Part One: The Siege — Chapter 7 - The Barman of the Ritz

JULY 24, 1940

“Monsieur, the manager has asked to see you in his office. As soon as possible,” Luciano murmurs.

Frank asks no questions. The boy’s face is enough for him: this is a serious matter. Standing in front of the mirror, he straightens his collar and, for a fleeting instant, thinks of his son.

Well, that’s it, the Widow has obviously issued the order, I’m going to be given the boot.

When he reaches the office, he knocks three times and enters without waiting for a response.

Slumped in his leather armchair, Elmiger does not bother to get up. He nervously sips a glass of scotch piled high with ice, his face half hidden by the pale whorls of smoke from his cigarillo. The manager is wearing a suit that is decidedly too big, and the dim light from the gold fringed lamp does little to improve the scene. In the half-light, Frank can just make out the figure of Süss next to Elmiger. Ramrod straight, grim-faced, piercing blue eyes, and a fringe of flaxen hair, Süss gives a wan smile and a little nod. A slight deformity of his upper lip lends his expression an almost permanent air of sarcasm. With a wave, he casually gestures for Frank to sit in the armchair facing the desk. After a moment, Süss says:

“Madame Ritz will be returning to us on Monday morning.”

Frank is a little shaken. Elmiger sighs.

“And that’s not all. Claude and Blanche Auzello will also be coming back on Tuesday,” Elmiger says wearily. “It goes without saying that Monsieur Auzello cannot return to his role as manager since he does not speak German.”

“Consequently,” says Süss, “Monsieur Elmiger will continue in the role.”

A double shock. There had always been bad blood between Marie-Louise Ritz and the Auzellos. The Widow had taken an instant dislike to Blanche. How could it have been otherwise? Marie-Louise was a woman from a different era and Blanche, a “liberated” woman, was altogether too vulgar to include in her circle. In Marie-Louise’s eyes, Blanche represented the new world—modern, ever evolving, uncontrollable—while she favored the culture of refinement and restraint. Born to a family of hoteliers from Alsace during the reign of Napoleon III, Marie-Louise was tough. After the death of César Ritz in 1918, she insisted the shareholders appoint her Chair of the Board of Directors—something utterly, and somewhat ironically, unprecedented, for a woman so dedicated to tradition.

Marie-Louise and Blanche loathed each other. Both exiles, both strong women, they’d long maintained a brutal, decisive fissure. In the spring of 1936, in the euphoria that followed the election of the progressive Front Populaire government in France, when for the first time three women were appointed undersecretaries of state, it had been Blanche Auzello who finally persuaded her husband to abolish the single-sex bars at the Ritz. Marie-Louise naturally opposed the idea, but Frank was happy to comply with the order. And so, in June 1936, almost two decades after women had been permitted to drink at the Ritz, even the most jaded of Parisian libertines were simultaneously shocked and thrilled to be able to visit a bar where, for the first time, men and women could drink together.

It was almost 11 p.m. on June 15, 1936, when Marie-Louise Ritz strode into the Petit Bar wearing black lace gloves and an ermine wrap, with her two wire-haired Brussels griffons. A deathly silence fell over the usually boisterous and opinionated revelers. Marie-Louise stared contemptuously at the fifty or so guests who had come to celebrate the grand reopening, an embodiment of the age-old battle between tradition and the avant-garde.

Dressed in a long, off-the-shoulder gown of ivory crêpe de Chine, Blanche Auzello was sitting on a high stool, with one elbow delicately propped on the copper rail of the bar. The smile never faded from her face as Marie-Louise hurled venomous insults at her. Such an indecent young woman, she insisted. And her dress! Where was Blanche’s dignity? Her humility? She was drunk, with no sense of tradition or propriety. Frank already knew that the response would come not from Blanche, but from the woman next to her, the dazzling Lily Kharmayeff. Known simply as “La Kharmayeff,” the former Russian ballet dancer was a startling, androgynous beauty who invariably wore a black jacket and trousers and was famed for her poise and her caustic tongue. She and Blanche were inseparable and had fought together for the right of women to drink with men. When Marie-Louise had finally finished spewing her bile, Lily tinkled some small coins in her pocket and strode into the middle of the room.

“A pretty little speech, madame,” said Lily, “but to me, tradition does not mean tending to the ashes, it means keeping the flame alive.” Marie-Louise flinched. “When it comes to tradition, you might say Blanche and I are fire-starters!”

The enthusiastic crowd clinked their glasses so loudly that no one heard the Widow’s two griffons yapping angrily. Then Blanche Auzello got to her feet, silenced the room with a wave, and, raising her Bijou cocktail, dealt the fatal blow:

“To the twentieth century! To progress and to change!”

A chorus of voices took up the toast. Blood drained from the face of the defeated Widow, who turned and left without a word. Frank still remembers Sacha Guitry, the director and actor, quietly kicking one of the griffons.

The following day a disciplinary committee was convened: Lily Kharmayeff was forbidden from entering the Ritz, and Blanche Auzello was forced to offer a written apology. As for Marie-Louise Ritz, she left to take a rest cure in Switzerland at the home of Baron Pfyffer, whom the hotel employees assumed had been her lover for the past twenty years. And Claude Auzello was forced to take on a deputy manager in the form of the baron’s devoted nephew, Hans Elmiger.

A tenuous truce seemed to have been reached.

What a disaster this will be, Frank thinks now, engrossed in his memories. The Auzellos and the Widow back at the Ritz again, and with all these Germans—it’s inconceivable.

Elmiger, Süss, and Frank are silent for a moment. The grim news hangs between them in the smoke-filled office.

Frank would give a handsome sum to know what the two Swiss men think of each other. But Elmiger and Süss are merely pawns in a game that is bigger than both of them. Elmiger stubs out his cigarillo, Süss pours himself a drink, and Frank says nothing.

Walking home that night, Frank tries to put his thoughts in order. He hasn’t been fired yet, but he knows the Widow will sack him at the first opportunity. Unless he decides to leave first. Cross the border into the Free Zone and join his son in Nice; why not? Finally be a father. Jean-Jacques is his missed opportunity. Frank has sacrificed his whole life for the Ritz and its prestigious clientele, but now, with all the Krauts around, what’s the point? Giving up everything and starting again is something he knows he can do and has done before. But he was younger then.

Back then, I was the apprentice. But now.

As it starts to rain, he quickens his pace. As he turns onto the Rue Henri-Rochefort, he tries to imagine himself in Paris without his job at the Ritz.

Unbearable.

Use the Krauts for whatever you can get out of them. Be cynical, like Georges. Remember what they used to say back in the Foreign Legion: if you’re brave, you risk getting killed; if you’re a coward, you risk getting captured; if you’re angry, you risk getting carried away; if you’re sensitive, you risk being humiliated; if you empathize, you’ll torment yourself. So, find a way between the lines, move, trudge, crawl, you can do it, Frank!

More than Luciano, more even than Blanche, it is his bar that he needs to protect. It is a matter of honor, a vision of the world that he will not surrender to the Krauts or the Widow. He will not desert his post.

Diary of Frank Meier

Where am I from? I don’t really know anymore.

If I dig down, I never forget that, at heart, I am Austrian. I have been molded by New York and Paris, but I come from a Germanic culture, and I sometimes feel a kinship with some of the German officers. I never really went to school, but Goethe and the Brothers Grimm have always been part of my identity. I remember that on cold winter evenings, in the Favoriten, an old Bavarian woman would tell stories to the local kids. People said she had once been governess to the two sons of a family of wealthy textile merchants, the Kleitzes, who lived in a huge mansion west of Vienna. Rumor had it that, during a summer holiday in the Alps, because of her negligence, the two little boys drowned in a mountain lake.

Eaten up by guilt, she tried to atone for their deaths by caring for local children. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the old lady would serve us herbal tea flavored with sprigs of thyme, and thin slices of candied orange spread on slices of French toast. She fussed over us. I found her rough voice mesmerizing. Truth be told, we all adored her. She would sit by the dilapidated old stove in her hovel, wrapped in a tartan shawl, a pince-nez perched on the bridge of her nose, and read us “Hansel and Gretel,” or “Little Red Riding Hood.” I couldn’t have been more than eight or ten when I first heard Goethe’s poem “The Erlkönig” and it pierced my heart. I was in shock. The young boy riding through the night with his father, who is snatched away by Death. His youth cut short by the invisible, rapacious Erlkönig. Much later, I would see many of my generation taken by the Erlkönig during the Great War.

When I first arrived in New York, perhaps because I was homesick, I bought a German edition of The Sorrows of Young Werther for a dollar and devoured it. I read and reread it in my little Manhattan room. It gave me an insight into the strait-laced, puritanical Austro-Hungarian Empire where I had grown up. The values I was taught were all about order and assimilation, sacrificing your individual dreams for the good of all. I saw many of my generation rebel against this rigidity, leaving their middle-class secondary schools to live on farms, wander the forests, form an alternative culture. I truly believe that one of the goals of the battles such as Verdun was to get rid of the young Germans who had rejected order and religion.

It is impossible to understand Germanic culture without considering its addiction to rules and borders and uniform behavior. Thanks to the genius of Goethe, I quickly realized why I had left Vienna for America, the land of freedom and of dreams yet to be fulfilled.