The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  The Vichy minister of education, poet Abel Bonnard, arranged a sumptuous reception at the Hôtel Ritz on the opening night. There to savor champagne and toast the sculptor and the remaking of French art under the Germans were the usual Hôtel Ritz regulars. Dancer Serge Lifar and Arletty chatted blithely with Sacha Guitry. Cocteau wrote a sycophantic poem “saluting” Breker’s genius and national spirit. (In return, his request that several friends in the film industry be exempted from forced labor in Germany was granted.) Present, of course, were collaborationist leaders Pierre Laval and Fernand de Brinon.

  From around Paris, too, came many of the most important modern artists still living in the city, including many celebrated abstract and fauvist painters. Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen, and André Derain all accepted invitations. Paul Rosenberg’s gallery collections included paintings by all of them.

  Those in the inner circle of the art world were not the only ones to embrace the exhibition. It was extraordinarily well attended by Parisians. In the ten weeks it ran—from May 15 until July 31—more than 120,000 French citizens attended the exhibition. Picasso was among them. The exhibition catalog was printed in thousands more copies. With much of the pageantry and with the appearances of the cultural celebrities of Paris captured on newsreels for circulation throughout the Third Reich, it was a German propaganda triumph.

  By the time the exhibition closed at the end of July, the climate in Paris had shifted precariously. As Arno Breker later remembered, the opening of his exhibition coincided with the killings on the streets of the city of several German officers out acting as tourists. The retributions were terrible. By mid-July, the Vichy government was rounding up Jewish foreigners beginning to round up Jewish foreigners systematically in the capital, using stadia as makeshift internment camps.

  But Arno and Demetra Breker stayed on in Paris. They would not leave the capital until he had completed, from his rooms at the Hôtel Ritz in the winter of 1942–43, a bronze portrait of the ballet star and director Serge Lifar. The couple were the beneficiaries of a massive income now in Germany, and that summer—sometimes in the company of Hermann Göring and often helped at the hotel, one supposes, by Hans Wendland, Karl Haberstock, and the mysterious Süss—the Brekers began amassing their own private modern art collection. In it, the works of Picasso, Derain, and Vlaminck were particularly well represented.

  Such works were disappearing from Paris by the time the summer of 1942 ended. Disdained by the grandest collectors in Paris—the Reischsmarschall and his Führer—modern works of art found their way increasingly to the open international markets in Switzerland. On July 27, 1942, in a massive bonfire erected outside the Jeu de Paume, however, many of the works of France’s “degenerate,” modern, “Bolshevik” artists that remained were destroyed in a symbolic cultural cleansing by auto-da-fé. It was the grim logical conclusion of the remaking of French art in a Germanic vision that Arno Breker’s exhibition had inaugurated.

  That auto-da-fé was a dark portent. Soon it would not be just works of modern art that would be incinerated in a broad policy of cultural cleansing. By August 1944, no one could remain ignorant of that fact or morally neutral in the face of it. Certainly, that morning in Paris on the first day after the liberation, Alexandre Rosenberg was preparing himself for what he and his men might discover.

  The train that they were bound to intercept had been loaded by a Wehrmacht soldier, and he had been given stern orders to see to it that this convoy safely reached German territories. It had been noticed first when it was delayed, weeks earlier, at the station in Le Bourget, less than a mile and a half from the massive compound at Drancy. From the summer of 1942 until the last trains departed in 1944, as many as seventy thousand people passed through the camp on the way to their deaths in the east. As one of the main centers for the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), there were also vast offices in the complex set up for processing their confiscated possessions. When the Allies liberated the compound that August, they found 1,500 survivors and acres of household objects.

  The convoy that morning was one of the last trains to leave the northeastern suburbs of Paris, and, while one woman named Rose Valland—a museum director—had guessed what was on board, Alexandre Rosenberg and his men had no idea what was awaiting them. If it was true that these cars had been delayed for weeks from Drancy in the summer heat, the sight might be unbearable.

  In a perilous operation, he and his men succeeded at last in exploding the tracks into twisted metal in front of the cargo as it rolled out of Aulnay toward Germany. Inside, those five priority cars contained not corpses but wooden crates, the last fruits of the German Möbel-Aktion—“Operation Furniture.”

  What Alexandre Rosenberg could never have anticipated was whose looted property had been intercepted. Inside the crates were hundreds of paintings. The works of the great modern artists of Paris—canvases by Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Renoir. Twenty-nine Braques. Sixty-four Picassos. Everywhere portraits of faces that he recognized from his childhood gazed back at him. All around him were works that had hung on the walls of his father’s gallery and in their private apartment in the 1920s and 1930s. They were faces that, on more than one occasion, had spent the occupation in luxury on the Place Vendôme with the occupiers.

  The paintings had somehow survived the auto-da-fé of 1942, somehow eluded the Swiss art dealers who descended on wartime Paris. Here was that lost, last shipment that the German ERR officials had packed before evacuating the capital. And Alexandre Rosenberg, by some amazing chance, had found the tangled threads of his own family’s wartime story.

  14

  Coco’s War and Other Dirty Linen

  Coco Chanel.

  THE FOOD WAS DONE, THE CHAMPAGNE WAS GONE, AND THE GIRLS HAD RETURNED TO THEIR HOMES TO EXPLAIN THE FACTS OF THE LIBERATION. THE SHOPS WERE CLOSED, THE STREETS WERE EMPTY, AND SUDDENLY WE REALIZED THAT THE WAR WAS NOT OVER. IN FACT, IT WAS GOING ON JUST TWENTY-FIVE MILES AWAY.

  —Robert Capa

  For Robert Capa, if the liberation of Paris was the most unforgettable day he had ever experienced, the “most unforgettable day plus seven was the bluest.”

  Late on that September morning, Capa’s hangover was the straightforward kind that came from too much carousing. He found himself “sitting in the bar of the Scribe Hotel, the Army’s grand gesture to the newspapermen, trying to teach [the bartender] Gaston to mix that most potent of pick-me-ups, the ‘Suffering Bastard.’ ”

  In fact, the sexual liberation that had taken place in Paris that first week had been nothing short of astonishing. “The city had gone crazy with rejoicing,” as Mary Welsh put it. “Everybody was eighteen years old, free of shackles, bursting with joy.” Few were celebrating harder than the thousands of Allied soldiers in the capital. It was already causing resentment.

  At the Petit Palais, the United States military was handing out free condoms to the troops. In the gritty red-light district of Pigalle, the prostitutes were seeing more than ten thousand men a day. Allied soldiers were passed out drunk on the Place Vendôme, and a stone’s throw from the Hôtel Ritz a shocked Jean Cocteau watched “American officers having lunch with whores off the street.”

  It was all something the military had expected, even encouraged. Before the Normandy landings in May 1944, the Allied intelligence service had put together a pamphlet titled France Zone Handbook No. 16, Part III, referred to, with tongue in cheek, as a guide to “Local Information and Administrative Personalities.” In fact, it was a list of brothels in Paris, along with their street addresses. Venereal diseases, the pamphlet warned the troops, were common in the French capital.

  For the French, who had already suffered four years of humiliation, the behavior was shocking, offensive, and disturbingly familiar. Brothels had also flourished under the Nazi occupation, multiplying sixfold in the capital. Even the prostitutes recalled later how wildly fantastic the all-night orgies had been under the Germans.

  Now it was more of the
same under the Allies—and especially the Americans—who couldn’t understand why some of the Parisians were beginning to resent the liberators’ presence. Jean Cocteau was not alone in thinking that this cultural difference was only going to become more difficult as the war continued. “The great joy that one should feel,” he wrote,

  has been negated by a feeling of malaise and sadness. . . . The organized disorder of the Americans contrasts with the style of German discipline; it is disturbing, it is disorienting. . . . [The] winter will be terrible because France under the German Occupation had the right and duty to be openly insolent, to eat, to glitter, to defy the oppressor, to say “you are taking everything from me and leaving me everything.” The Americans will not understand this process.

  The Americans had become, in the eyes of some of the French, the newest occupiers.

  At the Hôtel Ritz, the American “occupation” would last for nearly two years, and it had started already, despite the fact that, by September 2, 1944, many of the war correspondents were beginning to drift out of Paris. Fresh assignments were taking them that week to the front in Belgium or ultimately Holland.

  Among the American press corps who had come for the liberation, Robert Capa and Lee Miller were some of the last to leave the capital. Capa had an assignment that kept him in Paris much of September. Until mid-month, Lee Miller was still working the fashion angle as a reporter for Vogue magazine. Her post-liberation photographs of Marlene Dietrich in a satin evening gown were slated for an upcoming fall issue on the post-liberation haute couture revival.

  In fact, fashion had flourished under the occupation, and a good part of the luxury industry, in one way or another, had made its peace with life under the Germans. While some of the couturiers took secret pleasure in making clothes poorly for the wives of the German occupiers, few dared to refuse the commissions, and there had been regular fashion shows at the Hôtel Ritz throughout the war. The designer Lucien Lelong, a member of the hotel’s infamous Franco-German “roundtable” lunches, had flourished in particular. Those wartime monthly lunches at the Ritz, which brought together French and German industrialists, politicians, and designers to hammer out the economics of collaboration, began a conversation that would culminate, in just over a decade, in the creation of the European Economic Community. The conflict that was still steadily brewing between Charles de Gaulle and the Anglo-American liberators of Paris would fuel its revival.

  The Hôtel Ritz had been the center of the wartime fashion industry in more ways than just the roundtable lunches. Not only was the hotel located in the heart of the luxury district that has helped to define modern Paris but, in the first years of the occupation, some of the artists and journalists who stayed at the Ritz had been among fashion’s biggest consumers. “The wife of Steve Passeur, a [French] journalist and dramatist popular at the time,” for example, “missed no chance to be seen when the collections were shown. And as her position allowed her to live comfortably (the couple occupied a suite at the Ritz), expense did not bother her.” Women like “the daughter of Pierre Laval, Josée de Chambrun, who had to keep up [a] position in society and who attended Franco-German receptions . . . formed a distinct and limited circle. George Dubonnet’s wife, renowned for her legendary chic, was a case in point. Like the Steve Passeurs, the couple lived permanently at the Ritz” during the occupation.

  Everywhere in Paris after the liberation, the fashion houses were gearing up for a new season. The house of Chanel, however, was still shuttered. Coco Chanel had closed her atelier in 1940, when the occupation started, proclaiming proudly but some thought a bit disingenuously that it was “no time for fashion.” After all, she had kept her perfume boutique across the street from the Hôtel Ritz open and had made a wartime fortune selling Chanel No. 5 to eager German officers. Now American GIs were lined up along the sidewalk, looking for a souvenir to show that they, too, had been in Paris, either not knowing or not caring that Coco Chanel had spent much of the war trying to have her Jewish business partners stripped of their majority stake in the perfume company under the anti-Semitic laws of the occupation.

  Coco Chanel’s fashion house on rue Cambon remained closed, and there wasn’t any rush to relaunch the couture side of the business at that moment. Already past sixty and fabulously rich from the profits of Chanel No. 5 and decades at the top of the fashion world, Coco Chanel had effectively retired.

  Even if she had been interested in a return to fashion in that first week or two after the liberation, Chanel had bigger problems than putting together a new couture collection. So did her old friends from Hôtel Ritz circles Arletty, Sacha Guitry, and Jean Cocteau.

  There would be two kinds of justice in Paris for those accused of collaborating, neither pretty. First came the immediate extrajudicial purges. Those who had given aid and comfort to the occupiers—or were suspected of it—sometimes found a swift and brutal punishment at the hands of mobs of their neighbors.

  They were stripped, shorn, beaten, tattooed, raped, or occasionally summarily executed. The greatest humiliations were reserved for the women known as horizontal collaborators—women, in other words, who had slept with a German. The French would come to call it the épuration sauvage, or the “savage purging.”

  In town after town, the Allies and the war correspondents witnessed the same basic ritual upon liberation. Winston Churchill’s personal aide, Jock Colville, “watched an open lorry drive past, to the accompaniment of boos and catcalls from the French populace, with a dozen miserable women in the back, every hair on their heads shaved off. They were in tears, hanging their heads in shame.”

  At Chartres, Robert Capa and Time journalist Charles Wertenbaker entered the city just steps behind the troops. The first thing they heard was the voices of an angry mob shouting “Salope! Salope!”—the French word for “whore.” From the center of the town square came the stench of burning hair, a vast pile of blond and gray locks, still being shorn from the heads of the frightened women lined up against the walls of the public buildings in their torn dresses and undergarments. A young woman and a boy sold wine by the glass to the eager onlookers. At least twenty thousand women were shorn publicly in France after the landings at Normandy, perhaps more. German men, some estimates suggest, fathered during those years as many as eighty thousand French children.

  Across France and especially in Paris, Robert Capa would also take some of the iconic photographs of the épurations.

  For journalists, it was a complex business. In Chartres, a young woman in the French resistance, disgusted by wartime hypocrisy, begged someone to stop the spectacle. She bitterly told Capa, “It is cruel and unnecessary. They are soldiers’ women and tomorrow they will be sleeping with the Americans.” But war correspondents were another of the war’s neutral parties. A journalist’s right to witness the events of war depended on his or her status as an objective noncombatant.

  The second kind of postwar justice came later and took longer. The French call it the épuration légale, a mostly legal process of truth-and-reconciliation. In the end, nearly fifty thousand French people would be convicted of the crime of indignité nationale, or of disgracing the nation through their wartime acts of collaboration. Among them were many of the wartime Hôtel Ritz regulars. After all, to go to the Ritz during the war was by definition to socialize with the Germans.

  Arletty saw the handwriting on the wall clearly. One didn’t traipse around Paris on the arm of a German and not expect a visit now from one’s neighbors.

  No one had seen Sacha Guitry since the morning of August 23, 1944. Armed men had hauled him off, wearing only his canary-yellow Lanvin designer silk pajamas and a fedora. The arrest had interrupted his daily telephone conversation with Arletty.

  The men escorted him, she had discovered, to the infamous Vélodrome d’Hiver. During the war, this winter bicycle-racing stadium had been the site of the first mass roundup by the French police of Jewish residents in the Paris region in the summer of 1942, after the implementation of
Heydrich’s “Final Solution.” The inmates were crammed in and kept under the glass roof of the cycling stadium in growing heat and without water for “five horrifying days.” People passing by on the streets heard the screams of those who had gone mad or were trying to commit suicide.

  Pierre Laval had signed some of the key documents that had made those deportations possible, and it was an almost entirely French-led massacre. “The truth,” historians remind us, “is that not one German soldier—not one—was mobilized for the entire operation.”

  Now, in September 1944, the stadium had been turned into a detention center for Parisians who aided the Germans during the occupation. Sacha Guitry was denounced as a collaborator, his name splashed across all the major newspapers. There were those in Paris, after all, who remembered that Hermann Göring had visited Sacha at home and that the actor had been seen socializing gaily with General von Stülpnagel. At his trial that autumn, there were accusations flying about secret cash payments and “intelligence with the enemy.” Determined and unrepentant, Sacha denied it all stoutly.

  After Guitry’s arrest, Arletty fled her apartment, heading first to an address on rue François 1er, where she met up with Sacha’s girlfriend, the Romanian actress Lana Marconi. They turned to some friends in the resistance to see if someone could protect her.

  Afterward, Arletty would never quite say what happened. What she did say later, in her memoirs, was only that a “Countess X,” well connected in the resistance, put her in touch with a “Lord H.” With their help she was taken in a gleaming Cadillac to the house of another acquaintance—who bluntly declared when she arrived on his doorstep, “I refuse the package.” There were only a few reasons for a Frenchwoman to be rushing into hiding in the days after the liberation, and none of them was admirable.