You know how the rhyme goes: Old King Cole was a merry old soul, And a merry old soul was he; He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl, And he called for his fiddlers three. Every ...

OLD King Cole was a merry old soul. That you have often heard. But of the serious side of his life — such are the lapses of history — you may have heard nothing at all. History, like a ...

The old lounge space outside the bar was formal and for some a shade dowdy. The King Cole Bar, with its massive, ribald Maxfield Parrish mural—one of the great sights of New York in my book ...