Obituaries - March 3, 2000

Mary Bodne; Co-Owner of Algonquin Hotel

Mary Bodne, 93, who for 41 years co-owned the Algonquin Hotel, the famous Manhattan literary haunt. Bodne fell in love with the Algonquin as an 18-year-old bride on her honeymoon in 1924. She made her husband, South Carolina oilman Ben Bodne, promise to buy it for her. He made good on his promise 22 years later, paying $1 million for the 200-room hotel on West 44th Street that was best known as the home of the “Round Table,” a collection of writers and actors who regularly lunched at a large round table in the Algonquin’s Oak Room. During the 1920s, the Round Table included such personalities as Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Robert Sherwood, Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman. The Bodnes ran the hotel for more than four decades, continuing to host literary and show business luminaries, such as the humorist James Thurber, poet Richard Wilbur, and the songwriting team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Lerner and Loewe wrote the musical “My Fair Lady” in a ninth-floor apartment right under the Bodnes’ elegant 10th-floor unit furnished with antiques that reminded Mary Bodne of her native Charleston. She was a matronly and regal fixture in the hotel lobby through the 1990s, holding court in a wingback chair favored by her husband, who died in 1992. The Bodnes sold the hotel in 1987 to the Aoki Corp., the Brazilian subsidiary of a Japanese corporation. It is now owned by the Camberley Hotel Co. On Monday at a Manhattan hospital.