The Chelsea Hotel of BD times is but a pale shadow of its former glory. No cats in the halls?! We’ve long heard rumors of an eccentric lady who kept a tiger in her apartment at the Chelsea way back in the 60s, but we tended to dismiss them as just too wild even for this primordial urban jungle. But now, at last, the truth comes to light. According to London’s Daily Telegraph, Theodora Keogh, granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt, and who died just recently at the ripe old age of 88, kept a margay, a South American “tiger cat” similar to an ocelot, while in residence at the Chelsea(1/29/08).
As you might imagine, Theodora led a colorful life, carrying a knife and swimming nude as a young girl, joining a ballet company early on, running with the Paris Review crowd in the City of Love, and writing nine novels with such scandalous themes as: incest between twins, young girls being lured to bed by diseased sculptors, passing history exams by threatening to expose teachers as lesbians, street musicians falling in love with child criminals, rape, unspeakable things, and being stirred to perform marital duties by “. . .memories of a dark, swarthy Indian boy walking in the Place Vendome.”
Theodora abandoned writing in 1962, and apparently moved to the Chelsea Hotel soon after. The affair with the margay, however, did not end well: one night, when Theodora passed out dead drunk in her room at the Chelsea—18 whiskeys, anyone?--the ravening beast gnawed off one of her ears!
We corresponded with Chelsea Hotel historian Sherrill Tippins about Theodora, and she was way ahead of us: she said that she had already contacted a biographer, who denied that the Tiger Lady had ever lived at the Chelsea Hotel, claiming instead that the margay incident had taken place in another building in the Chelsea neighborhood. But we here at the Chelsea know better: in addition to the confirmation of the old rumors, what other building in Manhattan would allow ferocious jungle cats to range freely through its halls?!
Theodora died on January 5 of this year in North Carolina, where, reportedly, she had had to give up raising chickens because they kept getting eaten by coyotes. (Yeah, I know, North Carolina doesn’t seem like a real big coyote state: no word on whether or not she was raising the coyotes herself.) -- Ed Hamilton
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