The battlefield in this case was France, the number one European target of Americans, by a long way. France was central to over half of all American itineraries to Europe. No other country came close. Over 40 percent of France’s tourism revenues came from Americans. Seeing a huge market for his unique package of expensive modernity and comforts, Conrad Hilton was planning not one but two major hotels in Paris, one at the airport, the Orly Hilton, and another in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, the Paris Hilton.
Claude Terrail, on the other hand, wasn’t planning to open a branch of La Tour d’Argent in Beverly Hills. Instead, he was holding his hallowed ground in the Tour’s aerie overlooking Notre Dame, the Seine, and the glorious spires and rooftops of Paris, the most iconic view in the world, old or new. The Tour had only one rival in its exalted class: Maxim’s, the Paris shrine of art nouveau. Both restaurants had the ultimate rating of three Michelin stars, and both had more stars at their tables than there were in the heavens. Both had imperial, intimidating blacktie service, stupendous wine cellars filled with the noblest vintages, and kitchens as grand as those of the storied ocean liners, such as the Normandie, serving complex dishes composed of luxury ingredients—foie gras, truffles, caviar, lobster, prime beef, baby veal—and elaborate, often flambéed desserts, prepared tableside with great panache.
But it was the view that was Claude Terrail’s trump. Nothing on earth could match it, and it gave him his bargaining power. He would gladly serve Hilton’s guests, but he would serve them, as his devoted Hollywood client Frank Sinatra would say, “my way,” which was the way his forbears had served hungry travelers, pilgrims, and all manner of tourists for the past three centuries. Hilton stood for the American and the new; Terrail for European tradition. A major culture clash was brewing that would end up transforming both continents.
The greatest ally Terrail (or any French traditionalist) could hope for was the new first lady, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Jackie’s French surname was misleading; she was at most an eighth French, long ago and far away. But she embraced the culture as if she were Marie Antoinette. She had become a brave defender of an alien faith, holding firm against the demands of everyone from the Marshall Planners to Juan Trippe to Temple Fielding that France “modernize” itself to accommodate, aid, and abet the jet-fueled rise of American tourism. No running ice water for Jackie Kennedy, only Evian, Vittel, Perrier, Mouton-Rothschild, Dom Pérignon.
France had plenty of avaricious businessmen in the hospitality trade who were more than willing to sell Paris down the Seine for Marshall Plan handouts and block bookings from American Express. To that end, France was building its own versions of Hiltons: chains like Sofitel and Le Méridien, both financed by Air France. Jackie K was flying in the face of modernity, which in those days had the epic horsepower of Pratt & Whitney. Still, the irresistible force of the American way was meeting the immovable force of Jackie, who had to mind her White House etiquette to avoid provoking a McCarthyite backlash. She enlisted Igor Cassini’s brother, Oleg, to be her “beard” designer, knocking off the French couturiers Jackie loved but whom her husband had ordered her to eschew because he didn’t want her seeming sartorially unpatriotic or, in his words, “too Frenchy.”
Similarly, in redecorating the White House in an ultra-French mode, Jackie’s “front” interior decorator was Dorothy May “Sister” Parish, a very American socialite blue blood whose grandfather was Edith Wharton’s doctor. But the real work was done by Stéphane Boudin, the preeminent Paris designer and the man who could be said to have “Frenchified” the White House, turning it into what lots of chauvinistic wags ridiculed as “La Maison Blanche.” Boudin was also responsible for the Fifth Avenue diamond salon of Harry Winston, whose Hope Diamond Jackie arranged to have Winston lend to France to be exhibited at the Louvre, in exchange for which the Louvre lent “Whistler’s Mother” to a grieving Atlanta to commemorate the Air France crash that killed so many of its art patrons.
As for the cuisine at the White House, Jackie refused to have some executive chef from Howard Johnson’s dishing up patriotic meat loaf. Instead, she hijacked the Frenchman René Verdon from the Carlyle Hotel, the Kennedy clan’s New York pied-à-terre, whose haute cuisine extravagances Jackie knew firsthand from room service. She brought Verdon to Washington in 1961, the same year Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published. Having a Frenchman as the Kennedys’ head chef did more for Child than any book tour and led to her television show, which would enable America to “eat like the Kennedys.”
Jackie Kennedy may have seemed like a one-woman French connection, but she was simply the latest edition of a mystique that went back to such early chief executive Francophiles as Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. Monroe’s presidency had been preceded by a stint as minister to France. That had gotten him as French-hooked as Jackie’s junior year abroad had gotten her, but in Monroe’s case, it almost bankrupted him through his obsessive “Frenchification” of the original White House with his own funds.
You didn’t have to be an ambassador or a president to embrace France. During the Roaring Twenties, when America was mired in Prohibition, Paris was the place to be, and for trust-fund babies and others too big to fail in the 1929 Crash, Paris was even more fun in the thirties. After the war, the City of Light may have become a soot-caked black beauty, in dire need of sandblasting, but it was also the best bargain in the world. The writers poured in: Irwin Shaw, James Baldwin, William Styron, James Jones, plus all the rich post-Ivy preppies like George Plimpton and his Paris Review crowd. These writers paid for their cafés and croissants by filling the pages of the super-glossy magazines Holiday and Esquire with seductive dispatches from the European front. Many of their magazine pieces were in-depth accounts of the conspicuous consumption of Igor Cassini’s Jet Set, living the high life at the places Temple Fielding was raving about in his guide. Fabulous photographs by the likes of Slim Aarons captured all the revelry and turned it into a fantasy goal for the readers back home who couldn’t wait for Juan Trippe to cut his rates even more.
The biggest pre-Kennedy event of the fifties that primed the future pump for jet travel to Europe, especially France, was the fairy-tale wedding of Grace Kelly of Hollywood and Philadelphia to Prince Rainier of Monaco. In what may have been the most publicized nuptials in the history of publicity, Igor Cassini and sixteen hundred other reporters descended on the tiny Riviera principality, smaller than Central Park, most often described by them as “Graustarkian.” (Graustark was a famous fictional kingdom created by the author George Barr McCutcheon in a series of bestselling romantic novels in the 1920s.) Fiction may have been the operative word for a romance that mirrored the plot of Kelly’s final film, The Swan, released by MGM on the same day as her wedding. In the movie, a Graustarkian princess, played by Kelly, falls for a glamorous commoner, played by Gigi’s Louis Jourdan. In real life, the genders were reversed. The match was made by Aristotle Onassis, who essentially owned this Graustark on the Med, controlling its casino, its Sporting Club, its Hôtel de Paris.
Onassis, afraid of losing the return on his investment, concluded that Monaco needed more tourism and, hence, more publicity. He played an Aegean Cupid and created the paradigm that historian Daniel Boorstin described as a “pseudo-event.” Nobody did publicity like Onassis. He created a feeding frenzy, a tidal wave unmatched until he married Jackie Kennedy. But the question that nagged the public was what love had to do with it. The whole affair was just too orchestrated, what with the MGM movie tie-in and the radio broadcast of the wedding sponsored by Peter Pan brassieres.
Europe’s real royalty did not attend; they gave the Grimaldi “pseudo-dynasty” the bum’s rush. The closest thing to a king who showed up was an ex, Farouk of Egypt, recently deposed by Nasser, who was spending his exile at the gambling tables of Monaco’s famed casino. Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, was there because his ailing papa loved Onassis’s hospitality, as did a decrepit Somerset Maugham. But even Randolph was turned off. �
��I didn’t come here to meet vulgar people like the Kellys,” he snapped to one gossip.
President Eisenhower didn’t send anyone from Washington. That might have seemed too legitimate. Instead, he dispatched as his unofficial envoy his frequent golfing partner Conrad Hilton, whose presence stirred up hope among the tourist-starved locals that he might be scouting for a site for a Monte Carlo Hilton. No such luck. “We never build in resorts or small towns,” he said, deflating all expectations. Claude Terrail was the rare celebrity who was not invited. Onassis, who controlled the guest list, was a Maxim’s loyalist and decided to exclude the competition.
Even minus the star power, the crowd in Monaco was vast. Televised everywhere, the event got the world talking about Europe as a place where dreams (manufactured though they might be) could come true, even if the most satisfied of all the dreamers turned out to be Onassis. The French mystique had never abated, from the Lost Generation to the Beat Generation and now the jet-enabled baby boomers. France was ever the most favored nation.
England may have been the mother country, but maybe that was why it seemed less foreign, less glamorous, as well as, sadly, too wrecked by the war to match the fantasy that was France. All those killer fogs, all those crippling strikes, all that bad food and warm beer and the pubs that closed at nine. It was all too stiff-upper-lip, and you needed to be as indomitable as Winston Churchill to have the blood, sweat, and tears to endure it. Even Winston Churchill couldn’t take it, having fallen prey to Onassis’s unctuous Riviera yacht seductions. It would take the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to make London hot, and that wasn’t until 1964.
Italy, by contrast, had everything: ruins, art, style, sun, plus Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton making Cleopatra. The country provided some of the most unforgettable iconography of the Jet Set era, especially Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, whose title, more than any other, defined the entire epoch. Who could forget the image of Swedish bombshell Anita Ekberg and Italian god Marcello Mastroianni cavorting in Rome’s Trevi Fountain? And offscreen, who could forget the paparazzi images of that other Italian god, Fiat chief Gianni Agnelli, the handsomest man in all big business, with his trademark Rolex worn outside the cuff of his Brooks Brothers button-down? When it came to the Beautiful People, nothing could touch the land of the Caesars. But Italy’s infrastructure was a wreck, no one spoke English, and all in all, the country was just too challenging, at least for independent travelers without local connections.
France had as fabulous an image as Italy. Furthermore, that image was unsullied by any negative associations with poor immigrants, like the shanty Irish or the paisan Italians or the peddler Jews. There had been no massive French migration, no foie gras famine to escape from. There were no “Little Frances” in the United States, except maybe dreamy New Orleans and ritzy Beverly Hills, the sister city of Cannes. Indeed, aside from the primitive plumbing, what was not to love about La Belle France? The people, that’s what. So said the great profiler Temple Fielding, who warned his Guidesters:
As long as the newcomer doesn’t arrive with starry eyes, expecting the inhabitants to greet him with the beaming smile and mighty handclasp of the Dane, the Spaniard, the Hollander, the Norwegian, he should enjoy his sojourn. It is important that he remember the basic axiom that the French not only dislike all foreigners, but most other French people as well. This national suspicion of The Stranger, whether from Borneo or the next village, is as deeply inbred as their cynicism, their worldliness, or their appreciation of fine wines.
The image transmitted to America was that the French were arrogant, supercilious, and venal, holding out their palms for undeserved gratuities. Plus, there were lots of Communists in France, over 30 percent of the electorate. This was too close to Moscow, too close for comfort. It made America nervous. Forget the friendship of the Marquis de Lafayette. Forget the Statue of Liberty. Forget Maurice Chevalier. The country’s image was not helped by President Charles de Gaulle, a giant hero-general whose self-regard and France-regard were at least as megalomaniacal as that of Napoleon.
That America had saved France from the Germans seemed forgotten as De Gaulle, in 1966, pulled France out of NATO and ordered NATO troops out of their French headquarters in Fontainebleau. At the same time, he began getting chummy with Khrushchev. He saw Russia as part of Europe, and sought a détente, which caused lots of anxiety in America. On the other hand, De Gaulle saw Britain not as part of Europe but as a tool of Washington, and he constantly vetoed British efforts to join the Common Market. He also began developing his own nuclear weapons.
De Gaulle didn’t want his once imperial, still-imperious nation to be dependent upon America, not for defense and not for tourism. He was proud of his bidets, his shared baths, his traditions of personal service, and the fat tips that service richly deserved. Let Conrad take his Hilton and … The view was that De Gaulle had a lot of gall, and that view was not confined to Temple Fielding. Even the internationalist senator from Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, who created the program that sent thousands of Fulbright Scholars across the globe, specifically to France, went on the record telling his countrymen to “spare themselves the debauchery and sophisticated pocket picking of Paris.” Small wonder that JFK was worried about his wife seeming “too Frenchy.”
No one could have been more Frenchy than Claude Terrail, whose haute cuisine, even Jackie and Jack Kennedy would have been quick to admit, put White House fare to shame. In the 707 era, the main reason people came to France was the food, and nobody did food better than Terrail’s Tour d’Argent, the most expensive, most exclusive, most breathtaking restaurant in the world. It got the highest rating from Fielding, number one in his Guide, and the highest rating from Michelin, three stars for the cooking, five crossed knife and forks for the ambience. America and France had their differences, but on this, the twain could meet. And you could dine there for all of $15.
In 1959, the first full year of the jets, when tensions over French snootery were high and the Tour was the pinnacle of snoot, Fielding bestowed the ultimate Cold War rave that it gave “far more gracious reception and attention to American clientele than at Maxim’s or at any other big-league restaurant in the capital.” Julia Child noted on her first visit to the Tour, “The restaurant was excellent in every way, except that it was so pricey that every guest was American.” This might have been music to the rip-off-attuned ears of Arthur Frommer. To Conrad Hilton, however, American patronage was the extreme compliment, notwithstanding that the campfire tastes of Hilton never would have tolerated the Tour’s signature dish, canard au sang, the “bloody duck” whose sauce came from innards crushed in the Tour’s Torquemada-ish silver duck press. To Claude Terrail, it was an acknowledgment that he had pulled off his high-wire balancing act, running the most classic, recherché, and arrogant of all French restaurants and still packing in those Damn Yankees. Even Walt Disney, creator of Donald Duck—at the Tour an endangered species—loved the place.
Claude Terrail was born, in 1918, to be a host. Although he never ran a hotel, his father was a major hotelier, having built Paris’s first great modern hotel, the George V. When it opened in 1928, at the height of the Roaring Twenties, the deco paradise was instantly embraced for its revolutionary modernity—elevators, air-conditioning, every room with a private bath—by the stars of Hollywood. It remained the go-to lodgings of the film industry into the jet age. This grand hotel was where Claude Terrail grew up, a French male version of the New York Plaza’s fictional Eloise. While André Terrail, Claude’s father, was building the George V, Conrad Hilton had bought and was running his first hotel in Cisco, Texas. It was a whorehouse, or what the French would call an hôtel de rendezvous, where rooms were let by the hour, not the night. Then again, Conrad Hilton would later buy the Plaza, as if to get even.
Hilton and Terrail certainly didn’t start even. Claude Terrail was born with a silver spoon, as well as a silver room key, in his mouth. In addition to the George V, his father owned the nearby St. Regis, as classi
cal as the V was radical, as well as several other hotels in Paris and on the Calais coast, despite its chill and its fogs, the pre-airplane summer playground of rich Parisians. His resort flagship was the Royal Picardy in Le Touquet, which was Hiltonesque, the first French lodging with more than five hundred rooms and an Olympic swimming pool with a wave-making machine. With a phone in every room and a mini-golf course, it was advertised as the largest and most luxurious hotel in Europe.
While Claude Terrail’s father was a hotel kingpin, his mother, Augusta, was restaurant royalty. Her father, Claudius Burdel, had owned the Café Anglais on the Boulevard des Italiens, which was to nineteenth-century Paris café society what Oscar Wilde’s beloved Café Royal in Piccadilly was to London’s. The Café Anglais’s Adolphe Dugléré was arguably the first modern celebrity chef. Having cooked first and privately for the Rothschilds, he made the Anglais a dining shrine by creating such famous rich, buttery, creamy dishes as Pommes Anna, Potage Germiny, Sole Dugléré, and Tournedos Rossini, for which the Barber of Seville composer dubbed Dugléré “the Mozart of the kitchen.”
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 15
