Last Call at the Hotel Imperial by Deborah Cohen is a long, thick, dense book. It is about a group of American newspaper and magazine reporters who followed the stories around Europe, before, during and after World War II. Sometimes they reported the stories. Sometimes they found themselves inside the stories. Sometimes they were the stories. These “foreign correspondents” changed the rules of journalism. Find this in non-fiction at the Pine Bush Area Public Library.

Deborah Cohen lists the major players in “Personae” on the first pages. John Gunther, Frances Fineman Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker (Knick), James Vincent (Jimmy) Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson are first. There is an Outer Circle which includes Jawaharlal Nehru (first prime minister of India) and the novelist Rebecca West.

The book is about the stories they wrote and got past the censors, and how they drank, and who was unfaithful to whom among their marriages. It is also about who interviewed Hitler, Mussolini, Freud, Nehru and Gandhi.

Dorothy Thompson “was the center of every circle of reporters, arguing, laughing, telling stories… She commandeered planes and found cars when no one else could…Late one night in 1926 she borrowed money from Sigmund Freud so she could travel to Poland.” In the introduction, Cohen writes, “The first American correspondent to be expelled from Nazi Germany, she had an audience estimated at eight to ten million for her thrice-weekly…syndicated columns.”

Jimmy Sheean interviewed Gandhi in 1947. “There were questions he needed to ask Gandhi—fundamental questions about the future of the world… After an hour of talking, Jimmy realized he’d already stayed too long… When Jimmy next saw Gandhi a few days later… in the garden of Birla House… he was on his way to the prayer meeting… Jimmy didn’t see the khaki-clad man pushing his way through the crowd. The assassin fired three shots into Gandhi’s
belly.”

John Gunther wrote his news stories and then wrote books, including Inside Europe, Inside U.S.A. and then finally, Death Be Not Proud. I read that one in high school. It is about his son Johnny, who had a brain tumor, and died of it, after a long, agonizing struggle.

A lot of the book is long and agonizing. It is about personal relationships among the reporters and their families, and who was faithful to marriages and who was not. It is about alcoholism and ambition and the lengths people will go to, to get that story. Allow Deborah Cohen to have the last word.

Cohen writes, “The reporters turned to, not away from, the world. They relayed the global struggles of their era in a new kind of journalism, both more subjective and more intimate; they conceived too, a new kind of memoir, delving into previously unexplored areas of love and death…They began the decade by reporting the story, but by 1939, they were the story.”

Read it now. Answer that Last Call at the Hotel Imperial.