Kolkata :
The morning durbars under the portico of the delightfully eccentric Fairlawn Hotel on Sudder Street have just become history. The ‘Duchess of Sudder Street’, as Vi (Violet) Smith was popularly called, will not be holding ‘court’ there anymore. And legions of her fans, as well as the galaxy of loyal customers of her hotel, will no longer be regaled by her stories about the Kolkata of yore. Smith passed away at her first-floor quarters of Fairlawn Hotel on Saturday at an age of 93.
The stories she narrated were as eclectic as her personality, and the hotel itself. One of her favourites was how Shashi Kapoor (“drop-dead gorgeous he was,” recalled Vi) met and fell in love with Jennifer Kendall. In the spring of 1965, the Kendals, who used to own a mobile theatre company called ‘Shakespeareana’, were putting up at Fairlawn and Prithvi Theatre (owned by Shashi’s father Prithviraj Kapoor) also happened to staging shows at New Empire at the same time. Jennifer had gone to watch a show there and it was “love at first sight” for Shashi, who courted Jennifer, joined ‘Shakespeareana’ and eloped with her to Bombay to get married after her father Geoffrey refused permission for marriage. The couple spent their honeymoon in Room No 17 of Fairlawn, and Vi named it ‘The Shashi Kapoor Room’.
Vi was also very fond of telling visitors about Patrick Swayze who stayed at the Fairlawn while shooting for ‘The City Of Joy’ in 1991. “He was very nice and soft-spoken. He had told me about the ranches he owned in California and New Mexico, about his wife Lisa and his childhood,” the coiffed and elaborately made-up Vi told this correspondent a couple of years ago. She was also an encyclopedia on the Calcutta of the glorious past.
Violet Smith was an Armenian whose grandfather escaped the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottomans in Turkey in 1915 and reached India through Iran and Afghanistan. Violet married Edward Frederick Smith, a British army officer, in 1944 and moved to England later, but returned in 1962 to take over the affairs of Fairlawn. Violet’s mother Rosie Sarkies had bought the property from two British ladies in 1936. The sprawling structure that houses the hotel is 231 years old now, having been constructed by one William Ford in 1783.
Vi lent her personality to the hotel she dearly loved. Stepping in through the iron gates of the hotel is like entering a green oasis set amidst the bustle of the city. A profusion of plants, mostly palms, provides an immediate soothing experience and leads to the portico where, every morning, the redoubtable Violet used to hold court. Not just the abundance of potted plants, the colour of the walls, linen, wicker and cane chairs, settees and stools, many of the draperies and even some of the crockery are green or have splashes of it. It’s Violet’s favourite colour. “Green symbolizes freshness, vibrancy and reminds one of nature,” she used to say.
Other regular guests at Fairlawn that Vi would often talk about were filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, actors Melvyn Douglas, Penelope Cruz, Julie Christie, Felicity Kendal (Jennifer Kapoor’s sister) and Om Puri, writers Gunter Grass, Eric Newby, Dominique Lapierre, Ian Hislop and Glen Balfour-Paul, British playwright Tom Stoppard, TV presenters Dan Cruikshank and Clive Anderson, and even Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner (Sting, for the uninformed)!
And all have paid glowing tributes to the hotel and its wonderfully charming owner Violet Smith. Lapierre went to the extent of wishing he loses his passport when he stays at Fairlawn the next time so that he can stay on at the hotel forever. Newby calls Fairlawn his “most favourite hotel”. Vi would often say her motto was to “receive tourists as guests and send them away as friends”. For her innumerable friends all over the world, Fairlawn, and Kolkata, will never be the same without Vi.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> Cities> Kolkata / by Jaideep Mazumdar, TNN / September 22nd, 2014