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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Stories about the glory days of San Juan`s Normandie Hotel filter from one generation to the next like confetti from the rail of the former luxury liner that gave the hotel its name.
Here`s a favorite:
The night the hotel opened, Oct. 10, 1942, Don Felix Benitez Rexach, owner of the Normandie, entertained the finest of the fine in Puerto Rico. Dignitaries from the United States, Panama and the Dominican Republic were among 1,500 people who attended to view seven floors of deco decadence.
The Normandie took four years to complete and the final product was a blend of French, Roman and Egyptian details sprinkled onto a building shaped very much like the famous ship that had taken Don Felix Benitez Rexach (that`s what his friends called him) on his honeymoon. Opening night was the buzz among San Juan socialites.
All around were hints of affluence and excess, from gilded bordered ceilings to exotic tile floors, statues and paintings from famous Latin American artists. Guests were served from a mahogany bar that took eight months to carve, across the room from a mural of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Mario Dumont`s orchestra provided the music, then Moineau, wife of Don Felix Benitez Rexach, provided the unannounced but legendary entertainment.
Sometime late in the evening Moineau left her seventh-floor chamber, walked to the second floor, stripped naked and dove in her French nothingness into the Normandie`s courtyard pool.
Some of her French friends joined her. In later years, her Puerto Rican neighbors debated whether this and Moineau`s other liberal behavior (she wore pants and smoked cigarettes!) enhanced or doomed the Normandie.
In either case, there is something of Moineau`s spirit remaining still in the renovated version of the Normandie that opened last Dec. 26, after 13 years of being closed and several years of disrepair before that.
If Moineau dove from the second floor today, she`d hit a dance floor where the pool used to be, but a stay in the Normandie can conjure the giddy attitude that must have influenced her.
There`s a roof over the atrium now and air-conditioning ducts make a border around each floor`s railing, but the 1989 Normandie essentially captures the 1942 equation that used elegance and deco architecture to inspire romance.
There is no center to the Normandie, unless open air can be considered part of the symmetry that is an effective mix of sharp angles and rounded corners. Wide walkways are lighted by deco-period wall lamps and everything in the front rooms is one soft pastel pastiche stocked with modern conveniences -- remote-control television, refrigerator and wet bar, etc. -- that the original Normandie couldn`t have offered. Everything here is uncluttered, with little to distract the attention from the Normandie`s captivating interior design and architecture.
Amenities include morning delivery of the San Juan Star, and the Normandie`s zealous staff seems eager to keep her afloat this time around.
The hotel`s renovation comes after years -- beginning in the `60s -- that had seen the luxurious Normandie reduced to a decaying skeleton with a Burger King in the lobby and to a San Juan eyesore where the first floor was believed to be a whorehouse.
That started to change in 1980, when the Normandie was included in the National Register of Historic Places.
Several proposals to buy the hotel were made in the next few years and the one that stuck was offered by a partnership that bought it for $2.1 million in 1987, put $20 million into its restoration, then contracted with the Radisson Hotel Corp. for its management.
You can find the Normandie by winding around Munoz Rivera Avenue until it intersects with Los Rosales Street at the east end of Old San Juan. The best direction, however, may be to drive until you see a building that looks like a powder-pink seven-story luxury cruise ship.
Luxury is the key word. It begins with the concierge offering champagne before you`ve had a chance to drop your bags. It ends when you look at your bill: summer rates are from $95 to $140 (single) and $115 to $160 (double); in the winter that jumps to $160 to $220 and $180 to $240.
Today the pool is outside. Naked diving is not encouraged. Unless you`ve got the style to be a legend.
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