-Antoine.
(Courtesy Fairmont Hotels & Resorts)
Momentarily, I was taken aback, then the count explained that since I was a commoner, it was highly inappropriate for me to approach him with such misguided familiarity, let alone expect to touch him. I apologized. Then he told me that simply bowing before him was sufficient. I frowned and leaned toward a public relations woman beside me. “Is he actually expecting me to bow to him?”
She winked and whispered, “Just play along.”
So I made a big gesture of bowing with sweeping arms before the count. He nodded and strode regally over to his chair at the end of the table; I was seated to his left. Of course, he stood behind his chair, indicating I was to pull it out for him. I played along. The count began a history lesson that was so engrossing and detailed that within 15 minutes I completely lost touch with reality and started thinking he actually was the Count of Frontenac. I even asked him questions and talked to him as if he were the real McCoy. “When you arrived here, Count, those first years must have been awfully challenging, given how inhospitable nature can be in this region.” He answered with such depth, with such authority of feeling, that I was truly mesmerized. After about 90 minutes, he got up to leave. Without prompting, I bowed to him very naturally, then he whipped out his sword and placed it on my shoulder. I almost cried. It was an incredible evening, and a brilliant public relations tool.
Another memorable time at Château Frontenac was when I interviewed the actors in a film — the thriller Taking Lives starring Angelina Jolie and Ethan Hawke — that was shooting there and around Quebec City and Montreal. One day I was sitting on the set when the production took over the entranceway to the hotel for a couple of shots of Angelina’s character first arriving in a car, then rushing out the door for another scene to be used later in the film. It was a windy day, so there was a lot of waiting around for clouds to clear in order to match the various angles of the shots in terms of lighting. After I got the official interview stuff completed with Jolie and casually related some of the hotel’s history, I recounted my meeting with the Count of Frontenac himself. Then I told the actress that in 1953 Alfred Hitchcock was so impressed by Château Frontenac that he used it for the thriller I Confess.
This piqued her interest. “Was that the one where Montgomery Clift played the Catholic priest?” she asked.
I told her that was indeed the picture. Karl Malden, who co-starred in the film, had told me great stories about how much he loved shooting in Quebec City. At the time it was so remote and unused as a film location that it had an exotic freshness about it. Jolie called over an assistant and asked her to run out and find her a DVD of I Confess. She then told me that if we saw each other on the set again we could discuss the Hitchcock movie. I thought that was a great idea but never did get the opportunity.
There is another hotel in Quebec City that also has a great history, even though it is relatively new, only a few years old, in fact. Because of where it is and what was discovered when construction began, the hotel took on a whole new atmosphere and design. It’s called Auberge Saint-Antoine. My friend and ace travel public relations person Ann Layton of Siren Communications introduced me to this hotel. She arranged for me to spend some time in the place and meet Llewellyn Price, its owner.
The story of this multi-faceted hotel is quite interesting. It began when the Price family (of the Abitibi-Price pulp and paper empire) bought a collection of rundown, abandoned warehouses, an apartment house, and a parking lot on prime property facing the St. Lawrence River. In 1992 they converted part of the collection of buildings into a small inn called Auberge Saint-Antoine. It had only 23 comfortable rooms then. In 1995 the second phase of the hotel, Maison Hunt, opened. It was the old apartment house restored to reflect its 18th-century heritage. Now the auberge had eight more suites, but these new ones were each completely unique and had a specific historical theme reflected in their decor. A third phase was planned that involved digging up the parking lot and erecting an ultra-slick, hip boutique hotel, but because of the location’s historical significance, the Quebec government stepped in.
“It was suggested to us that we do a bit of an archaeological dig, a survey, beforehand to determine if there wasn’t something of historical value there,” Price told me. “Of course, we could only benefit by that, too, so we entered into a partnership with the city, the Ministry of Culture and Communications of Quebec, and the Council of Monuments and Historical Sites of Quebec, and brought in experts from Laval University to begin the dig.”
That dig turned up a virtual treasure trove of museum-quality pieces large and small and revealed a 17th-century cannon battery complete with intact walls and cannons as well as a wealth of dishes, pottery, utensils, and weapons. “We decided to build the 63-room modern boutique hotel on the site,” Price said, “but make everything that was discovered part of the hotel. The walls and cannons are perfectly preserved as part of the lobby, and the artifacts we found are displayed in the hallways under glass, so the hotel is a modern hotel and a museum of the history of the very site it was built on, going back 300 or more years.”
While Auberge Saint-Antoine is a lovely hotel, and I enjoyed every minute of my several visits there, the museum-like aspect is sometimes a bit distracting. In the comfortable suites, artifacts are displayed under glass on end tables, in the coffee tables, the desk, and the walls outside doors. It gives the place a reverential sort of vibe, so much so that you don’t dare put a soft drink can anywhere. Still, the boldness of creating a slick, ultra-modern hotel with a historical theme running through every corner is admirable.
Quebec City’s Auberge Saint-Antoine weds history to modern convenience to create a unique boutique hotel.
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Perhaps one of the most endearing and lovable characters from film and literature who brings together hotel living and the beauty of old-world hotels is Eloise, the perennial six-year-old girl who lives in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The Plaza (now owned by Fairmont) is to New York City what the Royal York is to Toronto — a beacon, a place of history, grace, and class that’s larger than its already immense iconic reputation. The first time I had the opportunity to visit New York I wanted to go to the Plaza and stroll through its grand lobby. When I did so, one of the first things I saw was the portrait of Eloise painted by illustrator Hilary Knight. My notions of the Plaza were formed by Eloise and by Neil Simon’s play and film Plaza Suite, and here I was standing in, as Archie Bunker once said, “the middle of their midst.”
This history of the Plaza and the Royal York has a lot of similarities, which probably explains why the hotels have, in some respects, similar appearances and characteristics. The Plaza is located in a prime Manhattan location: Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. It was designed by the American architect Henry Janey Hardenbergh to be “the greatest hotel in the world.” The Plaza opened on October 1, 1907, and was built on the site of another hotel called the Plaza, which was knocked down to be replaced by the current, grander building. No expense was spared to erect this 19-storey French Renaissance château-like structure complete with marble lobbies, solid mahogany doors, 1,650 crystal chandeliers, Swiss organdy curtains, linens manufactured privately for the exclusive use of guests, and gold-encrusted china.
In the books by New York show business figure Kay Thompson, Eloise lives in a suite on the “tippy-top floor” of the Plaza. Tall and slender with a deep, breathy voice, Thompson first invented her make-believe character in 1948 when she arrived late for a nightclub performance. The nightclub owner reputedly shouted at her, “Who do you think
