Where “Grand Hotel” Came From
In a piece about the novel “Grand Hotel” and its author, Vicki Baum, (the book was made into the glossy 1933 MGM movie), Noah Isenberg quotes Baum from her 1960 memoir, “It Was All Quite Different”: ‘You can live down any number of failures, but you can’t live down a great success. For thirty years I’ve been a walking example of this truism. People are apt to forgive and forget a flop because they care little about things that aren’t in the papers or on television, and a book that fails dies silently enough. But a success, moth-eaten as it may be, will pop up among old movies or as a hideous musical or in a new film version, or in a Japanese, a Hebrew, a Hindu translation—and there you are.’
