By Jeannette Batz Cooperman
Candace O’Connor has written a history of Washington University and a documentary on the 1939 Missouri sharecropper protest. But her most recent project immersed her in the glitz and glamour of the Chase Park Plaza and the Koplar family dynasty.
Which must have felt like bathing in champagne.
Meet Me in the Lobby: The Story of Harold Koplar & the Chase Park Plaza has cameos by Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and vignettes about everything from Art Deco debauchery to wrestling at the Chase. The story starts in 1910, when Harold’s father, Sam Koplar, converted the old Globe Theater and showed “nearly silent” pictures, paying people to stand behind the screen and read the captions aloud. In the 1920s, he built the vaudeville palace that later became Powell Symphony Hall. In 1929, inspired by a stay at the Savoy Plaza Hotel in New York, he began construction on the Park Plaza.
Not even the Depression could stop him. By 1940, his son, Harold, was designing a dark, sexy Zodiac Lounge at the top of the adjacent Chase Hotel, etching signs of the zodiac into a circular glass bar 62 feet in circumference. And oh, the flesh that would warm that glass bar, as it vibrated with jazz and secrets whispered in the dark.
O’Connor interviewed scores of people about HK, dubbed King Koplar by his loyal court. “He was larger than life,” they said—and he liked inventing. “Let’s start a TV station. Let’s start a lodge. Let’s start an airline,” she quips. “He had fun living.”
O’Connor will sign copies at a June 11 party in, where else, the Chase lobby.
