The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Graffiti slogans and hastily handmade posters appeared across the capital, urging revolution: “Run, comrades, the old world is behind you!”

  Even if Claude hadn’t seen the poster, he knew the feeling. The workers’ uprising of 1968 hadn’t left the Hôtel Ritz unscathed. “Students passing the unguarded Ministry of Justice in the Place Vendôme,” the papers reported, “threw stones through the windows.” Those who were there at the Ritz, however, didn’t need journalists to tell them of the turmoil playing out before them.

  Seventy years earlier, on the spring night the Hôtel Ritz opened its doors in the heady days of the Belle Époque, the square had been quiet enough for shrill voices and the clatter of wheels to disturb the peace of a fragile writer. Now the Place Vendôme—some days little more than a parking lot—throbbed with the sound of horns and engines.

  In 1898, women wouldn’t have dreamed of dining in public in Paris, not until Auguste Escoffier made it possible. Sunday dinner dances took place with white gloves and orchestras. Men in bespoke dinner jackets smoked serenely in the shadows.

  In 1969, Paris was reeling from Twiggy and miniskirts and the London “mod” look, which was taking over fashion. News drifted in from America of hippies and draft protests, birth control pills and the “Summer of Love.”

  The old world—the world where Paris was the pulse of the modern—was, indeed, behind them. The Hôtel Ritz was in danger of becoming no more than another of its legends. Occupancy was down. The hotel was teetering on the brink of financial collapse. It was easy to blame the absence of old visitors on de Gaulle’s determined anti-Americanism and on a new world rushing in upon them all too quickly.

  Claude Auzello knew better, though.

  Charley Ritz was the cause of this fiasco.

  It didn’t help, of course, that the hotel’s legendary residents—good and bad—had largely already departed. Even Claude couldn’t hold Charley Ritz responsible for the passing of a generation—and their passing was, it had to be said, often early and violent. Hermann Göring, the eccentric and uncomfortably charismatic Reichsmarschall, had swallowed contraband cyanide in the hours before his death sentence at Nuremberg could be carried out. Nuremberg concluded with ten executions and two suicides. Claude had no pity for them. He simply quipped: “We have lost twelve steady customers.”

  He was less sanguine on hearing the news about Robert Capa. The photojournalist had been killed in 1954, in a land-mine explosion in the war zone in Indochina. Capa was on assignment for Life magazine, and he wasn’t yet forty.

  Irwin Shaw on hearing the news promptly rounded up some friends and held an all-night wake in Capa’s favorite bar afterward in Paris, over bottles of champagne. Of his old friend and sometime enemy, Ernest Hemingway simply said, “It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. . . . He was so much alive that it is a hard, long day to think of him as dead.”

  Now “Papa” himself had been among the more recent departures. Ernest Hemingway, mentally ill and hopelessly alcoholic, shot himself to death in Key West in 1961, after years of wavering. In 1964, Mary Welsh—at last, Mrs. Ernest Hemingway—published a posthumous volume of his work, A Moveable Feast.

  In a letter to a friend in 1950, Hemingway had written of what it had meant, those magical years when the world had been young in the French capital. “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,” he had written, “then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” The memoir was an elegy to that city and that moment, and it had been pieced together from a notebook the writer found in a trunk of his papers that had rested in basement storage at the Hôtel Ritz since at least the 1940s.

  The only ones among the old legends left now at the Hotel Ritz were an eighty-year-old Coco Chanel and, on the odd occasions still, the aging Duke and Duchess of Windsor or their friend in the postwar years, an increasingly pain-ridden and drug-addled Marlene Dietrich. Mostly, the Windsors kept to their villa on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, and the film star kept to her apartment across town on avenue Montaigne. Claude Auzello knew where Marlene Dietrich lived because he and Blanche had an apartment nearby, and they were soon looking at leaving the Ritz themselves. He could never forgive Charley Ritz for this greatest of changes especially. And the reason was simple: Claude Auzello was being pushed out of his position as the managing director, a job that had been his life and his passion since 1925. He had guarded the reputation of the Hôtel Ritz and, at moments, had gone to heroic lengths to keep up its trademark standard of service, under the most unusual and trying of circumstances. But now his time at the legendary palace hotel was closing.

  In 1961, Marie-Louise Ritz, too, had died, at ninety-three, in that same room under the mansard roof overlooking the hotel garden where she and César Ritz had started on their bold adventure. Charley Ritz had returned to Paris and, after years of absence and equivocation, had at last taken charge of the family business.

  As far as Claude was concerned, Charley had been busy ever since driving it into the ground, and the familiar old quarrels between them had started almost immediately. The two men never saw eye to eye on the fundamentals. Claude hadn’t spent the Second World War holding up the old traditions in the face of air raids and food shortages only to allow gentlemen into the dining room now in velour lounge pants and outlandish blazers.

  Charley insisted that the world was changing. They needed to keep pace with it. Life was more casual now. Stuffy formality was outdated. The hotel was a business: it was just a matter of practical common sense. Both men agreed that the Ritz was losing its prestige, but they could not agree on why it was happening.

  The bottom line, of course, was that Charley Ritz and his family were the owners. And he probably wasn’t wrong, either, in his assessment of the ways in which the world was changing. Claude had quarreled and railed with Charley for nearly eight years, knowing full well that the younger man wanted him fired. Claude hadn’t minded for himself. He was worn out from waiting on others and ready to retire to a quiet villa in the south of France. It was Blanche who couldn’t bear it. She could not leave Paris, she said, as she wept and threatened. She could not leave the Hôtel Ritz—the place that had been her home since those long ago days now in the Années Folles—the crazy years of the 1920s. Claude knew that leaving would break her.

  For Blanche, things had been precarious for a long time. After the war had come a new kind of madness. She never recovered from those months in a Gestapo prison during the occupation or from the years of terror, living as the Jewish-born wife of the hotel’s managing director. Like Dietrich and Hemingway, she turned to alcohol to numb the pain. Now she was having blackouts even in the hotel lobby. While Claude had been able to keep them at the Hôtel Ritz, it was all just about manageable. Then, in April, came word that it was time for Claude Auzello to retire. He would not be getting a new contract as the managing director.

  It had been a month of anguish. They had fought the war here, even if no one had ever heard the sounds of the cannons. But now Claude was tired of fighting. He had finally made his decision.

  Hidden away carefully, in some desk drawer or perhaps in one of the closets that had been César Ritz’s innovation, he kept a dark memento: a German gun taken from a nameless soldier during the occupation.

  The night of May 28, 1969, Claude Auzello was sleepless. The sounds of traffic had died away, and only the thinnest crescent of the new moon broke the darkness. Perhaps he thought back in those quiet hours to Hermann Göring and Arletty. Sacha Guitry and Jean Cocteau, Scott Fitzgerald and Papa. Pierre Laval and Georges Mandel. Laura Mae Corrigan’s emeralds and Elsa Maxwell’s parties. The stories of Marcel Proust and Escoffier and his divine Sarah. Or perhaps his thoughts simply turned to the long-ago afternoon in the 1920s when he took Blanche Rubenstein to tea at the Hôtel Ritz for their first date and told her, sitting in the garden, of his dream of being its manager.

  Just as light began to
show on the horizon of a perfect springtime Paris morning, Claude surely turned to watch Blanche for a moment. Then he placed the gun to her hairline and pulled the trigger.

  While Claude waited and considered, the sun rose over the capital. To the north rested the gleaming tower of Sacre Coeur, high on Montmartre. To the south was the Eiffel Tower. Between them, the water of the Seine flowed as slowly and inexorably as ever, past the heart of France, as it had done for millennia. The Place Vendôme was just stirring. As he brought the gun slowly upward, drowsy neighbors heard a second pop, like the sound of a tire exploding somewhere not far off in the distance.

  Afterword

  Charley Ritz, on the balcony of the Hôtel Ritz.

  TIME PASSES, AND LITTLE BY LITTLE EVERYTHING THAT WE HAVE SPOKEN IN FALSEHOOD BECOMES TRUE.

  —Marcel Proust

  By the 1970s, it was no longer possible to ignore the fact that the Hôtel Ritz was failing. Its legend was waning, and profits were disappearing with it. Charley Ritz struggled to keep the palace hotel afloat, until his own death in 1976. Ultimately, looming bankruptcy made its sale inevitable. In 1979, the lease of the Hôtel Ritz went up for bidding. Salvation came from an unlikely quarter.

  A fifty-nine-year-old Egyptian-born business mogul named Mohamed Al Fayed had once visited the palace hotel as a boy and had vowed that someday he would own it. Mohamed Al Fayed purchased the Hôtel Ritz that year for the now unimaginably modest sum of $20 million. A year later, he embarked, with a team of innovative new talent, on a stunning nine-year wing-to-wing renovation. They stinted on nothing. The price tag for the remodeling averaged more than $1 million per room in the palace.

  Completed in 1987, those renovations transformed the Ritz into a freshly modern hotel and restored its fortunes. As the world knows, a new celebrity following flocked again to its corridors. That, of course, was why on a late-summer night in 1997 a royal British divorcée and Mohamed Al Fayed’s son slipped from a back doorway on rue Cambon to flee the pursuing paparazzi.

  While the Hôtel Ritz was once again among the most luxurious and splendid establishments in the capital during the 1990s, Charles de Gaulle never realized his dream of returning Paris to the center stage of world attention. But politicians and entrepreneurs and undoubtedly a few double agents have since haggled over cocktails in the rue Cambon bar and in the suites where Laura Mae Corrigan and Hermann Göring once lounged in their pajamas.

  By 1991, it was the town of Maastricht, in the Netherlands, that dominated world conversation. There, the six countries of France, West Germany, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, joined by Denmark, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and, at last, the United Kingdom, met and extended the principles of integration established in the postwar treaties of the 1950s and ultimately created a common currency and the European Union.

  It was the long-delayed conclusion of those talks that began at the roundtable lunches at the Hôtel Ritz during the occupation. Even more immediately, it was the conclusion of Charles de Gaulle’s wish for a united Europe that would rival the alliances of Anglo-Americans during an era of Cold War superpowers. And that has led some to wonder if, at the core of the agreement, bitter quarrels dating back to the 1930s and 1940s weren’t also unwittingly ratified. After decades of pointed exclusion from the European Economic Community and wary of the French turn toward Germany as its core economic partner, Great Britain at last did negotiate a special kind of separate peace with its continental neighbors and declined to integrate fully with the common currency. A unified postcommunist Germany threw itself into an industrial revival and France into the business of luxury. Switzerland remains, as ever, quietly and watchfully neutral.

  For a time, a new world order seemed on the horizon. Old fault lines are once again showing. Great Britain awaits another referendum on the future of a European community sometime before 2020. France and Germany tussle again publicly over economic and cultural superiority. The world that survived that second great war of the twentieth century is once again in flux. Another époque is perhaps emerging.

  And on the Place Vendôme, for the third time in its 115-year history, the Hôtel Ritz is reopening, this time after another cutting-edge, $164 million renovation. Perhaps for a second time, it will bring a new generation of global expatriates back to the always beautiful city of Paris. Perhaps for a second time, it will be the Hôtel Ritz where France and the world are remade again as all that is freshly modern.

  Acknowledgments

  Researching and writing about the occupation of Paris, I have discovered, requires historical sleuthing of the first order, and along the way many people with far greater experience and expertise than I have reached out to share information, leads, memories, and archival materials. My first and abiding thanks must go to those, especially in Berlin and Paris, who asked to remain anonymous but who spoke with me candidly and movingly about their recollections and knowledge.

  I would also like to thank for their correspondence, assistance (great and small), materials, editorial comments, and conversation along the way Raffael Scheck, Alan Marty, Xavier Demange, Robert Paxton, Kenneth Marx, Richard Marx, Rosanna Warren, Sylvia Crouter, Alan Riding, Andy Tolan, Don and Selma Wilson, Anne Dubonnet Shaio, Jacqueline de Chollet, Angela Cotterell, Richard Wendorf, Henry Woodrum Jr., Connie Lowenthal, John Beichman, Francis de Marneffe, Gerry Mannion, the archivists and librarians at the Jewish History Center in Paris, the library of the French Prefecture of Police in Paris, the library of the History of the City of Paris, the national archives in Paris, London, Berlin, and Washington, D.C., the Commission for Art Recovery in New York City, the Foreign Office archives in Berlin, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, the Paul Rosenberg Archives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and, especially, the New York Public Library, where significant parts of this book were written. All errors are entirely my own.

  I have been supported with time and space by a number of institutions, and I would like to thank especially the Brown Foundation at the Houston Museum of Fine Art for its generous support as a fellow at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France; the Clara C. Piper endowment at Colby College; and the Jenny McKean Moore Foundation for its support as a writer-in-residence at George Washington University.

  Barbara Klingenspor did preliminary work, unpublished here, on some German translations; my thanks to Rob Madole for his research assistance in Berlin and for all otherwise unattributed translations from the German included in the book. Bradley Hart was a superb research assistant in Britain, and I thank him for his work at the National Archives and in the Churchill Archives at the University of Cambridge once again.

  In the course of this book, I have had the pleasure to work at HarperCollins with no fewer than four editors—and each came along at just the right moment to shape the project in the best possible direction; my thanks to Matt Inman, Jason Sack, Julia Cheiffetz, and Gail Winston. The constant, of course, has been my could-not-be-more-fabulous literary agent Stacey Glick; thanks also to my film agent, Lou Pitt, for forward-looking wisdom.

  Among the personal acknowledgments, Eric Bryant and Charlene Mazzeo provided perceptive comments on early chapters of the book. Mark Lee was, as always, the most generous of fellow writers. Noelle Baker, Bill Hare, and Nish Gera were, as always, the most generous of friends. In Berlin, thanks to Ursula Vogel and especially to Axel Witte, at whose table this book first took shape; in New York City, my thanks to Mark Anderson, and my love and immense gratitude to Emmanuel Gradoux-Matt, to whom this book is dedicated, for his comments on draft versions of the manuscript, for countless conversations, and for protecting a shared vision of art and true kinship amid all the tumult. Finally—first and last and always—thank you to my much-loved husband, Robert Miles, for believing in narrative arcs and for trusting in a happy end to long stories in all their different media.

  Notes

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the
edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.

  1: This Switzerland in Paris

  9 “It would be foolish to disguise”: Winston Churchill Centre and Museum, Churchill War Rooms, London, online archive, www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/speeches-of-winston-churchill/91-be-ye-men-of-valour.

  9 on May 31, 1940, Winston Churchill: Roy Jenkins, Churchill (New York: Plume, 2002), 571ff.

  9 “the only reason not to stay at the Ritz”: A. E. Hotchner, “The Ritz, Then and Now,” New York Times, January 31, 1982, www.nytimes.com/1982/01/31/travel/the-ritz-then-and-now.html?pagewanted=all; also Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner, 1969).

  9 Georges Mandel, the Jewish-born French minister of the interior: John M. Sherwood, Georges Mandel and the Third Republic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970); Francisque Varenne, Georges Mandel, Mon Patron (Paris: Éditions Défense de la France, 1947); and Paul Coblentz, Georges Mandel (Paris: Éditions du Bélier, 1946).

  9 darkened rooms on the fourth floor: Claude Roulet, Ritz: une histoire plus belle que la légende (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1998), 81ff.

  10 The railway system ground to a halt: Hanna Diamond, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5.

  10 In the mass exodus that followed: Ibid., xiv. For firsthand accounts of the exode, see, for example, Francis de Marneffe, Last Boat from Bordeaux (Cambridge, MA: Coolidge Hill Press, 2001); my thanks to Dr. de Marneffe for personal conversations in 2011 and 2012 that contributed to the background of this book.