60 Years Later, a Rolling Tribute on Waldorf Terrain

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/nyregion/60-years-later-a-rolling-tribute-on-waldorf-terrain.html

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In the movie, with the actor Ralph Meeker at the wheel in postwar Vienna, driving a Jeep looked so easy. But driving a Jeep across a hotel ballroom in Manhattan filled with dignitaries like the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power?

Not so easy, it turned out.

It took four men to push the Jeep, in a tribute to the movie “Four in a Jeep” and the signing of the Austrian state treaty, the accord by which the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France called off the postwar occupation of Austria. From the end of World War II in 1945 until the treaty was signed 10 years later, soldiers from the four nations patrolled Vienna in Jeeps.

With the engines on.

The engine on the World War II-era Jeep in the tribute, at the Waldorf Astoria on Friday, stayed off.

“I wanted to start it,” said the man at the wheel, Lt. Col. Gregory E. Gimenez, who is assigned to the United States Mission to the United Nations, “but they wouldn’t let me.”

Nor did the 71-year-old vehicle handle as effortlessly as the one in the movie. Wrestling the wheel, Colonel Gimenez appeared to be building his biceps.

“It’s tough to steer,” he acknowledged.

The Jeep rolled in, and later out, at the Viennese Opera Ball, a charity gala that was celebrating its own 60th anniversary as well as the 60th anniversary of the signing of the treaty. The money raised goes to the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria, which runs a six-week summer program for singers and pianists.

The Jeep, operating on manpower, arrived after Austria’s ambassador to the United Nations, Martin Sajdik, and his wife, Tamara, had escorted Mr. Ban into the room. Some actual horsepower arrived later in an evening that stretched well into early Saturday morning; two horses figured in opera arias that were performed.

The Jeep was a 1944 Willys lent by Robert Del Gatto, a Long Island military enthusiast. Hours before the guests arrived in their ball gowns or white tie and tails, he drove into Manhattan in a pickup truck pulling a small trailer bearing the Jeep. He pulled into the driveway on the East 50th Street side of the Waldorf and climbed into the Jeep.

The plan was to start the engine and back the Jeep off the trailer, but the engine would not start.

With a push from Mr. Del Gatto’s sons, Tom and Rob, the Jeep was rolled off the trailer, and the engine turned over. Mr. Del Gatto maneuvered the Jeep into an elevator; the Waldorf has one big enough, just as it has an all-but-secret railroad platform where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt detrained in 1944.

The elevator took the Jeep and the Del Gattos to the third floor, and they pushed it out. Soon it was rolling across the plush carpeted terrain of the Waldorf’s Basildon Room. With every inch it advanced, it made a grinding, scraping noise.

With a turn it was on the black-and-white tiled highway of the foyer leading to the ballroom.

From there, the turns got tighter. The Jeep cleared the turn into the ballroom by inches.

“We had measurements,” Marcie Rudell, the executive producer and executive director of the Viennese Opera Ball, said as Mr. Del Gatto slid himself beneath the Jeep, belly up. He was making a fix in an effort to silence the grating sound. Apparently it was the emergency brake.

Ms. Rudell said that in 2004, for the 50th anniversary of the Austrian state treaty, she had staged a “mock re-enactment” of the signing, with copies of the pages from the actual treaty. This time around, she said, she watched “Four in a Jeep” and another movie about the postwar years, “The Third Man,” after a conversation with a diplomat. He had said that the Jeep had been a symbol of transition. In “Four in a Jeep,” the military men in the vehicle came from the four countries that eventually signed the treaty.

The Jeep motif continued long after Mr. Del Gatto’s Jeep had been rolled back into the shadows at the edge of the ballroom. The desserts were little Jeeps. The executive sous chef, Peter Betz, said they had components not found on Mr. Del Gatto’s. Chocolate buttermilk cake and chocolate mousse went into the bodies. There were pink macaroon tires and dark chocolate windshields.

Did the debutantes, in their long white gowns, long to slip behind the wheel? “I don’t think it would be advisable. I don’t have a driver’s license,” said one, Elisabeth Stam, 20, a student at Barnard College.

The driver, Colonel Gimenez, said steering a Jeep across a hotel ballroom was not something he had done before. But something puzzled the colonel, who at 38 was born 25 years after the Austrian state treaty was signed and 35 years after World War II ended.

“I didn’t understand the reference to ‘Four in a Jeep,’ ” he said.