Daniel Lavery’s 2024 novel, Women’s Hotel, is a witty and rambunctious collection of character studies set at the Biedermeier, a women’s hotel in 1960s New York City. Within its walls, the working women who call it home hustle for opportunities, pine for their hometowns, and, sometimes, find themselves bristling at the social mores of the time.
And in the 2025 follow-up, Christmas at the Women’s Hotel, the ladies find themselves flush with work during the holidays. In the excerpt below, one enterprising resident, society reporter Lucianne, is inspired to start a high-class, telephone-order male escort agency out of her room.
Christmas at the Women’s Hotel is now available online and in bookstores.
Mrs. Mossler had been particularly enthusiastic about the “new” World’s Fair, talking eagerly of the last one, in 1939, when she herself was but newly attached to the Biedermeier and bore far greater responsibility for her residents’ entertainment, as well as sharing all she could remember (and she remembered a great deal) of the nations represented, pavilions visited, muralists commissioned, novelties displayed. She remembered with particular interest the pavilion that had exhibited appliances from the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Corporation, the halls belonging to the National Biscuit Company, the Vermont Maple Tree Sugar Company, the Private Chauffeurs Local Union no. 800 — “And that strange little man who took us all to go see it — Ted Pelham, or Palmer, he called himself, though I have no idea what his real name might have been. He’d started a sort of escort guide service a few years before, during the Depression, since there were so many nice men out of work and so many nice women who couldn’t go anywhere interesting without them. He called at all the ladies’ hotels in those days. I remember he had a little patter for it: ‘Suppose I guarantee to have a dozen university men, all in their twenties, with Social Register backgrounds, perfect manners and reputations, well- dressed and thoroughly presentable, ready to squire any woman you have here wherever she wants to go, and prepared to deliver her back home as her own brother would? Suppose I supply the men, can you supply the women?’ He ran after all the columnists — he was absolutely mad for publicity, always hanging around the Stork Club trying to get his photograph taken — Lucius Beebe and Cholly Knickerbocker especially. But I don’t suppose you girls remember them?”
Only Lucianne did, although she didn’t think much of either. She felt that society reporters ought to report for society itself, not for the general public pressing their noses up against the glass.
“Anyhow, he rounded up as many out-of-work Ivy League boys as he could find–—they had to be tall, too, I remember, at least five foot ten — steady, no-nonsense. They never drank and they never used hair oil — perfectly well-behaved, nothing at all like taxi dancers, no matter what people said. He ran it along the lines of the Post Office, nothing could stay them from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. I hired a few of his young men myself when I wanted to see the fair. None of my men friends could have afforded to take me, you know, although they wouldn’t have admitted it for the world. They were all perfectly acceptable young men, except for Ted. One didn’t like him; one almost never does, with big-idea types, even when the ideas are good. Endlessly self-promoting, and for all his talk about consoling lonely hearts, it was perfectly clear that he didn’t like women at all.”
“And they came to the hotel?” Katherine asked, surprised. The chaperonage at the Biedermeier was never strict, running largely on a rather shabby and shopworn honor system since Mrs. Mossler could afford no stricter inspection, but it was nevertheless pleasantly shocking to imagine the lobby filled with paid escorts in their mothers’ generation.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Mossler said, entirely unconcerned. “It was a perfectly above-board operation. You could get away with rather a lot in those days, in the interest of giving men jobs. I don’t mean that he was getting away with anything unwholesome, only zany. I can’t remember why they arrested him now. I think he must have needed a license and couldn’t get one, because it wasn’t for anything indecent, I would have remembered that. I don’t know why more men don’t get that kind of service now. I suppose because they arrest you. Because there are still quite a lot of places that won’t let you in without an escort, although it’s nothing like it was then, of course. You really don’t know how nice it is to be able to go so many places by yourself.”
At this point Mrs. Mossler’s thoughts drifted back to the fair, and there would be no hope of returning her to any earlier topic: “Oh, and there was the Arctic Girl’s tomb of ice. I don’t think she was really Arctic, just a girl in a bathing suit who would lie down in a bed of ice as long as she could stand it. Maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but everybody wanted to go see a girl being frozen alive. My, but she looked cold in there. I’m sure they won’t have anything like that there now, would they, Pauline?”
“I haven’t seen much of the grounds, I’m afraid,” Pauline said.
“No, I suppose they wouldn’t. It was very entertaining at the time, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing people want to see nowadays. I was cold myself just from watching her. No, that wasn’t anything to do with the escorts–It was at the fair, near Admiral Byrd’s Penguin Island–just past the Congress of World’s Beauties and Nature’s Mistakes. . . .”
But Lucianne was long past listening. She made her apologies in equal parts politeness and haste before retreating to her room to take notes in her address book and make some probing phone calls.
There was no point in wasting eligible men on Biedermeier girls, of course–, but how many girls did she know who needed a well-bred occasional man, girls who would be more than happy to pay for the introduction, so long as he could be counted on to be punctual and charming? Not someone you were in real danger of liking, who you might quarrel with you tomorrow and then leave you without an escort for the rest of the week, but someone steady, impersonal, a good guest who wouldn’t embarrass you either at the table or on the dance floor, someone wholly disconnected from one’s own life, and whose idea of a good time lined up precisely with yours, because it was almost a certainty that the man you really liked was apt to get drunk at the worst moment, or to take a shine to one of your friends, or to vanish part way through dinner with the other unattached males in search of a better party, whereas the man who considered you his job for the evening had no reason to fail you — and besides, didn’t Lucianne know everyone who was worth knowing? People might criticize or even dislike her sense of humor, her arch and unsentimental, even pitiless manner, but none of them had ever criticized her taste. If Lucianne said he was all right for an evening, then he was, and that counted for something.
She also drew up an extensive list of rules, many of them underlined more than once, since so many of the principles regulating good behavior went without saying socially, but could always bear repetition in a professional setting:
A GUIDE FOR GUIDES
1. No more than one drink an hour, no more than six drinks a night. Sobriety is essential.
2. Be polite, not personal. Listen to her with interest. Keep your side of the conversation general, but not dull, and don’t bring up your private life. By no means ought she to know where you live, who your particular friends are, and certainly not the names of any other clients you might happen to see.
3. All contact with a client must be made through the office. Never give a girl your own telephone number. This job is no replacement for a social life of your own.
4. The evening ends at her front door.
5. You may choose to give her the impression rule #4 is slightly burdensome in her case — but only slightly, and only an impression. Do not invite her to break it.
6. Any violation of rule #4, however minute, will result in dismissal.
7. Treat her like your own sister. Make sure she has a wonderful evening. She could have a perfectly nice time on her own, so if she’s paying for the entertainment, it had better be wonderful. If she’s on the wall, dance with her; if she’s popular, be sure to stay off the wall yourself and be ready for a cheerful reunion at a moment’s notice.
8. Return any change from your expenses envelope to the client at the end of the evening. Tip conservatively unless she directs you to do otherwise; it’s not your money.
9. Don’t haggle, bargain, angle for gifts, or drop hints about tips for yourself. And for heaven’s sake, don’t mention in an offhand way that you’ve had your eye on this or that watch, cigarette case, python-skin shoes, mother-of-pearl studs, a trip to Bermuda, et cetera. Avoid discussions of your own poverty, no matter how grinding. If you’re that hard up, call the office for more appointments, or contact the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund.
If Lucianne had encountered very little trouble convincing her male acquaintances to sign up for the Guide Escorts, she found even less among her women friends. Even girls with steady dates called her up. Deanie Foote wanted a nice young man to accompany her to a traveling performance of Amy Beach’s Mass in E♭ by the Handel and Haydn Society, being taxed with a boyfriend who would whistle tunelessly along with the orchestra without ever realizing he was doing it. Betty Egerton wanted someone to go with her to Saint Thomas Church whenever her grandmother was in town, being engaged to an otherwise extremely good-natured young man who became tiresomely strident on the subject of religion, “as long as he’s between five foot nine and five foot eleven and has light brown hair, because Grandmother’s eyesight isn’t at all good, and she’ll never be able to tell the difference.”
