Part One: The Siege — Chapter 2 - The Barman of the Ritz

JUNE 14, 1940

“Noch einmal, bitte!”

“Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann.”

There are at least twenty of them, polished boots and close-cropped hair. Gold buttons and pristine uniforms. Frank stands behind the bar. Bedaux has tried to strike up a conversation with the soldiers but has barely earned a glance from them and been forced to retreat. The German officers do not yet know who Charles Bedaux is, nor do they care. They are flush with the glory of their victory, and they feel right at home here.

Gathered around the bar, laughing and shouting, they order beer after beer. It feels almost like a Munich beer hall.

All of a sudden, there is a ripple among the crowd and the sea of officers parts to reveal a dashing gentleman with a determined stride.

“Good evening, Monsieur Meier,” he says in an accent as polished as his epaulettes. “Nice to see you again.”

Where on earth does this Kraut with his colonel’s stripes know me from?

“Good evening.”

The officer smiles benignly.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“Well, I—”

The face is familiar, but who the devil can he be…?

“Hans Speidel. I was military attaché to the German embassy in Paris some years ago.”

“Herr Speidel! Forgive me, I am embarrassed.”

“Pah—I’m sure it’s just the uniform.”

It all comes flooding back. Speidel was a very charming man, urbane and handsome, though his hairline is receding now and he wears glasses.

“What can I get you? No, wait, I know! A Golden Clipper.”

The colonel flashes a beaming smile.

“Frank Meier, the barman who knows the favorite tipple of every diplomat in Paris! Clearly, your reputation is well earned. I have never had a more delicious Clipper than here.”

“Georges, could you fetch me the Bacardi and the crème de pêche?”

“Nothing has changed here, Herr Meier,” says the colonel, looking around. “It still feels like home.”

From his jacket emblazoned with medals, Speidel takes a cork-covered book that the astonished barman instantly recognizes. The Artistry of Mixing Drinks. His book. The sight of the little book takes him back to a time that still feels nearby despite the bitter blows of the German advance. The gilded cover that once evoked evenings of laughter and revelry, of tailored suits and lively discussions, suddenly seems like a relic, an antique. It is a tribute to America, to F. Scott Fitzgerald, to the decade now referred to as “the roaring twenties.”

“I found a copy in Stuttgart. I paid some decrepit old baron a fortune for it. I have never dared attempt your recipes, to my wife’s despair… For the past month, I have been lugging it around in my kit bag. Would you be so kind as to sign it for me?”

All eyes have turned to Frank and Speidel.

My first night surrounded by Nazis, and I’m signing autographs.

“And now—a round of Royal Highballs for everyone, and a toast: to the Führer.”

The white onyx clock by the piano chimes eight as Frank begins to assemble the drinks.

“Herr Meier,” whispers Speidel, after the cheering has subsided, “I really must be going, General von Bock is expecting me for supper.”

“Of course, Colonel.”

“Would you please give my regards to the beautiful Madame Auzello?”

Blanche Auzello. The wife of Claude, the manager of the Ritz, and the man who gave Frank his bar.

Is this a test, or does Speidel truly not know how things stand?

Frank hesitates for a moment before saying gravely:

“Madame Auzello is in Nice, she traveled with her husband when he was mobilized.”

Speidel throws his shoulders back, a smile glinting on his epaulettes.

“Thank you for everything, Frank. You’ll see me again soon, I want to know all there is to know about life in Paris. Look after my men!”

“You can count on me, Colonel.”

The man turns on his heel.

Frank watches as he silently strides through the crowd of officers.

Who are you in this new world, Hans Speidel? Who are you and what do you want?

But Frank, who once thought he could determine a man’s whole character by his first drink, is no longer certain of anything.

Diary of Frank Meier

At last, I left Europe on November 28, 1898, overwhelmed by excitement and dread. Bound for New York, the city of free men. The ship was full to bursting. The passengers sang and danced, united by the rapture of new beginnings.

But when the crew cast off and the liner’s foghorn sounded, I suddenly felt a terrible wave of sadness at the thought of my mother. Leaving her was the price of my adventure. I was billeted with a group of Ukrainian Jews. We slept on the lowest deck, just above the cargo; if you reached out your hand, you could almost touch the ocean.

As the crossing progressed, as the ship pitched and rolled, I felt the thrill of freedom return. Being fulfilled, finding myself, still seemed like a distant goal, but I felt that the beginning of this new century was also the beginning of my adult life, and it promised to be prosperous, free, and joyous. At that time, no one could have envisaged the coming world wars and millions of dead. Perhaps I should have sensed it, this violence that lurked in the shadows. Out on the ocean, I would sometimes go up on deck with my comrades from Odessa to try to get something to eat. If we were lucky, the rich passengers from the upper decks would toss us food, which we would greedily take back to the ship’s hold. The rich folk looked at us with distaste; to them, we were little more than starving animals.

When I disembarked in New York, I left my history behind me.

Through a series of casual jobs, I came to know the slums and the dive bars of the Lower East Side before I dared push open the doors of Hoffman House at Broadway and 25th Street. At the time, it was one of the most fashionable addresses in the city, run by a virtuosic barman, Charley S. Mahoney. This tall, lanky man changed the course of my life. In 1902, he took me on as a bellhop for the Christmas holidays. I was on my way, and although I was on the very first rung, I had begun to climb the ladder towards the middle class.

A wind of freedom was blowing through New York; Hoffman House threw lavish parties where artists rubbed shoulders with industrialists, brokers, and former gold prospectors. Truth be told, I didn’t hurl myself into this social world: I studied its codes and its conventions, I never overreached and, unlike most of my coworkers, who were eager to take part in the nonstop party, I avoided getting drunk every night.

It did not take long for Mahoney to spot my industriousness and take me under his wing. The veteran barman taught me the secrets of the profession: attention to detail, the art of serving, acknowledging every customer, being available to everyone. Managing supplies, a taste for spirits—and the key: the art of mixing them. For months, I watched him transform individual ingredients by blending them together to create unique cocktails. Then I began to study their effects on customers: which spirits thrill, which soothe, which balance. I soon realized that every drinker has their own identity, that intoxication is not the same for everyone, and that all it takes is the right drink at the right time to calm a customer who has got a little carried away.

Some of my creations so appealed to Charley Mahoney that they ended up on the cocktail menu at Hoffman House. Le Pompadour, a word from my childhood that my mother had loved to roll around her tongue: rum, Pineau des Charentes, and lemon juice. Three simple ingredients but an incredible flavor. And so, gradually, I became a barman, a conductor of the symphonies of those wild nights. These years behind the bar blend into a series of magnificent snapshots, crowned by the 1904 New Year’s Eve Ball, one of the most magnificent ever held in New York. Perrier-Jouët flowed all night long, and at midnight Mahoney launched a fabulous fireworks display from the roof of the hotel as ladies in furs looked on in tipsy wonderment. Sporting a spotless jacket, I spent the evening dizzy with the sheer feeling of being alive, of being bound for glory. Late that night, I even kissed Sofia, a pretty young Italian immigrant. Another soul in exile. Blonde as a wheat field in Tuscany with a smile that could send a strong man sprawling and a beauty I have never forgotten.

But in 1907, the management decided to demolish the hotel and rebuild a more beautiful, more impressive, more modern Hoffman House. During the construction, they shuttered Mahoney’s bar and I went with it. I had to start all over again.

“You should go back to Europe, kid,” the great Buffalo Bill Cody said to me one night. “You’d make a killing!”

Buffalo Bill had become a regular at Hoffman House after his return from a triumphant tour of France with his Wild West Show. I listened, rapt, to his effusive descriptions of the grandeur and beauty of Paris, its storied history, its majestic avenues, its opulent hotels. But what most piqued my curiosity was his insistence that Parisians had a feverish appetite for all things American.

I had experienced the best New York had to offer, I had become a skilled barman. I had only to pack my trunks and recross the ocean. I was not stepping backwards, oh no, I was avoiding the fall, something I have managed to do all my life. And Bill Cody was right. In Paris, extravagance had taken on a giddy new dimension. Europe had only just discovered cocktails, and quickly developed a taste for them. The list of ingredients seemed endless, the quest for refinement a sport. I had learned all the mysteries of alcohol, and, as for the secrets of European society, they proved easy enough to discern for a boy who had grown up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire—albeit on the lowest echelon. I opened my first bar, The Brunswick, in June 1907 on the Rue des Capucines near the Opéra, in the heart of the business district where expatriate Americans lived, some five thousand souls from the New World.

Within months, the reputation of my bar skyrocketed, and every night Claude Auzello—who, at the time, was the young deputy manager of the Hôtel Claridge—would send me American guests from his hotel. Business was thriving when the first war against the Krauts broke out. In August 1914, inspired in part by the patriotism of Claude Auzello, and naively convinced that nothing could compare to the glories of the battlefield, I closed The Brunswick and enlisted in the Foreign Legion. I imagined that what people had begun to call “the Great War” would be a wild, intoxicating, action-packed adventure.

Instead, I found myself face to face with the gray hell of the trenches, the rain of shells, the stench of death, the Krauts with their spiked helmets. I was thirty years old; the party was over. I first met Georges in the bleak fields of the Meuse. How often did we think we would die in that blood-drenched madness? Ten times, a hundred, a thousand? I heard friends from the trenches wailing like wild animals all night, facing the Grim Reaper alone in the no-man’s-land between the lines, cradling their entrails in their arms. I saw the terror in the eyes of big men pleading for their mothers.

We witnessed bodies mutilated and burnt, our nostrils were filled with the stench of burning flesh and dried blood. We watched men suffer, and afterwards we said nothing. Only the breakthrough on Vimy Ridge with Pétain remains close to my heart. The one victory we took from the Huns. I felt proud. I felt as though I had been brave.

Since then, we have lived as best we can. That’s the truth of it. I came through without so much as a scratch. Nothing. Though make no mistake, I never shirked my duty. It was a miracle, as if life had decided to spare me so that I could carry on my way.

But for what purpose? After the long-awaited armistice, what would I do? I had closed my bar at the outbreak of war; now I was faced with the task of starting over again.

As so often before, I felt the terrible fear of failing. Of finding myself back at square one. Of life suspended. And then, in December 1919, at a banquet organized by the National Union of Veterans, I met Maria Hutting, a Belgian refugee. A brief romance followed—sparked by our shared sense of displacement—and Maria became pregnant. By this point, whatever affection there was between us had all but died, but we married anyway, and in 1921 our son Jean-Jacques was born. I urgently needed to find work, and that same year, Lady Luck knocked on my door: in March I became a French citizen, and in April I was hired by the Hôtel Ritz to open a cocktail bar for an elegant, cosmopolitan clientele.

It felt like a reward for my suffering. Once again, I was on my way up. I was thirty-seven years old on April 6, 1921, when I first crossed the threshold of the Hôtel Ritz to set up what would quickly become the most fashionable bar in Paris.