THE RUSSIAN TEA ROOM: A Love Story
By Faith Stewart-Gordon
Scribner, 250 pages, $25
The recently resurrected Russian Tea Room, in midtown Manhattan, played host for more than half a century to the likes of Mary Tyler Moore, Salvador Dali, even Pope Paul VI. In this “love story” about the restaurant, Faith Stewart-Gordon, who ran the Tea Room for nearly 30 years, clearly delights in dish. Yet even for fans of books that read like gossip columns, “The Russian Tea Room” comes up short.
Incidents, many of which are humorous and entertaining, are assembled unevenly and without regard to narrative momentum. Certain incidents from the annals of the Tea Room have long ago passed into legend, but Stewart-Gordon resurrects them nonetheless. Zero Mostel frequently assumed the role of waiter. Leonard Bernstein scribbled the first bars of “Fancy Free” on a Tea Room napkin. A scene for “Tootsie” was filmed at the Tea Room. And Madonna reputedly was a coat-check girl. So colloquial is Stewart-Gordon’s narrative voice, you are more likely to read on than pause and ponder the material.
The book is, in part, a kind-of-autobiography of Faith Stewart-Gordon. How a friendly girl from Spartanburg, S.C., came to New York City to be an actress is a story that surely can pack a wallop. More interesting still is the tale of how an aspiring actress who worked with Audrey Hepburn on Broadway gave all that up when she married Sidney Kaye, a wealthy man 18 years her senior who owned the Tea Room. Still, upon finishing this book, we come away with little of what makes Stewart-Gordon tick–emotionally, psychologically–other than the glitz and glamor of being around Famous People. Even Sidney Kaye’s death after a seven-year bout with cancer is maddeningly glossed over.
This is not to say that “The Russian Tea Room: A Love Story” comes without attractions. When Stewart-Gordon tries least to be interesting or funny or wise, she accomplishes all at once. And when, in the ’60s, the Age of Aquarius seeps into the Tea Room’s Byzantine gilt, one has the sense that one is enmeshed in something truly magical, something entirely surreal yet substantive.
