Guests Of Honor The Davenport Was A Magnet For Famous Visitors To Spokane

You, too, can walk where Gandhi walked.

And since we’re on the subject of great humanitarians, you can also walk where Jerry Lewis walked.

An astonishing number of the bestknown people of the 20th century have walked through the Davenport Hotel’s doors in its 82 years of existence.

The Davenport’s Presidential Suite has been truly presidential: Ten presidents have visited (although not always while they were presidents). The Davenport’s guest list also includes three generals, one emperor, one queen and one Sultan (of Swat, Babe Ruth). We gathered anecdotes about famous Davenport guests from longtime Spokane residents, former Davenport employees and newspaper accounts. Here’s what we found:

Clark Gable - Clara Broadhead of Spokane was working at the Davenport’s dress shop during World War II when an Army officer in cap and uniform came in to chat.

“When he left, one of the girls at the cigar counter said, ‘Do you know who you were just talking to?” said Broadhead. “I said, ‘Yes, a captain at Fort Wright.’ She said, ‘You just talked to Clark Gable.”’

It was Lt. Clark Gable, who was stationed at Fort George Wright in 1943 for training. He was a common sight at the Davenport.

Peggy Lee - The quintessential ‘50s torch singer was just about to step in her bathtub when the fire alarm went off in 1955. Someone had called in a bomb threat.

Lee threw on some clothes, wrapped a scarf around her curlers, and stood outside on the sidewalk with the rest of the guests. Police checked out the building and found nothing.

Richard M. Nixon - The year was 1958, and the Davenport kitchen staff leapt into action when the roomservice order came in from the vice president’s suite. They whipped up the extra-special meal they had planned for him, and served it on the hotel’s famous gold service.

When the line of uniformed waiters reached the room, they discovered that … the order wasn’t for Nixon at all. It was for someone in his entourage.

Mahatma Gandhi - Only one detail survives from Gandhi’s visit (year unknown), but it’s a detail that fits the popular perception of this man of simplicity. While walking through the hotel, Gandhi took the time to stop and chat with one person in particular: Tony Giannou, the Davenport’s shoeshine man.

Jerry Lewis - John Reed, a Davenport bellman for 18 years, remembers Lewis as being “very, very serious.” During his 1959 visit, Lewis and bandleader Les Brown secluded themselves in the State Suite to rehearse their “Hollywood Revue” stage show, which they had brought to the Coliseum.

Woody Guthrie - The Dust Bowl folk singer was booked into the Davenport while singing at a Northwest Rural Electric Cooperative convention in 1947. He found the Davenport’s opulence snooty, or worse.

“This is an awful nice hotel … just a little too fascisti to satisfy my higher ideals,” he wrote to his wife. “But Spokane ain’t that way at heart. I like the Pacific Northwest more every time I see it. The folks out here got a good shot of the old free and easy pioneer spirit in them. They still ride the tough grass and dig in the hills.”

He later escaped from the Davenport and took his guitar where he was more comfortable: Skid Road.

Babe Ruth - He stayed at the Davenport for a week in November 1926 while appearing in his own vaudeville show at the Pantages Theatre.

He told a Spokane reporter that he always ate room service, never in the restaurant. When he ate in a restaurant, people stared at him and made him “so nervous that I would probably stick a fork in my eye.”

John F. Kennedy - JFK was at the Davenport at least twice, in 1954 and 1960, both times to speak at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner.

On that first visit, the Chronicle called him “the youthful Democrat from Boston” with a “shock of unruly hair.”

William Howard Taft - A guest more than once, President Taft reportedly told owner Louis Davenport, “This is home. This is the best hotel I was ever in.”

Rock Hudson - He was in town with a touring show, and one night he brought all of the people in the show down into the lobby to do skits and songs.

“It was very entertaining,” said Reed.

John Howard - Betty Merriman of Spokane will never forget her encounter with this film star, best known as Katharine Hepburn’s rich fiance in “The Philadelphia Story” and as Bulldog Drummond in a series of ‘30s and ‘40s films. Howard was in the hotel with actresses Ellen Drew and Patricia Morrison.

“My friend and I got on the elevator and there they were!” said Merriman. “For a couple of teenage girls, it was pretty exciting. For days afterwards, we would lean out of our window saying, ‘Oh, Johnny!”’

Van Cliburn - Donna Mikel, longtime hostess and cashier in the Davenport’s coffee shop, was impressed with the great pianist, and his mother, who was in town to judge the Greater Spokane Music and Allied Arts Festival.

“It was a pleasure to converse with them,” she said.

Dennis Day - Mikel wasn’t so enamored of this popular ‘40s singer.

“He was very tight with a tip,” she said.

Col. Charles Lindbergh - “He stayed in the State Suite, I remember,” former General Manager James S. McCluskey Sr. once reminisced in a newspaper story. “And all he wanted was chocolate eclairs.”

Marshal Ferdinand Foch - The supreme Allied commander from World War I had a particular soft spot for the Davenport’s famous soft water, pumped from a well beneath the hotel. “Foch came to attend a banquet and stayed four days just to get into a big tub and relax in that water,” McCluskey once said.

Thomas Wolfe - Bill Stimson, associate professor at Eastern Washington University, was studying some of Wolfe’s papers when he ran across a note scribbled on Davenport Hotel stationery. It said: “Saturday night. Late, late abed.”

Stimson said the famed author of “Look Homeward Angel” and “You Can’t Go Home Again” had toured the Northwest in the last months before his death in 1938.

Glenn Ford - Vicki Ball, now of Coeur d’Alene, was a Davenport elevator operator in 1960. One day, actor Glenn Ford (“The Blackboard Jungle,” “Teahouse of the August Moon”) stepped into her elevator.

Which is when the elevator decided to stall.

“My training quickly took over and got us safely to the floor,” she said. “Mr. Ford didn’t comment, thankfully. What I remembered most about him was his deep blue eyes. I remember thinking I could just dive into those eyes!”

Lynn Fontanne - She and her husband, Alfred Lunt, were the closest thing to royalty in the theater world of the ‘40s.

So, one day in the early ‘40s, Robert H. Ruby, now of Moses Lake, was “stunned to find myself wedged in the Davenport’s revolving door with this great actress.”

“She said to me in a most elegant and controlled voice, ‘Oh, pardon me, I thought it was my turn,”’ said Ruby, who had just seen her in the afternoon matinee. “I was speechless! … I have never forgotten this encounter because of Ms. Fontanne’s most kind and gracious manner.”

Liberace - One of the flamboyant pianist’s famous silver candelabras came from the Davenport, where it was given to him by McCluskey. This anecdote was unearthed by Laura Hollman, a Spokane third-grader, who wrote a school paper on the hotel.

Sam Spade - Yes, he’s fictional. But he deserves a place in this list because he is, after all, one of the most famous private eyes in literary history.

In Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon,” Spade stays at the Davenport and questions a suspect in his room. Hammett himself had stayed at the Davenport before.

Will Rogers - The famed cowboy humorist once said that, after Oklahoma, the Davenport seemed most like home to him.

That’s quite a compliment, but you have to wonder: Did Rogers ever meet a hotel he didn’t like?

John Philip Sousa - The famous bandleader and composer gave a starlight concert on the roof in 1915, with 700 people in attendance.

Vachel Lindsay - The poet lived in the hotel between 1924 and 1927 and wrote some of his finest poetry while sitting near the ever-burning fire in the lobby fireplace.

Do you have any Davenport celebrity stories to add? Call Jim Kershner at 459-5493, or write him at The Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane 99210, or send e-mail to jimk@spokesman.com.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 5 Photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Davenport guest list Famous people who have visited the Davenport Hotel in its 82-year history: Presidents, statesmen and politicians Theodore Roosevelt William Howard Taft Woodrow Wilson Warren G. Harding Calvin Coolidge Herbert Hoover Harry S. Truman John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Johnson Richard M. Nixon Mahatma Gandhi Robert F. Kennedy Hubert H. Humphrey Stuart Symington Haile Selassie Robert A. Taft

Singers, musicians, comics John Philip Sousa Harry Belafonte Will Rogers Victor Borge Les Elgart Harry James Les Brown Lawrence Welk Eddy Arnold Johnny Cash June Carter Ricky Nelson Nat King Cole Liberace Tennessee Ernie Ford Bill Cosby Van Cliburn Johnny Ray Joe Venuti Dennis Day Harry Lauder The Lennon Sisters The Kingston Trio Peggy Lee Bonnie Guitar Woody Guthrie

Military figures and explorers Robert E. Peary Charles Lindbergh Gen. John J. Pershing Marshal Ferdinand Foch Gen. George Marshall

Authors and poets Vachel Lindsay Thomas Wolfe Dashiell Hammett Zane Grey

Sports figures Babe Ruth Gentleman Jim Corbett Stirling Moss

Stars of stage and screen Mary Pickford Sarah Bernhardt Jeanette MacDonald Nelson Eddy Douglas Fairbanks Clark Gable Steve McQueen Rory Calhoun John Carradine Vincent Price Raymond Burr Jim Nabors Phil Harris Bing Crosby Bob Hope Jerry Lewis Betty White Rock Hudson Jimmy Durante Bob Barker Ellen Drew John Howard Betty Hutton Kay Francis Ethel Barrymore David Warfield Jack Benny Glenn Ford Lynn Fontanne Alfred Lunt Cecil B. DeMille

Miscellaneous Oral Roberts Queen Marie of Romania