The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  As the liberation of Paris approached, Gellhorn was far from France, reporting on the Allied advance through Italy and attached to a Canadian outfit. On the ground in Normandy, though, the simmering tensions between Capa and Hemingway had taken on a dark competitive undercurrent as early as August 5.

  Papa was keen to be the first to liberate more or less anything, and that morning he sent a message to Capa, who was reporting out of Granville, on the shores of Normandy, not far from Mont St. Michel. The Fourth Infantry “was having a good war for a photographer,” the note teased, and Capa “ought to stop fooling around behind a lot of tanks.” Hemingway had just captured a sleek Mercedes from some Germans and sent a driver round in it to fetch him. The photographer, knowing what Papa could be like when he was set on an adventure, climbed in reluctantly.

  When the Mercedes and driver rolled into camp with Capa in tow, Ernest was full of bonhomie and gusto. It was the first time the two men had seen each other since before D-Day in London. Then it had been Capa who walked off with the big press story. Now the photographer noticed that Ernest had shaved off his grizzled beard and that the forty-eight stitches it had taken to repair his skull after that drunken late-night car ride through Mayfair had healed nicely.

  Capa also noticed that Papa had managed to set himself up in style at the Allied military post. Sweet-talking the commander, General Raymond “Tubby” Barton, with his war stories, he had cobbled together his own private brigade more or less through sheer personal charisma. He had a certain Lieutenant “Stevie” Stevenson as his public relations officer, a private cook, a camp photographer, and his own supply of scotch whiskey. His right-hand man was a brash twenty-nine-year-old Jeep driver, a redheaded American private named Archie “Red” Pelkey. “Barred from carrying a weapon, as were all war correspondents,” Capa remembered, “Hemingway made sure his personal platoon carried ‘every weapon imaginable’—both German and American.”

  Ernest announced gleefully that he and his band of “irregulars” had a plan to liberate the village of St. Pois. He generously invited Capa to come along to get some shots of the mission. As Papa pulled out the map and started explaining his strategy, Capa started to get a bad feeling. The Allied regiment, as Ernest showed him, was planning to take the village from a route shown on the left. His idea was to take a shortcut on the map and drive into the village from the right, beating the military sticklers to the punch and to the glory with their rogue assistance. The Budapest-born Capa was unambiguously dubious. His “Hungarian strategy,” he told Ernest Hemingway, always wisely “consisted of going behind a good number of soldiers, and never of taking lonely shortcuts through no-man’s-land.”

  Things got tense quickly. Hemingway suggested Capa was a coward. Indignant, the seasoned war photographer took the bait and grudgingly decided that going along was the only option. After all, there might be a good story, even if it was a hare-brained scheme. Stranger things had happened. And Capa wasn’t going to be accused of a lack of macho toughness—not by Papa.

  Along with his Mercedes, Hemingway had commandeered a motorcycle with a sidecar. Papa, Red Pelkey, and their army-assigned photographer loaded up the sidecar with whiskey and machine guns and led the convoy off with a surprising sedateness. Behind in the luxury sedan Capa and Lieutenant “Stevie” followed ruefully.

  As a photographer, Bob Capa had been in one war or another his whole adult life. He had the instincts of a man used to living by his wits. As they came up on a sharp bend in the road, stopping every few minutes to check the map and the terrain together, he had a grim sense that things were just too quiet. Ernest Hemingway brushed him off and took the corner boldly.

  As Papa rounded the bend, the shelling started.

  One shell exploded ten yards from the motorcycle, out in front of the convoy. The brakes screeched as the bike slid to a stop, launching Ernest Hemingway out of the sidecar and up into the air. Papa landed with a dusty thud in a narrow ditch on the roadside. The other two abandoned the motorcycle and beat a hasty retreat back to safety on the far side of the curve in the road, out of the range of the artillery. As his compatriots watched, the tracer bullets starting popping in the dirt around Hemingway’s head, and Capa knew that if they could all see an inch of his head poking out of that ditch so could the Germans.

  Then he looked up to see a panzer tank moving at a slow, steady clip in their general direction.

  Hanging around wasn’t a great idea, and Capa hadn’t been much in the mood for this sort of mock heroics from the beginning, but he couldn’t exactly leave a friend in a ditch to be shot at by the Germans—though he thought about it. As they began inching forward, tempting the Germans with fresh targets, Hemingway let loose with a furious “Get back, goddammit.”

  But no one was following Papa’s orders.

  At last, when the Germans turned their sights toward a bigger prize—the arrival of the Allied regiment on the other flank—Hemingway made a run for it and reached the bend in the road, white with fury. Capa later regaled people with the story. He accused me, Capa laughed, “of standing by during his crisis so that I might take the first picture of the famous writer’s dead body.” “During the evening,” the photographer quipped, “relations were somewhat strained between the strategist and the Hungarian military expert.”

  Though Capa laughed it off publicly, for the two friends it wasn’t ultimately a joking matter. Hemingway fumed and stormed, and it ended with a cold, studied silence. For days they didn’t speak to each other. After that, Papa didn’t have room for a Hungarian photographer in his band of fighters. Robert Capa left camp and headed back to Mont St. Michel and then, on August 18, moved on again, this time to meet up with Time journalist and editor Charles Wertenbaker as part of the vanguard of the press corps reporting on the liberation of Chartres, where French civilians were already dishing out mob justice to local traitors.

  For Ernest Hemingway the race to the Hôtel Ritz was now the only thing he could think about. The ego-bruising humiliation of that hour in a roadside ditch outside St. Pois had left the forty-five-year-old writer all the more determined that Capa, especially, wasn’t going to scoop him. “My own war aim at this moment,” wrote Hemingway in a report for Collier’s magazine, is “to get into Paris without being shot.” He was hell-bent on the competition and wasn’t much concerned about following the rules of combat and military order—not if it meant missing out on his share of the action and a front-row seat for the liberation of Paris.

  On August 19, with Capa in Chartres, Hemingway broke free from the main body of the Fourth Infantry Division and from the cadre of international journalists that followed the Allied main advance. By now, “more than 300 members of the press corps . . . were vying for pole position in the race to Paris: the city’s Liberation was the next great story.” Hoping to outwit them all, Hemingway headed to the small village of Rambouillet, about sixty miles outside of Paris, where his four-man crew met up with another dozen or so French Maquis fighters who were headed to the capital.

  That morning—“a beautiful day that day,” Ernest Hemingway extolled—Papa, Red, and his motley group decided to set up a staging ground in the village and fight their way into the capital as a private militia. They even had uniforms. “Mary,” Hemingway wrote in one of his typically telegraphic amorous dispatches later, “we have had very strange life since wrote you last. On nineteenth made contact with group of Maquis who placed themselves under my command. Because so old and ugly looking I guess. Clothed them with clothing of cavalry recon outfit which had been killed at entrance to Rambouillet.” It was in complete contravention of all the rules for war correspondents and accredited noncombatants.

  By August 22, Hemingway and his men had purportedly blown up with a hand grenade some Germans hiding in a cellar and, tired of camp life, checked into the local inn at Rambouillet en masse on his press budget. With him by now were Colonel David Bruce of the OSS American espionage service, army historians Lieutenant Colonel S. L. A. Marshall and
Lieutenant John Westover, a resistance fighter named Marcel, another local patriot named Jean-Marie L’Allinec, and a small group of Frenchmen determined to use code names in case they were captured.

  The group had spent those last few late nights bonding over copious supplies of the local wine and a bottle of Grand Marnier. Hemingway had strong ideas about liquor and male bonding. “Hey, Jean-Marie, unless you have a drink,” he chided the more sober-minded L’Allinec, “there’ll be distance between us. We have a few drinks—it closes that distance.”

  The real distance Hemingway wanted to close was between Rambouillet and Place Vendôme. As Jean-Marie told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter years later, “It was more than just being the first American in Paris. [Hemingway] said, ‘I will be the first American at the Ritz. And I will liberate the Ritz.’ ”

  Before too long the French division also arrived in the village. With the French troops came, of course, the press corps that Papa had been slyly outwitting. By August 22, the village was flooded with journalists.

  On the night of August 22, drinking wine in the same café were Colonel George Stevens, a Hollywood film director, and his crew. Before long, Irwin Shaw showed up and joined them. Irwin was long accustomed to taking Ernest Hemingway’s boozy antics in good-natured stride. The “irregulars” had adopted Papa’s boisterous mannerisms and, Robert Capa teased, went around “spitting short sentences from the corners of their mouths in their different languages [and carried] more hand grenades and brandy than a full division.”

  It was taking over the hotel so no one else could get a decent bed that especially irritated American journalist Bruce Grant, who loudly expressed his indignant dissatisfaction. A colorful exchange of profanity and a barroom tussle ensued. Hemingway laid a boxer’s punch on the journalist’s chin, and before long the two war correspondents were pounding each other in a tangle of fists and army boots on the floor of the bistro. A young war correspondent named Andy Rooney watched it all from a café table and said afterward that he “could never take Hemingway seriously after that. I’d always liked him as a writer, but this was such a schoolboy thing.”

  When Capa showed up in Rambouillet, that was the last straw for Hemingway. There were too many journalists and photographers crawling about. He was going to run his own operations while they all sat around waiting for someone to give them their marching orders. “Every night,” Capa noted, Hemingway and his band “went out to harass the remaining Germans between Rambouillet and Paris.” He pointedly didn’t invite along his old friend.

  On August 23, with the plans of the military brass taking shape at last for the liberation, the press corps was buzzing with rumors.

  It started to appear that General Leclerc wasn’t going to let any of the foreign Allied journalists be there to witness any of it—or to share in any of the glory. That morning, the press corps at Rambouillet got wind that Leclerc had moved the French Second Armored Division out of the village and toward Paris and deliberately not told any of them.

  To a group of experienced war correspondents and journalists, this was throwing down the gauntlet, and the competition to be the first reporter in Paris only accelerated now that many were likely to miss the liberation entirely.

  There was full-scale race on now between the Anglo-Americans and the French to see who was going to be the first to liberate Paris.

  True to form, Capa and Hemingway each pursued a different strategy. Capa and Charlie Wertenbaker set off from Rambouillet to try to catch up with the main flank of Leclerc’s army. By the evening of August 24, they found the tank formations at Étampes, thirty miles southwest of the center of Paris. Capa was still determined to keep as many soldiers as possible in front of him. They slept that night on the side of National Route 20. “From beneath the Big Dipper came occasional flashes of light and then the sound of artillery in the distance. The French tanks were dark blurry shapes beneath the trees,” Capa remembered. Those flashes of light on the far horizon and the silent French tanks on the roadside were at the heart of the diplomatic and military storm that was still brewing.

  In the press camp, Hemingway, Colonel Bruce, and their gang formed their own rogue column. Ralph Morse, another correspondent for Time, had worked with Mary Welsh on a few stories, and he and Ernest were chummy. As Morse remembered it, “So, we’re in this camp, waiting, and Hemingway says, ‘You know, the Germans can’t possibly have mined every road into Paris. Why don’t we find a back road? We can be at the Champs-Élysées before the troops get there.’ ”

  “I had bicycled through this area for many years,” Hemingway explained. “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them.” He was sure he could get them to Paris out in front of the main columns, using just the kinds of shortcuts that made Bob Capa dubious.

  For better or worse, journalistic competitiveness botched that adventure. Hemingway’s plan “to get into Paris before U.S. troops headed in was scuttled,” Ralph Morse said later, “because someone—maybe a reporter who wasn’t invited along? Who knows?—someone leaked the plan to [General] Patton, and before we knew it, the press camp was surrounded by military police. Patton walks in and says, ‘If any of you make a move toward Paris before the troops do, I’ll court martial you!’ ” So, instead, even Ernest Hemingway had to wait until dawn like everyone. He had already violated so many rules of a war correspondent that sooner or later General Patton was going to have to look into it.

  For the moment, Hemingway was grounded. As luck would have it, though, he and Red ran into the army historians Lieutenants Marshall and Westover at a local café. The lieutenants had a much greater range of motion than a journalist, and Papa was back in action. “Marshall, for God’s sake, have you got a drink?” Hemingway roared delightedly, and with a laugh Marshall pulled a bottle of whiskey out of the jeep. His militia camped that night, too, under the starlight and distant shelling, on the banks of a small river.

  On National Route 20, Bob Capa, Charlie Wertenbaker, and their driver Hubert Strickland woke at dawn on August 25 to find the coordinated advance on Paris beginning, and by mid-morning they were only two miles outside the city. It looked like they were going to be there to see the liberation after all.

  Then disaster struck. The French Second Armored Division stopped the reporters at a checkpoint. General Leclerc was still enforcing his orders: no one except the French division was going to be allowed that morning into Paris. “The old boy,” Capa grumbled, “was definitely losing charm.”

  He noticed something interesting: the soldiers barring their route into the capital were speaking French with a Spanish accent. Looking over, Bob Capa saw, too, that on the column of one of their tanks someone had painted the name of one of the most fearsome battles of the Spanish Civil War—a battle he had survived along with them. It was shameful, he fumed loudly in Spanish. He knew that they were Spanish republicans who had come to France as refugees during the civil war and were now fighting for the liberation of Paris with Leclerc’s army. But he was one of them. Were they really going to bar him from the greatest battle of the war? Some band of brothers was this.

  When the Spanish soldiers heard him expostulating and realized that he was an old comrade-in-arms, that changed everything. They not only gave him a warm welcome and waved him grandly through the barriers. The soldiers also insisted that Capa ride on the tank with them into the capital. Strickland and Charlie followed just behind in the jeep, all the way to Paris.

  At 9:40 A.M. precisely the three men passed the Porte d’Orléans, one of the historic entrances dating back centuries to when Paris was a small, walled city. There were crowds waiting along the roads with flowers, and the women shouted “Merci, merci!” and kissed them. In his memoirs, Capa described his feelings that early morning in August. “The road to Paris was open,” he remembered, “and every Parisian was out in the street to touch the first tank, to kiss the first man, to sing and cry. Never were there so
many who were so happy so early in the morning. . . . I felt that this entry into Paris had been made especially for me. On a tank made by the Americans who had accepted me, riding with the Spanish Republicans with whom I had fought against fascism long years ago, I was returning to Paris—the beautiful city where I had first learned to eat, drink, and love.”

  The tank rolled that morning past scenes from another lifetime, before his lover Gerda Taro had been killed on the front lines in Spain taking photographs, before her funeral in Paris, before D-Day and Normandy. In front of his old home, Robert Capa caught sight of his former landlady, waving a handkerchief, jubilant. “C’est moi, c’est moi!” he yelled to her, hoping she would see him and remember. But by now, “the thousands of faces in the finder of my camera became more and more blurred; that finder was very very wet.” “Bob Capa and I rode into Paris,” Charlie Wertenbaker recalled, “with eyes that would not stay dry. We were no more ashamed of it than were the people who wept as they embraced us.”

  They left the jeep on the boulevard des Invalides and rolled on in the tank toward the river and the Quai d’Orsay. In the middle of a street, a German officer was kneeling and pleading before a crowd of French patriots who were preparing to execute him. As they turned away, three French marines arrived to arrest the officer, saving his life. They stopped for a drink at the Café du Dôme in Montparnasse, where pretty girls in thin summer dresses climbed up on their tank and covered their faces with lipstick. “Around the Chamber of Deputies we had to fight, and some of the lipstick got washed off with blood,” Capa simply said later.