On the heels of the military men, now that the action in the capital had ended, at last came Robert Capa.
He, too, wanted to spend his first night at the Hôtel Ritz on this most amazing of all nights in Paris. He wanted to—but when he arrived at the hotel, he discovered that Hemingway had already claimed it as his personal territory. “Hemingway’s army,” he mused, “had come into Paris by a different road, and after a short and happy fight had taken their main objective and liberated the Ritz from the German yokels.” Given how things stood and the fact that they were still feuding sullenly, Capa wasn’t at all sure of his welcome.
Capa pulled up at the Hôtel Ritz. Red Pelkey was standing sentry at the doors of the palace, grinning widely and showing a smile that had all his front teeth missing. Aping his hero, Ernest Hemingway, he talked only in staccato phrases. “Red” told Capa, “Papa took good hotel. Plenty stuff in cellar. You go up quick.” The two men eyed each other for a moment. Capa headed across the grand lobby.
“It was all true,” Capa remembered about the wine cellars. And the night ended happily. Ernest Hemingway had accomplished what he already knew would be a legendary objective. Surrounded by friends and admiration, he was feeling generous.
“Papa made up with me,” Robert Capa wrote in his memoirs, “gave me a party, and key to the best room in the hotel.”
Later, the journalists made the rounds and stopped for a drink in the bar of the Hôtel Scribe, where Capa and Hemingway saw many of the same people who had been at that party on Belgrave Square in the days before the Normandy landings. Among them were Bob Capa’s friend Charlie Wertenbaker and the American “dame” photographer, Lee Miller, whose beauty had made her a Paris legend in the 1930s.
Neither Mary Welsh nor Martha Gellhorn showed up, though. Hemingway would have to go back to his brass bed that night without either of them for company.
On the streets that night, “It was an amazing sight, an amazing feeling,” one of the journalists at the party remembered:
So many people in the streets, holding hands, everyone headed for the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe, the same way that everyone in New York heads to Times Square, for example, when something momentous happens. It really was . . . well, liberating . . . [there was] the feeling of certainty in the air. Everyone knew it was over. And I don’t mean the battle for Paris. I mean the war. We all knew there was a lot of fighting left. The Battle of the Bulge a few months later proved that, and who knew what was going to happen in the Pacific? But when the Germans surrendered Paris, we all sensed it was now only a matter of time, and not much time, before we took Berlin.
It seemed as if, soon, the war might truly be over.
Although Mary Welsh wasn’t there in the bar of the Hôtel Scribe, she was already in Paris. She had received her travel orders late on August 24. The next morning she wrangled a spot on a United States Army supply jeep that was taking a bored major into the capital. She had been only a few hours behind Ernest Hemingway and Robert Capa on her way into the city.
“Paris, Paris, I was like a cat in heat,” she admitted with her customary sexual frankness. She, too, had wanted to capture the big story. She might have beaten them except for that bored general and his driver. The major didn’t speak French and kept giving the driver the wrong directions. Then the driver got drunk on calvados over a maddeningly long lunch. By the time their jeep passed Versailles and finally entered the city through the gates at St. Cloud, where she could at last see the Place de l’Étoile in the distance, the sun was already going down over a liberated Paris. Had she scooped Ernest Hemingway, it might well have been the end of a certain love story.
Mary Welsh’s first stop late in the afternoon was the Hôtel Scribe, where she couldn’t manage to hunt down her editor, Charlie. “I knew I should have walked to Notre Dame to see what, if anything, was happening there,” she later wrote. But she didn’t. She didn’t head over to the Hôtel Ritz afterward, either. Instead, exhausted, she brushed her teeth in the hotel room washbowl and fell into her bed to sleep, while the city around her partied. Downstairs in the bar, Ernest Hemingway didn’t know that she was only a couple of floors above him on the night of the liberation.
When Hemingway left the Hôtel Scribe, it was to make his way back to the Place Vendôme. With Mary sleeping dreamlessly—and his wife, Martha, still a few long hours away from the city—Papa did the only thing that seemed sensible. He moved the party up to his suite, accompanied by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, where they all camped out on the brass bed, Papa in his pajamas. Before long, Simone and Papa had reached a silent understanding. “Look,” Simone put it to a bewildered Jean-Paul, “why don’t you get going? We’re going to stay here and do a little drinking and serious talking.”
Sartre finally accepted the inevitable around three o’clock in the morning. Simone de Beauvoir left Ernest Hemingway, surrounded by half-empty bottles of scotch and rumpled bedclothes, the next morning. The Hôtel Ritz wasn’t the only thing that was liberated that night in Paris.
12
Those Dame Reporters
August 26, 1944
Sniper fire at the Hôtel de Ville, crowds fall to the ground during the liberation of Paris.
I’VE NOTICED THAT BOMBS NEVER MAKE HITS ON PEOPLE THAT LIVE IN THE CLARIDGES OR THE RITZ.
—Clare Boothe Luce, 1940
The next morning, for those who had survived four years of occupation, began the first day of freedom in Paris. The war wasn’t over—far from it. In fact, the battle continued less than fifty miles out of the city, and it would be more than a year still before there would be peace in Europe. But it was a new day in Paris.
That morning, when Ernest Hemingway roused himself, he did what he would do every morning for the next seven months that he would live at the Hôtel Ritz. He opened a bottle of Perrier Jouët Grand Brut champagne and fussed a bit about writing.
Mary Welsh was on his mind. He started drafting her a letter, telling her about his adventures in Rambouillet, his loyal band of fighters, and, of course, his liberation of Paris. “Have been to all the old places I ever lived in Paris and everything is fine,” he started writing to her. “But it is all so improbable that you feel like you have died and it is all a dream. Wish very much you were here as am all fought out and would like to have something lovely and touchable or is it tangible, same thing anyway, not something, you please. Thank you very much.” He would also write a few lines about facing armed combat and killing some Germans.
Then he set the letter aside. He would finish it tomorrow maybe. After all, he wasn’t even sure yet where to send it.
By then, it was time to head downstairs, and he wasn’t in the least bit contrite about his late-night carousing. As the tight-knit group of Americans in the press corps gathered for a preprandial cocktail, Ernest took charge. It was a who’s who of the war correspondents, with familiar faces such as Irwin Shaw, Charlie Wertenbaker, and now Helen Kirkpatrick, a crack reporter for the Chicago Daily News and a well-known name in America and Europe.
In the world of 1940s war journalism, Helen Kirkpatrick was anything but a minor figure. A tall and imposing blue-eyed, thirty-five-year-old American journalist with an acerbic wit and a talent for ferreting out the hard stories, she had been one of the most powerful voices reporting from Britain on the dangers of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the various follies both of appeasement and of the Duke of Windsor. In 1940, she became the Chicago Daily News’s first woman reporter and covered the Blitz bravely from London. And she was there for the Normandy landings, right along with Robert Capa and Martha Gellhorn. The Free French Forces had their pick of a correspondent to be assigned to their headquarters. They chose Helen.
On August 25, she had entered the city in a tank as part of General Leclerc’s Second Armored Division, something both Ernest Hemingway and Robert Capa might well have envied. It was the first wave of the action. That first day of freedom in Paris, Helen remembered that Ernest Hemingway “w
as a loose cannon. . . . He had gathered all these forces around him. He was totally illegal, but that didn’t bother him.”
At the Hôtel Ritz, drinks turned into lunch, and eventually Helen announced that it was time for her to leave. That afternoon, General Charles de Gaulle was leading a patriotic march from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde, and tens of thousands were already lining the broad avenues of Paris to take part in the official celebration of the liberation. The parade was going to end with a mass of thanksgiving in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and Helen didn’t want to miss out on reporting the day’s story.
As she rose, there was an awkward moment. She was getting up to head over to the parade route when Ernest Hemingway, once again playing Papa, advised her, “Daughter, sit still and drink this good brandy. You can always see a parade, but you’ll never again lunch at the Ritz on the 26th of August, the day after Paris was liberated.”
Off Helen went anyhow, along with Lieutenant John Reinhart. That afternoon, Helen and John Reinhart would find themselves, along with Robert Capa, unexpectedly back in the middle of the fighting.
Always on the lookout for new angles, Hemingway had heard about a downed American airman who had been on the run in Paris since the end of May—and that meant that this young man had been, surely, among the very first of any of the Allies there in the city. It was bound to be an interesting perspective. So he sent off a note to Henry Woodrum, inviting him to come for a drink in the bar of the Hôtel Ritz. He wanted to shake this man’s hand and hear his story. There had to be some true “gen” he could use in working up his next article for Collier’s.
Then, piling into the jeep with some of his cronies, Hemingway set off for the Left Bank to check on how the literary scene had fared under the Nazi occupation and to visit his old friend, the American proprietor of Shakespeare and Company books, Sylvia Beach.
As the jeep rolled to a stop along rue de l’Odéon, Ernest Hemingway jumped out and started bellowing out her name. Soon “everybody in the street took up the cry of ‘Sylvia!’ ” Her partner Adrienne finally put two and two together. “It’s Hemingway! It’s Hemingway!” Adrienne hollered. “I flew downstairs,” Sylvia said:
We met with a crash; he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people on the street and in the windows cheered. We went up to Adrienne’s apartment and sat Hemingway down. He was in battle dress, grimy and bloody. A machine gun clanked on the floor. . . . He wanted to know if there was anything he could do for us. We asked him if he could do something about the Nazi snipers on the rooftops in our street, particularly on Adrienne’s rooftop. He got his company out of the jeeps and took them up to the roof. We heard firing for the last time in the rue de l’ Odeon. Hemingway and his men came down again and rode off in their jeeps—“to liberate,” according to Hemingway, “the cellar at the Ritz.”
Never mind, of course, that he had already liberated a good portion the evening before. Telling and retelling that story was already on its way to becoming one of the defining elements of the larger-than-life Ernest Hemingway legend.
Sylvia had her own harrowing wartime stories. Along with other Allied women in Paris—like the film-star-turned-resistance-fighter Drue Tartière, the “American Angel” Laura Mae Corrigan, and the others—she had spent time in the prison internment camp at Vittel after the Americans ended their formal neutrality and entered the war in 1941. One of the women there with them at Vittel was another American who also happened to be named Sylvia and who lived at the Hôtel Ritz with a French colonel husband. She had been released immediately.
Hemingway and his entourage next went off to find Pablo Picasso, whose atelier was just a few streets away from Sylvia at 7, rue des Grands Augustins. The two men had been introduced more than twenty years earlier, when Ernest first arrived in Paris, a twenty-three-year-old unknown writer. Picasso, of course, had already been famous.
But Hemingway wasn’t the first American journalist to visit the painter. Photographer Lee Miller had arrived the afternoon of the liberation.
As a war correspondent for Vogue, she had reported from the army hospitals in the days after the landings at Normandy, and it was known throughout the officer ranks that she played a mean game of poker. Now, she laughed about how she had been “in the doghouse” for working too close to the combat zone at the battle at St. Malo in mid-August, where, as one of the male journalists put it with undisguised admiration, she had been “the only reporter, and only photographer, let along the only dame, who stayed through the siege” and faced down danger with the soldiers.
There, outside St. Malo, in the village of Cézembre, she had unwittingly taken dramatic shots of one air raid, not knowing then that they were documentary evidence of America’s first use of napalm bombs in modern warfare. Life magazine had wanted to publish the images, but the censors confiscated the film, and she had been reassigned to the comparatively sleepy Nemours, some fifty miles southwest of Paris, as punishment.
That was the reason why, on the morning of August 25, Lee Miller was still waiting for travel orders that would allow her to go to Paris. She wanted to be part of the race to the capital, but with the brass angry with her, her papers were slow in coming. “I won’t be the first woman journalist in Paris, but I’ll be the first dame photographer, I think, unless someone parachutes in,” she at least consoled herself that day. It seemed to everyone that she probably had been.
The darling of Parisian surrealist circles before the war, Lee Miller was still tremendously beautiful now in her mid-thirties. She knew everyone famous in artistic circles. A talented photographer, she had been both Man Ray’s model and lover. She was Jean Cocteau’s trusted confidante and the avant-garde designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s favorite fashion model. Picasso once painted her portrait, and she still considered all of them her friends. So after stopping at the Palais Royal to visit Cocteau in his apartment at 36, rue de Montpensier, she headed to Pablo Picasso’s atelier over on the Left Bank immediately.
When Lee arrived that afternoon, Picasso welcomed her as a dear friend. “This is the first allied soldier I’ve seen, and it’s you!” he exclaimed delightedly. A savvy journalist, she memorialized the reunion with some press photos, and that evening she went to dinner at a favorite café around the corner with Picasso and the surrealist photographer Dora Maar—a mutual friend whom the painter had unceremoniously dumped back in March, after a tumultuous ten-year liaison, for a much younger beauty.
There, in a city short on food but high on passion, the three celebrated the liberation of the city they each loved over a skinny roast chicken, some wine, and a flask of brandy. Picasso told Miller to come back soon. The war had changed her. Her face had taken on fascinating new dimensions. He wanted to paint a new portrait. Throughout the war, he had painted dozens of portraits of Maar. For Dora, it had not always been a flattering experience. One after another showed her in torment. “Dora, for me, was always a weeping woman,” Picasso said. “[W]omen are suffering machines,” he explained philosophically. For some strange reason, more than one of Picasso’s lovers ended up with a nervous breakdown.
Meanwhile, by the morning of August 26, over at the Hôtel Scribe, Mary Welsh had finally tracked down Charlie Wertenbaker and been given an assignment. Her job was to report for Time-Life on how the occupation had changed the world of Paris fashion. Vogue quickly gave its correspondent Lee Miller the same assignment. Among the female war correspondents, it was meant to be a race for the best couture coverage. Many of the women journalists, after having experienced combat, were having a hard time getting too excited.
For Mary, starting her day’s work at the Place Vendôme was only natural. The famous fashion houses of Paris in the 1940s were “almost all located between the Champs Elysées, Place Vendôme and Faubourg St. Honoré, in what was customarily referred to as the temple of elegant,” and the 1942 telephone directory for Paris lists more than a half dozen of them clustered around the Hôtel Ritz, either on the Place Vendôme or, than
ks to the fame of Coco Chanel, just along rue Cambon, running north from the octagonal plaza.
That didn’t mean Mary didn’t have an ulterior motive. While there she was going to track down Ernest Hemingway. “I walked around to the Place Vendome entrance of the Hotel Ritz and asked the concierge, my acquaintance from 1940, if [Monsieur] Hemingway was by chance in the hotel,” as she told the story later:
Bien sûr, the concierge said, and directed me up to Room 31. I rode up the coquettish little lift, the liftboy in his proper uniform and white gloves, knocked at No. 31, and asked the freckled soldier who opened the door if Mr. Hemingway was in. “Papa, there’s a dame here,” Pfc. Archie Pelkey yelled into the room. Ernest emerged into the hallway, a whirlwind of good cheer, and gave me a welcoming merry-go-round bear hug. . . . Inside the room a couple of his friends from the French underground, who had been with him since Rambouillet, were sitting on the bare floor intermittently cleaning rifles and sipping champagne.
Ernest Hemingway poured her a glass of the Perrier Jouët from a tray resting on top of a fragile-looking little Empire-style desk, and for a long moment the two stood admiring the view from the French windows. One of Papa’s men was sacked out in his dirty boots on top of the Hôtel Ritz’s pristine pink bedspread. Stay, Hemingway told her. There was plenty of champagne on ice, and he hadn’t made any bones since back in London about his intentions. Mary, though, needed to go get to work on her story for Charlie Wertenbaker. He could take her, instead, she supposed to dinner.
On her way out of the Hôtel Ritz lobby, an even better idea struck her. She asked Hans Elminger if he might be able to find her some accommodation. In a matter of moments, he gave her the keys to room 86, a cozy suite with twin-sized brass beds and a chaise longue decorated with roses in gold brocade patterns. There was a big dressing table with a pink pincushion, and over the marble mantelpiece hung the silhouette in bronze of an old-fashioned lady. Her room “on the garden side” looked out over the green space behind the Ministry of Justice. It would be her home until March, as it turned out—home “with complications.”
The Hotel on Place Vendome Page 15