The Hotel on Place Vendome Read online

  Faced with the choice between returning to America and carrying on in France, Laura Mae made an agonizing decision. She offered her emerald ring to Göring. For it he gave her fifty thousand British pounds sterling—nearly $2 million in today’s figures. Through the Reichsmarschall, she sold a gold dressing case to Adolf Hitler. She liquidated her Renaissance tapestries and all her beautiful French antique furniture. She cashed out—some said she sold out—to the Nazis. And she was formulating a secret plan for what she was going to do with her riches.

  She was going to stay in France. She was going to keep on selling her treasures. But she wasn’t going to do it in occupied Paris. Instead Corrigan headed for the neutral territory of Vichy, the famous spa town in central France that became the headquarters of the collaborationist French government during German occupation, taking her cash and remaining hoard of luxuries with her.

  At Vichy, she could have rented a lavish mansion or thrown wartime parties to curry favor with French and German officials. But she did something different and unexpected. She checked into a small and decidedly average hotel. Without fanfare or ceremony, Laura Mae Corrigan began funneling all her money—an average of two thousand dollars a month—into her charity for wounded French soldiers. She would earn among those veterans the title of the “American Angel.”

  In time, the chief of the French state, the general Philippe Pétain, learned of it and was moved to award Laura Mae Corrigan with the Legion of Honor—the nation’s highest recognition of service to his country. Historians note that “Mrs. Corrigan had the distinction of being the only American woman apart from [the African-American showgirl and spy] Josephine Baker to receive this most coveted of French honors.”

  For her efforts in France, Laura Mae would also spend time as a prisoner in the internment camp at Vittel, when the United States entered the war in December 1941 and all neutrality for Americans vanished. When she was released from the camp in 1942, she made her way to London. There she continued to dedicate her fortune to helping wounded soldiers. For that service, the British government awarded her the King’s Medal in recognition.

  Elsa Maxwell had said of Corrigan that “she was not beautiful, she was not educated or particularly clever.” But Elsa also went on to say that “she was honest, she had vitality, and she had a heart as big as her bank.”

  For the moment, she was a wartime heroine. Years later, Charles de Gaulle would ask post-liberation France to judge Laura Mae Corrigan from a different perspective entirely.

  5

  The Americans Drifting to Paris

  1944

  Ernest Hemingway, 1944.

  WHEN I DREAM OF AN AFTERLIFE . . . THE ACTION ALWAYS TAKES PLACE AT THE RITZ PARIS.

  —Ernest Hemingway

  In May 1944, the world had been at war for the better part of five years. Paris had been occupied for nearly four of them. And, if wars have their stories, this one was quickly approaching its climax.

  Certainly, Ernest Hemingway thought of war as a kind of uniquely human drama, and for many of the American journalists reporting from Europe in the spring of 1944, it was the return to Paris that mattered. That was where the action was.

  Hemingway wasn’t the only one who thought that the best kind of action took place at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris. In the heyday of the Roaring Twenties and into the early 1930s, a talented group of American writers known as the “Lost Generation” had been young together in the French capital, and their antics were hotel legend. F. Scott Fitzgerald had dreamed of diamonds as big as the Ritz and had once mused on how “the best of America drifts to Paris.”

  Scott had been dead since the winter of 1940 from a heart attack in California. Now a group of the old regulars at the Hôtel Ritz were slowly making their way back to Paris without him. Their return would end more happily for some than for others. But for each of them, it was a circuitous and tangled journey, filled with heartache, danger, and more than a bit of nasty double-crossing.

  For Hemingway, the return would start with a night of some competitive drinking just across the English Channel—less than three hundred miles north of Paris, but a different world entirely. The celebrated American author’s return would take many by surprise: on the morning of May 26, several newspapers reported that Hemingway had perished in a terrible car crash on the streets of London.

  The trouble had all started two nights before at a debauched party in Belgrave Square, in one of the old terraced mansions that surrounded the park, now a wartime parking lot for tanks and military equipment and the haunt of foreign correspondents.

  The combat photographer Robert Capa had run into his old friend Hemingway in the bar of the Dorchester Hotel, and, as the correspondent later put it, Ernest “was a sore sight for sore eyes, but I was really happy to see him. . . . To prove my devotion and prosperity, I decided to give him a party in my useless and very expensive apartment.” Besides, “Papa” Hemingway—as Ernest liked people to call him—had a foul-looking beard that was covering up a skin condition, and, as his friend quipped, “Papa’s got troubles . . . that beard scares off all the girls.” He was going to need some spirited uplifting.

  So, with the skill for rounding up black-market supplies that his friends always admired in him, Capa nicked a “ten-gallon glass jug borrowed from an atomic research laboratory,” soaked a half dozen ripe peaches in a bottle of precious brandy, and poured in a case of champagne—at thirty dollars a bottle, wartime prices—to make one of the war’s most lethal party punches. Then Capa opened the doors of his apartment on the square to a select group of unruly friends in London. No one was surprised when it turned into a late-night bender.

  When the party wound down in the wee hours of the morning, Hemingway was too drunk to get behind the wheel. In fact, by all reports so was his friend Dr. Peter Gorer. They set off anyhow, with the doctor’s wife in tow, for a wild ride back to the Dorchester, in the neighboring district of Mayfair. The German Luftwaffe—the Nazi air force, under the command of Hermann Göring—had been bombing metropolitan London again since early January, in what later came to be known as the “Baby Blitz” of 1944. The city was pitch dark because of the blackouts. Headlights were strictly forbidden, but no one thought that the dark that night was at the heart of the problem.

  Long before the revelers reached their beds, Gorer lost control of the car and smashed them all headlong into a water tower. The revelers were rushed with injuries to the nearby St. George Hospital. Hemingway was hurt seriously, with a nasty gash on the head from where he hit the windshield and with dreadfully mangled knees. Capa got a call from the hospital soon after, and when he arrived in the emergency room at seven o’clock that morning, “There, on an operating table, I found 215 pounds of Papa. His skull was split wide open and his beard was full of blood. The doctors were about to give him an anesthetic and sew his head together. Papa politely thanked me for the party. He asked me to look after the doctor, who had driven him into a water tank, and who must have been hurt pretty badly too.”

  The accident left the writer with a serious concussion that should have kept him in bed and off booze for days. Instead of contemplating the good fortune of his near miss and vowing reformation, though, Ernest Hemingway’s thoughts were on other matters. In fact, they were mostly on a petite and nicely plump blue-eyed American journalist named Mary Welsh. She had caught his attention at lunch just a few days earlier, on May 22, at the White Tower restaurant in London, with her tight-knit sweater and curly brown hair. As a fellow war correspondent, she had a confident, breezy style that he found enchanting. She was lunching with another war journalist and novelist, Irwin Shaw, a native New Yorker. Allied war correspondents from all over were descending on London in droves that week, and they all had their eye on the same prize: filing the first report from a liberated Paris. But the competition between Hemingway and Shaw quickly took on a sharper edge. Mary Welsh also just happened to be Irwin Shaw’s lover.

  By her own testimony, Welsh had an attractive figur
e, and she wasn’t shy about making the best of it. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere under that tight-knit sweater, either.

  “God bless the machine that knit that sweater,” sighed Shaw when he saw her.

  As they walked across the room, there were jokes from all the correspondents. “Nice sweater,” one whistled. There were murmurs of “The warmth does bring things out, doesn’t it?” and “Mary, I’d like to see more of you.”

  Hemingway took one look and said, “Introduce me to your friend, Shaw,” and of course Irwin Shaw made the fateful introduction. There was no getting around it. Mary wrote for Time magazine, and Ernest boldly asked her if she would have lunch with him alone another day. So what if, besides being Shaw’s girlfriend, she also happened to be Mrs. Noel Monks and another man’s wife? Ernest Hemingway was smitten. The feeling was apparently mutual.

  There was just one other complication on the horizon: another American war correspondent, by the name of Martha Gellhorn, was also on her way to London. “Marty,” as her friends called her, was hell-bent on getting back to Paris and on getting the big story, too. She happened to be Mrs. Ernest Hemingway.

  In fact, the night of Bob Capa’s blowout party, Martha was just arriving in London, and she was unsettled in the extreme. She had been the only civilian on a war transport ship, loaded with explosives, crossing the Atlantic since May 13, 1944.

  It was a risky way to get back to Europe to cover her stories for Collier’s magazine, which was her turf in the world of wartime journalism. A weapons transport ship was a high-value target that spring, and she had taken an astonishing risk in traveling on it. That month, German submarines sank three Allied ships and a United States escort carrier in the Atlantic, and the risks were so great that Winston Churchill later confessed in his memoirs that “the only thing that ever really frightened me was the U-boat peril.” During the war, tens of thousands of sailors died at sea transporting supplies from the United States to Britain. Throughout the voyage, the captain kept blowing the ship’s whistle incessantly at anything that came near them on the horizon. It was a whistle that meant, as Martha put it sarcastically, “for Christ’s sake don’t run into me, you baboon, I’ll explode.”

  Martha was on that transport ship for one simple reason: it was the only way she could find to get across the Atlantic. And that was a pinch she found herself in because of the double-dealing of a certain Ernest Hemingway. Something big was going to happen in the European theater that spring. The temperature of the war was heating up dramatically, with the Allies bombing over France now almost every night. Being there was something as a correspondent she wanted badly.

  Hemingway not only had poached her assignment from Collier’s—leaving her without official press accreditation going into the summer of 1944 and officially sidelined—but he also had refused to help her get a seat on the Pan Am flight from New York City that ferried journalists to Britain in advance of what everyone already knew was going to be a momentous few weeks in France. “Oh no, I couldn’t do that,” he had told her back in New York. “They only fly men.” He knew perfectly well that other women correspondents were on that flight, of course. He simply wanted his wife to stay at home and to act like a woman.

  For Martha, the blow was cruel and devastating. “The way it looks,” she told a friend in despair, “I am going to lose out on the thing I most care about seeing or writing on in the world, and maybe in my whole life.” Sitting sidelined during the Allied invasion of France was going to take “an awful lot more humility and good sense than I now have at my command,” and she knew her husband well enough to suspect that teaching her some humility was part of his mean-spirited object lesson. Professional jealousy and a nasty competitive undercurrent ran throughout their relationship, which was now seriously foundering.

  Arriving at the docks in Liverpool that afternoon, Martha had had seventeen days at sea on a Norwegian freighter to work up a white fury. By the time she made her way to London and stashed her bags in their hotel room at the Dorchester, Hemingway was already back to partying in his London hospital room with Shaw and Capa. Despite the concussion and a head wrapped up in white gauzy bandages, there were empty bottles of booze and champagne under the bed.

  Bob Capa was one of their closest mutual friends, and he had photographed the Gellhorn-Hemingway wedding for Life magazine back in 1940. It had been a big story, this celebrity marriage of the writer and the journalist. Now the photographer was taking cheeky shots of a bare-butted and tipsy Ernest Hemingway in the hospital room, happily posing in his gown with “Pinky,” Bob Capa’s pretty young redheaded girlfriend Elaine Justin. For his friends, Papa always played up the wry machismo. But from Martha, even after the dirty trick he had played with her press accreditation, he wanted wifely compassion for his suffering and not steely pragmatism.

  Unluckily, Martha wasn’t much in the mood for sympathy. Ernest’s “mock-heroics” only got her laughing contemptuously at his melodrama and self-pity. After all, as Martha put it, “[i]f he really had a concussion he could hardly have been drinking with his pals.” He was playing it up: bragging about his derring-do and, as usual, exaggerating. Narrowly escaping death once again was part of the old Hemingway story, and just at the moment she was a bit tired of hearing it.

  The hospital room marital quarrel was spectacular, and Martha didn’t stay around to nurse the tiresome patient in the aftermath. The perky Mary Welsh, however, came bouncing into his room afterward with a huge bouquet of spring tulips and daffodils and dripping sympathy. As far as Papa was concerned, that settled it. What Martha didn’t know was that Hemingway had already more or less proposed to Mary Welsh in her hotel room one night at the Dorchester anyhow. “I don’t know you,” he had told her, as they sat in the air raid darkness on her bed one warm spring evening. “But I want to marry you. You are very alive. You’re beautiful, like a May fly. I want to marry you now, and I hope to marry you sometime. Sometime you may want to marry me.” Mary wasn’t precisely repulsed by the flattering attention of the literary giant.

  Hemingway was released from the hospital a few days later, on Tuesday, May 30, 1944, and, wanting some peace from the endless “Papa” party and his tirades on her wifely failures, Martha moved into her own room on the top floor of the Dorchester. The marriage was in trouble, and she was miserably unhappy, but she figured the row would blow over as usual. Down on the second floor of the Dorchester Hotel, Ernest Hemingway and Mary Welsh were figuring something different. As Ernest put it to Mary, “This war may keep us apart for a while, but we must begin on our Combined Operations.”

  Back in New York, it had been a game of cross and double-cross already between the two celebrity journalists, and the Collier’s business had been a painful win for Hemingway. The rivalry between the two, however, was just gearing up, and there would be more high-stakes one-upmanship. Ultimately, their story would end in France and would lead them—and Robert Capa and Mary Welsh, too—back to the Hôtel Ritz in Paris before the end of the summer.

  In some respects, it was at the Ritz where their stories had all begun anyhow.

  There is a reason that the bar on the rue Cambon side of the hotel is called the Bar Hemingway. In the early days of the Second World War, after Paris had fallen to the Germans and before Pearl Harbor, when the Americans were still neutral, the bar at the Hôtel Ritz had been the second home of a whole generation of daring war correspondents and modernist expatriate artists.

  Almost precisely six years earlier, in May 1938, Martha and Ernest had been in Paris together. Back then they were less than two years into their love affair, which had begun in a not dissimilarly complicated fashion. Ernest had visited his old friend Sylvia Beach, the American owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. That afternoon, Sylvia joined them both for a long lunch, and who could help but reminisce about the days of their youth in Paris? After all, the Ritz had also been at the heart of the American literary scene in the 1920s and early 1930s, back in the years when the exchange rate made
the city cheap for artists and dreamers.

  Back in the crazy years of the Roaring Twenties, Scott Fitzgerald tried his charms on a pretty girl in the Ritz bar by offering her a bouquet of flowers and then, when she refused him, gallantly ate the whole thing petal by petal in front of her. “The amazing part of it,’’ Hemingway said, laughing, “was that it worked and Scott got his way with that beauty. Afterwards, I always referred to such ruses and maneuvers as the Orchid Ploy.” The Hôtel Ritz had been synonymous with the carefree glamour of those freewheeling days, when the girls still danced the Charleston and kept dancing when the pearls went flying.

  It had remained a glittering beacon throughout the 1930s, part of the legend that was Paris. As far away as Harlem, “Putting on the Ritz” had been the youth culture anthem. Coco Chanel—long since a fashion icon—had made the Ritz her home already for the better part of a decade.

  The hotel staff and owners knew them all and had helped to keep the party going. For decades, Marie-Louise Ritz—in her trademark white gloves, trailed by two coddled Belgian griffons—had run the hotel with an iron fist. Ernest Hemingway and Charley Ritz, Marie-Louise’s son, the bored heir apparent, were infamous old drinking buddies. His mother had ordered Charley back from his adventures in the fledgling American film industry to work in the family business—after having sent him out of the country in 1928 in complete exasperation. But Charley couldn’t muster a passion for running a luxury hotel. All he really cared about was fly-fishing and his favorite Dutch lager. Marie-Louise, Charley put it bluntly, was “the most critical person I ever knew,” and her son did not particularly impress her.

  Charley’s American wife, Betty, was an even more devoted tippler, and it was because of Betty and another American woman, Blanche Auzello, the wife of the hotel’s director, that the ladies could drink in the hotel bars. Charley Ritz and Claude Auzello were left to bicker over whose wife was the bigger alcoholic. Hemingway thought Blanche was great fun, and he always planned to write a novel about the place. If Blanche would just give him the inside gossip, he promised, he’d even make her a character—just like Proust had done for the loyal Olivier.