FLORENCE TURNER At The Chelsea [paperback]

The Hotel Chelsea is not just a New York institution. It is not even merely an American institution. For over a century this extraordinary building - part hotel, part rooming house, part sanctuary - has been one of the most important landmarks on the circuit of international bohemianism.

Sarah Bernhardt adored the Chelsea. Robber barons moved in. Lily Langtry came to stay. Mark Twain took up residence. Thomas Wolfe wrote Look Homeward Angel in room 831. Andy Warhol used it as a forum for his happenings. Sid Vicious lived there. Nor were artists the only ones to succumb to the Chelsea's charm. Stockbrokers and accountants, drifters and lost souls, all entered its lobby, extravagantly decorated with the good, and bad, art of its residents, and stayed. Florence Turner, who gave us this highly entertaining account of the Chelsea, was none of these. A theatre scout for MGM, she lived in the hotel for eleven years. The personalities of the 1960s were her close friends, and after she left the hotel in 1975 her affection for the place did not dim. The Chelsea, she said, provided inspiration, warmth, support and a 'kind of continuity of aberration'.