The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Now, at the beginning of June 1944, the same journalists who had camped out in the Ritz bar in the late 1930s, covering the Spanish Civil War, were the ones on their way back to Paris, waiting in London for the chance to be among the first wave of reporters to arrive in the French capital. After all, although Adolf Hitler and his generals didn’t know it, the Allied troops were only days away from landing on the beaches in Normandy. Within weeks, tens of thousands of young American men would be on the march toward Paris.

  Martha was determined to follow the troops back to France and get the scoop, even if she had to do it on the sly, without her press credential. She certainly wasn’t going to ask her husband’s permission.

  Ernest, his head still bandaged from the car crash, still limping from his knee injuries, had his press credentials in order. The head injury meant that he couldn’t fly with the Royal Air Force, as he had promised Collier’s. Instead, Hemingway saw the D-Day invasion from a landing craft at sea, coming in on the seventh wave, late in the action.

  The landings at Normandy had originally been planned for June 5, 1944, in that narrow window of a full moon and a good tide, but the weather wouldn’t cooperate. So, instead, the Allied troops left England in darkness, and the first troops landed after sunrise on June 6.

  From where Ernest Hemingway watched, the artillery “sounded as though they were throwing whole railway trains across the sky,” and he could see the infantry on the shoreline, advancing “[s]lowly, laboriously, as though they were Atlas, carrying the world on their shoulders.” In a sense, they were. The future of postwar France depended on this operation.

  Hemingway filed his story for Collier’s back safely ashore in Britain, and it was the magazine’s lead article of D-Day coverage. But he was not among those soldiers making their perilous way across the headlands. At Normandy, he never stepped foot on land. It would be six weeks still before Ernest Hemingway would find his way back to France, en route at last to Paris and the Hôtel Ritz.

  For Robert Capa and Martha Gellhorn, D-Day ended very differently. Bob Capa always said of war photojournalism, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” When the American First Infantry Division landed at Omaha Beach that June morning, the thirty-year-old Bob Capa was among them, covering the story for Life. And he wasn’t in the rear of the action. “The war correspondent has his stake—his life—in his own hands,” he explained later. “I’m a gambler. I decided to go in with E Company, in the first wave.”

  On the transport ship in the English Channel in the darkness of June 5, the correspondents and some of the officers passed the night shooting craps and playing poker. “It didn’t matter whether you won or lost,” one sergeant on board remembered, “it was just a way to pass the time. You knew you probably weren’t gonna get a chance to win your money back anyway.” At three in the morning, all the men assembled for a final breakfast, a white-glove service of pancakes, eggs, sausages, and coffee. By four A.M. the ship was ten miles from the beach, and everyone aboard stood on the deck silently. “I was thinking a little bit of everything,” Robert Capa said afterward, “of green fields, pink clouds, grazing sheep, all the good times, and very much of getting the best pictures of the day. None of us was at all impatient, and we wouldn’t have minded standing in the darkness for a very long time.”

  Over the loudspeaker came the final orders: “Fight to get your troops ashore . . . and if you’ve got any strength left, fight to save yourselves. . . . Away all boats! . . . Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.” At 5:50 in the morning, the shelling started.

  Later, he would remember the moment when “the flat bottom of our boat hit the earth of France. . . . [M]y beautiful France looked sordid and uninviting, and a German machine gun, spitting bullets . . . fully spoiled my return.” In the water with the troops, his rolls of films protected from the damp by Army-issue condoms, he started shooting pictures, with bullets cutting up the surf around him. He took 106 photographs of the combat before he clambered aboard an infantry landing craft and was pulled from the action by a nineteen-year-old machinist named Charles Jarreau. As the ship began to pull away from the shore, he thought, “This is my last chance to return to the beach.” “I did not go,” he confessed later. “The mess boys who had served our coffee in white jackets and with white gloves at three in the morning were covered with blood and were sewing the dead in white sacks.” He had spent ninety minutes in the water and now passed out on the deck from exhaustion.

  When he landed back on the docks in England early on June 7, a plane was waiting to whisk him off to London. The world wanted to hear the first radio broadcasts of those who had witnessed the landings. Capa, however, couldn’t do it. He handed his rolls of film over to a courier who would take them to be developed in London, and then he took the first boat that he could find back to Normandy. He was back on the beaches by the next morning. Of those 106 images, only eleven would survive the bungling of a careless darkroom assistant. Those that did survive became the iconic images of the D-Day landings.

  Martha Gellhorn made it to the beaches of Normandy as well. Without an official press accreditation, despite her years as a war correspondent, she had to lie to do it. On June 5, the night before the invasion, she sweet-talked a British sailor into letting her aboard a hospital ship, claiming she was there to interview a nurse on board for a story. In fact, it was the first hospital ship to cross the Channel, destined for the front lines of the battle. Then Martha locked herself in the bathroom until the ship, painted a ghostly white and marked only with red crosses, had left the harbor. She wrote in her diary, “9.46 or so. In five seconds the command will be given to the world.”

  When she could feel the swell of the waves as the ship crept out into the Channel, she went above with the nurses. “Pulling out of the harbor that night,” she reported, “we passed a ship going the same way. The ship was grey against the grey water and grey sky and standing on her decks, packed solidly together, khaki, silent and unmoving, were American troops. No one waved and no one called. The crowded grey ship and the empty white ship sailed slowly out of the harbor toward France.” There were more than five thousand Allied ships in the Channel that night. Some ten thousand of those young men and women on board them would not live to return to Britain.

  The nurses that night were all “[b]adly spooked,” she remembered. “We drank a lot of whisky. . . . I was very scared, drank, got unscared.” In the morning, in the first rush of the landing, Martha watched helplessly as the bodies of some of those young men, now “swollen greyish sacks,” floated past the ship. They were the ones who never made it to the shores of France but were killed in the water.

  When the nurses landed onshore, Martha Gellhorn was among them. She joined the ambulance team and worked side by side with the other medics feverishly on the beaches and headlands. Only later would she return to London and file her stories with Collier’s as a freelancer. The magazine had too much sense not to publish them, and Hemingway never forgave her for getting to France before him.

  For illegally sailing to France and reporting without credentials, she was arrested by the military police and interned in a nurses’ training camp outside London. The wily Martha, however, would not be contained. She made her dramatic escape from the camp convict-style, one step ahead of the military police. She was on her way back to the European theater. Ultimately she would rendezvous again with Bob Capa and with Ernest Hemingway and Mary Welsh—along with some of those soldiers—in the Hôtel Ritz. The Allied troops were already battling their way east toward Paris.

  Some of those who had passed the Second World War living at the Ritz in luxury were just beginning to understand that with the arrival of the Allies would come a terrible reckoning.

  6

  The French Actress and Her Nazi Lover

  Still shot, Arletty in Les visiteurs du soir (The Devil’s Envoys), 1942.

  IT’S TOUGH, COLLABORATION IS.

  —René, Count de
Chambrun

  On May 27, 1944, while Ernest Hemingway was boozing it up in his hospital bed in London, the diminutive black-bereted French philosopher and author Jean-Paul Sartre was in Paris, celebrating the premiere of his new play Huis Clos at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, where before the war crowds had gathered to see Béatrice Bretty in celebrated roles. Though she was living in exile, during the occupation the theaters were still packed. In fact, rarely had the scene been livelier. A play with a famously absurdist message, Huis Clos was the story of three self-indulgent sinners locked in a room with “no exit.” In French, the title is a pointedly sharp one: Huis Clos is the literal translation of the Latin judicial term in camera, the phrase for a trial held in private chambers.

  Sartre’s play was disturbingly timely. As the occupation was reaching its turning point that summer, it would soon start dawning on plenty of sinners that they, too, might end up trapped behind closed doors in Paris, facing judgment and agonizing consequences.

  One of the women in the audience at the Vieux-Colombier that night was the forty-six-year-old aging beauty Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat. Born in a working-class suburb of Paris only a few weeks before the Hôtel Ritz had first opened its own doors to the public in 1898, she had risen from those humble origins and her early days as a cabaret performer to international fame with her role in Marcel Carné’s 1938 film Hôtel du Nord. Set not on the glitzy Place Vendôme but along the far scruffier Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, she played in that film an unrepentant prostitute in a dark comedy set on Bastille Day. Now one of the most celebrated movie stars of her generation, she was known to all of France simply as Arletty. She remembered later of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play that, despite the arrest of the leading actress by the Gestapo, the performance that night was “an enormous success.”

  Perhaps Arletty had even gone to the premiere with her young Nazi lover. She was in love that summer. Her paramour was a handsome blond German lieutenant named Hans-Jürgen Soehring, who had begun his career by studying law in Grenoble and was now attached to the office of the commanding general of the Paris Luftwaffe.

  Arletty’s love affair with Soehring had been a very public romance. The son of a diplomat, Hans-Jürgen introduced her to German literature over cozy evenings in front the fireplace with her old friend, the playwright and screenwriter Sacha Guitry. The lovers enjoyed long lunches à deux just around the corner from the Hôtel Ritz at the expensive Café Voisin on rue Cambon, a favorite local hangout of the German officers. She introduced him to the pleasures of metropolitan Paris—especially its theaters and operas. They were often seen around the capital attending performances.

  As word of the Allied landings at Normandy swept through Paris on June 6, Arletty now found herself faced with a difficult decision. It was the same decision others had faced before her. Like many of the private citizens of occupied Paris, she thought of herself as a neutral party. After all, the fall of France hadn’t been her idea. When asked, she admitted that she wasn’t a supporter of Charles de Gaulle and his “Gaullist” party. But she wasn’t a Nazi, either. She was, she proclaimed saucily, nothing more than a “Gauloise”—a fan of the ultra-French cigarette brand, Gauloises, that was the trademark of fellow artists and friends like Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre.

  Sooner or later, however, she would have to throw in her lot with one side or the other. Her German friends were already warning her that the moment of decision was coming. Soon she would have to choose between Hans-Jürgen and Paris.

  Arletty was not the only Frenchwoman to spend the occupation living in luxury at the Hôtel Ritz with a German lover. In fact, that summer of 1944 there were several. After all, the hotel was uniquely a place where high-ranking officers of the Third Reich and diplomats for the Axis powers could live in easy proximity with French civilians.

  Some of the women who made the Hôtel Ritz their wartime homes were simply beautiful and charming French girls who were willing—or compelled—to overlook the niceties of patriotism. In her memoirs of the occupation, the American-born B-list actress and courageous resistant Drue Tartière remembered how, even on her street in a small suburb of Paris, there was a woman whose daughter lived at the Ritz and sent home from the Place Vendôme enough food to sustain the family. German writer Ernst Jünger, another wartime Ritz regular and a friend of Arletty, put it succinctly one night during the 1940s over a sumptuous dinner at the famed Tour d’Argent, the oldest restaurant in Paris: “food is power.” While there was champagne and oysters at the Ritz, during the occupation much of the city suffered from devastating food shortages and malnutrition, perhaps as many as 20 percent of the inhabitants.

  Even Coco Chanel had her own German beau, the suave aristocratic divorcé Hans von Dincklage. He was another of the spies who lurked in the hotel’s bars and worked the secret wires—though whom he spied for, no one was ever quite certain. Some said he was close with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, a double agent for the German resistance in Paris. Others said he spied for the Third Reich.

  Many of those at the Ritz during the occupation had connections with the film industry. It was the inevitable hangover from the 1910s and 1920s, when the hotel had been at the epicenter of the cinema world—a world that was pioneered not in Los Angeles but in Paris. That was why Blanche Auzello had first come to the capital. Now the German general Otto von Stülpnagel—a man “who loved to take hostages and kill them,” as one person who knew him remembered—was regularly seen lunching in the hotel dining room with a notorious Dutch motion-picture provocateur and spy. Josée de Chambrun, the aristocratic daughter of the Vichy high official Pierre Laval, was a determined patroness of movie stars and, with her talent for procuring travel passes, practically their wartime manager.

  Since the spring of 1943, Arletty had been traveling off and on to the south of France for another film that she was starring in under the direction of Marcel Carné, the movie ultimately released in 1945 as Les enfants du paradis (The Children of Paradise). Josée de Chambrun had pulled all sorts of connections to get the actors and the film crew the necessary German approval, and Arletty benefited materially from her friend’s assistance. Her movie-star salary that spring was 100,000 francs a week—160 times the weekly salary of the average Parisian family.

  Beyond the doors of the Hôtel Ritz, France was spiraling into a brutal chaos by mid-month. The Allied landings at Normandy were still under way, and, emboldened, the fledgling resistance was on the rise. There were also steady air raid alerts in the city, often coming as many as three or four times a day. Every evening, Allied pilots and gunners were getting shot down over France. On the ground, the Gestapo feverishly hunted down with dogs and bullets those airmen who survived the midair combat. Josée de Chambrun’s father, one of the architects of Vichy collaboration, was smack in the middle of the terror operations.

  At the Hôtel Ritz, however, even the air raid shelters were first-class indulgences. The cellars were equipped with fur rugs and silk Hermès sleeping bags, and the British wit Noël Coward—posted for a time to the British war propaganda bureau in Paris during the phony war—couldn’t help but laugh remembering Coco Chanel’s servants trailing behind her, carrying her gas mask on a satin pillow. It was so much hustle and bustle. Everyone knew the military targets were far from the Place Vendôme, located somewhere out by the railway yards in the suburbs. Nights that spring, the death tolls in parts of Paris rivaled the worst losses during the Blitz on London, in 1940–41. Arletty’s response to anything unpleasant was to make a joke of it. She wrote to Hans-Jürgen, “Paris decrees, France follows. . . . It’s kaboom everywhere.”

  By mid-June 1944, things were intensifying quickly across Europe, in part because the Allies were quarreling. Charles de Gaulle was in a tiff with the British and the Americans, who refused to tap him as the inevitable ruler of postwar France and were insisting on an interim Allied military government. Winston Churchill was exasperated, and it ended with Charles de Gaulle calling the British prime minister “a gangster�
� and setting off for Bayeux, France, on June 14.

  De Gaulle’s accusation aside, a whole cadre of real-life gangsters was running amok by that point in Paris. On June 14, Joseph Darnand—who had earned himself the sorry sobriquet “the French Himmler”—was the Vichy minister of the interior. He directed the day-to-day terror operations for the French police, which Josée’s father, Pierre Laval, officially headed.

  But Darnand was running a rogue operation. With his promotion to secretary, the city descended into what was effectively a civil war between his paramilitary Milice goon squads and the ruthless guerrilla resistance network. Even as late as the end of June, astonishingly few French citizens were actively resisting the German occupation. Before the summer ended, the organized resistance would swell to perhaps a couple of hundred thousand people in all of France—less than 3 percent of the population, no matter what tales of bravado anyone told later.

  As the landings at Normandy wound down and word spread that the Allies were gaining ground by the end of the month, the senior German administrators were showing signs of apprehension. Ambassador Otto Abetz and his French-born wife, Suzanne, were making evacuation plans. Hans-Jürgen Soehring encouraged Arletty to do the same.

  Once again, Arletty laughed off his worries. She couldn’t believe that Otto and Suzanne were planning an escape route. Otto was “[t]he first German official I met,” she complained to Hans-Jürgen. It had been at Sacha Guitry’s house in 1940. If he were to leave, it would be the end of an era.

  Hans-Jürgen, who talked to Otto and Suzanne about the situation, knew that when the Allies arrived no one was going to imagine the occupiers had been neutral. Arletty could leave with them when they left for Germany. The paperwork might take a while, but Josée promised that she would help. Or he could take her with him to Berlin if she wanted. He even offered to arrange for her to go to Switzerland if fleeing to Germany offended her patriotic sympathies. But he urged her to do something—and to leave Paris at once.