The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  The Hôtel Ritz had been one of the couple’s favorite retreats since the 1930s. Back in the days when the young duke had still been styled Edward, Prince of Wales, he had partied there boisterously, once leading the discerning maître d’hôtel Olivier Dabescat to observe that, in his experience, only three people knew how to host a dinner party properly—Prince Esterhazy, Elsa Maxwell, and the Prince of Wales. The duke and duchess had later kicked off their honeymoon at the Ritz in 1937, in company with their pro-fascist American friends Charles and Fern Bedaux, whose château at Candé hosted the wedding celebrations.

  They had stayed on as regular visitors until the eve of the occupation. In the days before the fall of France in June 1940, the Windsors fled the capital along with the rest of French high society. Much of the gratin that spring decamped to Biarritz, where, waiting for visas that would mostly never come, the glitterati blithely continued a dizzying round of more cocktail parties and dinners, this time from rented suites and mansions. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, however, had a distinct advantage when it came to crossing the border out of France in the spring of 1940: the British government was determined that the royals would not fall into the hands of the Germans as prisoners of war. The British leaders were equally determined that the Windsors wouldn’t go willingly over to the Germans, either. There were periodic disturbing reports that the couple had secretly received the promise of Hermann Göring and the Führer himself that, if the Germans occupied Britain, they would be returned to power. The Duchess of Windsor was an old friend of Pierre Laval, and American intelligence files uneasily noted that “the Duke of Windsor was labeled as no enemy of Germany [and was] considered to be the only Englishman with whom Hitler would negotiate any peace terms, the logical director of England’s destiny after the war.” Even rumors of this sort were a potential political and public relations disaster for the Allies. So the British stashed the royals for the duration of the war on the island of Bermuda, where they still caused Winston Churchill more headaches than he needed.

  After the war, with antifascist antipathy running high in post-Blitz London and with King George VI wary of testing the limits of his brother’s political ambitions, the Windsors returned again to France. And George VI was wise to be cautious: the duke and duchess definitively had not given up their dream of ceremonially ruling again over Britain and its territories. Far from it: grasping the reins of power in England was something they were planning.

  In his abdication speech to the British nation on December 11, 1936, Edward had announced resolutely, “I now quit altogether public affairs, and I lay down my burden.” He couldn’t imagine life, he proclaimed, without the woman he loved beside him. Less than a decade later, he was no longer convinced that having both was impossible. As early as 1946, the duke and Wallis were covertly hatching a plan to prevent Princess Elizabeth from inheriting the throne as Queen Elizabeth II. At fifty-seven, the duke had discovered that the charm of the life of the idle playboy was not inexhaustible. And living up to the love affair of the century was sometimes hard going.

  This postwar plot to return the duke of Windsor to the throne of Britain has only recently been discovered in private royal correspondence, by a particularly intrepid archivist. What the documents reveal for the first time is that, astonishingly, from 1946 until as late as 1952, the duke and duchess, in conversations in Paris and in a series of letters, worked backroom channels and strategized ways to displace the young princess.

  As long as George VI remained hearty, there was no question of a coup d’état in Britain. But the king’s health was uncertain. It was a tempting opportunity. In 1946, the king was seriously ill, and Princess Elizabeth was barely twenty. With a fellow British aristocrat, Kenneth de Courcy, the duke and duchess began taking steps that would allow the duke to fill the power vacuum that would surely develop if the king died before his daughter’s role was firmly established.

  The trouble was that the king inconveniently kept pulling through one health crisis after another before concrete plans could be implemented. And the Duke of Windsor was perhaps a bit too equivocating in his approach to political betrayal. By the time his brother was hospitalized for a second time, in the spring of 1949, the young Princess Elizabeth was still vulnerable, and some in the British aristocracy and government were anxious about her recent marriage to a young Greek nobleman named Philip, from a German ducal house. Had the duke acted then, it was a dangerous moment, and it is not impossible that he could have succeeded.

  The strategy set out for the duke by his advisers was a straightforward one of political rehabilitation. Kenneth de Courcy, on the ground in London, recommended that the duke and duchess return to England and establish themselves in a quiet and respectable life of rural retirement—but not too far from the city. Buy a large estate and take up agricultural modernization and domestic industry, he advised them. And make sure this new estate is near enough to London that those who worked the levers of power could drive down for country weekends and dinner parties. The princess was vulnerable because of her age and what some saw as the overreaching ambitions of the prince’s relatives. When the king passed away, so the logic went, the Duke of Windsor would be the obvious, reassuringly familiar “English” postwar alternative, if only he played his cards sensibly.

  There was just one crucial caveat. The duke was a notorious roué as a younger man. His womanizing and tawdry affairs in the 1920s and 1930s were a constant source of public—and private—censure and some disgust in elite circles. His marriage to the twice-divorced Wallis was not generally looked upon still with any great favor, but perhaps the nation could get used to it, as long as there were no hint of fresh scandal. Thus, de Courcy advised, “There should be a rigid refusal to be seen anywhere which might in the faintest degree give enemies the chance of putting out a play-boy propaganda.” There must also be no whispered innuendos about the duchess’s predilections. Too many people still remembered her love affair with Benito Mussolini’s late son-in-law, the Italian count Galeazzo Ciano, or the fact that Joachim von Ribbentrop sent her carnations.

  Once again, in 1949, the duke had hesitated. And in truth, it was a risky and sensitive undertaking that required treading lightly. In the spring of 1951, there seemed to be a new opportunity on the horizon. The king’s health was deteriorating badly. He was, by now, “walking with death,” as Winston Churchill famously put it. The duke’s mother, Queen Mary, was ailing. Coming home to sit at his mother’s bedside was as good a way as any to justify a return to Britain, and on June 3, 1951, the duke set off from Paris for London.

  Who knows what the duke was thinking on that fresh June morning. Perhaps he was still entertaining the fantasy of once again ruling over the country whose throne was his indisputable birthright. Certainly, many historians think so. That spring had seen the publication of his self-promotional memoirs, largely written the year before in rooms on the Place Vendôme, and the autobiography set just the tone of seriousness and sober reflection that the plan required. The wheels, he could have been forgiven for thinking, were in motion.

  Unfortunately for the duke, those dreams were already unraveling as a scandal took shape around him. That week in Paris it would escalate dramatically in his absence. In his planned political rehabilitation of his reputation, the duke had already made his first and fatal tactical error: he had unwisely left Wallis alone in the capital. In the six days that he was away, she would manage to do immense damage to the Windsors’ reputation—and to destroy any last chance of its rehabilitation.

  It all came down, of course, to sex and discretion. The duke must have suspected already that Wallis was carrying on in some fashion or another with their mutual friend and constant companion, the handsome and ultrarich American-born rake Jimmy Donahue. Jimmy’s cousin and staunch ally, the Princess Troubetzkoy, had until recently been famous as Mrs. Cary Grant. Most of the world knew her simply as the richest girl in the world, the heiress Barbara Hutton. Barbara and Jimmy’s mother shared between them the
largest portion of the immense Woolworth drugstore fortune—among the most sizable in the world in the 1950s. And Barbara Hutton lived, of course, in a grand suite at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris.

  The duke might have suspected the liaison—after all, it was hard to miss being the fifth wheel in one’s own marriage. But since Jimmy Donahue was boisterously homosexual, a good deal of indiscretion was put down to mere flirtation in the beginning by wagging tongues in the capital. It was a convenient cover. The truth was that, despite Jimmy’s sexual preference, he and Wallis had been lovers since they all sailed together on the transatlantic crossing of the RMS Queen Mary a year earlier.

  In the beginning, the duchess tried to be discreet. On riotous evenings out at nightclubs with Jimmy that first year, she made sure there were aristocratic chaperones to vouch for her good conduct. Opening the doors of a limousine unexpectedly, his friends found Wallis crouching on the floor so no one would catch sight of her in passing. But that weekend, when the duke was in London, things in the nightclubs on Montmartre escalated at last into some very public dirty dancing—and into a weeklong fling that took Wallis and Jimmy from one hot spot to another across the capital by night and found them in the afternoons cavorting in delicto at the Ritz, in the lavish suite lent to him for the purpose of some privacy by his millionaire cousin.

  “I knew it was physical,” Barbara Hutton’s personal secretary, Mona Eldridge, later admitted. It was just a confirmation of what everyone saw was happening. “I knew from the maid there was sexual activity,” Mona acknowledged. “She was in love with him, she was besotted by him, she chased him. She really fell for him.” And once the affair was out in the open anyhow, the duchess made a display of it. “No one,” one aristocratic onlooker put it, “could have behaved worse than the Duchess when she got her infatuation with Jimmy Donahue. She really flaunted her affair in a way that was quite unnecessary.” Soon she and Jimmy would publicly torment the duke with their liaison.

  Even if the duchess hadn’t tipped her hand, the storm of gossip about to break upon the Duke of Windsor was inevitable. Jimmy Donahue had a reputation as an incorrigible gossip with a mean-spirited sense of humor. That same aristocratic onlooker described him thus: “He was an alcoholic, he was a drug taker. He was sadistic and depraved and seriously vicious.” Once, he cruelly—but comically—impersonated the notoriously dumpy Ritz hostess Elsa Maxwell in a prank that earned him shocked gasps and snide giggles. He “turned up [at a popular restaurant] in a dress stuffed with pillows, wearing odd shoes and a five o’clock shadow, claiming to be Miss Maxwell, and noisily demanding her table.” Another time the heiress of the Guinness beer fortune, Aileen Plunket, remembered how at a dinner party he unzipped his pants, laid his privates on the dinner plate in front of him, amid the potatoes and gravy, and joked crudely about the enticements of this prize-specimen pink sausage, knife at the ready, to anyone who would listen. Now he bought the Duchess of Windsor half a million dollars’ worth of jewels as a present, charged to his mother’s account, and considered himself at perfect liberty to blithely tell all of Paris the details of their congress.

  By the time the duke returned to Paris on June 9, 1951, the duchess’s hijinks were the talk of the capital. In the cruel way of gossip, of course, there is no way of knowing precisely when the duke discovered the public nature of the scandal. One night not long afterward, though, the duchess’s flagrant badinage with Donahue reduced the duke to tears at a late-night cocktail table in a crowded room. And the worst of it was that the duchess was still smitten with her vicious playboy all that summer and autumn. She toyed with leaving the duke and ending even now the marriage that had cost him so dearly.

  In the end, of course, Wallis stayed, and her passion for Jimmy Donahue faded. But the spectacle destroyed any last hopes the duke still entertained of returning to Britain as the steady and domestic alternative to his niece. When his brother, King George VI, passed away at last on February 6, 1952, the youthful princess became Queen Elizabeth II. In the end, it was a sad and slightly shabby irony: among the rumpled sheets in a bedroom suite at the Hôtel Ritz, the Duke of Windsor had lost for a second time perhaps his chance at the throne of Britain, once again because of Wallis Simpson.

  And the duke and the duchess did buy their rural country estate and fade at last into a retirement. But this new estate was not an easy drive from London. They divided their time in the years to come, instead, between a villa in the posh suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, northwest of Paris, and a sprawling retreat some fifteen miles southwest, in the village of Gif-sur-Yvette.

  And for a certain circle in the capital—those who looked to the past as their brightest moment—life in the decades to come mirrored the old prewar patterns and prejudices. At their country estate, the Windsors entertained their neighbors and friends Sir Oswald Mosley, better known to history as the notorious founder of the British Union of Fascists, and his unapologetically pro-Nazi wife, the former Diana Mitford. Never quite understanding how the new world had its tangled roots in old conflicts, the Duke of Windsor would callously comment in the decade that followed, “I never thought Hitler was such a bad chap.” Instead of the power brokers of London, an aging Marlene Dietrich came down instead for weekend visits. In Coco Chanel’s suite at the Hôtel Ritz, the duke and duchess again enjoyed private dinners in the company of many of the old friends who had passed the war in comfort. In the space of just a few short years, even Paul Morand and Marcel Proust’s Princess Soutzo would again be part of the dinner company. It was an old world of privileged glamour, only slightly wrinkled now at the edges.

  The Ritz was starting to show its age as well in the 1950s. The only question was whether the hotel could find a way to entice a new generation to its doors by reviving the spirit of avant-garde daring and innovation that had, in those closing years of the nineteenth century, first made it famous. At the end of the nineteenth century, the reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair had launched the hotel on the path to decades of celebrity. In the 1960s, however, Charles de Gaulle’s determined anti-Americanism discouraged tourism in the capital. Soon long-standing season reservations were being canceled. New customers weren’t coming in the same numbers to replace them.

  And the global social scene moved, as it had been doing steadily since the 1930s, to New York City and increasingly Hollywood. The stars and starlets who had once clamored for cocktail tables at the Ritz bar had largely retreated to sprawling mansions under the palm trees of Los Angeles. That moment when Paris was the heartbeat of all that was new and glamorous had passed. For the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, that would mean trouble. Its celebrity was slowly fading and before long it would be on the brink of bankruptcy unless something could be done to change direction.

  There were those who doubted that it was possible. Already the longtime hotel staff was dubious. Soon bad tempers and squabbles would escalate into tragedy on the Place Vendôme in Paris.

  18

  The War’s Long Shadow

  May 29, 1969

  Claude Auzello, in his office at the Hôtel Ritz.

  THERE ARE STILL SCARS ON PARIS. CHUNKS OF SOME BUILDINGS SHOW IT PHYSICALLY. BUT A DEEPER, SPIRITUAL SCAR SHOWS EVERYWHERE.

  —Thomas S. Dodd, United States chief of counsel for the prosecution of Axis criminality

  The lobby of the Hôtel Ritz was quiet. Things at the Hôtel Ritz had been quieter in recent years in general, now that the Americans came less regularly and the hotel’s star was dimming. In fact, the Ritz was already sliding toward bankruptcy.

  It would be easy to blame Charles de Gaulle for that. He had resigned his presidency at last just weeks before, after a tumultuous decade in power. But in that decade, France had turned its back against its Anglo-American allies and sought new alliances with Germany. Twice he had used France’s veto power to exclude Great Britain from the emerging European Economic Community, a coalition that had its formal roots in a treaty signed in the spring of 1951 by the nations of France, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, It
aly, and the Netherlands. Those alliances, in the decades to come, would lay the foundations for the establishment of the European Union in 1993—and for the crises that would face that union in the new millennium to follow.

  In that time, France’s colonial possessions had spiraled further out of control, both in Indochina and in Africa. The senior hotel staff might have remembered an immigrant busboy named Ho Chi Minh who worked in the Ritz kitchens in the 1920s. By the 1960s, Ho Chi Minh had been a legend already for years in his country—the communist-run and still highly contested Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

  Fears of new conflicts and, in this post-atomic age, the power of new weaponry loomed large too. Somewhere over a desert in Algeria, France exploded its first atomic bomb in 1960. De Gaulle, convinced that “[n]o country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent,” withdrew his country from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Ironically, the commander in chief of NATO’s ground troops in postwar central Europe was the Ritz’s own Hans Speidel. He alone of the ringleaders at the hotel had survived that failed plot by the German resistance to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

  It was all a sign of just how many things in the world that Claude Auzello had known were rapidly shifting. He couldn’t help but find it alarming. Only a year ago—in May 1968—Paris had exploded with two weeks of strikes and a different kind of street warfare than what Claude remembered from those dizzying days of the liberation.

  Across France in the spring of 1968, eleven million workers and students took to the streets. Panicked, Charles de Gaulle fled the country, heading for refuge at French military bases in Baden-Baden, Germany. Half a million in Paris took to the streets, wishing him good riddance. Newspapers across the world flashed astonished headlines and told the world of the newest French “insurrection, there is no other word for it, [that] swept a stupefied Paris.”