The Hotel on Place Vendome Page 6

  And soon Jean Cocteau’s own career would rise—and falter—all precisely because of his cool detachment. Perhaps it was true, as he once said, that in Paris everyone wanted to be an actor. By the time it came to test his mettle two decades later, Cocteau would lack either the presence of mind or the courage. Although Cocteau didn’t know it yet, he had already adopted the only role that would define him: the cornered observer.

  4

  Diamonds as Big as the Ritz

  September 1, 1940

  Laura Mae Corrigan.

  HE WAS NOT REALLY DISAPPOINTED TO FIND PARIS WAS SO EMPTY. BUT THE STILLNESS IN THE RITZ BAR WAS STRANGE AND PORTENTOUS. IT WAS NOT AN AMERICAN BAR ANY MORE—HE FELT POLITE IN IT, AND NOT AS IF HE OWNED IT.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Babylon Revisited,” 1931

  More than twenty years later, a second war was on the horizon for Paris, and once again the conflict shaping life in France was that fated rendezvous with the Germans that Charles de Gaulle had predicted.

  On September 1, 1940, the occupation began in earnest for those on the Place Vendôme. That was the morning that the World War One ace pilot—and now German air force general—Hermann Göring officially took up residence in the imperial suite.

  The staff had been preparing for this event since Göring first strode through the doors of the Hôtel Ritz ten weeks earlier.

  There had been new renovations and a flurry of activity in advance of this newest occupation. Above all, workmen had come to install in the apartments a massive, oversized bathtub to accommodate Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, the fleshy Reichsmarschall.

  It wasn’t just that the German Luftwaffe commander enjoyed a long soak in the bubbles while sipping champagne and wolfing down caviar in Paris. Not that he was opposed to such pleasures. But the hotel staff assigned to attend to the German commander soon learned that the bathtub masked a darker secret, one shared by many of his generation.

  Hermann Göring was a morphine addict. He had been trying to kick the habit since the mid-1920s. Painkillers were a basic fact of postwar life for many of the men who had survived the “Great War.” Both cocaine and narcotics became wildly popular in modernist Berlin during the years of the so-called Weimar Republic—the epoch that had ended with Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power and with the peculiarly backward-looking brand of German pre-industrial nationalism that came with the rise of fascism. Modern warfare—with technological “innovations” that included the first widespread use of the self-powered machine gun and chemical weapons—had also inaugurated a new era of addiction to pharmaceuticals.

  In the 1930s, a German doctor from Cologne named Hubert Kahle had announced the medical discovery of a new “wonder cure” for morphine addiction, and Hermann Göring had turned to the eminent professor for a course of treatment that included long baths to manage the symptoms of withdrawal. There in the Hôtel Ritz, the doctor would come to “submerge Göring in a tub of water, give him injections, then submerge him again, for hours and hours,” the staff remembered. “We had to bring the professor piles of towels and lots of food, because the procedure made Göring ravenous.”

  When Göring took over the imperial suite at the Hôtel Ritz, the previous occupant of the room found herself abruptly relocated—and she faced that week an agonizing dilemma.

  That previous occupant was a certain Laura Mae Corrigan, the widow of a midwestern steel industrialist and since his death one of the richest women in America. Her monthly income in the summer of 1940 was $800,000—something significantly more than $12 million a month in today’s value. That meant that Mrs. Corrigan could afford to live at the Hôtel Ritz more or less permanently.

  Since 1938, she more or less had. Of course, when the newly appointed British prime minister Winston Churchill had come to visit Paris in the spring of 1940, in the weeks and days before the Battle of France, he had stayed in the imperial suite. One had to give way to dignitaries and heads of state, naturally. Corrigan understood as clearly as anyone how much the niceties of rank mattered. But, in general, the grand apartments on the Place Vendôme were Laura Mae’s favorite. They were the best rooms in the palace. And she had deeper pockets than almost any of them.

  It hadn’t always been the silver spoon for her. Born in 1879 into a working-class family in Waupaca, Wisconsin, Laura Mae Whitrock had worked her way from a waitress to a telephone switchboard operator to the wife of a Chicago doctor and then the mistress of the great iron and steel industrialist James Corrigan. After a quick and quiet divorce from her doctor, in 1916 she and Corrigan dismayed his family and much of Cleveland high society by getting married.

  When the Cleveland elite snubbed them, the couple took off for Manhattan. There the gates were closed just as firmly. In his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald told the story of a midwestern upstart trying to buy his way into old-money East Coast circles and failing tragically. Laura Mae ran up against the same obstacles. When several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of lavish parties couldn’t buy Mrs. Corrigan entrée to the upper crust, the couple relocated to Europe. There no one imagined that a rich American had a pedigree anyhow. And, after the financial losses of the First World War and the Great Depression, a generous hand with a vast personal fortune more than made up for the lack of prominent ancestors.

  By the time Jimmy Corrigan’s heart condition caught up with him, Laura Mae was a sensation. As America’s most famous social-climbing hostess—the squat and singularly unattractive party planner Elsa Maxwell—so succinctly put it, “A great London Hostess in the twenties was the irrepressible Laura Corrigan who established a formidable handicap in the American Cinderella Derby by covering the ground from switchboard operator to rich widow in a record six months.” It was a wild exaggeration. Jimmy Corrigan died in 1928, not 1916. When it came to cutting witticisms, though, no one cared about precise chronology.

  In Europe, Laura Mae pursued a reliable old-world strategy. She bought her way swiftly into the gilded reaches of society, and before long she was cavorting with dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses. She threw extravagant gala events and carefully started inviting all the right people. She gave expensive gifts and paid cash-strapped duchesses to come to her dinner parties.

  It was a tactic that, at the Hôtel Ritz, Elsa Maxwell had perfected. As Janet Flanner, the New Yorker correspondent in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, dryly observed, Elsa Maxwell had a knack for establishing upstart American socialites in European aristocratic society—if they had enough money. For a fee, Elsa Maxwell “transformed un-notables into notables, using the publicity surrounding their galas to the best possible advantage for them and herself. She preferred to give her soirées at the Ritz” in Paris. Most often, those soirées were masquerade balls, where appearing in drag was considered witty. Flanner noted that Coco Chanel, in particular, “did land-office business generally, cutting and fitting gowns for the young men about town, who appeared as some of the best-known women in Paris.”

  The Ritz was where wealthy Americans in Paris inevitably headed. It had been since as early as 1900. For decades already, the new-world rich had rubbed shoulders with the rootless Dreyfusards, artists, and intellectuals of the European continent. The result was a kind of rare cultural magic.

  By the late 1930s, Laura Mae Corrigan, too, had arrived in in the French capital. Her parties were “generally considered at the time to be the most generous free meal ticket for downgraded entries in Burke’s Peerage” on the Continent. Even with all her millions, it was sometimes tough going. As Elsa Maxwell put it, the trouble was that Laura Mae “was not beautiful, she was not educated or particularly clever—[and] her innocent blunders of speech provided almost as much amusement, behind her back, as her parties.” Eventually, though, she cracked the nut that was Parisian society.

  On September 1, 1940, Laura Mae Corrigan was in a particular sort of predicament. She was vastly rich, and her investments in Treasury notes had weathered the Wall Street crash beautifully. And having deep
pockets mattered a great deal in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s. At no time did it matter more than during the occupation. For those with money at the Hôtel Ritz, life went on in those first days after the fall of France more or less as always. Of course, there had been a few obstacles and some deftly managed alterations. But luxury was a powerful insulation.

  Now, however, the United States government, afraid that her monthly millions—whether through design or accident—would fall into the hands of the Germans and aid the fascist war effort, had frozen her income and limited her to a budget of five hundred dollars a month for as long as she stayed in Europe.

  Had it not been for this freezing of her assets, she would have preferred to stay on in the capital. She had made plans that depended on it. With a number of other high-society American women and the French Duke de Doudeauville, she had thrown herself into charitable relief work in Paris weeks earlier. Everyone expected a display of wartime concern and philanthropy. Their organization Bienvenue au Soldat—“Welcome, Soldier”—sent care packages to the war wounded and supported hospitals.

  Laura Mae Corrigan found herself if not penniless, then certainly cramped significantly. With Hermann Göring firmly ensconced in her suites at the Ritz, she also found herself homeless.

  Harder yet, Laura Mae understood plainly and painfully that even European high society tolerated her only because of her fortune. Five hundred dollars a month was around eight thousand dollars a month in today’s value, enough to keep her comfortably in France but not enough to hole up in the hotel’s imperial suite for the duration—even if those rooms hadn’t just been claimed by the German general. It was certainly not enough to sustain her philanthropy in Paris’s most posh circles.

  The dilemma for Laura Mae was what to do and where to go without a fortune. Staying on in Paris was not impossible for a rich American in the summer of 1940. The Hôtel Ritz, long a favorite among the Americans in Paris, had been filled with them in the spring. Marlene Dietrich had ended a liaison with Joseph Kennedy there the year before, and her paramour moved on quickly to a new conquest. The socialite Clare Boothe Luce, the journalist wife of the owner of Time and Life magazines, was rumored to have been carrying on with Joe Kennedy in her Ritz bedroom in April. When Clare fled France in the mass exodus, she famously insisted that Hans Elminger tell her how he could possibly know that the Germans were coming. (He quipped, in response, a deadpan “Because they have reservations.”)

  Plenty of other Americans had stayed on after the occupation started. Legendary decorator Lady Mendl. Socialite Barbara Hutton. Despite the United States ambassador urging citizens to leave France while it was still easy, the heiress Florence Jay Gould was insisting that she planned to stay in the capital under any conditions.

  The wife of the hotel’s managing director was fast coming to the same decision. Claude Auzello and his feisty American-born wife, Blanche, were always rowing violently about his determination to keep a mistress. With a husband like hers, she had no intention of leaving France, either.

  There were a surprising number of women at the Hôtel Ritz that September. With the arrival of Hermann Göring and the other officers, the trend quickly accelerated. In the hotel bar, Laura Mae Corrigan would have found some new regulars. Secretaries like the pretty Inga Haag from the nearby Abwehr—one branch of fascist intelligence offices—caroused with Daisy Fellowes, the heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune (and a cousin of Winston Churchill by marriage). Of course, Daisy Fellowes’s maiden name was Glücksbierg, something the Germans surely noted in their files. Inga Haag was not without her own connections, either; her uncle was the Abwehr director, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.

  Fern Bedaux and her husband, Charles, were part of the lingering American smart set in Paris. Like more than a few of those who stayed on, their politics were distinctly pro-fascist. Wartime dinner guests at their country estate included Göring and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. They had hosted the royal wedding between the American-born Wallis Simpson and the former king Edward VIII at the château three years earlier. After the abdication and the marriage, the new king gave them the titles of Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

  The royals were pressed to abandon Paris when the German advance became serious. But both were sympathetic to Adolf Hitler. When the Germans first invaded France and began bombing London, the Duchess of Windsor won few British admirers with her callous comment to the press that “I can’t say I feel sorry for them.” The Führer appeared to return the mark of favor: their hôtel particulier at 85, boulevard Suchet, was carefully “looked after by a German caretaker and handed back in 1944 in perfect order.”

  British intelligence was concerned, however, about something far more sinister than the duchess’s press outrages. The Duchess of Windsor was still passing information to her former love von Ribbentrop in 1940. Rumor had it that von Ribbentrop in return still sent her seventeen carnations each morning—one for every time they had been to bed with each other.

  Laura Mae Corrigan had never liked Wallis Simpson. But she had been friendly with the Duke of Windsor since early days in London, when he came to one of her parties. She had entertained von Ribbentrop at her mansion in London.

  It all meant just one thing. Laura Mae could stay on comfortably enough—if only she had the money. Returning to America, on the other hand, would be disastrous. She would be going home to the life of a rich social outcast. The Cleveland elite had not warmed to her in the years since she had left the Midwest in the dust, and New York high society had not become more inviting.

  In those last days of summer, Corrigan considered whether she should take up the obvious solution to her financial problems. She could raise quite a lot of cash if she were to start selling her personal items to the Germans. In Paris, the Germans were buying up everything—from bottles of Chanel No. 5 for sale across the street at rue Cambon to antiques, art, couture, and jewelry.

  In fact, the moment he arrived in the capital, the Reichsmarschall had demanded fresh supplies of a favorite perfume made by the nearby house of Guerlain. It was Hans Elminger’s unlucky task to reveal to the general that, so late in the evening, the boutique was closed until morning. Göring in a roar advised Elminger that somebody had better go and open it and ordered his chauffeur to drive the hotel manager to the store directly. Göring had been on an art-collecting binge since then, and snapping up works of art across Paris. “With a carload of detectives following a hundred yards behind him,” writes one of Göring’s biographers, “he cruised through the bazaars of Paris” picking up luxuries and bargains.

  Corrigan’s personal effects were a fantastic bazaar of their own. Göring wouldn’t have to step one foot outside the Hôtel Ritz for his pleasures if she decided to raise funds for herself by selectively offering treasures to him.

  She couldn’t sell her fur coats, of course, which was a pity since Göring loved mink and sables. When the Germans informed her that she would have to vacate her three-bedroom imperial suite (complete with maids’ quarters, several salons, a dining room, and a boudoir), there had been no option but to hide her fur collection. If the Germans understood the extent of her valuables, they undoubtedly would take them by force. So she piled them into one of César Ritz’s built-in cupboards and dragged a massive old armoire in front of the door as a disguise. There Corrigan’s furs passed the war undetected and secure—even from her access to them. Throughout the Hôtel Ritz, César’s unexpectedly discreet amenities served clandestine wartime purposes on more than one occasion.

  Göring was trying to charm or bully Laura Mae’s emeralds out of her, though. She had made the mistake of letting him catch a glimpse of them. The stones were exquisite. In fact, Laura Mae had a massive collection of important gems—not just emeralds but diamonds and gold pieces. And as much as Göring liked to luxuriate in furs and confiscate Old Masters, gems were his true obsession.

  One of the Reichsmarschall’s coveted purchases in those first days in Paris was a gold marshal’
s baton, studded with diamonds, that he ordered the luxury firm of Cartier to make for him in short order, paying pennies on the dollar. One could catch sight of him sometimes that summer, walking grandly up and down the central staircase of the Hôtel Ritz, outlandishly dressed, drug-addled, and twirling his baton like a tipsy cheerleader. Those who had seen his closets in the imperial suite knew that lavender trousers and silk kimonos were just the start of it. Staff reported finding “lavish gowns trimmed in ermine and mink . . . jeweled sandals, the emerald brooches and diamond earrings. He wore makeup and doused himself with exotic perfumes, they said, and kept a crystal bowl filled with morphine tablets on a table beside an armchair, alongside another bowl, which contained a mélange of precious gems—emeralds, black pearls, opals, garnets, rubies.”

  The Italian foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, son-in-law of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, came to stay at the Hôtel Ritz in the spring of 1942 and noted wryly in his wartime journal that “Göring talked of little else but the jewels he owned. . . . he played with his gems like a little boy with his marbles.” This about a man capable of terrible violence and cold indifference.

  People laughed at Göring. Even the German soldiers on sentry in the Ritz had a hard time not mocking him discreetly. Laura Mae knew that people laughed at her, too. The whole purpose of the high-society sniping was to make sure she knew that she was tolerated on sufferance. In that one small way, she and the German air force commander were not so different.