HOTEL RITZ

Charles Ritz and Ernest Hemingway at the Ritz inspecting the fish.

Monday, August 4, 2014 by Liz Smith Puttin' On The Ritz While Paris (Almost) Burned.  “WHEN I dream of an afterlife ... the action always takes place at the Ritz Paris,” said Ernest Hemingway in 1944, as World War II was hurtling toward an end. Click to order "The Hotel on Place Vendome." I have two good friends, Peter Rogers in New Orleans and Jim Mitchell of NYC. Both wrote me on the same day to recommend this book that they "couldn't put down." I don't know how I had missed Tilar J. Mazzeo's deft work for Harper's titled "The Hotel on Place Vendome." It is subtitled "Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris.” This is an informal, intriguing history of the great hotel that managed to rise without parallel in the days of Proust and the Dreyfus affair and then struggled to stay open during four years of the Nazi occupation of Paris in the 40s. All the names, the gossip, the invented drinks and extravagances, the French resistance, the spies, the ones who were complicit, the tortures, the movie stars, the literature, the tragedy, the hilarity and the heartbreak. This book doesn't seem to miss much! (There is still plenty of Ritz history after World War II, including the American ambassador to France, Pamela Harriman, dying in the Ritz swimming pool and Princess Dianabeing chased from there on the night of her death. But I guess that's only a P.S.)

The Ritz swimming pool, where Pamela Harriman suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.

Diana outside of the Ritz hotel, just a few minutes before the crash that took her life.

We do get the good-guys and villains of the Ritz up to circa 1945 in this book. For instance,Hermann Goering, air hero of World War I, in all his morphine-addicted glory, stealing the treasures of France from a plush suite at the Ritz ... Chanel with her German officer (she said at her age, she didn’t question a handsome officer’s uniform) ... Jean Cocteau, trying to imitate Proust, and on and on. The author opens the book with a glossary in front naming those who endured, profited and made themselves into traitors or heroes, like Marlene Dietrich who essentially flipped Hitler the bird. (She would not return to Germany. She would entertain Allied troops!)

Hermann Göring, left, greets a German submarine captain at the Ritz during the occupation of Paris, in 1941.

Sailors help Dietrich disembark the Queen Elizabeth upon her return from her USO tour in August 1945.

And, of course — the war correspondents — from Robert Capa to Hemingway. The latter's 24 hours of drinking after the liberation of Paris, carousing as he dumped his wife, the gifted reporter Martha Gellhorn, for someone named Mary, makes for a fascinating read in itself. (Hemingway was always drunk so it's hard to judge. Mary became his fourth wife.)

Robert Capa, left, writer Ernest Hemingway, right, and driver, during a wartime assignment on the liberation of Paris, Dec. 31, 1943.

The book is quick, suspenseful, funny, tragic and full of people like General Dietrich von Choltitz who refused to destroy the city when Hitler asked "Is Paris burning?" (Hitler's provincialism is well displayed in the work.) There are those who refused to leave although the S.S. came for them in the end. We also get the despised Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who were downright traitors it seems to me. But they survived to live on as a kind of ennui-laden jet-set joke.

General Dietrich von Choltitz.

This dash down memory lane is to laugh and cry over — the contrast of pain and luxury, of excess and depredation. “Hotel on Place Vendome” is full of gossip, dread, joy and horror. Readable? Yes!

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor with Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1937