The Hotel on Place Vendome Read online

  For others, what remains of this history is far more personal. The occupation is at the heart of modern France and—from the perspective of someone who considers herself both a Francophile and a realist—at the heart of its most difficult evasions.

  In any culture, there are some things that feel dangerous, even after decades or centuries. In France, this is that subject. On at least one occasion, I was warned that I should not attempt to tell this story. The warning came from an elderly Frenchwoman, a neatly dressed lady with sharp eyes and a long memory of what happened in Paris during the dark years of the war—and the dark years that followed. One afternoon in the spring of 2010, we met in an obscure and studiously average café just off rue de Rome in the distinctly unfashionable seventeenth arrondissement. Her late husband had been in the resistance, part of the underground movement that fought against fascist control of occupied France—and against fascists who were not always conveniently German. Through the contact of a contact of a contact, she had agreed to meet me and maybe to talk.

  This was the first thing she told me:

  “Most of those who tell you they were in the resistance are fabulists at best. The worst are simply liars. It was a frighteningly small movement, covert, secret, and the price of discovery was monstrous. After the war, everyone wanted to believe that they had supported it. It is a collective French national fantasy.”

  Then, as the room around us grew very quiet, she placed on the café table in front of me, one after another, her husband’s war medals.

  “So you know that I am not among the pretenders.” Then she said, “Here is what I need to tell you: The truth you are looking for, it was lost to history the moment the war ended. Perhaps it was lost even before that. The questions you are asking are more treacherous than you think. This book about the Hôtel Ritz and the story of the occupation, you should not write it. I am sorry.”

  You hold in your hands the evidence, for better or worse, that I did not take that advice. Perhaps I have not taken it because it seems too impossibly cloak-and-dagger to an American author raised in the Cold War of the 1970s. What, really, about this past could touch me? What about it could touch anyone of my now middle-aged post-atomic generation? Yet what happened at the Hôtel Ritz during the Second World War and in Paris during the occupation was part of what laid the foundations for those same nuclear conflicts that are not yet fully behind us. And the occupation of Paris was nothing if not a kind of mass urban terrorism.

  But it is also true that the history of the Second World War is often told too simplistically, in black and white, as an epic battle between the forces of good and evil. There are those who resisted, and there are collaborators, we learn. And, of course, there are those whose actions fall starkly into one category or the other. For most of those who lived in Paris during the occupation, however, survival depended on how adeptly one could navigate the nuances of wartime reality. At the Hôtel Ritz, the shades of gray were at their most impenetrable. In its spaces, astonishing things happened. In those gray areas—where courage and desire collided with brutality and terror—were powerful human stories. This is the astonishing history of those lives and deaths and their dangerous liaisons, as it all took shape there on the Place Vendôme in an always seductive Paris.

  1

  This Switzerland in Paris

  June 1940

  A Frenchman weeps, watching Nazi troops occupy Paris, June 14, 1940.

  JUST AS A PORTRAIT TELLS THE SITTER’S DESTINY, SO THE MAP OF FRANCE FORETELLS OUR FORTUNE . . . OUR COUNTRY HAS AT ITS CENTER A CITADEL . . . BUT IN THE NORTHEAST THERE IS A TERRIBLE BREACH THAT LINKS [TO] GERMAN TERRITORY . . . [OUR] FATAL AVENUE.

  —Charles de Gaulle, Toward a Professional Army, 1934

  For anyone looking at a map of France, that breach to which de Gaulle refers lies where the borders of the Alsace and the Lorraine jut sharply into the German Rhineland. To the north rest the low-lying countries of Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. To the south rise up the Alps and the mountain state of Switzerland.

  By 1939—after ten years of disastrously expensive construction and the hard-won lessons of the First World War—the French had built, along that boundary from Luxembourg to Switzerland, a barricade against a dark future: a series of formidable steel-and-concrete fortresses known simply as the Maginot Line, named after the general who planned them.

  Those fortifications, however, also had a fatal weakness. At the northern edge of the French border, to the east, lay Belgium, and that deep and friendly frontier remained largely unprotected. Nowhere were the fortifications lighter than where the border ran along the dense forestland of the Ardennes. It was considered impenetrable. In a matter of days in May 1940, a million German soldiers proved that it was not.

  With fearsome speed that spring, the forces of the Third Reich swept through the Low Countries and into France. Their object was the citadel at the heart of the country: the storied capital city of Paris.

  And for many of the high-ranking German officers, who were no more immune to the enticements of legend than the rest of their generation, the Hôtel Ritz was already at the heart of Paris. Since the end of the nineteenth century, this palace hotel on the spacious Place Vendôme in the city’s first arrondissement, or “district,” had been an international symbol of luxury and all that was glamorous about modernity, home to film stars and celebrity writers, American heiresses and risqué flappers, playboys, and princes. The 300,000 Germans who would soon occupy the city would live in Paris not just as an army and as bureaucrats but also as tourists, many of whom wanted nothing more than to be delighted with the pleasures of this famously beautiful metropolis.

  Before the war had even begun, the Hôtel Ritz had already been at the center of political action on the Continent and was shaping this century. The German arrival would change nothing about that. Winston Churchill had visited the hotel not once but twice in the weeks before the Germans skirted the Maginot Line. In fact, immediately after delivering at mid-month his first radio broadcast as Britain’s prime minister—in which he conceded that “[i]t would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour”—he headed straight to Paris for a crisis meeting of the supreme war council with his French counterpart, Paul Reynaud. At the end of the month, on May 31, 1940, Winston Churchill came again, this time to see if there was any way France could survive the westward onslaught.

  Winston Churchill always preferred to stay at the Hôtel Ritz. “When in Paris,” Ernest Hemingway once quipped, “the only reason not to stay at the Ritz is if you can’t afford it,” and Winston Churchill, the son of an English lord, had never been short of resources.

  With the Germans on the march that spring, there was one old friend that Churchill especially wanted to talk things over with. He and Georges Mandel, the Jewish-born French minister of the interior, had talked things over like this many times in the last decade, when, together in the political wilderness of the 1930s, they had warned their countrymen that the unfettered rise of a nostalgic German nationalism would have terrible consequences. Their predictions had been sadly accurate.

  Georges Mandel, however, didn’t just stay at the Hôtel Ritz occasionally. He had lived in darkened rooms on the fourth floor full-time since the mid-1930s. The Hôtel Ritz had among its numbers in those days at least a dozen permanent residents, none of them obscure or powerless.

  Some of those residents would soon be leaving. By June 11, 1940, with German troops within thirty miles of the city, a collective panic swept through Paris. The French government fled the capital overnight and decamped to Bordeaux, in the southwest of the country. The railway system ground to a halt only a few hours later. Over the radio the next afternoon came an order for all the men in the city to leave the capital to prevent their capture. Rumors flew about the brutality and sadism of the advancing German soldiers, and no woman relished being left behind as a war trophy in a fallen city.

  In the mass exodus that followed, a full 70 percent of the city’s population—clo
se to two million people—took to the highways, hauling their possessions and their infirm relatives behind them in an effort to flee the German advance, joining a stream of refugees from Belgium and Holland. But it was already hopeless. They would turn the roads heading south into a colossal traffic jam. Most would never make it more than a hundred miles beyond Paris.

  The Hôtel Ritz was not immune to the panic. By June 12, 1940, for the second time since the battle for France had begun, the German air force, the fearsome Luftwaffe, was pounding the city of Paris with incendiary bombs, and a siege seemed inevitable. The hotel’s newly promoted director, an old French soldier named Claude Auzello, had been called up for military service, and his American-born wife, Blanche, had followed him to his posting in Provence. His deputy director, Hans Franz Elminger, the nephew of the hotel’s most important aristocratic investor, however, was Swiss—and the Swiss, of course, were famously neutral. So that week it was left to Hans Elminger, along with the elderly Marie-Louise Ritz, the Swiss widow of the hotel’s eponymous founder, César Ritz, to chart a course for the cast of characters who inhabited this luxurious refuge. The next few days would require deft diplomacy and all their combined efforts.

  Suddenly there were fewer characters in the Place Vendôme lobby. The Hôtel Ritz had been operating on a skeleton crew for weeks. The staff was normally a force of 450 men and women—from bartenders and chambermaids to waiters and oyster buyers—in a palace hotel with just over 150 rooms. Now, Hans Elminger reported to his uncle in Switzerland, “[m]any people have naturally left Paris, and we are down to thirty-six masters and seven servants. . . . Despite everything, the restaurant is working and we even had a large room of thirty-eight places.” “Unfortunately,” he added, “the lunch was interrupted by the bombing of Paris.” Eventually, the wartime staff would stabilize at around twenty employees, almost all of them older men, women, or, like Hans Elminger, people whose passports listed them as the citizens of a neutral country.

  Soon there would be a fresh influx of visitors. For the moment, the guest numbers at the hotel were plummeting. The long-term residents of the Hôtel Ritz and many of its Parisian regulars were disappearing quickly in the exodus. With mass hysteria gripping the city, even the rich and famous in France could not know what awaited them with the fall of the capital.

  These socialites and celebrities were a close network of friends and acquaintances, and many of them had made the Hôtel Ritz their de facto living room for years. Georges Mandel wasn’t the only old friend whom Winston Churchill saw that spring in Paris. The iconic Coco Chanel had lived in rooms at the Hôtel Ritz since the early 1930s. She and the British prime minister owned summer villas near each other on the French Riviera.

  At Coco Chanel’s table in the Hôtel Ritz dining room on any given evening, one might find the flamboyant playwright and screenwriter Sacha Guitry, the lithe Russian ballet star Serge Diaghilev, or the increasingly drug-addled Jean Cocteau.

  In the same dining room, Georges Mandel’s mistress, the curvaceous comic actress Béatrice Bretty, shared cocktails and good times with France’s most acclaimed film star, a woman known simply as Arletty. As early as 1935, Georges Mandel and the two film stars had celebrated together the night Béatrice Bretty made history by delivering in Paris the first television broadcast in France.

  They all knew the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso and his wartime lover, the surrealist artist Dora Maar, as well as the couple’s friend Lee Miller, a celebrated and sexually liberated American fashion model and art photographer. Of course, no one was a stranger to all those American writers of the Lost Generation, from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, either. They were regulars, themselves inspired by an earlier generation of writers and stage stars who had made the Hôtel Ritz a meeting place and home since the last days of the nineteenth century.

  Finally, a generation of exiled European princes and princesses had also made the Hôtel Ritz a home in Paris. It was the first sign of things to come when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor gave up their extravagant suite at the Ritz with the beginning of German hostilities.

  As the word came of the German advance, there were hushed and frantic conversations at the hotel during the second week in June 1940. To stay or to go was the pressing question. Arletty, wavering to the last, ultimately joined the caravans of Parisians heading south to safety. Coco Chanel shuttered her couture house across the street from the Hôtel Ritz, on rue Cambon, declaring it was no time for business. Coco Chanel didn’t want to leave her permanent rooms at the Ritz that week, but her maids, sisters Germaine and Jeanne, were too frightened to stay in the capital, and she couldn’t see how to get by without her domestics. Just as she was ready to flee, the new chauffeur that the hotel staff had found for her refused to drive her powder-blue Rolls-Royce through the crowds.

  A nine-year-old girl named Anne Dubonnet, another familiar denizen of the Ritz, was trundled into a less ostentatious waiting car with her wealthy French parents and her Scottish nanny. The Dubonnet family had spent several weeks a year at the hotel since the mid-1920s.

  Georges Mandel was also making plans to leave Paris with Béatrice Bretty and their young daughter, Claude. He would go south with the French government. But he couldn’t bring himself to abandon the fight for France entirely. Already, Winston Churchill was urging him to come to London. It was Georges Mandel whom the prime minister always wanted as the leader of the Free French resistance in exile, not Charles de Gaulle, and there was a spot on a military plane waiting for him. Georges could not stomach the idea of it. “It is because I am a Jew that I won’t go,” he explained. “It would look as though I were afraid, as though I were running away.”

  Before Georges decamped, Marie-Louise Ritz sought out her old friend. Georges was a man whom everyone at the Hôtel Ritz trusted. After all, they had lived with him in their midst for the better part of a decade.

  Marie-Louise Ritz had a tricky dilemma. The hard-nosed and eminently pragmatic Marie-Louise—or “Mimi,” most often—was Swiss, and, like the Americans in the spring of 1940, the Swiss were not part of this war that Hitler was waging. Once described by Ernest Hemingway as a “small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways,” Switzerland was perched high among the Alps and was studiously neutral. The Nazis left it unmolested in their march eastward. In a sense, none of this was her battle.

  Her dilemma: Should she and the other investors keep the hotel open now under the Third Reich? Or should she close the city’s famed luxury establishment? The moment the Nazis arrived in Paris, there would be high-ranking Germans in the lobby, and Marie-Louise knew it.

  In a rumpled coat, sleepless and worried, Georges Mandel confidently assured his elderly landlady that there was no other option. If she closed the hotel, the building would be requisitioned. Then “you will never get it back, Madame Ritz,” he told her. With manager Hans Elminger, he was even more direct: “You are Swiss,” Georges told him, and “therefore neutral, and speak German perfectly, which is an advantage in the circumstances. Your hotel will certainly be occupied by the Germans when they enter Paris and they will respect it, because of your presence and neutrality.”

  So the Hôtel Ritz stayed open. When the government fled, Georges Mandel went south with Charles de Gaulle and a cadre of important ministers.

  By June 12, the British papers were reporting “thousands upon thousands of Parisians leaving the capital by every possible means, preferring to abandon home and property rather than risk even temporary Nazi domination.” Even as the French residents and the elite international refugees of an already vanquished eastern continent fled the capital, others were arriving—scores of journalists from the American press corps on assignment budgets, especially, all looking for plush rooms at the Hôtel Ritz.

  On Thursday, June 13—the last day in a free Paris for more than four years to come—those two passing worlds held their collective breath for one fragile moment and raised a glass to the uncertain future of Paris together at a memorabl
e dinner party at the Hôtel Ritz. Tomorrow, perhaps, Paris would be burning.

  In the morning would come the last possible moment to flee Paris. That June evening, though, the party went on at the hotel like always. The hosts were the American writer and journalist Clare Boothe Luce, on assignment for Life magazine, and Hugh Gibson, the former United States ambassador to Belgium, now occupied Nazi territory. At the table were dignitaries of a world that no longer existed, among them head of the Polish émigré government and the twenty-eight-year-old exiled crown prince of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, Otto von Hapsburg. The Nazis had a bounty on his head. “It was,” Otto von Hapsburg later remembered, “incredibly macabre: the city was two-thirds surrounded by German troops, the sky was lit up with artillery fire, and there, at the Ritz, everything was as it had always been: waiters in tails, the food, the wine.”

  That evening, Hans Elminger asked his distinguished visitors to sign the guest book before retiring. The next entry would be the registration of the German field marshal Erwin Rommel, there to take command of the capital.

  On the morning of June 14, the last exiles struggled to make their way to safety before the city fell to the conquerors. By afternoon, German tanks rolled unopposed down the broad avenues, and the Third Reich took possession of Paris. The occupation had started.

  Louis Lochner, a news correspondent from Milwaukee, was there to see the arrival of some of those Germans. “I have passed,” he wrote in his news brief to Life, “through many ghost towns in Belgium and northern France . . . but no experience has become more indelibly fixed in my mind than that of entering the French nation’s incomparable capital, Paris, on June 14, immediately after the first German vanguard. It seemed inconceivable, even though I stood on the spot, that this teeming, gay, noisy metropolis should be dead. Yet dead it was.” A swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower, and “Paris’ famed galaxy of luxurious hotels had vanished behind shutters.”