Miriam Fry

Miriam Fry runs the Griffith Hotel with the warmth of a customs officer. She receives Peggy Carter for a residency interview and pronounces the references impeccable. A limp coming through the door earns a raised eyebrow. A question about ambition earns a better answer: Peggy intends to work the telephone company only until she is married, exactly the horizon Miriam likes to hear.

Then comes the sermon: In a city filled with temptation, debauchery, and mischief, the Griffith stands as a haven for proper young ladies, and its code of conduct is not open for negotiation. Attire is demure and elegant. Curfew is ten o'clock. No drinking. No men above the first floor, no exceptions. Miriam delivers each rule like scripture and asks if it is clear. It is.

Her boarding house admits single women only, under one commandment she will not bend: no men above the first floor. She assembles the residents for a lecture, summoning the ghost of Harry Houdini, who once wowed a crowd in the building yet never once beat the stairs. Fort Knox, Alcatraz, take your pick. By Fry's telling, the Griffith is impenetrable. She makes a public example of Molly Bowen, ordering the girl to pack her bags for sneaking a suitor upstairs.

The boast doesn't quite land on Peggy as she had intended. Carter hears the whole speech and decides, flatly, that no building is impenetrable, a notion that sends her digging into how a thief cracked Howard Stark's vault. Fry has no idea the role she played in such a tightrope of a case. Later she plays gracious hostess, steering a cheerful new tenant named Dorothy Underwood over to meet Peggy and Angie.

Miriam Fry continues operating the Griffith Hotel according to her strict rules and closely monitors the women living there. She notices Peggy's unusually long hours and comments on her late-night activities, reinforcing her belief that the women under her roof require supervision and protection from their own impulses.

On the evening that Peggy smuggles Howard into the Griffith Mrs. Fry nearly catches her. Thanks to Stark's.. ability to talk his way into places, she does not. Miriam also becomes unintentionally useful to Otto Mink when he arrives at the hotel looking for Peggy. She provides him with Peggy's room information without realizing that he intends to kill her.

When the SSR arrives looking for Peggy, Miriam objects to agents going above the lobby. Her concern is primarily for the hotel’s rules rather than Peggy’s secret mission, but her resistance briefly complicates the search. She is extremely upset to learn that Peggy put a hole in her wall. Later, she calls the residents down for a Griffith meeting, which prompts Angie to discover that Dottie has vanished.