Mistress of the Ritz

by Melanie Benjamin

Blanche laughed, even as she felt skewered to the deck railing by the piercing truth of the girl’s mangled speech. Goddamn if she wasn’t rather like a balloon lately, blowing this way and that, allowing anger and idleness and gossip and pretty clothes and fancy meals and strong cocktails, infantile petulance—not to mention disappointment that her life had not turned out to be a grand, heroic drama after all, Ritz or no Ritz—to tug at her string daily.

  Blanche wasn’t selfish enough to blame her current balloon-like state entirely on Claude and his wayward Thursday nights, however. Or even on the lack of a child she didn’t precisely know that she desired. But neither was she able to find a way out of it, to recapture a sense of purpose—to act, instead of react.

  Until, perhaps, now.

  “Come visit me at the Ritz. Day after tomorrow,” Blanche called to Lily, who was linking arms with total strangers, drawing them into her dance, and soon there was an impromptu conga line snaking around the deck; Lily grabbed Blanche and absorbed her into it. “Come have tea. I want to introduce you to Claude. I want you to meet all my friends.”

  “Of course,” Lily said, as if it was only what she’d been expecting, after all. “You have rich friends, I bet! They can help me, too. But forget them now, and dance, Blanche. Dance while you can! It won’t last; it never does.”

  But she said this with merriment, giggling at her own joke—at the inevitability of the last note of the trumpet, the last spin of the waltz. Blanche giggled, too, and allowed herself to be dragged along in a line of strangers, all of them dancing to nothing but the onward rush of the ocean as they pushed through it relentlessly, oblivious to all the other boats in the sea.

  Until the giant awoke…

  It was true that the Ritz, throughout its illustrious history, had been home to some unsavory characters. What hotel hadn’t? It was Claude’s unfortunate experience that people staying at a hotel indulged themselves in ways they never would at home. The matron who kept the tidiest house in the neighborhood had no qualm leaving towels and dirty lingerie all over the hotel floor. Strict dieters threw caution to the wind and ordered every cake available from the kitchen. Early risers found themselves sleeping until noon in the unaccustomed plushness of a cushiony bed outfitted with the softest linens.

  So it was unsurprising that indelicate things sometimes happened, even at the Ritz. The baron who died of a heart attack in the bed of his mistress while his wife slept, unawares, in their suite next door. The suicides: There have been more than one, but the most famous was that of Olive Thomas, a silent movie star and the wife of Jack Pickford, whose sister was the more famous Mary. It was in 1920, before Claude began here, but of course he knew all about it; the demented soul drank mercury bichloride, so the rumor went, because her husband had infected her with syphilis. Monsieur Rey had to quickly remove her so that none of the guests would see; she was taken out through the kitchen wrapped in a duvet, poor girl.

  The Ritz, then, had seen its share of shady characters before. But nothing in Claude’s experience had prepared him for the startling change in clientele that the Ritz began hosting in the latter half of 1937 and continuing into 1938.

  The Spanish Civil War was the reason. The bar was suddenly full of talk of nothing else, and many of the regulars had left to experience it, some in uniform, others as correspondents. Hemingway, in particular, had bellowed long and loud about it being the opportunity of a lifetime; some said he’d enlisted with the Loyalists, but Claude suspected his manner of enlistment was more of a drunken observer on the sidelines—although, according to others, the man could write. Claude did not know; he had more than enough French literature to keep him occupied during his rare moments of leisure.

  While the war raged, all sorts of people washed in and out of Paris and France; the country along the border between Spain and France was flooded with refugees, peasants mostly. But certain unsavory characters ended up at the Ritz, too: agents trying to secure more money, more guns, more help—for both sides.

  As that war ground on, and as the German Air Force was revealed in all its ferocious power and might, bombing citizens as well as soldiers, others showed up at the Ritz—others with hated German accents, wearing the black armband of the Nazi party, their black boots always shining obscenely, their medals polished to an unearthly glow.

  As the Germans arrived, the Americans left. Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, they all disappeared. Overnight, it seemed—gone were Blanche’s writer friends, the artists, the musicians. The dabblers in life, Claude could not help but think. But they were replaced by others just as unstable—Europeans treating themselves to a desperate last revelry in Paris, dancing a wild dance, ignoring what was going on about them: The starving refugees from Spain, forced to live exposed to the elements in refugee camps near the border; the dispatches detailing the bombing of civilians. The smiling pictures of Hitler and Mussolini shaking hands, masses of brown-shirted crowds raising their arms in that harrowing salute.

  Claude was being run ragged by these dissipated Europeans determined to have the most ridiculous times of their lives. In all his years at the Ritz thus far, he’d organized (expertly, of course) his fair share of wild revelries: The Cubism parties popular in the 1920s, where the guests all dressed in ridiculous costumes of exaggerated angles. The parties that were held here after the triumphant performances of the Ballets Russes, when they hired dancers, dressed as nymphs and satyrs, to work as waitstaff. But nothing had prepared him for the fin de siècle flavor of the parties held at the Ritz in the late 1930s.

  A dinner party given by a count who insisted on serving his guests elephant feet—somehow, Claude found them by calling every zoo in France, Austria, and Belgium. Elsa Maxwell (technically an American, but she spent most of her time in Europe tagging along after the rich and famous), who wanted to throw a masked ball at the very last minute—she breezed in at two P.M. to say that two hundred of her closest friends would arrive at eight. Claude and his staff had six hours to procure fresh flower arrangements, trinkets for favors, and a trapeze artist willing to perform from a very rickety, hastily constructed gilded trapeze Claude wheedled out of the Moulin Rouge. A revelry for a group of British socialites and minor royalty on their way to fight in Spain; they treated the entire prospect as an impending holiday and bought baskets and baskets of the best pâtés and foie gras, cheese, wines, champagne, and chocolates, to take with them. As if war was a picnic.

  Claude knew it was not, but it was not his place to lecture. It was his place to manage, to fulfill every request, no matter how absurd. For that was what he did. He managed.

  However. Claude reached his limit one day and did not manage to hold his temper when he encountered one more shining, fat German face poking around every corner, every office, and every room at the Ritz.

  The most personable of the Nazis who increasingly scurried about the hotel—indeed, the entire city—like a cockroach was a man named Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, an attaché at the German embassy. He was young, handsome with shining blond hair and cloudless blue eyes; newly divorced and quite flirtatious with all the women, including Claude’s Blanchette. This had created problems with Coco Chanel, who regarded von Dincklage—nicknamed Spatzy (German for “sparrow”) due to his propensity to table-hop in the restaurant and bar—as her own personal property.

  One evening, Chanel met Blanche and Claude as they were ascending the stairs on the Place Vendôme; Chanel’s private suite of rooms was on this side of the hotel. Since her fashion house was only a few doors away on the rue Cambon, this arrangement made sense to her, and it was a nice, reliable income for the Ritz.

  But not many at the Ritz liked the woman herself, it must be said. She often sent her meals back down to the kitchen, saying they weren’t up to her standards. (Not that the woman ate anything at all, other than liquids.) She’d insisted on redecorating her rooms—not for her the intricately patterned wallpapers, tap
estries, gilt, and gold that stamped the Ritz as the most luxurious hotel in all the world; she made her rooms over in the new modern style, which was hideous, if you asked Claude. So much glass, so many straight lines. Horribly uncomfortable, to say the least.

  She seemed to really have it out for Blanche, in particular—almost as if she’d chosen the one person universally loved in the Ritz to make a point. A point known only to herself.

  “Blanche, do you have any idea what I just heard?” Chanel smiled that night, and Claude was immediately on his guard; she was the type of woman who only smiled when she was about to destroy someone.

  “What?” Blanche was more innocent than he was; she stopped on the stairs and folded her arms, as if she were about to be told a funny story. She resisted Claude’s attempt to steer her out of Chanel’s way, so he had no choice but to listen, too.

  “My seamstress asked me the other day if you were a Jewess.” Still Chanel smiled, as coolly as a cat. “How unusual of her, don’t you think?”

  Blanche nodded.

  “I told her I’d ask. But you can’t prove that you’re a Jewess, can you, Blanche? I could ask to see your passport. But how absurd!” Chanel laughed, and her eyes glittered like onyx.

  “What a good idea.” Blanche sounded amused. “Of course, you’ll have to show me yours, too. C’mon, Coco, let’s do it—let’s show each other our real ages!”

  Chanel stopped laughing; she drew herself up and looked down that sharp nose of hers.

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” she huffed, parading with solemn ceremony up the staircase, while Blanche guffawed until she had tears in her eyes.

  Claude could not share in her laughter, however. He knew that Chanel was dangerous and not above spreading lies and rumors; she had a habit of conforming her ideals to match whomever she was sleeping with at the time.

  And at this time, she was sleeping with von Dincklage.

  For now, all Claude could do was bite his tongue, remain vigilant, and warn Blanche—as well as all his staff—to be very careful around these new German guests. And pray that they would remain just that—guests—in the months to come.

  When do occupiers become guests? When does the enemy become a friend?

  These are questions Blanche has to ask herself, as the weeks and months go on.

  At the Ritz Paris, she knows so well, guests sometimes become more like family than real siblings, spouses, parents. But even those regulars, like Hemingway and the Windsors and the Fitzgeralds and the Porters, leave eventually. But this is different; with the Nazis using the Ritz as their headquarters, Blanche is forced to get to know them, and to her surprise, some of them aren’t so bad. And the same uniform that, seen walking down the Champs, instills in her fear and revulsion appears almost harmless in the rosy, flattering light of the Ritz.

  There is the young soldier staying in room two-nineteen, an officer but still a boy; his uniform never looks as if it quite fits him, the collar too big for his skinny throat with the prominent Adam’s apple. He’s homesick, he tells Blanche one day when she comes across him outside in the rue Cambon, leaning against a wall with a pad and pencil, sketching away at the scene on the street. “It’s to send back home,” he says, showing her his amateurish work; for sure, he’s no Picasso, but he seems very proud of the picture he’s drawn anyway. “For my mother, who is very worried about me.”

  Then he tells Blanche about his girl back home, still in school, and he’s worried about that, that she’ll fall for a student while he’s away. And Blanche decides that he’s a nice young man, really; a kind person, and she starts to go out of her way to ask him if he’s gotten any letters that day, if he’s heard from his mother or his girl (Katrin, her name is). She tells herself he didn’t decide to invade France, Hitler did. This boy—Friedrich—only followed orders.

  Then there’s the driver for General von Stülpnagel; the poor man sits out in that car in front of the hotel, day in and day out, no matter the weather. He only comes inside to use the facilities and then he is polite, even deferential, embarrassed to look anyone in the face. So Blanche has taken to bringing him a cup of hot tea when the weather is cold and he is shivering in the seat of the car, all alone. To chatting with him when the sun is shining. It’s really terrible, she rages to Claude, the way von Stülpnagel treats him! He’s a man, not a goddamn machine. And, she further explains to her husband, who’s interested in a distracted sort of way (only humoring her, she suspects), that the driver—Klaus—has a wife back home whom he’s eager to talk about. As if, in talking about her, she is real to him; and if he couldn’t talk about her, he’d be afraid she would disappear, like a dream. And while Blanche has never sent a loved one to the front, she understands his eagerness to keep her alive in this way, and she listens to him.

  And the secretary for Colonel Ebert—a young woman, not so pretty; Blanche sees her looking at the Parisiennes, the chambermaids, even the laundresses, shyly, in awe. The poor girl has to wear the ugly green uniform, the square-cut tunic over the shapeless skirt, her feet in black bricks for shoes. And the uniforms of the Ritz employees are much more flattering and fashionable, not to mention what the guests wear. The girl—Astrid—sits all day taking stenography and typing. She’s surrounded by men, none of whom give her a second look; they’re too busy ogling the French actresses and socialites who sail in and out of the rue Cambon side. Astrid doesn’t have a sweetheart back home or in the army, she confessed to Blanche once, when Blanche saw her at one of the cafés nearby and sat with her as she ate too much pastry.

  “Have a cigarette instead,” Blanche urged as the girl ordered another Napoleon, but it was no use. Astrid’s simply sad and lonely and homesick and finds in food her one comfort.

  It’s in this way—seeing them every day, knowing them beyond the uniforms and swastikas, observing the things she has in common with them (Blanche has thought of taking her revenge out on Claude in pastry many times)—that they become people, not nouns. Living, breathing, eating, drinking, crying, laughing people. They go to church—there are even Catholics among them; Claude was surprised and disturbed, he told her, the first time he encountered some of them in church, kneeling and lighting a candle before slipping into a pew on Sunday. They buy presents for their friends and family back home. They cry when they don’t receive enough letters and wonder if something terrible has happened, and Blanche cries and wonders right along with them.

  And then she tries to imagine what Lily would say, if she saw her drying Astrid’s tears, or patting Friedrich on the shoulder when he doesn’t get a letter. But Lily isn’t here, Blanche is; she’s the one who has to live with these people, find a way to survive, connect with them, maybe not the worst of them, but with the ones who are only following orders—there has to be something they have in common.

  Doesn’t there?

  * * *

  —

  TWO DAYS AFTER THEIR ship docked in Cherbourg back in 1937, Lily was Blanche’s guest at the Ritz; she remembers, so vividly, Lily’s reaction to her first glimpse into Blanche’s world.

  Gone was the confident miniature revolutionary who strode off the boat and right past all the customs officials into France with no passport, no visa, armed with nothing but cunning and attitude. In her place was a shy child, overwhelmed by her surroundings, clinging to Blanche like a cold sweat. “You live here, Blanche?” she kept asking, no matter how many times Blanche answered in the affirmative. She gaped up at the tall ceilings with their plaster ornamentations, she clutched her umbrella tightly, suspiciously, to her chest when the top-hatted doorman rushed to take it from her, she blinked at the rosy light everywhere—the light that César Ritz had decided was most flattering to women, and so had installed throughout his palace. There was no light anywhere in all of Paris like it; only at the Ritz was every woman beautiful, no matter her age, no matter her social position.

  No matter her
secrets.

  “Well, sort of. We do have an apartment, too. Our official address.” For the Auzellos had moved again, and now had a lovely four-room apartment, not counting the kitchen, on the prestigious avenue Montaigne, just off the Champs. Blanche had convinced Claude that this address was much more suitable to his position; the wide, tree-lined street was full of fancy dress salons, including Mainbocher, Molyneux, Vionnet, Patou, and Lucien Lelong.

  Lily didn’t quite understand how Blanche and Claude could have an apartment and live at the Ritz, however. And Blanche had to admit, it did seem a little extravagant. So in order not to discuss it further, she steered Lily into the bar and introduced her all around. Frank Meier, Blanche couldn’t help but notice, seemed to recognize her; he raised his eyebrows, as did Lily, which was odd, as Lily said she’d never been to Paris before.

  “Madame,” Cole Porter said with a neat little bow. “It’s not only a pleasure but a treasure to meet you.”

  Lily glared at him skeptically, and Blanche knew she didn’t quite pick up on the wordplay; whatever Lily’s native tongue was, it surely wasn’t English or French. But suddenly Lily beamed at Cole, and Cole beamed back, and it was as if one child had suddenly found another in the midst of a forest of adults; they were almost the same height, their eyes almost identically round and dark, their skin, too, both the same olive tint.

  “You must be the famous waif,” boomed Hemingway, as he took her delicate hand in his great big paw. “I’ll put you in a book.”

  “Stand in line, Lily,” Blanche told her, hitting Hemingway on the shoulder. “He says that to everybody.”

  “It’s the best way to pick up women,” he admitted with a boyishly shy grin, and Blanche had to laugh.

  “Where’s Scott?” She looked around; he wasn’t at his usual corner stool pestering Frank Meier, who always had the sense to cut him off when he got too sloppy.