24793: Severe: (Pub) LA Times Story on Oloffson Hotel

[sak-pase@bimini.ws]

Constantin Severe <csevere@hotmail.com>

7:21 PM PDT, April 17, 2005
Haitian Unrest Weighs On The Once-Vibrant Hotel Oloffson
By Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer


PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — If the walls of the Hotel Oloffson could talk, they 
would have to be silenced.

Reputations could be ruined with disclosures of hedonistic excess. In its 
heyday, the rich and powerful flocked to the gingerbread mansion on this 
raucous capital's outskirts to escape 1950s Communist witch hunts and to 
indulge appetites for rum cocktails, cocaine and trysts with minors.

The Oloffson was a stage for political intrigue in fact and fiction. The 
hotel's John Barrymore suite cloistered a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald and 
two strangers just a few months before President Kennedy's assassination. 
The hotel's pool was the dumping ground for a government official who came 
to a bad end in Graham Greene's novel "The Comedians."

"This house has always been at the center of things," said Max Sam, the 
hotel's 92-year-old owner and son of the man who built the mansion as a 
family home in 1896. Sam has owned the place throughout its myriad 
manifestations, from family home to conscripted military quarters to 
hot-destination hotel.

Sam sees the three-story clapboard home of his birth as a canvas on which 
history has painted the undulating waves of chic and terror that have 
defined his country. Throughout the tumultuous decades of coups, 
insurrections, dictatorship and ecological disaster, the Oloffson was an 
oasis of art and intellectual banter, a gathering place with a whisper of 
intrigue and danger, a place from which to spy and be spied on.

Today, the hotel is as replete with mildew as it is with mystery. Mirroring 
a country lost in political turmoil and violence, the Oloffson is almost 
abandoned, its spacious suites a dilapidated shadow of their heyday.

Fretwork above the pillars is clogged with the dust and grit of ages. Chunks 
of the stone steps have broken off, forcing visitors to ascend with caution. 
Electricity is spotty, and chickens that have apparently escaped from nearby 
yards strut among the wicker furnishings of the lobby. Those who still come 
to dine on the veranda have to rap on the kitchen door to summon a waiter, 
and guests often must bestir the languid bartender from her TV shows to 
check in.

In the once-glamorous suites, not inexpensive today at $117 a night, tap 
water that smells of decay runs into stained sinks. Painted wood-planked 
floors are covered with matted, soiled carpet remnants. Mosquito nets draped 
around king-size beds on outdoor sleeping porches are torn and misshapen, 
leaving guests vulnerable to nocturnal insect invasions.

The hotel, now in the pulsating heart of a violent city, exposed to gang 
rampages and stray gunfire, was originally set in an orange grove. During 
the 1915-1934 U.S. occupation, it was used as an American military barracks 
and hospital. It became a hotel just before World War II.

"After the Americans left, it was too big to use as a private residence, and 
a lady from Scandinavia came and had the idea to create a hotel," Sam 
recalled of the first of many hoteliers to lease his mansion.

The mysterious Madame Oloffson — no one recalls her first name or ever 
meeting her seafaring husband — transformed the military quarters into a 
grand accommodation, decorating the whitewashed walls with naive paintings 
and embroidering linens with the initials of the hostelry she named for that 
absent husband.

A crocodile-keeping Dutchman, Maurice de Young, ruled Sam's residence during 
the war years, when Allied troops patrolling the Atlantic would put into 
port for the occasional respite and European surrealists began taking an 
interest in Haitians for their fascination with voodoo and the occult.

In the late 1940s, a Russian French photographer and art collector named 
Roger Coster acquired the Oloffson's lease and began attracting a Hollywood 
clientele keen on escaping the McCarthy-era cultural witch hunts. Errol 
Flynn, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote were among the 
first wave of glitterati to frequent the little-known oasis of 1950s Haiti, 
enraptured by the vibrant dance rhythms and verdant surroundings.

Meanwhile, assassinations and violent overthrows escalated to the point at 
which the rise of dictatorship stirred little worry. But Haiti's exotic 
image began to tarnish soon after Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier came to power 
in 1957, the start of a 29-year family tyranny during which suspected regime 
opponents turned up dead in odd places, rather like the fictional secretary 
for social welfare in Greene's 1966 novel whose body is discovered in the 
drained swimming pool of the "Trianon Hotel."

Oloffson history is often difficult to separate from literary flourish. In 
Greene's story and in reality, the mysterious woman who founded the hotel 
lived out her days in seclusion in an upstairs bedroom. Both the fictional 
Trianon and the Oloffson were frequented by a white-tuxedoed bon vivant 
alleged to have informed on foreign visitors to Haiti's father-and-son 
dictators.

"The hotel can't be separated from the personality of Aubelin Jolicoeur," 
said Port-au-Prince historian George Corvington, referring to the gadfly 
columnist who was the inspiration for Greene's character Petit Pierre. "He 
animated the place. He cultivated a lot of acquaintances and was the center 
of the hotel. Foreign artists and celebrities came to see him. He was a 
celebrity in his own right."

Jolicoeur, who died on Valentine's Day this year at age 80, patronized the 
Oloffson for 40 years, sporting a gold-tipped cane, tickling the ivories 
with such legends as Bobby Short and enlivening the jet-set clientele the 
Oloffson drew during its second era of chic, still referred to as "La Belle 
Epoque Creole," of the 1970s.

"Graham Greene made Aubelin more famous than he was," said Michel Beaulieu, 
a radiologist and erstwhile playboy who was a confidant of Greene's during 
the nine weeks the author spent in the coveted turreted corner suite.

Beaulieu attributes the Oloffson's renaissance after the death of Papa Doc 
in 1971 to the notoriety bequeathed by "The Comedians," which Greene 
researched and wrote in the early 1960s when Papa Doc's murderous tontons 
macoutes security agents had chased away even the most adventurous 
clientele.

During the pleasure-seeking years after Papa Doc's death and his son's 
ascension, Chicagoan Al Seitz and later his widow, Suzanne, renovated the 
hotel and recovered its postwar image as an exotic destination on the East 
Coast's doorstep.

Mick Jagger, Richard Burton, Liza Minnelli and Jackie Onassis visited. So 
did newly married Bill and Hillary Clinton. Bungalows and suites bear the 
names of artists, entertainers and journalists who stayed there: Jimmy 
Buffett, Jonathan Demme, Irving Stone, Ed Bradley.

Suzanne Seitz fondly remembers the Casablanca-like blend of allure and 
danger that pervaded the hotel during the 15-year reign of Jean-Claude "Baby 
Doc" Duvalier.

"I don't know how we got away with what we did, even though we never did 
anything openly anti-political," Seitz said of the years that her hotel was 
a gathering place for figures later influential in the resistance that drove 
out Baby Doc in 1986. "I think the regime knew we were good PR for the 
country. If you stayed out of politics, they left you alone. It wasn't free, 
but it now seems like the good old days."

Some contend, though, that the guests fiddled while Haiti burned.

"I used to see how the tontons macoutes tortured people and threw their 
bodies in the streets," guide and driver Alex Toio said. While his 
countrymen were being hounded and killed, celebrities and sun-seekers sipped 
Barbancourt rum and danced until dawn, recalled Toio, who told of ferrying 
underage girls to the rooms of men staying at the hotel.

After her husband's death in 1982, Seitz ran the hotel for four years before 
falling out with Sam and handing it over to Richard Morse, whom the aging 
owner regarded as a stepson. Morse's mother, Haitian dancer Emerante de 
Pradines, had been involved with Sam four decades earlier, and they had a 
son together years before Morse was born.

Morse is now the guiding force behind the Oloffson and its signature 
entertainment, the African roots band RAM. Former patrons criticize him for 
focusing on the band to the hotel's detriment, and failing to invest in the 
Oloffson's upkeep.

"I wanted to take the Haitian voodoo rhythms I'd heard as a child and make 
dance music," the hotel's current manager said. Now in his 18th year at the 
Oloffson, Morse recounts the dark chapters that followed his arrival soon 
after the fall and exile of Baby Doc and continue amid the violent struggles 
for power that have yet to end.

"I figured if we had democracy, we'd have tourists, and if we had chaos, 
we'd have journalists. But when they started shooting journalists, I had 
nothing," said Morse, a Princeton graduate who recently had his long, 
graying hair plaited into cornrows.

Three months after arriving here, Morse married a Haitian singer. Together, 
they formed RAM, named for Morse's initials but also employing the zodiac 
symbolism of Aries. The band emerged in 1990, when the rise of Jean-Bertrand 
Aristide, a radical priest who was soon elected president, was inspiring 
Haitians to take pride in their African heritage.

With its fevered rhythms, RAM quickly became the most popular entertainment 
in Haiti, breathing new life into the hotel as hundreds flocked to weekly 
concerts that quickly drew official suspicion.

"Politicians in Haiti think anyone going after an audience is a threat, and 
musicians need audiences," Morse said of his run-ins with police and 
gangsters over songs of subtle protest. His band represented resistance to 
the junta that ruled Haiti during the three years Aristide was forced into 
exile in the early 1990s, and it became a target of Aristide attacks years 
later when the musicians refused to use their popularity to promote him and 
his Lavalas Party.

The interim leadership in power since Aristide was flown into African exile 
in February 2004 differs little from its predecessors, Morse says, recalling 
a Nov. 4 police raid that picked up three of his musicians without a 
warrant.

These days, the hotel is sometimes full on Thursdays, when RAM plays. But 
encroaching security risks from the nearby slums and indifferent service 
have chased away all but a few tourists.

"Our tours are intended to open people's eyes to the reality of Haiti," said 
Elizabeth Marhone, a Canadian who recently spent the night at the hotel with 
10 colleagues of the Friends of Haiti relief group to take in the RAM 
performance. The only guests the previous night included a journalist 
exploring the hotel's history and an Israeli photographer given a break on 
the rates for a monthlong stay.

Sam has lived at the more upscale Villa Creole for 25 years. At the end of a 
rare visit to the Oloffson, he cast disapproving looks at the cobwebbed 
ceilings, stained linens, bare light bulbs and power cords affixed to the 
walls with staples.

He has given up on his family home and wants to sell the Oloffson and leave 
the proceeds to a handful of nieces and nephews who are his last remaining 
family. "It's time," he said.

In Haiti's current circumstances, though, there are no takers.