Alice Brock, 1941–2024
“They may think it’s a movement! And that’s what it is, and all you got to do to join is sing it…”
Claire loves old buildings partly for the architecture and partly for the history. You see the architecture first, and she was drawn to the inn first for its appearance and siting. But even before the deal had closed, she started digging. It was built by a woman, an Astor, potentially illegitimate. The third owners added a billiards room (today the Ostrich Room) and a master suite over it (today room 8); the husband died here (presumably in that room). It was made into a hotel by a guy who went on to become a famous anthropologist. This is all covered in her new history on our website.
“And, do you know the Arlo Guthrie song ‘Alice’s Restaurant’?” (I didn’t, though I probably nodded when Claire first asked.) “Alice once owned it!”
We say that constantly. Or people come in and ask, “Was this really Alice’s Restaurant?” And, to be precise, we have to correct them: the song referred to her first restaurant, in the next town over; this was her third and final.
Sometimes people quote the chorus: “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant!” And for a long time that was all I’d ever heard of it.
I quickly learned that, around Lenox, her people are everywhere. Claire’s lawyer from the sale is married to “the friend” in the song. (I didn’t yet know what that meant.) A bar patron mentioned he designed her menus. The bookstore guy knew them somehow. People came in who had bussed tables, or tended bar, or built the bar, or just ate and drank under her reign. You’d think she’d built this town.
She had a reputation for benevolent mischief, for tough talk and kind deeds. Topless discos in the “omelette” room. Drinks and drugs and convertibles. No men allowed in the kitchen. We read that, contrary to norms of the time, she let women sample the ordered wine. We heard that she made a paper microphone to keep behind the bar and yelled into it when customers were annoying.
We got a lot of stories, but Alice herself was out of reach. We heard she’d long since moved to Cape Cod. Claire asked someone to pass along a message to her, but never heard back. When we were on the Cape with Claire’s family last summer, she thought about trying to just drop in, but we didn’t know quite where she was.
On November 17 it all came together. Claire was out of town, my high school friends had come to stay, and our Sunday brunch was interrupted by a chronological parade of hotel history. First, Adi introduced me to a table full of friends of the late great anthropologist, Roy Rappaport (the ’50s era); then, I met a table of friends of Alice (the ’70s); then, Sharon Walker herself walked in (the ’90s through ’10s).
Alice’s friends said she wasn’t doing well. If Claire and I were going to visit, we should do it soon. Two of them, Lori the lawyer and her son Jesse, were about to go themselves. They got her on the phone and put me on. Could we come? “Well, I’m not going anywhere!” she said. “Sure.”
On Tuesday morning we drove down to Wellfleet behind Lori and Jesse’s red convertible, and I listened to the song for the first time.
I remember that for years I was baffled that “Call me Ishmael” was such a famous first line. When I finally read the whole first chapter, I realized that the fame of the first line stood for the greatness that followed. I felt similarly about the song.
It’s a lot more meandering than I’d expected, and a lot funnier. It has a good little gag where it refuses to use straightforward pro-forms and instead repeats the full antecedent verbatim; e.g., after first mentioning “twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one”, it doesn’t just refer back to them as “the photographs”, but repeats the epithet “twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one” every time.
It starts with the famous part, “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant”, fun and innocent and fit for a television jingle.
Then it goes into the part of the story I’d heard about: that Arlo and his friend had littered and gone to jail over Thanksgiving and Alice had bailed them out.
But when the chorus first comes back, “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant” is not at all a statement about how big a menu is. It’s what Guthrie suggests you tell the military shrink evaluating you to be drafted to go to Vietnam. It’s a shibboleth to mark your membership in the club that sees that some bureaucracy’s moral compass is so backwards that, in order to demonstrate that you’re not worthy to go “burn women, kids, houses and villages”, you can just confess to being a “litterbug”. The chorus, then, is almost a pledge of allegiance to some mix of mischief and Alice’s neighborly hospitality, to her compass instead of the state’s.
All this time people had been quoting it to me — I mean, I don’t think they were deliberately treating me like the military shrink. But it did mean something to them I wasn’t getting.
I think Alice’s restaurant here went bankrupt in under three years. At the end, in September 1978, Management & Profit Systems, Inc., under contract to Tramco, Inc., delivered a preliminary report on her operation to the Small Business Administration (SBA-7-(1)-MA-78-2, task order #48). We found a copy a while ago in a bag in the basement. The report concluded that she was not capitalizing enough on her fame:
There is little marketing and virtually no sales effort made outside of the Stockbridge-Lenox area other than advertising “Alice’s At Avaloch” in the newspapers serving Western Mass. “Alice” and “Alice’s Restaurant” are world famous. The people who live within 1 hour and could frequent the restaurant are not being cultivated.… A professional advertising agency should be employed to promote “Alice” and manage the advertising budget.
Or, if you ask her friends, the answer seems to be that whenever she got money she’d give it away too fast. In any case, she does not seem to have taken the recommendations; she left for Provincetown. Alan Carr bought the hotel from the bank the next year and ran it as Portofino.
Unfortunately, that period came after she wrote her book, My Life as a Restaurant. But the book, right from the amazing title onward, makes clear how she felt about her objectification:
[W]hen some city-slicker suggests that a ten-dollar bill or the name of a friend will get him a table that he is sure I’m holding empty, I usually blow up and chase him halfway across the parking lot assuring him that I wouldn’t feed him my socks for a million bucks. I am often accused of being rude to customers. Well it’s true, I am as rude as they are, only they don’t always realize that their behavior is inhuman: after all, I am a restaurant and THEY are hungry, THEY drove all the way from Florida, THEY just want a sandwich, THEY just want to see Alice, THEY just want to look around, and take a picture, get an autograph, use the bathroom, introduce me to their dog who is named Alice, have a cup of coffee, SPEAK TO THE OWNER… because this food-covered lady in work boots, who is so rude, can’t possibly be the OWNER. I guess I have a temper… good! I won’t stand for being treated like a piece of public property or a freak and I will never allow a customer to get away with giving an employee a hard time. The customer is NOT always right. Being a “service industry” makes people think we are just computerized slaves. One of the high-lights of an evening is to hear of a customer bringing a waitress to tears. I rush out to the dining room, pull their plates off the table and point to the door: “OUT.... OUT... GET OUT AND LEARN SOME MANNERS!” To try to please the “difficult” customer at the expense of my fellow workers and other customers is ridiculous. Some people just have an attitude. They upset the waiter or waitress, who in turn upsets me, who in turn upsets the whole evening. It’s not worth it to try to please or placate these bitter, unhappy people, better to put them out at the first sign of trouble. This is something I have to be there to do… it’s hard to tell or expect someone else to do it. Sometimes I’m wrong, or the waitress is wrong, but better to lose a customer than a co-worker.
If our visit had been a month or two earlier, I think Alice and Claire could’ve talked for hours. Alice must’ve had dreams for this place. We know by the end she hated a lot of it. She must’ve had some specific insights about some awkwardness of the flow between kitchen and dining area, or about what plot would be best suited for a garden. It would’ve been great to talk about all that.
But Alice was tired, and we were certainly not entitled to her time. We had a brief but lovely visit. I wrote down one thing she said: “I’m a still point in a spinning world — everyone has to come to me.”
On Thursday afternoon, Lori texted us that Alice had died.
That night a couple of her friends came into the bar and told stories. Someone mailed us a framed copy of one of her old menus. (Was it you? Let us know!) Since Sunday she’d gone from being a bit of historical trivia to looming over our lives. I was living in her world.
The next week, for Thanksgiving, we did not bail anyone out of jail or otherwise serve the community; Claire closed the hotel and we went home to our families. I was conscious of not doing what Alice would do. But Alice was nothing if not irreverent. How do you revere irreverence?
Maybe she’d hate how we run the place. I mean, I hope not! But maybe she’d hate the sappy tributes too. I think she’d hate the idea of anyone pledging allegiance to her benevolence. She hated the movie made about her. She was spunky and independent, and would probably hate us being too preoccupied with what she would hate. But we can’t help but be somewhat inspired by her.
By chance her friend Sandy came in as I was writing this by the fire in the hotel lobby last night, and she described what she’d heard of Alice’s small, beautiful wake on the Cape. Beautiful linens, a beautiful bow.
Sandy’s husband Bill once described that Sunday brunch before Alice died as something like a “harmonic convergence” of the different eras. That’s not just a hippie-ish phrase, it’s a specific New Age reference — to August 16 and 17, 1987, when the planets formed some kind of triangle in the sky. If 144,000 people got to power centers like Mounts Shasta, Fuji, and Yamnuska, then it would create a “field of trust, to ground the new vibrational frequencies coming in at that time.” I don’t know if they pulled it off, but I’m happy to see our old friend Michael Coe quoted in this AP coverage.
But yes, that brunch was a very harmonious convergence. Alice helped a local generation converge, and they’re still together here without her.
Sandy was meeting her friend Melissa, who hadn’t been here in Alice’s time, but said she was glad we’d reopened because she used to love seeing Chantell perform here. That means she was brought in by the Khaghan era, the last one, right before Claire.
There are a lot of eras to do justice to! And if we fixate too much on any of them, then it’ll be hard to find the voice of our own! But I was glad to be able to tell Melissa that Chantell had just been singing here last night, with Andy’s trio, and was amazing, as usual.
There was a big cool hot young group of people over in the back lobby seating area. We don’t always get that; I wonder how they got here. The Khaghan era was young and cool; maybe they’d been brought in by it, too. Or maybe they’re our people. Yeah! And in fifty years they’ll be telling some youngster: man, they were not reliable about sending out their “weekly” newsletter.
Thanks to Bill, Sandy, Jim, Jane, Lee, Matt, and especially our guides that week, Lori and Jesse — and everyone I’ve forgotten. Keep coming!
The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, or in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things, in the strength which, through the lapse of seasons and times, and the decline and birth of dynasties, and the changing of the face of the earth, and of the limits of the sea, maintains its sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations; it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and color, and preciousness of architecture; and it is not until a building has assumed this character, till it has been entrusted with the fame, and hallowed by the deeds of men, till its walls have been witnesses of suffering, and its pillars rise out of the shadows of death, that its existence, more lasting as it is than that of the natural objects of the world around it, can be gifted with even so much as these possess of language and of life.
— John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849
We have to multiply poetic subjects and objects — which are now unfortunately so rare that the slightest ones take on an exaggerated emotional importance — and we have to organize games for these poetic subjects to play with these poetic objects. This is our entire program, which is essentially transitory. Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future. Passageways. Our only concern is real life; we care nothing about the permanence of art or of anything else. Eternity is the grossest idea a person can conceive of in connection with his acts.
— Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action”, 1957
Guest book
Since October, oh man, lots of people.
Jess shepherded the big group of my high school friends that was there at the harmonic convergence, including Dan, Julie, Laura, Christian, Sara, Dan, Liz, Patrick, and Alex. Prize to Liz and Patrick for coming early. Prize to Sara for the best thank-you note. All I could think about was wanting to make everyone read through a scene of Annie Baker’s “John” together, which Jess directed us in. I still wanna put that on here. Like an immersive thing where we don’t tell the other guests it’s happening.
Betsy and Emily stayed before their big spa day! I was honored to finally meet Betsy.
Bobby and Meg and Ian and Rachel with their kids — Bobby taught me a lot about fire. If it’s smoking too much, put on more wood. You want it to burn hotter. Turn into the skid.
That same weekend, John and Michelle, Rachel and Michael, Alison and Kyle — we shot a great downtown shopping montage I still haven’t edited and posted.
I forget exactly when this was but I missed some fun weekend before the holidays where Bip and a bunch of her friends and then maybe like Morgan and Dave and Joe and Lidey and Daisy and Midge and others came?
Julie came to shoot some proper photos, including our sledding, a proposal, and a show. Claire says we’re always taking a hundred harried blurry iPhone shots when what we need is just one proper photograph of each of the key things.
We are flattered that Claire’s aunt Marea brought her whole great big birthday party crew here, including tarot card readings and a Beatles-themed cake topper with like twenty separate pieces.
Larry and Lilah came a couple weeks ago to scheme about branding and bring their keen eye to spotting onsite architectural flourishes. And we got an incredibly good rendition of their love story.
Edward and Kaye and their kids are regulars now, having come a couple times to go skiing. Did you know Apple Tree Inn is not just about that darn summer music festival? There is skiing in the Berkshires! Even we sometimes forget to pitch that selling point for the slow winter months. Thanks for the reminder, Edward and Kaye!
My mom and Angela came this weekend and surely must’ve been the main draw on Friday for what turned out to be Claire’s favorite night in the Ostrich Room yet. People spilling out into the lobby, dancing, etc.
Changelog
The door between the side entrance and the round room has been removed and then reattached.
Announcements
Since it’s so slow in the winter, Claire and Christian agreed to each take a month off and cover for the other. So we went to Japan for all of January, and now he’s been out hiking Machu Picchu — and, less fun, getting shoulder surgery. Send prayers and/or secular well-wishes for Christian’s swift recovery!
Since before our time, when you connect to the free hotel Wi-Fi, you’ve gotten a splash screen asking for your email address. Where does it go? To a great big list in the sky, now 9,000 strong, to which Claire is now sending her own newsletter. It’s more in-front-of-the-scenes, guest-facing, with announcements and recommendations for restaurants and activities and such. So far:
At the start she told me, “I can’t talk to you about it because I already know everything you’ll say. You’d probably say I’m too close to [marketing consultant] Deborah. It’s like two poles. You’re like, ‘I farted!’ — transparent, personal, controversial is better. And then Deborah is like, ‘Let it snow! A beautiful crowded night in the Ostrich Room!’, and I need to be somewhere in the middle.”
That’s OK Claire! You do you! I love the Valentine’s Day one! I love you and anything you write! I can be too hard on the marketing mindset sometimes, but Deborah is right, it’s a beautiful night.
If one newsletter from a small rural inn is not enough for you, you can subscribe to that one here. I gotta pick up the pace to compete!
