The Books: “From Beirut to Jerusalem” (Thomas Friedman)

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman. This was an important book for me. I remember where and when I was in my life when I read it. I was never into non-fiction. (Can you believe it? Now I have to FORCE myself to read novels … for the most part, I am a non-fiction girl). But for whatever reason, I decided to pick up that book and read it. I was in grad school – for acting, of course – and I lived, breathed, ate, dreamt, acting – 24/7. Grad school is a cloister, sort of. So to be reading that in the middle of the cloister was incredible. I had assimilated a lot of the information in the book, of course, because – I remember the civil war in Beirut, just from the news, I know a lot of the events because – you know – they were on the damn news. But this book was the first – it led me to other books, it made me dig deeper, read as much as I could – it led me into other areas – because everything is interconnected when you really start to learn about it – it was the spark that lit the flame, the beginning of my non-fiction journey. I can tell how blown away by it I was because of all the writing in the margins, and all of the underlining. First off – I love his writing. The book is full of memorable anecdotes of a personal nature: the whole “check-point” thing – one of the funniest sections in the book, the golf course outside Beirut, the hostess of the dinner party in Beirut saying to her guests – as explosions rocked the apartment: “So should we wait until after the battle ends to have dessert?”

I’ll post a bit from the Beirut section – where Friedman describes the whole Commodore Hotel phenomenon in Beirut. Now I was in grade school and junior high way back then – but even I remembered the name “Commodore Hotel”. It had somehow filtered down into the consciousness of even a young girl.

From From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman.

The home of all good Beirut fixers — not to mention all good Beirut reporters and crooked taxi drivers — was the Commodore Hotel. Every war has its hotel, and the Lebanese wars had the Commodore. The Commodore was an island of insanity in a sea of madness. It wasn’t just the parrot in the bar, which did a perfect imitation of the whistle of an incoming shell, that made the place so weird; it wasn’t just the front desk clerk, who would ask registering guests whether they wanted a room on the “shelling side” of the hotel, which faced East Beirut, or the peaceful side of the hotel, which faced the sea; it wasn’t the way they “laundered” your hotel bills by putting all your bar charges down as “dry cleaning”; it wasn’t even the sign in the lobby during the summer of 82 which read: “In case of shooting around the hotel, the management insists that neither television cameramen nor photographers attemp to take pictures. This endangers not only their lives but those of the guests and the staff. Those who are not prepared to cooperate may check out of this hotel.” It was the whole insane atmosphere, an atmosphere that was neatly captured by the cartoonist Garry Trudeau in a series of Doonesbury strips he did about the Commodore during the summer of 82. My favorite shows his character, television newsman Roland Burton Hedley, Jr., calling down to the front desk from his Commodore room.

“Any messages for me?” Hedley asks the desk clerk.

“Let’s see …” says the clerk. “Yes, a couple more death threats. Shall I put them in your box?”

“Yeah, look,” says Hedley, “if they call again, tell them I only work for cable.”

You did not stay in the Commodore for the quality of its room. The only thing that came with your room at the Commodore was a 16 percent service charge, and whatever you found in the blue-and-gold shag rugs. The lobby consisted of overstuffed couches, a bar, a would-be disco with a tin-sounding organ, and enough bimbos to stock a whorehouse. There was also a Chinese restaurant and an old dining room, where the service was always bad and the food even worse. When the Shiites took over West Beirut in 1984 and imposed a more fundamental regime, the Commodore management was forced to close the bar in the lobby and to open up what became known as the Ramadan Room on the seventh floor. (Ramadan is the Muslim holy month of fasting.) Hotel guests would knock on the Ramadan Room door with all the caution of entering a speakeasy during Prohibition. Yunis, the bartender, would peek out to make sure it wasn’t some mullah come to break his bottles, and then let you in. Inside, guests would be sitting in the dark, sipping drinks on the couch, while Fuad, the hotel manager, would be shuffling back and forth uttering his favorite expression: “No problem, no problem.”

If you got tired of visiting the battlefront, all you had to do was sit in the Commodore lobby and wait for the front to visit you. One quiet Saturday night in 1984, a large number of journalists were gathered around the bar, getting loose after a day in the field. Yunis was keeping the booze flowing, when suddenly shots rang out from the lobby. The journalists all ducked behind the bar while a band of Druse gunmen poured into the hotel from the front door and kitchen, chasing after a certain gentleman who was apparently cutting in on their drug business. They found him in the lobby and tried to drag him out, but he, knowing what was in store for him, wrapped his arms around the leg of a couch. In order to encourage him to let go, the Druse pistol-whipped him and then pumped some lead into his thigh. Just as this scene was unfolding, my friend David Zucchino happened to come out of the elevator.

“All you saw in the lobby was this poor guy holding on to the couch for dear life, while the gunmen were trying to drag him away; and over at the bar all these little eyes of journalists were peering out from behind the stools,” Zucchino recalled. “At the front desk, two gunmen were beating the clerk, who was trying to call Amal for help. But what I remember most was that CBS correspondent Larry Pintak’s Dalmatian, which he used to keep tied up to the AP machine in the lobby, got so excited by all the shooting that he broke his leash and started lapping up this guy’s blood on the lobby floor. It was disgusting! The gunment finally left and this guy let go of the couch, got up, and sat on a bar stool in shock. Fuad immediately showed up and pronounced, ‘No problem, no problem.'”

Why did any sane journalist stay at the Commodore? To begin with, most deluxe hotels in West Beirut had been destroyed during the early years of the Lebanese civil war. But more important, the Commodore’s owner, a Palestinian Christian by the name of Yousef Nazzal, who bought this fleabag in 1970 from a pair of Lebanese brothers who needed some fast cash to pay off their gambling debts before their arms were broken, was a genius of catering to journalists. He understood that there is only one thing journalists appreciate more than luxury and that is functioning communications equipment with which to file their stories or television spots. By paying enormous bribes, Yousef managed to maintain live international telex and telephone lines into his hotel, no matter how bad the combat became. In the summer of 82, he once paid someone to slip into the central post office, unplug Prime Minister Shafik al-Wazzan’s telex, and plug the Commodore’s in its place. Yousef never took politics or life too seriously. He loved to sit on the stiff blue couch in the lobby right around deadline time and listen to the hum of all the telexes going at once — at a rate of about $25 a minute. He would sneak up behind me and say, “Tom, my boy, some people make a living, other people make a killing.”

The other important attribute of the Commodore was that it filled the void left by the defunct Lebanese Ministry of Information. For a “small consideration,” also known as baksheesh, also known as a bribe, the Commodore would get you a visa at the airport, a work permit, a residence permit, a press card, a quickie divorce, or a marriage certificate. Hell, they would get you a bar mitzvah, if you wanted it. As long as you had money, you could buy anything at the Commodore. No money, see you later.

Pro-Israeli press critics used to complain that the Commodore was a “PLO hotel”. There is no denying that many a Palestinian spokesman hung out there, but when the Israeli army invaded West Beirut, more than a few Israeli officers dined in the Commodore’s restaurant and sued it to contact reporters — the exact way the PLO had. The Commodore lived by the motto: The king is dead, long live the king. I would not be surprised if today a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini is hanging over the reception desk.