The collaboration of France in the fascist project had some of its roots in the cultural rift exposed by the trial of Alfred Dreyfus. The Second World War had some of its roots in the 1919 humiliation of a vanquished German people. Now the beginnings of the atomic age would usher in a Cold War whose parameters had already begun to take shape in the 1940s.
16
From Berlin with Love and Last Battles in Paris
1945
Marlene Dietrich at the Hôtel Ritz after the liberation.
GENERAL, YOU MUST NOT HATE YOUR FRIENDS MORE THAN YOU HATE YOUR ENEMIES.
—Clementine Churchill to Charles de Gaulle
Before the Second World War ended, things were destined to get more ugly than anyone imagined.
The winter of 1944–45 was bruising for everyone. Beyond Paris, the war continued. The race to harness and control the power of the atom only intensified. Across Europe, the weather was punishing, and there were massive shortages of food and fuel. Life in the French capital was harder than it had been at almost any time since the beginning of the occupation. And in Germany, the numbers of people dying in the concentration camps were skyrocketing.
The winter of 1945 also marked the beginning of a new low in French relations with the British and the Americans.
At the liberation, the proud and cantankerous Charles de Gaulle got his wish. He assumed the role of prime minister of the autocratic provisional French government and largely quashed the communist-led factions that led the local resistance. Increasingly, he stopped trying to keep his antagonism toward les Anglo-Saxons a secret as well. Clementine Churchill, who was fond of Charles de Gaulle, sagely advised him, “General, you must not hate your friends more than you hate your enemies.”
De Gaulle, however, was not in the mood for caution. The Americans, British, and Soviets found him so obstreperous that they declined to invite him to the summit at Yalta in February, where the fate of a new modern Europe was decided. France was offered a founding seat in the United Nations and an occupation zone in postwar Germany, but the general was still furious. Defeat by the Axis powers was not an option anyone entertained for a moment. But the cost of victory in the Second World War was looking more and more delicate.
In the winter of 1944–45, Marlene Dietrich and Martha Gellhorn were both back in the French capital. The cost of victory there was also hard-fought and nasty.
When Major General James Gavin hauled her into his office on the eastern front earlier that year, Martha had dropped the hint that she would be based out of the Hôtel Lincoln in Paris. He tried on several occasions to catch up with her in the capital. Somehow they always seemed to miss each other. So Jim Gavin finally decided to act the part of the major general. He sent someone to Paris with a military plane and orders to bring Gellhorn to him in Germany.
Being ordered about didn’t much suit Martha, and she was about to refuse the colonel who had been sent to fetch her, until the colonel explained that, in fact, Jim Gavin wasn’t kidding. Her choice was either to come to Germany—and he was giving her the press credentials she needed as part of this bargain—or she would be returned by military order to the United States, which would be the end of her wartime reporting.
Face-to-face with her would-be paramour a few hours later, Martha’s fury over the peremptory method of seduction faded when he offered her a dry martini and an unheard-of wartime steak dinner in exchange for a few hours of her company. By the time they were on to the brandy and low music in front of the woodstove, they had discovered they were mutual friends of Bob Capa. That night they became lovers.
Martha Gellhorn—once again an accredited war correspondent thanks to Jim Gavin’s curious wooing strategy—returned to the front almost immediately. She had been shaken by what she had seen reporting on the torture centers in Paris. At the beginning of April, she followed the Allied troops as they liberated the first concentration camps in Germany. Some of these had been where France had sent 75,721 Jewish refugees and other citizens, many of them from metropolitan Paris. Thirty-three thousand people remained in the German camps that spring. Fewer than two thousand of these survivors were deported French Jews.
Martha arrived at Dachau, Germany, in the first days of May 1945, directly on the heels of the American troops. A typhus epidemic had swept through the camp, and conditions had deteriorated horrifically. In the woods nearby were torture chambers and everywhere hundreds of bodies. Almost half of those who died at Dachau, Martha learned, perished in the last few months before its liberation.
There was no comprehending what confronted those first observers. “Behind the wire and the electric fence,” Martha wrote in her report for Collier’s, “the skeletons sat in the sun and scratched themselves for lice. They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky.”
As Gellhorn stood in the infirmary, “what had been a man” entered the room, one of the only Polish detainees to survive the last transport from Buchenwald. Everyone else in the fifty boxcars that made up the convoy had perished. He was six feet tall, but he weighed less than a hundred pounds, and he wore only a prison shirt and a dirty blanket around his midriff. “This man had survived,” Martha told her readers, but “he was found under a pile of dead. Now he stood on the bones that were his legs and talked and suddenly he wept. ‘Everyone is dead,’ he said, and the face that was not a face twisted with pain or sorrow or horror. ‘No one is left. Everyone is dead. I cannot help myself. Here I am and I am finished and cannot help myself. Everyone is dead.’ ”
For Martha, nothing would be the same afterward. She was herself of Jewish heritage. “A darkness entered my spirit, there, in that place in the sunny early days of May 1945,” she wrote. “It is as if I walked into Dachau and there fell over a cliff and suffered a lifelong concussion, without recognizing it.”
The man returned not long after—and whispered something in Polish urgently. The doctor translated. He had come to tell them the news that had come too late for everyone there. The war in Europe was over.
On the evening of May 4, 1945, Germany formally began negotiations for surrender.
No one celebrated anything in Dachau.
Had the Allies pushed on past Paris, forgoing that liberation in August, would they have arrived sooner, in time to stop the last weeks of horror? It was a question too agonizing even to formulate.
A few days later, Martha was back in Paris, assigned to cover the V-E Day celebrations. She tried to find Jim Gavin in the capital. Instead she ended up in a room at the Hôtel Scribe, where a French friend held her for hours in bed while she wept, talking of Dachau. Soon thereafter, Martha returned to Germany, where at Bergen-Belsen she witnessed Allied soldiers bury thousands of bodies. James Gavin seemed to be the last thing on her mind.
Conflict with Marlene Dietrich, however, was looming on the horizon, even if Martha didn’t yet know it.
Dietrich had often said in her wartime USO act that, when the Americans took Berlin, she hoped some nice soldier would look up her aged mother. The German-born Dietrich was passionately antifascist, and she had taken up American citizenship in defiance of Adolf Hitler. The chance of her mother surviving that insubordination was dicey.
In that search for her mother, she had the help of a powerful American general. One night that spring, Ernest Hemingway invited James Gavin and Marlene Dietrich to the same late-night party at the Hôtel Ritz. The night ended for the new acquaintances with a passionate romp in the general’s bedroom. Sometime between pillow talk and breakfast, Gavin found that he had been enlisted to lead the search for Frau Dietrich.
The Gellhorn-Hemingway marriage had ended—and ended acrimoniously—months earlier, and it is hard to say if Ernest knew that he was causing mischief in making this introduction. But regardless of whether he relished now the fresh heartache and humiliation coming Martha’s way or not, heartache was coming. It was only a question of when and how Martha would learn of her lover’s betrayal.
&nbs
p; She would not learn of it quickly for the simple reason that Martha was less and less in Paris that summer. At the Ritz bar, however, Dietrich soon found another “warlord” to contend with in her absence. By July 6, 1945, another famous starlet had moved into the Ritz, and it was probably a good thing that Marlene missed Ingrid Bergman’s big entrance. Marlene Dietrich was not a gracious loser.
When Bergman arrived at the Hôtel Ritz that July morning it was a showstopper. Journalists were elbowing each other out of the way at the imposing Place Vendôme entrance to get the best shots of the stunning Swedish actress. Her role as Ilsa Lund in the 1942 film Casablanca, opposite Humphrey Bogart, had made her immensely famous. Everyone remembered those lines: “We’ll always have Paris.”
Dietrich was annoyed to hear that she had celebrity competition in the Ritz circle. “Ah, now you’re coming—when the war’s over!” she snidely offered her Swedish nemesis as words of welcome.
Irwin Shaw and Robert Capa, bent over their poker chips, perked up considerably as Bergman glided past. By then Capa was being held captive at the Hôtel Ritz, where the staff refused to let him check out until he could settle up his bar tab with Frank and his hotel bill with Claude Auzello. Unsurprisingly, there were also some sizable gambling debts that needed clearing.
Throwing in their cards, Capa and Shaw immediately started composing Bergman a warmer welcome letter. They pushed the note under her bedroom door an hour later, and they couldn’t believe their good luck. The thirty-one-year-old Ingrid found it sweet and funny.
They wrote in the letter:
Part 1. This is a community effort. The community consists of Bob Capa and Irwin Shaw. 2. We were planning on sending you flowers with this note inviting you to dinner this evening—but after consultation we discovered it was possible to pay for the flowers or the dinner, or the dinner or the flowers, not both. We took a vote and dinner won by a close margin. 3. It was suggested that if you did not care for dinner, flowers might be sent. No decision has been reached on this so far. 4. Besides flowers we have lots of doubtful qualities. 5. If we write much more we will have no conversation left, as our supply of charm is limited. 6. We will call you at 6.15. 7. We do not sleep.
Then the two men repaired to the rue Cambon bar, where they enjoyed a few more of Frank’s cocktails.
Astonishingly, when they called upstairs to her room, she agreed to join them. She told them cheekily that, as they had promised to take her out to dinner, “I hope you have enough money, because I’m very hungry.” Off they went to one of the swankest cafés in Paris, Fouquet’s, on the Champs-Élysées, where they promptly ordered champagne.
Poor Irwin Shaw was about to find himself, once again, on the losing side of an amorous competition. He would fare no better up against Capa than he had fared against Hemingway that fateful afternoon with Mary Welsh in London. Capa had talent with the ladies. Before long, he and Bergman were camped out together at the Hôtel Ritz as lovers. That romance, too, would last all summer.
On August 6, 1945, the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima, Japan. The second bomb was dropped on August 9, on Nagasaki. On August 14, Emperor Hirohito made a radio broadcast to the world and announced that Japan, too, would surrender. The Second World War ended at last, nearly a year after the liberation of Paris.
Driving down the Champs-Élysées with Robert Capa in a jeep for the V-J celebrations, Ingrid Bergman—for months now a Hôtel Ritz resident—took to kissing some pleasantly surprised soldiers.
Still wrangling bitterly with the Allies, Charles de Gaulle forbade British troops from taking part in the celebrations. Banning the Americans from the party in Paris was harder. In the summer of 1945, the Americans were still a dominant presence. Until the war was over and all the treaties signed and delivered, Allied troops provided security in the capital. And since spring, another breed of visitors had been steadily arriving. They were there to cover and to lead the European war crimes tribunals.
Those men and women headed to the Hôtel Ritz like generations before them. Among the newest residents on the Place Vendôme were Justice Robert H. Jackson, Thomas S. Dodd, Colonel John H. Amen, and General Edward C. Betts. President Harry S. Truman tapped Robert Jackson to serve as the United States’ chief prosecutor at the international military tribunal slated to get under way in the autumn in Nuremberg, Germany.
Thomas Dodd, one of the American prosecutors assisting Justice Jackson, described life in the French capital that summer. There were still shortages of everything. “Paris,” he wrote on August 4, 1945, “is so crowded. No taxicabs at all—a few horse carriages at fabulous prices. There are some automobiles on the streets—not many—and very few after dark.” Inflation and the devaluation of the French franc were crippling an economic recovery. Butter on the black market was ten dollars a pound, well beyond the reach of most in the city.
The trials at Nuremberg would last until 1946 and unfold the extent of the horrors of which Martha Gellhorn had witnessed a small fraction. Eventually, two of the old Hôtel Ritz regulars, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Hermann Göring, received death sentences in Germany.
In Paris, justice—or justice of a sort—came faster. While the French celebrated V-J Day in the streets of the capital, behind the scenes Philippe Pétain, the head of the Vichy collaborationist government, and his right-hand man, Pierre Laval, were engaged in another life-and-death struggle to indict each other. On August 15, 1945, Pétain’s three-week trial ended. It was another death sentence. De Gaulle controversially commuted it to life in prison.
In custody and preparing for his trial that autumn, Laval guessed that his fate would not have this same quality of mercy. He didn’t have much faith in due process in that punishing season. “Do you want me to tell you the setup?” he asked his lawyer on August 4. “There will be no pretrial hearings and no trial. I will be condemned—and got rid of—before the elections.”
Laval ultimately faced the firing squad, executed for his wartime collaboration. As he predicted, death came before the end of October and the first postwar elections of the new French government. Historians have long acknowledged that, despite his many sins during the occupation, the trial of Pierre Laval did not follow any defensible judicial process. It was the last of the savage épurations.
By autumn, the trials at Nuremberg had started, and the postwar story was no longer unfolding in the French capital. By 1945, the legend that was Paris was something the world looked back on as a beautiful symbol of a uniquely modern moment that had shaped the destiny of Europe. That moment was now passing.
The story had moved to London, Los Angeles, and, that year, Berlin especially. By September, Martha Gellhorn left the French capital for good to report on postwar Germany and to be full-time with Jim Gavin. She had to leave Bob Capa—eager to be back out reporting, too, and now looking for a way out of his love affair with the increasingly serious Ingrid Bergman—stuck miserably in Paris.
Gellhorn ultimately was able to purchase Bob Capa’s freedom. She promised to take one of his old suits to sell on the flourishing German black market. If she succeeded, she’d send him the money. One morning, on the Alexanderplatz, an old friend of theirs from Spanish Civil War days, Freddy Keller, found her there hawking the garment and handed her enough cash to give Capa his second Paris liberation. Capa briefly followed Bergman to Los Angeles—but before long he left her for Berlin.
And in those last months of the autumn, Marlene Dietrich was also in Berlin and not Paris. That September, two lieutenant colonels with the 82nd Airborne in Germany finally tracked down her frail and elderly—but living—mother. It was headline news. Marlene was flown from Paris and her home base at the Hôtel Ritz to Berlin for the dramatic reunion in front of flashing cameras. Her host was none other than the dashing General Gavin. There she finally went on the full-bore romantic offensive. She whispered to an unsuspecting Gavin that Martha Gellhorn had been unfaithful. Hurt and angry, Gavin once again went to bed with the film star out of pride and v
engeance.
This time Gellhorn at last discovered the betrayal—as she was always meant to do. Shattered by the news, she broke off completely with the general. There in Berlin, Marlene Dietrich had won her quarry.
Soon even Charles de Gaulle would be looking toward Germany in his vision of a postwar Europe. It was either there or looking westward. And the old general was determined to turn his back on the Anglo-Americans and the special relationship that he was convinced excluded France from world power. When he was, at last, elected to the presidency of France in the 1950s, with the Cold War now under way, de Gaulle set about building a new relationship, not with his old Allies but with the Germans. Once again, the Germans and the French sat down, at tables in Berlin, on the Champs-Élysées, and even at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, to hammer out a vision of a shared economic and politic vision that would unify a pan-European community.
17
Waning Powers in Paris
June 1951
Party for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the 1950s, with the Woolworths.
THE TWO PEOPLE WHO HAVE CAUSED ME THE MOST TROUBLE IN MY LIFE ARE WALLIS SIMPSON AND HITLER.
—Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother)
In the spring of 1951, Paris was once again, briefly, the center of the world’s attention. That April, six European countries ratified an agreement known as the Treaty of Paris and established the European Coal and Steel Community—a supranational pact binding France and Germany in a new economic and diplomatic collaboration. It was the second time in just over a decade, this time under far more auspicious circumstances.
In the spring of 1951, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were also in the capital. That June, the royal couple was negotiating a new place on the world stage again, too. It was a plan that involved more than a little sneakiness and double-crossing, and what the Duke and Duchess of Windsor couldn’t yet know was that it was about to end badly for both of them. That drama was unfolding—as so many of the dramas of their generation had unfolded—on the Place Vendôme in Paris.
The Hotel on Place Vendome Page 20