The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  In the aftermath, Coco disappeared to Lausanne, Switzerland, and reunited with Hans von Dincklage. The couple passed the better part of a decade in self-imposed exile. Whatever her covert activities, her public ones were enough to earn her the disdain of her fellow citizens in Paris.

  That was why, in the autumn after the liberation of Paris, her atelier on the rue Cambon remained shuttered. Her rooms at the Hôtel Ritz sat empty.

  She would eventually return to them again only in the mid-1950s, when the Nazi occupation was already becoming something no one in Paris wanted to remember. By then European integration seemed more promising than the Anglo-American alliance.

  For those who had lived as guests at the Hôtel Ritz during the German occupation, the liberation was the end of one story about luxury and modernity and Paris. It was the passing of the generation that had changed the shape of the future in the 1910s through the 1930s.

  Already in September 1944, other film stars, socialites, and celebrities were on their way to making new legends. Among those working quietly in the shadows of the rue Cambon bar was a second generation of wartime spies, the men working on the Manhattan Project. They were in a desperate race to prevent Adolf Hitler from obtaining a nuclear weapon as Germany collapsed under the Allied advance.

  15

  The Blonde Bombshell and the Nuclear Scientists

  Assimilated Colonel Fred Wardenburg, 1944.

  MIGHT NOT A BOMB NO BIGGER THAN AN ORANGE BE FOUND TO POSSESS A SECRET POWER TO DESTROY A WHOLE BLOCK OF BUILDINGS—NAY, TO CONCENTRATE THE FORCE OF A THOUSAND TONS OF CORDITE AND BLAST A TOWNSHIP AT A STROKE?

  —Winston Churchill, “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” 1924

  In the weeks following the liberation, new visitors would arrive on the scene in Paris, in a changing cast of characters.

  Sacha Guitry and Arletty still languished in prison with thousands of other French collaborators. On August 30, 1944, the Nazis executed a broken and battered Carl von Stülpnagel in Germany. On September 7, the Gestapo interrogators finally caught up with his conspirator, Hans Speidel, the last free member of the Ritz-based resistance circle that conspired in the July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Amazingly, Hans Speidel survived the autumn.

  In mid-September, Vogue correspondent Lee Miller left for a two-week assignment in the Loire Valley, but she would return to Paris by the end of the month and move into modest digs with fellow journalist Helen Kirkpatrick. The two gals still wondered what was going to happen when Martha Gellhorn found out about Ernest and Mary.

  At the Hôtel Ritz in October there were immediate reminders that the war in Europe was far from over.

  Baron Hans von Pfyffer arrived from Switzerland to inspect the hotel that month. It had taken weeks to arrange for the safe-conduct visa required to cross the front lines, which were still only a couple of hundred miles from Paris. His arrival sent the hotel staff in a flurry of action. Marie-Louise Ritz, who had largely taken to her rooms after the liberation, perhaps prudently, was suddenly more of a presence.

  More important, that month an American engineer—and spy—named Frederic Wardenburg arrived at the Hôtel Ritz on a secret and crucial wartime assignment. He was part of the “Alsos” mission investigating German progress in developing an atomic bomb. He was there as a secret agent for the Manhattan Project in liberated Paris, a project that would end with Hiroshima.

  Fred Wardenburg was thirty-nine years old. He was the father of two school-aged children, and he had spent his career as a desk-bound executive and science representative at the Du Pont chemical company, based out of Delaware. He had a pretty young wife named Martha. Although he had the requisite chiseled features and striking good looks, he was an unlikely candidate for the kind of James Bond–style adventures that had somehow unexpectedly landed him in Paris.

  Fred Wardenburg never planned on a life of espionage or covert government missions, but he was exceptionally suited to the moment. He was an excellent engineer and sleuth, and he happened to speak both French and German.

  He had been rigorously vetted for the assignment. After all, he was, quite simply, being trusted to carry out a mission on whose outcome the entire war potentially depended.

  The United States military approached him in the first weeks after the liberation. The Second World War hadn’t ended with the freedom of France. There was one way that Adolf Hitler could still achieve his long-dreamed-of world domination: by discovering how to split the atom. The race to develop the nuclear bomb was still too close to call, and the country that discovered its secret first would have a staggering advantage. In the words of one official report on the Manhattan Project, “In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor.”

  They wanted Fred Wardenburg to join the secret intelligence team based out of Paris. The team’s mission was to hunt down, capture, and interrogate German nuclear physicists and to stop the Nazis from completing work on an atomic weapon. Wardenburg was one of only two American civilians entrusted with the top-secret information on the current state of the nuclear research.

  For weeks Fred and his wife, Martha—who was to know none of the details of his assignment—were confined to a hotel room in Washington, D.C., while the American brass weighed the risks of the operation. One night, late, the phone call came telling him that he was to meet agents in the lobby immediately. “I’ll be in touch” was all that he could say to Martha, because even Fred didn’t yet know that he was about to find himself holed up in a different hotel room by morning: a posh one at the Ritz in Paris.

  In the French capital, Fred was joining a very small and elite network of Allied operatives. At the head of the scientific team was the Jewish-born Dutch-American physicist Professor Samuel Goudsmit, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two British spies, Eric Walsh and Rupert Cecil, were there to assist with intelligence, along with a civilian engineer named James Lane, who was their resident expert in facilities construction. In charge of them all—and responsible for the precarious and dangerous mission—was Lieutenant General Leslie Groves of the United States Armed Forces. The mission’s code name—Alsos—was derived in his honor, it being the Greek word for “grove.”

  Before leaving Washington, D.C., Fred had been promoted to the “assimilated” rank of a United States colonel. All the civilians had been given military ranks for their own protection. It would give him, in case of the worst, high-level prisoner-of-war status under international treaty. On more than one occasion these scientists-turned-spies operated—like all those other wartime agents—from stools at Frank Meier’s bar on the rue Cambon side of the Hôtel Ritz.

  Frank was still there in the autumn of 1944, mixing up his inventive and deceptively strong cocktails. In those days after the liberation, the bar at the Hôtel Ritz was still going strong as the center of the action. Nearly fifty years after the Dreyfus Affair, it remained the chosen haunt of film stars, artists, writers, and intellectuals—Jewish or otherwise.

  Down in the rue Cambon bar, Ernest Hemingway and Mary Welsh kept to their preprandial two-martini ritual, as always. Fred Wardenburg later joked about having a drink with a resident Persian princess and the French film actress Danielle Darrieux, who was another regular. Sam Goudsmit was the life of the party and a fine-wine aficionado, and with those well-stocked Ritz cellars things often got cheerfully boisterous.

  The reigning celebrity of the Hôtel Ritz and the queen of the bar, though, was Marlene Dietrich. She had been since her arrival in September. In the next two years, she would make more than five hundred appearances to entertain the Allied troops as part of the United States Overseas tour. Wardenburg and Goudsmit were soon knocking back drinks with the sultry bombshell, who had also been given the assimilated rank of a colonel by the United States government. Appearing carefree was part of their cover and part of her morale-boosting wartime performance. But all of them were taking risks.

  Fred and Sam were on a covert mission. Dietrich was engaged in some
undercover tactical maneuvers herself. But there was nothing altruistic about hers. For one thing, she was trying to bring about the speedy conclusion of the Hemingway-Gellhorn marriage.

  Dietrich dubbed the macho writer “the pope of my personal church” (although Mary Welsh wryly noted that making money “seemed to be her religion”). She and Mary had rooms on the same floor of the hotel, and when she understood how things stood in Paris Marlene threw her support behind this amorous liaison. Marlene thought Papa was simply wonderful. “Papa,” she would tell him, “you are the greatest man and the greatest artist.” Ernest Hemingway unsurprisingly thought she was charming.

  Marlene would come and sit on the tub in his bathroom and tell him that he just had to end his marriage to that Martha. Sometimes she would sing for him while he was shaving.

  Papa didn’t need much encouragement when it came to carrying on with Mary. Martha Gellhorn still didn’t know about the affair, but in later years she and Mary would exchange a couple of civil letters. Gellhorn, however, would never talk of Dietrich as anything other than a venomous, nasty little “cobra.”

  In truth, the hostilities between the two women had less to do with Hemingway than with a second tactical operation Dietrich soon had in the works.

  That fall, just outside the small town of Nijmegen, in Holland, Gellhorn had caught her first glimpse of the dashing Major General James Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. Still persona non grata in the eyes of the military after her rogue escape from the nurses’ training camp in London after the Normandy landings, Martha had just been arrested and hauled into his office for reporting from the combat zone without press accreditation. Martha admitted that she was, indeed, reporting from the combat zone on the sly, but the general laughed and said that he guessed she’d made a pretty good guerrilla fighter. As long as she disappeared, he promised to forget this ever happened.

  There was an immediate chemistry between them.

  Soon another woman would set her sights on the handsome American commandant. That woman would be Marlene Dietrich. When she ultimately learned that Gellhorn and Gavin were lovers, she was “sick with rage” and frustration. Throughout the late autumn, the two women were “opposing warlords” in the Ritz bar, and, as the military pressman Colonel Barney Oldfield remembered those showdowns, “There was always the impression that each resented the other and denigrated her.” Martha’s love affair with the general was a call to battle, and the legendary beauty Marlene had a considerable sexual armory at her disposal.

  Gellhorn would not win the war. Unfortunately for her, as with the atomic bomb, in love the advantage belongs to the aggressor.

  In the bar of the Hôtel Ritz, all this plotting was business as usual. New acts of betrayal and counter-betrayal, new intelligence and counterintelligence operations had taken the place of the old ones. It was simply a new set of postwar characters.

  But for Fred Wardenburg and the Alsos team, the stakes of their mission were impossibly high and the timeline frighteningly urgent. The Germans had discovered the principles of nuclear fission in 1938. In 1939, they had started a military nuclear research program, formally headed by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Early in the war the Germans had captured the world’s richest supplies of the necessary raw materials. The Allies—on the verge of cracking the mystery of the atomic bomb—were afraid that the Germans would be that one, fatal step ahead of them. If they were, the liberation of Paris and the losses at Normandy would be pretty well irrelevant.

  The Alsos mission was created to find out exactly where the German nuclear program stood in the fall of 1944 and, as the Third Reich fell to pieces, to track down their research physicists before the Nazis could send them into hiding at a secret facility. Nothing less than the fate of the world after the Second World War hung in the balance.

  Paris had been one of the wartime atomic research centers. One of the world’s great physicists had been working throughout the war in the capital. Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the son-in-law of the famed Marie Curie, ran research laboratories throughout the war, and the occupying forces made certain that they were well staffed with some top-notch, loyal German scientists.

  Unsurprisingly, Joliot-Curie had to answer some hard question after the liberation about his collaboration. In fact, as the Allies quickly learned, he had acted with immense cunning and courage. Frédéric had spent the war secretly fighting for the French resistance. He used his scientific know-how to build Molotov cocktails for the résistants in the days leading up to the liberation.

  The Alsos team knew, as well, that the chief German scientist in Paris, Wolfgang Gentner, had known all about Joliot-Curie’s covert resistance activities and protected the scientist from the Gestapo throughout the occupation. In the gray areas of the French occupation, there is always this complication: the bad guys weren’t always German. Sometimes they were French. Or British. Or American.

  The first thing the Alsos team did in Paris was to search the files in Frédéric’s wartime laboratories. They had been inventoried back in August, in the first days after the liberation, and the Allies had turned up only a couple of letters, written in German. Everyone was disappointed when they turned out to be from an insistent woman asking her lover to send her urgently some Chanel No. 5 from occupied Paris.

  Their search led them to a second German research facility, just off the Champs-Élysées, where in October they finally had a lucky break. The scientific files had all been destroyed, but someone had forgotten to take the visitor book in the porter’s lodge. It listed the names of all the German scientists and technicians who had visited the laboratory.

  Now the Alsos team knew exactly who had been part of the Paris-based nuclear research program—and exactly whom they were hunting.

  They caught up with one of those scientists in Paris. It was a second major break. Fred Wardenburg and Sam Goudsmit hauled the physicist in to the Hôtel Ritz for military-style questioning. “We transformed our hotel suite into a tribunal for the interrogation of our prize quarry,” Sam remembered later. “We placed him facing the window so that we could observe all his reactions, [then] proceeded to shout dozens of questions at him.”

  It was a bust. “[H]is answers,” Sam Goudsmit lamented, “were all disappointing. Either he was hiding something, or he really didn’t know what it was all about.”

  In the scientist’s suitcase, however, were some papers that terrified everyone involved with the operation. There were records of massive German industrial stockpiles of the radioactive chemical thorium. Nuclear physicists in Britain and America already suspected that thorium might be able to replace highly refined uranium in an atomic reaction. Had the Nazis discovered the last missing piece in the race to build a nuclear weapon capable of mass urban destruction?

  By the fall of 1944, the world’s physicists were working only on the final stages of the atomic process. How to refine uranium or how to replace it with some other element were the two questions that held the key to the puzzle of how to build a nuclear weapon. Evidence that the Germans were processing uranium was precisely what Wardenburg and his fellow agents were desperate to confirm in the last stages of the Manhattan Project. As he knew, Du Pont had been part of a secret government mission throughout the war to manufacture uranium 235, the most elusive part of the atomic project, and Fred knew that it hadn’t yet found a way to isolate the isotope reliably.

  The new information led the Alsos team in a frantic hunt all over Paris. New evidence led them at last to the German border in late October and early November. Caught up on the front lines in fierce fighting, it was a hair-raisingly dangerous experience. The stakes could not have been higher that autumn.

  Success came at last when the city of Strasbourg was liberated in the middle of November. The Alsos agents followed on the heels of General Patton’s army as the Allies made their way into the city and discovered another cache of scientific papers at a facility. Back in Paris, they pored over them, trying to work backward from th
e notes and to understand what the German scientists were after.

  At the Hôtel Ritz there was at last cause for some jubilant celebration. The files “proved definitively that Germany had no atom bomb and was not likely to have one in any reasonable time,” as Sam Goudsmit put it officially. The Germans had been working on developing a uranium pile still as late as August—and they had missed something huge. They hadn’t discovered how to use plutonium.

  The Germans hadn’t discovered how to use thorium in building an atomic weapon, either. Fred Wardenburg laughed when they learned why the German company was hoarding stockpiles of chemical thorium.

  The company was, indeed, strategically preparing for postwar domination. That domination, however, was strictly cosmetic. The German industrialists were planning to launch a new brand of toothpaste to compete with the Americans: “thorium oxide . . . was supposed to have the same effect, probably, as peroxide, and they were already dreaming of their advertising. . . . ‘Use toothpaste with thorium! Have sparkling, brilliant teeth—radioactive brilliance!’ After all, America had its Bob Hope and Irium”—the old trade name for Pepsodent.

  It led a too-modest Fred Wardenburg to later tease that the war medals he earned for his service “were for conspicuous bravery in riding rickety wartime Paris elevators.”

  Soon the Americans would unlock the secrets of nuclear weaponry, and the world would see the bomb that Winston Churchill had once been afraid to envision. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not the liberation of Paris, would finally end the twentieth century’s most lurid conflict. And it would be a distinctly modern conclusion to an ugly story that in France and in Germany and across Europe and North America had been decades in the making.