Beirut Haven for Press to Close Its Doors : Commodore ‘Won’t Be a Hotel Anymore,’ Owner Says of Money-Loser

Youssef Nazzal, who defied the gunmen, the shelling, the car bombs and the odds, made his decision Friday: He is closing his West Beirut hotel, the Commodore.

For days, at his home in London, Nazzal had been listening to reports from the Lebanese capital about the fighting in and around the Commodore, which once served as an almost sacrosanct haven for the press.

The Commodore was a place where reporters could withdraw from the madness of Beirut. Nazzal had made this possible by paying off the various militia factions that roamed the streets and, when necessary, by posting guards around the hotel.

Nazzal took up the challenge of keeping the place running in the mid-1970s, when civil war erupted, and hung on through the years, even during the Israeli siege of 1982. Over the past four years he struggled to keep it open, although the reporters were no longer coming to Beirut.

Hotel Losing Money

He is wealthy, and he kept the Commodore open because it was an institution, even though it was losing money. But on Friday, Nazzal decided that the institution was dead, that Beirut had finally killed it.

“It won’t be a hotel anymore,” he told a reporter by telephone.

The stories Nazzal heard from Beirut were chilling--pools of blood in the hotel lobby, where Druze and Shia militiamen, once allies, fought with machine guns and grenades; hooded fighters crouched in the lobby with guns trained on the entrance.

One story dealt with the hotel’s last two guests, American Muslim leaders seeking the release of hostages. They were trapped, then robbed. One robber said he was Druze, the other a Shia. The two Americans left the country.

‘Shooting--Then Looting’

Then came word of gunmen carrying off everything from liquor to towels. Nazzal said it was the “Bedouin way--first the shooting, then the looting.”

At last, the final insult: A truck pulled up and carted off the piano from what had been the dance floor.

“It’s finished,” Nazzal said. “That’s it, the end of the line.”

In its own way, the Commodore was as famous as Saigon’s Caravelle had been to reporters who covered the Vietnam War, or Tehran’s Inter-Continental to those who covered the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis.

The Commodore was a seedy, third-class hotel of 200 rooms in a city that was once the playground of the Middle East. It was a subject of the “Doonesbury” comic strip, and it survived countless days of vicious combat. It was always the place where the telephones and the telex worked, even when communications were knocked out in the rest of the city.

On those grim evenings when the bullets were flying, when reporters who lived in apartments in the city were forced to move to the Commodore, Nazzal was there, sitting on the couch in a corner of the lobby that was reserved for him and his father, Abu Youssef.

Crush at the Bar

Those were the glory days, when a room was $200 a night, when the two bartenders, Mohammed and Younis, struggled to keep up with the crush. And sometimes, late in the evening, after the crowd had thinned out, Nazzal would tell the story of the Commodore, of how he bought it from a pair of brothers who went broke playing cards and playing the horses; of how, in the old days, the Commodore was where people on cheap package tours were put up.

Then, he recounted, in 1976 the civil war broke out. Nazzal was flying back to Beirut from London, the plane was crowded with press people sent in to cover the fighting, and they wanted to know where it would be safe to stay. The Commodore, he said.

Nazzal installed new telephones and telex equipment, along with teleprinters that carried the Associated Press and Reuters reports. From then on, the Commodore was never the same.

Newcomers would be suddenly frozen by what sounded like the whistle of an incoming shell, only to learn that the sound came from Coco the Parrot, on his perch by the circular bar. It was Coco’s best trick.

Champagne and Orange Juice

Fuad Saleh, the hotel manager and chief fixer, could accomplish almost anything. He could get your glasses repaired, get your residency permit renewed. Once, at a time of particularly heavy fighting, a group of press people wired ahead to say they would be coming in by boat because the airport was closed. Saleh met them with champagne and fresh-squeezed orange juice.

“No problem,” he said.

Saleh, ever the dapper dresser, would roam the hotel until the wee hours of the morning, buying a drink here, stopping to chat there, and on occasion sending an employee down to the Green Line--the boundary between the city’s Christian and Muslim sectors--to rig a telex line at the main post office.

In 1984, when Shia fundamentalists, enforcing Islam’s stricture against alcohol, went through Beirut smashing bars, Saleh prudently moved bottles and glasses to an upstairs suite.

Guns Checked at Door

Hotel clerks kept machine guns behind the check-in counter. Gunmen were asked to check their weapons at the door. Guests chose rooms on one side of the hotel or the other, depending on where the sniping or car-bombing seemed to prevail at the time.

When the city was virtually without food, as it was so often, the Commodore had prime rib. When reporters needed cash for a quick foray into Tehran, the Commodore came up with $120,000 in a matter of hours. When there was fighting, the hotel was the place to be.

There were cockroaches in the rooms, but the laundry was done every day.

In recent years, the press drifted away. Those who lived and worked in Beirut have for the most part been moved out to other cities. The March, 1985, abduction by terrorists of Terry A. Anderson, the AP’s chief Middle East correspondent, made it clear that the press was no longer immune to the savagery of the city.

Nazzal said he had a premonition last week that something was going to happen to his hotel. He called Saleh, the manager, and told him to be on the first plane for London.

Today the Commodore is no longer a hotel. There are holes in its walls, its windows are shattered. It is one more casualty of the war that never seems to stop.

Nazzal said he will wait for a while before he decides what to do with the building.

“I can decide that when I see what’s left of it,” he said.

J. Michael Kennedy was The Times’ correspondent in Beirut from 1981 to 1984. For nine months he lived at the Commodore.