The French Second Armored Division now swept through Paris to the west, past the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées. The Allies swept along the east. At 10:30 A.M., General Dietrich von Choltitz had, at last, his long-awaited ultimatum. He was still prepared to surrender Paris. It seemed as if, miraculously, the City of Light had been saved from the final act of destruction.
Bob Capa already knew that he “wanted to spend my first night in the best of best hotels—the Ritz.” There was nothing to stop him. He had beaten Ernest Hemingway to Paris by more than two hours.
Hemingway, true to form, was determined that his entrance into Paris was going to make for a good story. Already in his mind that day he was starting to compose the letter that he was going to write to Mary Welsh. He would tell her how he and his militia that morning “[r]an patrols and furnished gen to the French when they advanced.” “Gen” was the signature Hemingway lingo for something that was “genuine” or good intelligence.
He and his band, along with Colonel Bruce, crossed over the bridge at Pont de Sèvres into Paris from the southwest just before noon in a jeep. Skirting along the south end of the vast forested park at the Bois de Boulogne, they came under the first gunfire from German die-hards. They would evade sniper fire all the way into the city, along a route into the capital that took them through the heart of historic Paris. At the immense axis of the Place de l’Étoile, their jeep passed the looming grandeur of the Arc de Triomphe, and then their driver headed east toward the wide avenue of the Champs-Élysées. To their right, the Eiffel Tower sparkled quietly across the river. To the left, rising high above the tiled rooftops of Paris, was the white dome of Sacré Coeur on top of Montmartre—the mountain of the martyrs.
What Hemingway’s draft letter to Mary didn’t mention when he finally sat down to start writing it a day or two later—and what Jean-Marie later remembered—was that his “march on Paris seemed to be punctuated with long, winey stops at this café or that hotel.” “It’s a wonder he ever got to the Ritz,” the Frenchman marveled. By the time their jeep had even reached the River Seine, Lieutenant Marshall had already counted sixty-seven bottles of champagne in it.
Just east of the Place de l’Étoile, Ernest Hemingway encountered an old acquaintance: Émile Vieubois, part of General Leclerc’s Second Armored Division. The far western end of the Champs-Élysées was quiet, but Émile warned them that there was heavy fighting farther down where the boulevard opened onto the Place de la Concorde and to the northeast along the rue de Rivoli. It was the obvious route to the Place Vendôme. All Hemingway wanted to know was what was likely to be the fastest way to get to the Hôtel Ritz under the circumstances. He invited Émile to come along for a drink that night in the hotel bar. That’s where the victory party would be happening
Avoiding the combat along the Champs-Élysées meant skirting to the north of the Place Vendôme, toward the Opéra. Hemingway and his militia had already made a number of boozy stops, and it seemed like a good time for another refresher. At the axis of the boulevard des Capucines and rue de la Paix there just happened to be a favorite bistro, only a stone’s throw away from their final destination. The liberators pulled off for one more celebratory libation at the aptly named Café de la Paix—the café of the peace—and gathered up some more local recruits. By the time the band roared south to the Hôtel Ritz around the corner, there were somewhere between fifty-five and seventy-five of them. It was a glorious way to return to Paris.
Hemingway was glad they had army historians with them that afternoon. “Otherwise everyone would think it was a damned lie,” he mused. He boasted later to Mary of the dangers, writing that he’d had a “strong feeling my luck has about run out but [was] going to try to pass a couple of more times with dice.” Apart from sporadic sniper fire along the Champs-Élysées, though, it had been a relatively sedate entrance into Paris. But Hemingway was already composing a new element of the enduring Papa legend.
It had to be quick refreshments at the Café de la Paix, because Hemingway still hadn’t yet achieved his most pressing objective. He wanted to pull up at his old entrance on the rue Cambon and liberate the Hôtel Ritz from the Germans. He and his followers were ready for some heavy action. The only question was whether he would make it there in time to be the first American.
11
Ernest Hemingway and the Ritz Liberated
Crowds celebrate in Paris, Arc de Triomphe, 1944.
CHARLEY [RITZ] WENT WITH ME DOWN THE LOVELY RED-CARPETED HALL AND HE WAS LOVING AS THOUGH WE WERE ALL LOST CHILDREN WHO, NOT HAVING SENSE ENOUGH TO BE BORN SWISS, HAD BECOME INVOLVED IN THE DIRTY TRADE OF WAR.
—Ernest Hemingway, “A Room on the Garden Side”
After another couple of drinks at the Café de la Paix, Colonel David Bruce and Ernest Hemingway clambered back into the truck. Archie “Red” Pelkey, still behind the wheel, turned south toward the Place Vendôme. A few moments later, Hemingway’s band, accompanied by some French fighters they had picked up along the route and by a young American woman named Jacqueline Tavernier, burst into the broad expanse of the plaza and its ancient circle of Renaissance palaces at two o’clock in the afternoon.
General Dietrich von Choltitz had departed, with the last of the Germans and their loot, on August 23, and the moment they left Hans Elminger and Claude Auzello raised the French tricolor over the hotel. There was a dicey moment when word came that the Germans had taken the wrong road out of the city and were coming back down the avenues. The directors stood their ground and refused to take down the French flag, whatever the consequences. Now that flag cracked in the breeze some twenty-four hours later, and the opulent rooms were sitting empty, ripe for the picking.
The Americans weren’t the first ones there, however, and Ernest Hemingway wasn’t the only one who had been dreaming of some luxury accommodation. Some forward-thinking British troops had arrived an hour earlier and were planning to set themselves up in residence.
They wouldn’t hold those palace suites for long. Not if Papa was going to have anything to do with it. He was primed to do battle with just about anyone.
As Hemingway’s entourage pulled to a stop in front of the Hôtel Ritz, a great cheer went up around them. This was the moment he had been waiting for. Claude Auzello met him at the entrance, delighted to welcome Mr. Hemingway with a show of studied Ritz formality. After all, elegantly unruffled feathers under any circumstances, that was the trademark welcome. Ernest boisterously announced his mission: he was there to liberate the Ritz from the Germans personally. “Of course, Mr. Hemingway,” Claude intoned calmly, but his tired eyes twinkled. “But be so kind as to leave your weapon at the door, would you?”
Hans Elminger’s wife, Lucienne, was standing near the entrance. In the hallways, the British soldiers were busy setting up their headquarters. It was a tense and comic moment. Ernest took one look at the British soldiers, efficiently laying claim to his Hôtel Ritz, and he swung instantly into brash offensive action. “I’m the one who is going to occupy the Ritz,” he blustered at them. “We’re the Americans. We’re going to live just like in the good old days,” he snapped. Then he started ordering the British out onto the street, barking his commands to them in German, of all things. Astonished—and astonishingly—they obeyed his orders.
Lucienne remembered that scene clearly, even decades later:
He entered like a king, and he chased out all the British people who had arrived an hour earlier. He was dressed in khaki, but his shirt was open on his bare chest. He had a leather belt under his big stomach, with his gun beating against his thigh. . . . He had presence, the way people know Hemingway, but no chic. My husband was not very happy to see this happening, in his Ritz.
Frank Meier’s deputy bartender, Georges Scheuer, remembered another reason some of the staff were uncomfortable. Ernest had come roaring through the door—in that familiar war correspondent’s uniform of an official noncombatant—swinging a 9 mm British submachine gun, something everyone knew was not
just “very wrong” but more than a little dangerous. It would only be a matter of weeks before Papa would be facing a military investigation for just this sort of breach of neutral conduct.
Hemingway, for his part, remembered Scheuer from before the war and was happy to see familiar faces everywhere. “I had known him when he was seventeen and the wisest boy of seventeen I had ever known and the fastest and the most skillful,” Hemingway recalled. Georges had known Papa “when [the writer] had come in with only the money for two drinks, coming in no oftener than once a month and happy to see the stainless steel beau monde before there was such a thing as stainless steel.” Hemingway’s nostalgia for the days when he had been young in Paris was palpable.
Once the Hôtel Ritz had been liberated from its British allies, Hemingway and his men did a sweep of the building, racing up to the rooftop in his search for any lingering Germans hiding in the attics. With a series of well-placed rounds, they succeeded in bringing down a line of freshly washed bedsheets on the roof that had been rustling at just the wrong moment.
No one quite believed that the sweep of the cellars that came next was entirely a military operation. The determinedly correct Hans and Lucienne Elminger might have disapproved quietly of Hemingway’s antics, but his militiaman Jean-Marie L’Allinec watched with astonishment as Claude Auzello bounced around, deliriously happy. Privately, of course, Claude always said that the real liberation of the Hôtel Ritz was that moment a day earlier when the directors raised that French flag and watched the Germans roll out with all their loot. But he was happy to let their distinguished former guest and the great American writer have his moment of glory. “We resisted the Germans—we kept the best premiers crus from them. We saved the Cheval Blanc!” Claude told Ernest gaily. “Well, go get it!” Papa ordered, grinning broadly. “They brought up some bottles and Papa started slugging it down,” said Jean-Marie, remembering the scene years later. “Imagine! This great old Bordeaux, and he’s slugging it down like water.”
Then Hemingway marched down to Frank’s bar and ordered a round of seventy-three martinis for his men and got down to work establishing himself as camp Ritz commandant. He posted guards, assigned himself room thirty-one, and headed upstairs with a couple of bottles of champagne and brandy. “It was incredible, incredible,” Lucienne Elminger remembered. “It was breathtaking to see him behave as if the hotel was his home.”
Hemingway and his entourage had technically been the first American journalists on the scene. So it was a real pleasure to rib the two unlucky American correspondents who arrived only moments after him, Alan Moorehead and Ted Gilling. They rolled into the Place Vendôme like something out of the wrong decade, in a dusty Volkswagen loaded with camp gear, both men unshaven and looking pretty sorry. With gusto, Ernest suggested to them that, after a much-needed bath, they probably wanted to stop by his suite for some champagne. Papa was heading upstairs now to start celebrating having beaten them to the prize story.
Robert Capa hadn’t yet arrived. He had beaten Hemingway into the city, but he hadn’t beaten him to the Ritz. And for good reason. Across the city at that moment, the sporadic fighting near the river was still going on, and as always the photojournalist was determined to be at the center of the action. He was busy taking rolls of still more photographs that would become some of those days’ most famous.
At four o’clock, Charles de Gaulle entered the capital at last. The Germans had capitulated formally, and most of the German soldiers who were left in the city simply surrendered en masse, their hands in the air and white flags draped on their shoulders. When General de Gaulle arrived at the Préfecture of Police—the central police headquarters—to accept the support of the metropolitan police divisions, more vicious fighting broke out from German and pro-Vichy insurgents. It was early evening before de Gaulle finally took the stand in front of the Hôtel de Ville, to deliver his liberation speech to the tens of thousands who jammed the public squares to welcome him.
At seven P.M. General de Gaulle’s first words from a free Paris were broadcast live around the world. Hearing them over the BBC radio in London, Winston Churchill might have been forgiven once again for wishing that he had been able to save Georges Mandel back in 1940, when this all started. After the mounting tensions between Generals Bradley and Leclerc, some of the Americans could share that perspective. The developing conflict between the French and the Anglo-American allies would play out for years still and shape the fate of the Hôtel Ritz after the occupation.
“Why should we hide the emotion which is taking us all, men and women,” Charles de Gaulle intoned in his victory speech to a waiting world, we “who are here, at home, in Paris who stood up to liberate itself and could do so with its own hands?” Warming to his theme, he went on: “Paris! An outraged Paris! A broken Paris! A martyred Paris! But . . . a liberated Paris! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and the help of all of France, of the fighting France, of the only France, the real France, the eternal France!” It would not go down in history as one of Charles de Gaulle’s most gracious Franco-American moments.
In the public squares and plazas of Paris, the épurations, the purges, had started. Among those in the crowd that afternoon listening to de Gaulle’s speech was one of the old wartime Hôtel Ritz regulars, Jean Cocteau. The writer was in a bit of a post-liberation predicament. His poems—in German—had come out just that summer. Throughout the occupation, he had been chummy with the fascists and been one of the Hôtel Ritz’s jolly bystanders. It was not a bad moment to start feeling a little bit nervous.
Cocteau would end up back at the Ritz bar before the evening was over. And Ernest Hemingway would pull himself out of bed before long and carry on downstairs with boisterous gusto. For the moment, however, Hemingway was camped out in what he thought of as the middle of the best action—“action [that] takes places at the Ritz Paris.” In his dream of it,
It’s a fine summer night. I knock back a couple of martinis in the bar—Rue Cambon side. Then there’s a wonderful dinner. . . . After a few brandies, I wander up to my room and slip into one of those huge Ritz beds. They are all made of brass. There’s a bolster for my head the size of the Graf Zeppelin and four square pillows filled with real goose feathers—two for me and two for my quite heavenly companion.
He skipped the dinner, and the night of the liberation he didn’t have a heavenly companion, but it was a good way to spend an afternoon in Paris. With his celebrity, Hemingway could count on a steady stream of visitors, which was certainly flattering.
Among the first to arrive that afternoon were the philosophers and writers Jean-Paul Sartre and his lover Simone de Beauvoir. The couple had wisely left Paris in mid-July for a “vacation,” worried that Jean-Paul’s writing for the new underground publication Combat might cause some troubles. They had been back in the city since at least as early as August 22, when Jean-Paul had joined a group of dramatists occupying the Théâtre-Français. Not everyone in Paris was awed by Sartre’s wartime politics. “Some wits,” as one historian puts it, “remark[ed] later that Sartre joined the resistance on the same day as the Paris police.” In other words: ten days before the liberation.
Later, Hemingway got his dream dinner. The party in the dining room of the Hôtel Ritz was exuberant. Soon the war correspondents were making their way to their old haunt on the Place Vendôme for a celebratory meal and rounds of champagne. Most of the press corps had set up in rooms at the Hôtel Scribe, a few blocks away, where Time editor Charlie Wertenbaker had opened offices for the correspondents looking for assignments.
By evening, Paris was free, and most of the Germans still in the capital had surrendered. The city was brightly lit up, for the first time in years. Despite all the military tussles for national honor and precedence that had marred the day for the generals, now the tricolor and the Stars and Stripes waved side by side on the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe to mark the symbolic occasion.
Soon, some of those military men started trickling into the Hôtel Ritz. The rue Cambon bar was the chosen watering hole of all the high-ranking Allied officers. “That evening,” said Lieutenant John Westover, one of the two army historians who had traveled into Paris with Papa, “Marshall and I went down to the Ritz and joined up with Hemingway and Col. Bruce for dinner. We all passed around a paper and each person signed their names. We said we were the first people (from the outside) in Paris.”
“None of us will ever write a line about these last twenty-four hours in delirium,” Hemingway proclaimed. “Whoever tries it is a chump.”
It was a hopeful edict. Hemingway wasn’t in much of a state just then to write anything. The idea of the others busily filing press stories rankled.
After dinner, an unthinking waiter “slapped a Vichy tax on the bill.” The waiter hadn’t quite comprehended that the liberation of Paris meant that no one had to follow all those repressive old wartime orders. The result was a jubilant general insurrection at the dining room table: “Straightaway we arose as one man and told him: ‘Millions to defend France, thousands to honor your fare, but not one sou in tribute to Vichy.’ ”
In offering “thousands to honor your fare,” the diners were being gallant that evening. The dinner on offer the night of the liberation was, by Hôtel Ritz standards, uncharacteristically scanty. Everywhere in the city, food was in short supply, and those who weren’t going hungry were already among the lucky. Even if other supplies were scarce, the wine cellars at the Hôtel Ritz—thanks to the quick thinking of Hans Elminger years earlier—were still brimming with treasures. After the fall of France, Elminger had secretly hidden, in cellars across the Seine, at 205, rue Lecourbe, 120,000 bottles of wine, one of the great collections in France and certainly the finest in all of Paris. As a result, there had never been a Bordeaux shortage during the occupation. Now hundreds of bottles of fine French wine were guzzled down merrily.
The Hotel on Place Vendome Page 14