Mistress of the Ritz

by Melanie Benjamin

  “But I love J’Ali. I really do. Crazy me.”

  “Forget about J’Ali. Go out with that Auzello guy—his tongue was practically hanging out at the sight of you! Have fun, kid. Real fun.”

  “But J’Ali wanted to show me Paris.” Blanche picked a fleck of tobacco off her tongue and tapped the ash from her cigarette into a black ashtray embossed in gold. Hôtel Claridge.

  “J’Ali’s not here. You think he’d wait for you, if the shoe was on the other foot?”

  Blanche had to laugh at that—the thought of J’Ali waiting for her, or any woman. If the world was, indeed, a man’s world, then Prince J’Ali Ledene lived in the Garden of Eden; women were put on this earth to give him apples—preferably between their breasts.

  But Blanche had followed him to Paris anyway, broken her parents’ hearts, left all she knew behind. Simply because she—the defiant flapper, the jazz baby—still didn’t know what to do with love. Except to follow where it led her.

  But to her surprise, it led her not to Egypt after all.

  * * *

  —

  “WELCOME HOME TO THE Mistress of the Ritz!”

  Poised at the top of the staircase, Blanche grins, bows to the crowd looking up at her. Then she has to laugh.

  It’s a toy title, something a child would name herself, although Claude is the one who gave it to her. But he did it out of exasperation. He grows weary of her meddling, impatient with her drinking, jealous of her friendships. And when, upon finding her sharing sandwiches and champagne with the staff at the end of a long day which for him is still not over, he purses his lips and calls her Mistress of the Ritz, he does not mean it as a compliment.

  But Blanche takes it as one anyway.

  Because after seventeen years of marriage, even to a guy whose tongue was practically falling out of his mouth when he first saw you, compliments are rare, while grievances are as common as geraniums in spring. The young man who so ardently wooed her, fought for her, defied even an Egyptian prince for her, has turned into a husband. But she can’t fault him for that, because Blanche has turned into the most typical of wives.

  Only the Ritz can seduce her into forgetting this, on those occasions when her people bow down before her, like now, as she—freshly bathed and wrapped up like an exquisite present and wearing her perfect shoes—descends the staircase to the small lobby on the rue Cambon side of the hotel. She is hugged by chambermaids with tears streaming down their cheeks: “Oh, Madame Blanche, we were terrified for you!” One of them pulls at Blanche’s sleeve, turning a pale face with huge brown eyes, smudged from sleeplessness, toward her as the girl whispers, “Madame Blanche, I know you have—we’ve heard, you see—someone told me you once changed—”

  Blanche shakes her head, puts her finger to her lips as her heart begins to pound; she’s just glimpsed a German soldier below, standing sentry at the entrance to the long hallway connecting the two sides of the Ritz. She bends to give the girl a kiss on the cheek, murmuring, “Come see me tonight, after ten. Alone.” And the girl gasps, almost sobs, before composing herself.

  Blanche continues to work her way down the stairs; bellhops grasp her hand in their rough mitts, shaking her arm until it’s nearly out of its socket: “Madame Auzello, you’re home! Things will start to look up again, God willing!”

  “How’s it hanging, boys?” she asks, and the bellhops tell her exactly how it’s hanging in vivid French detail, until she laughs so hard she bends over, a hand on her aching ribs. She is overreacting, she knows: laughing too much, smiling too broadly. But she has to. Because if she didn’t, she’d dissolve into tears. So many beloved faces are missing; the male staff is very depleted. She can only pray that those young men are still making their way back after being discharged, and not in German prison camps.

  Then a door opens and there is a hush: no more laughter, no more lewd tales. The bellhops and chambermaids retreat against the railing of the stairs and the walls of the lobby, all eyes trained on the ground. They stand at rigid attention, afraid to move.

  For it is her. Mademoiselle.

  Coco Chanel, that bitch.

  She is just coming in the door from the street, and when she perceives the scene before her, she pauses and looks up, narrowing her eyes at Blanche. With an impressive flare of her nostrils, Chanel takes in the vivid Schiaparelli dress—a print, giant pink flamingoes on a bright green background—with undisguised loathing.

  “Hello, Blanche. I see the time away has been good for you,” she purrs, reaching into her handbag for a cigarette, which she holds out, imperiously, to the nearest bellhop, who lights it with a trembling hand. “You’ve lost weight, chère. Perhaps soon, you won’t have to wear rubbish, and can fit in some of my clothes.”

  Chanel, of course, is wearing one of her own creations: a black jersey dress draped so elegantly, Blanche instantly covets it. The woman knows how to make a dress, that’s for damn sure.

  “Nice to see you, too, Coco, honey.” Blanche smiles, knowing that the designer hates it when she calls her Coco instead of “Mademoiselle.” “You haven’t changed a bit. Still got that stick up your bony ass, I see.”

  There is silence as each woman assesses the other before bowing, as adversaries do, and Coco commences up the staircase, that alleged stick making her back as straight and unyielding as a narrow brick wall.

  But she pauses again when she reaches Blanche; she exhales cigarette smoke only a few inches to the left of Blanche’s face and mutters something under her breath. Just one word, one syllable, and she has moved on, disappearing upstairs, but Blanche freezes, unsure. Did Coco say what Blanche thought she did?

  Did anyone else hear it?

  But no; the bellhops and chambermaids are no longer frozen; now they’re all laughing, grinning at Blanche, and one of the bellhops takes her arm and raises it, as if she’s just won a boxing match. So she relaxes. For now. And enjoys the moment as best she can, aware—a skin-crawling sensation of being a specimen trapped under glass—that German soldiers are also watching. Listening.

  But for this moment, it doesn’t matter.

  The Mistress, by God, has returned.

  And brought her to his enchanted castle…

  “Claude,” she told him a few months after their marriage. “If you’re going to spend all your days with this rival of mine, then I’m going to be there, too.”

  “What do you mean?” Claude grew nervous; another thing he was learning about his Blanchette was that he would never learn everything about his Blanchette.

  “I mean I’m going to spend time at the Ritz, too. It’s the best show in town, Claude. All the little dramas, the social climbing, the fashion parade. That place is your life and I want to be part of your life—all of it—and that means I’m going to spend my days there, when I’m not working.”

  “You are?” Did she mean she was going to sit in his little office all the day long? Trail after him when he made his rounds?

  “Yep. I’m going to get to know the Ritz as you do—I’m going to figure out why you love it as much as you love me.”

  Claude gulped, but smiled. Because he was pleased, to tell the truth, that she shared his passion and wanted to be more in his world, even if he suffered a guilty pang over the fact that he didn’t share her passion for the movies. But he easily dismissed this pang. After all, he was the husband, the rightful breadwinner; a man had a career, while a woman could only have a hobby.

  Claude also knew that there was no better setting for a fairy-tale princess, and it all made sense; why else had he rescued her, if not to ensconce her at the Ritz?

  * * *

  —

  AND SO THEY ENTERED into a new phase of their young marriage: a ménage à trois, in a way. The Ritz, Blanchette, and Claude.

  He would leave his little apartment—she was already hinting they should rent another, bigge
r one in a more fashionable area of town “as befits your position”—earlier than she did. He would kiss her sleeping brow, then take the Métro to the Louvre station, where he’d walk the few blocks to the Place Vendôme. But he always ducked around to the rue Cambon side, where the service entrance was. Claude entered through those doors just to see that all the deliveries were being made—the fresh vegetables, the flowers from the market, the linens, the fish and meat.

  Once he was certain the deliveries had arrived, Claude would retire to his little office across from the guest elevator, where he would have coffee and a croissant, flaky and buttery and fresh from the kitchen, and go over the schedule for the day. There were always private luncheons and banquets to be arranged, both for guests and for Parisians who recognized that there was nowhere in Paris more elegant. Now that the Great War had destroyed so many fragile empires, displaced minor European royalty roamed the earth like the dinosaurs that they were. And many lumbered into the Ritz.

  Every day a newly impoverished duke or duchess or baron or baroness imperiously rang the bell at the desk, insisting on their old suites from their days of glory. It was Claude’s job to gently talk them into something more reasonable—something they might actually be able to afford instead of ducking out in the early morning, bills unpaid—while still bowing and flattering and reinforcing their former image of themselves.

  Every day, too, pretty American girls, their mamas and papas rich with new money, arrived at the Ritz in pursuit of some of these titles. For there were many bachelor dukes and barons.

  And there were the mamas and papas themselves, owners of department stores and gold mines, coming to France for the first time and staying at the Ritz because “Everyone says this is the place to stay in Paris. By the way, my name’s George. What’s yours?” And Claude would press his lips together before admitting that it was the place to stay, and ring for someone to show them to the suites formerly occupied by the now displaced dukes and duchesses. While, naturally, Claude was delighted that these Americans had waterfalls of money, and it flowed everywhere—gushing into the bar, the restaurant, lavish tips that made the bellboys’ eyes pop—still, he couldn’t suppress a little pang that he had not worked here at the Ritz in its glory days. Back when César Ritz still was alive—every day, Claude said a silent prayer to his enormous portrait hanging in the main hall—back when King Edward VII had stayed here, along with Romanovs and Hapsburgs, and they were all still in power, all still regal, and the Ritz must have looked like an embassy with all the medals and tiaras and gold military braid.

  But it is not profitable to long too much for the past, particularly if it is not your own. Claude quite enjoyed the Ritz that he, more and more, ran by himself. He was seldom off-duty. Even at night.

  “You do realize, Claude, that most of these midnight summons come from broads?” Blanche asked one evening when their phone rang, and the sultry voice of the Duchesse de Talleyrand-Périgord was on the other end, asking for “Monsieur Claude of the Ritz.”

  The duchess was staying in a very expensive suite while she searched for a Parisian home. “Claude,” she’d confided to him, breathlessly, one day as she returned to the Ritz after walking her poodle in the Place Vendôme, “I have a premonition.” She fluttered her eyelashes and breathed heavily, as if she’d been pursued by a ghost; her bosom heaved most attractively.

  “What, madame?”

  “I’ve always known it. I’ve always known that I would be murdered in a hotel!” She shuddered, and so did her breasts.

  “Oh, madame, no! Surely you are mistaken?”

  “No, Claude—what if I’m not?”

  From that moment on, she’d sought his assurance with frequent summons to her room to check for intruders, and now a phone call to his home.

  “Claude, you must come at once. You must save me—I’m so afraid!”

  Naturally, Claude dressed to go to the Ritz, even though it was after midnight.

  “I have to. She is one of our most important guests and it is my job to make sure she remains one,” he explained as he tied his shoes, after first washing his face and brushing his teeth and spraying a hint of cologne on his fresh handkerchief.

  “Of course,” Blanche said, eerily calm—uncomfortably understanding. As Claude hurried through the streets, he worried about that. What did it mean, that Blanche wasn’t throwing vases and shoes at him as he left?

  The next day, he found out.

  “Claude, I’ve been thinking,” Blanche said as they lunched together in the hotel kitchen. The kitchen wasn’t a bright or airy place, as it was below ground. But all the stainless steel, the bright white tile, the warm copper pots and bowls, the crisp white chef caps and aprons, the aroma of baking bread and pungently sweet herbs, the perfume of simmering garlic in olive oil competing with the vanilla scent of decadent pastries made it cheerful nonetheless.

  “What have you been thinking, Blanche?” Claude waved for another coffee; it had been a late night with the duchess, whose insistent charms he was not sure he could succeed in avoiding without offense for much longer.

  “I’ve been thinking about your late nights. Your many late nights.” She gave him a probing look, which Claude returned innocently. “We ought to have rooms here at the Ritz. Don’t you think? That way you can still attend to your very important guests, but you won’t have to traipse through the streets and then back again. And you won’t have to worry about me, all alone in the apartment. So late. At night.”

  Claude was on the verge of assuring Blanche that he did not worry about her being alone at all, for he had learned that she wasn’t quite the damsel in distress he had thought she was—in all honesty, he worried more about the hapless would-be burglar because Blanche, as he well knew by now, was in possession of a solid right hook—but decided that would not be in his best interest. Not at all.

  “I don’t know, Blanche…”

  “Ask Madame Ritz. Tell her you will be able to perform your—duties—in a timelier manner.”

  “I’ll ask,” Claude agreed, for he was already familiar with Blanche’s reluctance to let go of certain ideas.

  And so Claude did ask, and Madame Ritz—as she fed one of her Brussels griffons a bite of liver, freshly chopped by the head chef of the Ritz, from a silver fork—looked at him piercingly.

  “Claude, you are doing very well here, and I’m grateful for all you’re doing for Monsieur Rey, assuming so many of his duties while he is ill. I will grant you two rooms on the rue Cambon side. Will that satisfy your wife?”

  “Madame, it has nothing to do with satisfying my wife,” Claude replied stiffly. “My wife will be satisfied with what I tell her to be.”

  Madame Ritz smiled, very wisely, and said nothing, and as Claude turned to leave, he felt that women were at times more bothersome than they were pleasurable.

  But only at times.

  Blanche was thrilled by the two adjoining rooms they fashioned into a suite, appointed with extra furniture and rugs brought down from the attic storage area. The rooms looked out on the narrow rue Cambon and were accessible from the staircase in that small lobby area that was flanked by the bar and the ladies’ salon. She moved many of her clothes and a few paintings into the suite, and soon it seemed as if the Auzellos spent more nights here than they did in their apartment. It was quite clever of her, Claude thought with rueful admiration.

  Now she would never have to learn to cook.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE RITZ, BLANCHE had her favorite haunts: a certain sofa in the grand hallway, which provided her an excellent view of the staircase, a fashion show every hour of every day as royalty, movie actresses, and wives of millionaires descended, each one trying to outdo the other in their dress, in the size and number of jewels draped about their throats and on their fingers. For the point of staying at the Ritz was not only the luxury at hand, b
ut the opportunity to be seen, gossiped about, or photographed by one of the new journalists always clustered outside in the Place Vendôme whose jobs were to write about only the rich and famous.

  Blanche also had a special chair in the ladies’ salon, where she got up games of bridge with some of the more neglected wives of millionaires, and thus picked up tips that proved useful for some of her poorer friends. She might hear of a matron from Ohio in need of a ladies’ maid back home, or a displaced duchess looking for a traveling companion—et voilà! Some of her former movie friends now had honest jobs.

  Blanche even, once a week, had tea with Madame Ritz herself, who enjoyed Blanche’s gossip and humor. And in spite of himself, Claude began to appreciate her efforts on his own behalf; his wife had become an asset to his career. Through her games of bridge, her growing circle of friends both rich and poor, she had brought much new business to the Ritz, convincing people to throw parties here instead of at home, for instance, as they used to do before the war. She even befriended Barbara Hutton, the shy American heiress who might not have made the Imperial Suite her official Paris residence had it not been for Blanche’s warm, easygoing companionship.

  His wife was becoming so much of an asset, as a matter of fact, that even Claude was able to relax a bit. His marriage might be different from his friends’ in many ways; most men left their wives in the morning and only returned in the evening, while Blanche and Claude were together almost constantly. Their pillow talk was always about the Ritz, the employees, the guests—so far, no children had appeared to consume their conversation. But in one way, Claude determined, this marriage would resemble that of his parents, his friends. A very important way. A very French way.

  It was something of a surprise, however, to learn how differently the French and the Americans viewed the situation.