An Appropriate Setting in Land of Voodoo : Quirky Old Hotel in Haiti Returns From Dead, With Couple’s Help

Three voodoo priests have sworn that there is a buried treasure on the palm-shaded grounds of the celebrated hotel.

A benign ghost is said to have visited often, amusing two generations of guests, a list of whose names reads like a mid-20th Century celebrity register. British author Graham Greene used the hotel as the centerpiece of his haunting novel about Haiti, “The Comedians,” and he wrote part of it while staying there.

It is the Grand Hotel Oloffson, one of the most famous and popular inns in the Caribbean until the violent Duvalier family dictatorship and fear of AIDS killed tourism--and the hotel--in 1986.

Improbable Optimism

But with improbable optimism typical of the troubled, impoverished island nation, the Oloffson has been born again, almost as it was in earlier days when it attracted the rich and famous.

Like most of its noted visitors, including Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Paulette Goddard and Irving Berlin in one generation, and Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace and Mick Jagger in the next, Greene found the Oloffson’s atmosphere both weird and inspiring.

“The architecture of the hotel was neither classical in the 18th-Century manner nor luxurious in the 20th-Century fashion,” he wrote in “The Comedians.”

“With its towers and balconies and wooden fretwork decorations it had the air at night of a Charles Addams house in a number of the New Yorkers. (Addams was, in fact, a frequent visitor.) You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him.

“But in sunlight, or when the lights went on among the palms, it seemed fragile and period and pretty and absurd, an illustration from a book of fairy tales.”

Closed and Stripped in 1986

To many old Oloffson regulars, Greene’s description evokes nostalgia for a languorously free tropical ambiance long since vanished into the blood-stained past of Port-au-Prince.

For a time, the Oloffson itself all but disappeared, a crumbling relic of Haiti’s rare, carefree days. Starved for guests during the worst of the Duvalier years, it was closed and stripped of its furnishings, even its light switches and electrical outlets, in 1986. But as Greene and all who have stayed at the Oloffson know, there is a magic about the place that, given the right hands to manage it, can transcend Haiti’s troubles.

Today, the quirky old hotel with its gingerbread fretwork appears to have been found by the right hands--a couple of young Princeton graduates who have restored it and are determined to make it a launching pad for a renaissance in Haitian art, culture and tourism.

On the surface, Richard Morse, 30, and Blair Townsend, 27, seem an odd pair to take on the task of hotel restoration and management. He is a cultural anthropologist and former rock musician, she an economist and art historian more at home in Soho and Paris than in the tumble-down capital of Haiti.

Deeper Ties to Haiti

But their ties to Haiti and its prolific primitive artists go deep. Morse is the son of the noted Latin America-Caribbean scholar Richard Morse--of Yale, Stanford and the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson Center--and the Haitian entertainer, Emerante de Pradines, famed for bringing voodoo songs and dances out of rural obscurity three decades ago.

Townsend, from Malibu by way of Pasadena, followed economics at Princeton with art at the Sorbonne and focused on Haitian primitive artists while working at several Soho galleries in New York, where Morse was based with his all-Princeton rock group, “Groceries.”

Morse, whose maternal grandfather composed the music of the old Caribbean standard, “Yellowbird,” gave up the rock band and returned to Haiti in 1986 to write pop music that would reflect Haitian themes. Townsend, to whom he has been engaged for seven years, joined him.

“When you’re engaged, you’re always on that brink, and it’s so much more exciting,” she said happily of their unmarried partnership.

Was Assistant Manager

For a brief period before the hotel closed in September, 1986, Morse worked there as assistant manager. Townsend explored the seemingly inexhaustible world of primitive art. It is said that in Haiti every citizen is either a painter or a presidential candidate. Together, the couple began to plot the revival of the old hotel. They found support near at hand.

Morse’s mother, now a cultural adviser to Haitian President Leslie Manigat, was related to the family of Demosthenes Sam, who built the sprawling Victorian structure 100 years ago as the most elegant residence in Port-au-Prince. Demosthenes’ brother, Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, lived there until he was hacked to death by an angry mob, an act that triggered the U.S. Marines’ invasion and occupation from 1915 to 1934.

The Marines requisitioned the Sam mansion for use as a hospital and fortuitously added a maternity wing that later converted handily into a row of hotel rooms. The gentle ghost who is said to pay an occasional visit appears to have been created in the Marine hospital’s surgery.

When the Marines departed, the dispossessed Sam family elected not to move back in and leased the mansion to the Norwegian-Haitian Oloffson family for conversion to a hotel. The inn thrived until the end of World War II, when the widow Oloffson sold the lease to an eccentric former New York stockbroker named Maurice De Young. De Young drove guests away by--among other nonattractions--raising caiman, a particularly fierce breed of alligator, in the hotel swimming pool. But another rebirth was not far off.

‘Barracks for Derelicts’

In 1954, Roger Coster, a free-lance photographer for Life and other magazines, and his Haitian wife, Laura, bought the lease on the almost-ruined hotel. Coster described it then as “a magnificent run-down barracks for derelicts.”

One of Laura’s first acts was to send a newspaper photograph of the Oloffson to Charles Addams, with a note that said, “It looks like one of your cartoons.” Addams soon visited, told his friends and, within two years, solely by word of mouth, the guest register became a sort of international Who’s Who.

But in 1960, Coster decided that the two-year-old regime of Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier, who already was earning a deserved reputation as the most brutal dictator in Western Hemisphere history, “smelled bad.” Coster sold the lease to another New Yorker, Al Seitz, who directed the Oloffson until he died in 1982. Seitz’s widow, Suzanne, struggled on with an ever-declining guest list until she was forced to close the hotel.

Seitz’s most important visitor in the early 1960s was Greene, who conceived and wrote part of “The Comedians” in a spacious room just off the graceful, wrap-around veranda that fronts the hotel and serves today as one of the city’s top restaurants. The novel, set mostly in the Oloffson, was made into a movie of the same name, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. It chronicled the tragicomic adventures of an expatriate hotelier during the Duvalier regime.

New Wave of Celebrities

The novel and film generated a new wave of celebrity guests, but by the early 1980s the identification of Haitians as a high-risk group in the acquired immune deficiency syndrome epidemic and the durability of the Duvalier family dictatorship through February, 1986, deterred others from following.

Greene was so touched by the hotel’s troubles that he co-authored with Seitz a whimsical article entitled “The Mechanics of Running an Empty Hotel.” Until a year ago, the description was apt.

Then Morse and Townsend, encouraged by the Sam family, which still owns the property, took over the near-derelict building and restored it with the mix of antique mahogany and chintz-cushioned white wicker furniture that had decorated the Oloffson before it was stripped. Even the long mahogany bar, fashioned by the Oloffson’s from the Marines’ old pool table, was put back in its place just off the veranda. The famous Oloffson rum punch, a secret recipe that Morse says has “almost but not quite” been copied by Trader Vic’s, was revived by Destouches, the Oloffson bartender for 27 years who understudied the original barman, Cesar Joseph, the model of the limping bartender Joseph in “The Comedians.”

Character Returns

Another character from the Greene novel, the gossipy Haitian journalist with the silver-tipped cane, Petit Pierre, also returned. In real life, he is Aubelin Jolicoeur, still the same dapper, diminutive gadfly Greene depicted, but now an art gallery owner whose sometimes haunting, often amusing artworks by famous Haitian painters decorate the hotel. At the grand reopening last Nov. 8, 76-year-old Max Sam, who was born in the old mansion and is currently patriarch of the family that owns the building, chortled: “It’s a miracle. They’ve worked wonders.”

Prospects looked bright because the country then was just three weeks away from its first democratic presidential election in 30 years, an event that many expected to open a new era of prosperity and freedom for the most depressed nation in the Western Hemisphere. “We’re hoping to succeed in difficult times because if Haiti becomes peaceful again, we’ll have tourists,” the optimistic Morse said. But he added in a more cautious voice, “If it explodes, we’ll have journalists.”

Exploded in Violence

On Nov. 29, when Haiti exploded in election-day violence that killed hopes for immediate peace and democracy, the Oloffson’s six restored rooms were all occupied by journalists. “It was so devastating even the journalists wanted to leave,” Morse lamented.

Since the November violence, however, the country has settled into an uneasy peace. Townsend and Morse have finished decorating 16 of the hotel’s 24 rooms and the veranda is crowded most days with lunch and dinner guests. After a demoralizing slump following the November violence, room occupancy has reached respectable levels, according to Morse, thanks partly to visiting foreign diplomats, businessmen and the occasional Graham Greene devotee.

“But the Oloffson is not just a hotel, it’s a gallery,” Townsend, said, describing plans to lure art lovers from Europe and the United States for art shows, seminars and photography workshops. Among other events, the Oloffson expects to host a book publication party and seminar with author-critic Seldon Rodman when his new book, “Where Art Is Joy: 40 Years of Haitian Popular Art,” comes out in October, Townsend said.

Seeks the Creative, Adventurous

“We want to attract creative people and adventurous tourists, people who want to see another culture without going all the way to Africa,” she said. “Maybe,” Morse quipped, “we should promote it as ‘Come to the Oloffson in Haiti’s DMZ.’ ”

Despite the relaxed atmosphere inspired by the high-ceilinged old hotel with its lazily turning overhead fans, Morse and Townsend work long days at a rapid clip, managing the staff in fluent French and Creole, lending a personal touch of welcome to the increasing number of guests, restoring the remaining unfinished rooms.

Their profits, now beginning to trickle in after a rough start, are being reinvested in the hotel in keeping with a Creole proverb that Morse said he learned at his mother’s knee. “ Greskochon kwit kochon ,” he said, “meaning, ‘The fat of the pig cooks the pig.’ ”

But late at night, Morse said, he and Townsend often stand alone on the veranda, looking across the swimming pool at the lush tropical garden that shields the Oloffson from the city, and feel themselves almost transported to the time of “The Comedians.”

“I have to catch myself sometimes,” Morse said. “The place seems so romantic when its empty.”