Part One: The Siege — Chapter 3 - The Barman of the Ritz

JUNE 15, 1940

“So, here we are, facing down the Krauts again,” Georges whispers. “Though this time, they’re less likely to shoot us.”

It is by now past midnight, and Frank has a vicious migraine.

What a strange night!

After the colonel’s departure, the German officers carried on drinking greedily—mostly brandy, thrown back in one gulp.

And, of course, without paying. Such is the price of defeat.

It seems to him that several lifetimes have passed in the space of a few hours.

“Go home to bed, Frank,” says Georges, holding a mop. There is a look of resignation in his eyes. “We’re going to have to learn to live with them.”

Frank lights a cigarette and hands one to his old comrade.

They both slump onto the chesterfield sofa and Frank stares at a smoke ring as it rises towards the ceiling.

The two men are silent for a moment, as though trying to dispel their gloomy thoughts with plumes of cigarette smoke, then Georges stubs his cigarette out in the brass ashtray and hauls himself out of the sofa.

“You know what?” he says. “When I saw those bastards coming into the bar, I thought about my friends. All the men who died in Péronne with their guts hanging out. And for what? To see the Huns trooping in here tonight? I tell you, Frank, I feel like crying.”

Frank and Georges, like millions of others, have spent the past twenty years living with their nightmares of the trenches. Some wounds never really heal, and tonight the German soldiers rubbed salt into those wounds.

Frank goes down to the basement to fetch his leather bag from his locker.

He says goodnight to the doorman and steps out onto the deserted Rue Cambon. The Germans have introduced a strict eight o’clock curfew, but they have issued Frank a special Ausweis, a permit allowing him to pass safely through the streets at night. Alone with his thoughts, he winds his way across the city.

It is almost two in the morning when he steps through the door of his building on the Rue Henri-Rochefort. As he collapses on his bed, he does his best to think of happier memories. New York, nights spent at the bar with the great French actress Arletty, with Hemingway: anything that might transport him back to a gentler life. A half-measure of nostalgia, a pinch of sadness, a drop of despair and two dashes of hope—this is the cocktail for this evening.

Diary of Frank Meier

It was Scott Fitzgerald who first gave me the idea. It was Christmas Eve, 1934.

“Write a book, Frank. You’ll make a mint!”

A book? Me? About what? I’d had to ask.

“About you, tell us all your secrets!”

Propped at the bar with a dry Martini, Fitzgerald was insistent.

“Writing a book is like plowing a furrow: it makes you immortal.”

He was convinced that with my fame as a barman, publishers would rush to sign up a collection of my recipes and barkeeping tips.

“You’ve learned the ways of the intellectual elite, Frank,” he said. “Write your book and become one of them.” His words were still ringing in my head two years later, at the party held at the Ritz to celebrate the publication of my book: The Artistry of Mixing Drinks, an English-language guide for worldly men. A print run of one thousand, not a single copy more. Rarity drives demand. In the fifteen years that I had been at the Ritz, I had become a respected figure in Parisian high society. My hospitality was selective, my criteria were strict; only the crème de la crème were allowed in my bar, and no other bar in the world had a clientele as illustrious as mine. I counted among my patrons Parisian dandies, New York novelists, wealthy heirs, and sophisticated diplomats. This book was my life’s work: signed and numbered copies belonged to the Duke of Windsor, Josephine Baker, Georges Mandel, Gabrielle Chanel, Noël Coward, Sacha Guitry, Jean Cocteau, Winston Churchill, the dancer Serge Lifar, Cole Porter, Arletty, Hemingway, and even Kermit Roosevelt, the president’s son.

The launch party was the height of elegance and refinement. In honor of the occasion, Christofle, the most famous silversmith in all of Europe, had sent me a set of silver cocktail shakers, strainers, and long-handled spoons—exquisitely crafted treasures that shimmered and glistened as I wielded them behind my bar. I invented, I smiled, I whirled. Georges, my faithful lieutenant, was dressed to the nines. He was tender and mocking by turns. This was his night too, a night that celebrated bartenders everywhere. The photographer Roger Schall showed up with his Rolleiflex and Hemingway wrote me a sonnet in rhyming alexandrines. Arletty, wearing a slim-fitting yellow and white suit, a carved rose-gold necklace, and long gloves in dove gray, a black fascinator perched insolently on her brow, called me “Frank, mon chéri.” The peerless star had got all dressed up for my book, for me. I was ecstatic. By this point, I was driving a Bentley, dining from time to time at La Tour d’Argent, buying hand-tailored suits, and tonight everyone who was anyone in Paris was here to honor me.

And then she arrived, at 8:30 p.m. With her twinkling eyes and her caustic humor, Blanche Auzello, Claude’s wife, instantly bewitched the assembled company, including Hemingway and Fitzgerald. She dazzled in her pencil dress of purple and black velvet, perched on patent-leather stilettos paired with fishnet stockings, wearing a dragonfly necklace studded with aquamarines.

Her husband Claude and I have always held each other in great esteem, because each of us knows what the journey to the highest rungs of society has cost us. That night, as a nod to my past, he gave me an old coaster from The Brunswick that he had kept, a little gesture that brought a tear to my eye.

It was a magical evening. Cocktails flowed like water. I paid for everything. Never skimp on glory. From time to time, between mixing cocktails, I thought about the little Austrian boy curled up between the cattle in the freezing carriage bound for Munich. I thought of Charley Mahoney, of Sofia, of the friends who lost their lives in Verdun, a hell from which—I don’t know why—I had emerged unscathed.

One person was not in attendance that evening: my wife, Maria. This was not her world; worse than that, she despised it. “Your cosmopolitan crowd,” she would say, “sucks the blood out of our country.”

I should have realized that she would leave me. It was for the best. The following day, Maria joined the nationalist Action Française movement and six months later we were divorced. Fortunately, my professional success distracted me from thoughts of my collapsing marriage. Fitzgerald was right, that book will be the last vestige of Frank Meier in the world that comes after. Proof of my existence.