The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  She wouldn’t listen. The point of crisis didn’t come for Arletty until the end of the first week of July, when two things happened.

  First, Hans-Jürgen Soehring told her that he was leaving, regardless. He still wanted her to go with him. But the Germans were going to evacuate Paris.

  The second was a brutal murder. The victim was her old friend from the Hôtel Ritz, Georges Mandel. Pierre Laval’s Milice gangsters had taken him out to the forest of Fontainebleau, not far from the city, on July 7 and shot him as a warning to the resistance. Arletty could no longer avoid the stark reality: for some people, Paris was getting dangerous. The trouble was, she couldn’t yet see that she was among the vulnerable.

  Georges Mandel’s wartime story had started and ended in Paris. What had happened was ugly. Journalist-turned-politician Georges Mandel had been a prisoner for nearly four years, and he had spent much of the first part of the internment in solitary isolation outside Berlin. In the spring of 1943, his captors had transferred him to Buchenwald, where for a while—until the Gestapo took offense at their tone—he was at last allowed to write a few love letters to Béatrice Bretty. He didn’t confess in those letters how desperately ill he was already. “With camp sleeping pills,” he noted in his last journal entry, “I slept only five hours. . . . Woke up sick, with pain and nausea. Had a great deal of difficulty in getting up and dressing. Took only a cup of weak tea in the morning. . . . I feel very much alone. Cannot count on anyone. Every move I make is watched.” He was under constant surveillance.

  Now word was spreading throughout the Hôtel Ritz that a favorite long-term resident—the man whose encouragement had almost single-handedly convinced Marie-Louise Ritz that she was right to keep the hotel open—had been brought back to Paris and assassinated. The orders had come from Ministry of Justice offices just across from the Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme.

  Behind the scenes it had been a wrenching weeklong showdown between Pierre Laval and Otto Abetz. On the first of the month, a smug Abetz—who had been agitating for this death for months—told Laval, as the head of the Vichy ministers, that the Jewish prisoner was being flown to Paris. Laval was to make sure he was executed. “This isn’t much of a gift you’re giving me,” Laval protested weakly.

  A week later, the French Gestapo put nine bullets into Georges Mandel, loaded his riddled body into the trunk of a car, and shot up the vehicle. It was meant to mock the resistance by making the death of Georges Mandel look like the act of a deranged French movement.

  Hearing the news in London, Georges Mandel’s old friend Winston Churchill couldn’t help feeling downtrodden. Charles de Gaulle was still stirring up friction with the Anglo-Americans. Mandel was, Churchill had always proclaimed, “the first resister.” That last summer of the occupation, the British prime minister could be heard wishing aloud that things had turned out differently for France and her allies. Those tensions between de Gaulle and the Anglo-American alliance would be a lasting legacy of the war and shape the future of a modern, postwar Europe.

  The newspaper coverage was a sign of just how dark the climate was in Paris that summer. For those who cared to remember the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, the rhetoric was depressingly familiar. Je Suis Partout, a right-wing newspaper formerly edited by the French writer Robert Brasillach, and now by a certain Pierre-Antoine Cousteau reported the news of the assassination in the language of stark anti-Semitism: “We regret that the Jew Mandel, who had deserved death a thousand times . . . was not publicly judged and shot. But the most important thing is that the Jew Mandel no longer exists.”

  Laval insisted that the death of his ancient political archrival was not his doing. In fact, although it was late in the war for Laval—the man who signed the Jewish deportation orders—to be developing a conscience, he swore that he had tried to stop it. He had only heard of the assassination—and “I cannot use any other word” for it, he had sputtered in fury—on the morning of July 8. The orders came, Laval was certain, from the highest reaches of the German government. It didn’t take much to suspect that Otto Abetz knew something about it. “You are to go immediately to the German embassy,” he told a subordinate, “and tell Abetz quite plainly” that this is the end of it. “One corpse is enough!”

  But soon there would be other corpses.

  The assassination was a new escalation in the gangster-style warfare sweeping through Paris, and what was suddenly clear to many of those who had collaborated with the Germans was that neutrality was not going to be much of a defense when—not if, but when—Paris was liberated. Laval was insistent that he had done nothing to betray his country. “I was,” he said until the end, nothing more than “the trustee in bankruptcy.” Some in his quisling government were even now turning on him, decrying his “policy of ‘neutrality’ ” and demanding fuller French support for the Third Reich—and greater powers for the bureaucracy that had betrayed him.

  Beyond those inner circles of collaboration and accommodation, where he was disdained for his weakness, Laval knew that many of his countrymen loathed him. Few in Paris would believe that the execution had not been his doing. As the Allied troops drew closer to the capital, a time of judgment was coming.

  With the murder of Georges Mandel, Pierre Laval had lost, as a fellow in the ministry later remembered, the only man “capable of interceding effectively for him on the day of reckoning.” For Laval—who had started his own career in the law and was no stranger to judgment—Sartre’s play Huis Clos had already proven prophetic: there was no exit strategy possible any longer. He knew it the moment he set down the telephone receiver that morning.

  Arletty had seen Georges Mandel for the last time on the docks in Bordeaux in 1940. She had watched as the boat carrying Béatrice Bretty to exile and safety crept from the harbor. Arletty had decided not to leave on one of those last boats but to return home instead to Paris.

  Mandel had refused to flee, too, despite Churchill’s urgings. He had gone on to fight with the Free French in North Africa. He had been captured almost immediately and betrayed into the hands of German captors.

  A few days later, Arletty would catch her last glimpse of Pierre Laval on a street in Paris. He was walking near the river, making his way back from Mandel’s funeral. She watched for a moment as he turned his footsteps, hunched and weary, toward the Notre Dame cathedral.

  For weeks, Arletty had dismissed out of hand all of Hans-Jürgen Soehring’s plans and worried suggestions. Now she considered them seriously for the first time. Over and over, she had refused his pleading. “Me, leave?” she kidded him. “Never. I’d prefer to have my head cut off in France. In my country.” “When I said to him I wouldn’t go,” she remembered afterward, “he said to me: ‘I’ll save it.’ ”

  Now Soehring wasn’t making any more promises about the Germans saving the French capital.

  She called Sacha Guitry, her old confidant. He knew she was struggling with her decision. “She was already uneasy,” he later remembered. “She spoke, even her, of eventual troubles. She chatted a bit—but only for form.” She didn’t want to admit it, but the fearless Arletty was getting nervous.

  Arletty simply could not bring herself to trade in reality. She had lived in cocooned luxury throughout the occupation as a movie star and a celebrity. Sometimes the line between life and those fantasy projections had become more than a little blurry.

  That sense of unreality would be her undoing. The German administrators billeted at the Hôtel Ritz and at the confiscated grand private mansions throughout Paris saw the future plainly. In the grand suites along the Place Vendôme, the Nazi officers were packing.

  Faced with the choice between bravado and acknowledging her vulnerability, Arletty did what had made her famous as a movie character time and time again. She resorted to ironic jocular defiance. She weighed in her mind the questions of neutrality and culpability and decided that none of it—this war and all its ugliness—had been her business. Her only crime, as far as she could see, was falling in l
ove with a charming officer who happened to be German, and that was surely her private affair. For anyone who challenged her liaison with the occupiers, she had a sharp quip at the ready: “If you hadn’t let them in, I wouldn’t have slept with him.” Later, she would put it more crudely: “My heart is French, but my ass is international.”

  She loved Hans-Jürgen Soehring. She loved him not just passionately but dramatically, even distractedly. But she stubbornly told him again that she would not leave Paris. This decision now would have to be irrevocable. Things between them would never be the same again, not with what came after.

  It was only after Soehring had gone that Arletty began to suspect that her defiance and defensiveness would have consequences. Paris seemed lonelier and more brutal than she had imagined possible. When she called Guitry now, it wasn’t just to chat.

  “What do you think is going to happen?” she asked him.

  Sacha told her, “Don’t worry.”

  But the words meant nothing to either of them any longer.

  Tearfully, she told Sacha that she wished she had gone with Hans after all. Perhaps she would, in the weeks to come, leave Paris. But leaving now was no longer that easy. In the summer of 1944 at the Ritz they were all huis clos—behind closed doors in a city on the brink of an explosion of wild vigilante justice that would leave even a war-weary world gasping at its cruelty.

  Arletty would soon find herself one of its main targets.

  7

  The Jewish Bartender and the German Resistance

  The Hôtel Ritz Bar, Paris, just before the occupation.

  A GOOD BARMAN REALLY REQUIRES EVERYTHING A DIPLOMAT SHOULD HAVE AND SOMETHING MORE.

  —introduction to Frank Meier’s The Artistry of Mixing Drinks, 1936

  In the rue Cambon bar at the Hôtel Ritz, it all looked lustrously placid. The mahogany counter gleamed, and Frank saw that overnight someone had polished the brass and the mirrors until they sparkled, just as always.

  But Friday, July 21, 1944, was anything but an ordinary day at the Ritz, and Frank was rattled.

  Both General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military commander of Paris, and his liaison, Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, had been edgy since the previous Friday. The general lived in rooms at the Ritz and had governed day-to-day operations in the city from the hotel since his appointment.

  Word had spread quickly through Paris that the day before a German nationalist attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler had failed miserably. It was a spectacular loss for the German resistance.

  Frank knew that a good part of the plot had taken shape over his cocktails. He knew because he’d been part of it, at least tangentially.

  The lobby of the Ritz was swarming already with storm troopers from the SS—Heinrich Himmler’s notorious Schutzstaffel militia—and even Germans who had known nothing of the plot were frightened. General von Stülpnagel, ordered to return to Berlin instantly, had attempted suicide that morning on the road out of Paris and was now in the custody of the Gestapo. Von Hofacker and Hans Speidel, another German colonel and regular on the Place Vendôme, were missing.

  Frank had worked as a kind of agent for all of them.

  With so many high-ranking Nazis caught up in this debacle, it wasn’t likely that the Gestapo would come asking him questions immediately. No, it was Blanche Auzello who was the real liability. The Gestapo had arrested her six weeks earlier, on June 6, when she had rashly been out celebrating the Allied landings at Normandy. She was Jewish. Frank knew because he had helped her forge a passport. She was also working with the resistance.

  In fact, Frank knew of at least two other members of the Ritz staff who were also running defiant operations. One way or another, a good part of the staff was in on the secret. The Ritz was just too small a place to hide everything. Now they all faced the ultimate test of loyalty and mettle: Would someone crack under the atmosphere of terror and betray them all to the Gestapo? Was there some way to give the weakest links among them a warning?

  Shrugging into his white bar coat and adjusting his pince-nez neatly, Frank thought back to the week before. Last Friday had been Bastille Day—July 14—the French patriotic national holiday. In a sign of how quickly things were changing, a hundred thousand Parisians had turned out to face down the panzer tanks of the military government and had closed off the streets with gunshots and bonfires. German military intimidation quelled the demonstration, but for the first time there had been a distinct whiff of smoke and sullen resistance in the air.

  That night Colonel Speidel unexpectedly returned to Paris. He had lived at the Hôtel Ritz full-time for several years at the beginning of the war, when he first took up his post as the chief of staff for the military commander of the city in 1940. For the first two years after the fall of France, Speidel had been more or less in charge of overseeing the hotel operations, which mostly meant a fair bit of smoothing ruffled diplomatic feathers and trying to explain why caviar was in short supply during wartime. It was the perfect location for his second assignment: nurturing a select group of artists and scientists who would continue to keep Parisian culture vibrant. It was part of the Führer’s grand vision. In fact, when Adolf Hitler visited Paris in the first summer of the occupation, Hans Speidel had been his tour guide.

  Now Speidel had moved on to more important military and political matters and spent most of his days at the fortress château of La Roche-Guyon, twenty-five miles outside the capital. It was regional military headquarters, and he hadn’t been back in Paris since April, when he’d started a new appointment as the chief of staff to the commander of Army Group B, the “Desert Fox,” Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. When Hans did make it to Paris, it was the Hôtel Ritz that felt like home, and everyone still remembered him.

  As Frank thought back over the risks and the vulnerabilities and all the times the staff at the Ritz had evaded German attention, it was hard not to think of Hans Speidel. For one thing, Hans was one of the Germans who surely suspected Blanche’s true identity. It was whispered that back in the 1920s she’d stepped off the boat in Paris as Mademoiselle Blanche Rubenstein, a Jewish-born German-American B-grade film starlet, the lover of an Egyptian prince and playboys.

  Coco Chanel also knew her secret from those early days. One day, passing Blanche on a back staircase at the Ritz, the aging fashion designer had stopped her. “One of my salesgirls told me you are a Jewess, Blanche,” she had mentioned. “You can’t prove you’re Jewish, can you?” she continued. Nothing more was said, and it was a cryptic sort of comment, but Blanche read the innuendo ominously. Everyone knew that Chanel was willing to play dirty when it came to the Jewish question. Her lawyer, René de Chambrun, the husband of Pierre Laval’s fashionable daughter, Josée, was already helping her try to have her perfume company taken from the Jewish business partners to whom she had sold a majority stake in the early 1920s. And Blanche was not one of Coco’s favorites.

  When the Germans had looked into Blanche’s paperwork, everything was technically in order. Her passport for years had read Blanche Ross, Catholic, from Ohio. Yet she didn’t seem to have a clear idea of where on a map one located Cleveland. No one had been persuaded. Somehow, the matter never went any further, and because she was married to a French citizen, she had been allowed to stay in Paris.

  Frank was glad that Blanche hadn’t cracked then, and he hoped she wouldn’t crack now either. However, with a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and Göring linked to hotel residents, it was easy to imagine a clever Gestapo agent putting renewed pressure on her.

  The passport was old news, of course. Frank had been the one who helped her to fake it more than a decade earlier. He was still helping forge passports for people who needed to get out of occupied France. He had put her in touch with a Jewish contact named Greep, who for a hundred dollars had forged the false papers and knocked a few years off Blanche’s official age in the process. She had renewed the passport with the American consulate, and the new document was perfectly legitimate.

&
nbsp; The trouble was, Blanche had worked with Greep more recently. Greep was also part of the resistance, and they had needed his help as part of an operation to help a downed British Royal Air Force gunner escape the capital. Blanche spoke German like a native, and throughout the war she helped fallen airmen make their way out of enemy territory through various underground networks. Airmen were falling from the skies again with a startling regularity.

  Blanche, though, was in prison, and the trouble was that even at her best she wasn’t particularly discreet or reliable. She liked the ill-timed show of defiance. In fact, it was ill-timed defiance that accounted for her present predicament—which was not the first time she had been arrested by the Gestapo. According to one source, she and an Eastern European girlfriend named Lily Kharmayeff were dining at Maxim’s on June 6, when the news of the Normandy landings was making some of the Germans especially ferocious. Different accounts of the story were making the rounds. Some said a tipsy Blanche repeatedly demanded in German a rendition of “God Save the King” from the orchestra and complained about the fresh oysters being reserved for the Germans. Others said that she had turned on two Frenchwomen having an amorous lunch with Nazi lovers and told them plainly that they were whores and traitors. Her nephew later remembered that Blanche claimed to have thrown a glass of champagne on the crotch of a German officer when he offered her a “Heil Hitler!” Those who knew her best suspected that any of those comments were unfortunately likely, though the stories of her several arrests are frequently jumbled. A lot of people in Paris appreciated the sentiments, but expressing them aloud was foolhardy.