Ritz Paris Quotes

It was the heart of any true moment of decadence: the knowledge that an epoque is already slipping from us, inexorably, even in the moment of its glory.

Each force in flight is balanced by an opposing force. The opposite of lift is weight. Weight is always trying to pull an object back to earth, so to get something to stay up, lift has to be greater than weight. You’d think your weight would always be the same, but it isn’t. When you do aerobatics or go into a dive—like a kite that’s plunging into the sand at the beach—there’s an increase in gravity, and that makes you weigh more. If you want your heavy kite to stay in the air, you have to increase the lift, as well. Maybe by waiting for a stronger wind. Maybe by finding a windier place to fly your kite. Maddie brought lift back into my life by forcing me outside. So did Bob, who introduced me to the editors of this magazine. So did Fernande, the chambermaid at the Paris Ritz, who gave me her daughter’s clothes and made me get dressed and brought me coffee every morning for three weeks.

We're at a dinner party in an apartment on Rue Paul Valéry between Avenue Foch and Avenue Victor Hugo and it's all rather subdued since a small percentage of the invited guests were blown up in the Ritz yesterday. For comfort people went shopping, which is understandable even if they bought things a little too enthusiastically. Tonight it's just wildflowers and white lilies, just W's Paris bureau chief, Donna Karan, Aerin Lauder, Ines de la Fressange and Christian Louboutin, who thinks I snubbed him and maybe I did but maybe I'm past the point of caring. Just Annette Bening and Michael Stipe in a tomato-red wig. Just Tammy on heroin, serene and glassy-eyed, her lips swollen from collagen injections, beeswax balm spread over her mouth, gliding through the party, stopping to listen to Kate Winslet, to Jean Reno, to Polly Walker, to Jacques Grange. Just the smell of shit, floating, its fumes spreading everywhere. Just another conversation with a chic sadist obsessed with origami. Just another armless man waving a stump and whispering excitedly, "Natasha's coming!" Just people tan and back from the Ariel Sands Beach Club in Bermuda, some of them looking reskinned. Just me, making connections based on fear, experiencing vertigo, drinking a Woo-Woo.

As each day passed the community became more and more indoctrinated into the world of psychobabble. It was used to keep patients in subservient positions. "Poor impulse control," "defiance," or "you want what you want when you want it" were all catch phrases. Pronouncing judgement, Brian said, "These recovery institutions are all alike. Former addicts own and operate them. They're founded on the cliches these individuals accuse us of, grandiosity, arrogance, and selfishness. They take away human dignity and wrap themselves in the AA free spiritual principals, while charging so much money you'd think you were staying at the Ritz in Paris.

Everyone knew that Chanel was willing to play dirty when it came to the Jewish question. Her lawyer, René de Chambrun, the husband of Pierre Laval’s fashionable daughter, Josée, was already helping her try to have her perfume company taken from the Jewish business partners to whom she had sold a majority stake in the early 1920s.

I need someone who knows to enjoy life. Someone who'll get high with me at the Pere - Lechaise cemetery. Someone who'll lose their breath running trough the Louvre. Someone who'll go to coffee with a good book ( Fyodor Dostoyevsky, L. Tolstoy, Voltaire, A. Camus, Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert ). During the weekends to the cafe de Flore, and after that lunch at Ritz. Someone who'll get lost in Paris in the middle of the night. Someone who'll lay beside Seine, drink wine and listen to Florence and Machine, Banks, Borns, Hurts, Bjork, Tom Odelle... Someone who can sit in front of S.Dali's paintings for hours and not talk. Someone who wants to live. Someone who wants to travel and see the world. Someone who'll look at the stars for hours, talk about life, someone who is not afraid of death.

Bruce and Hemingway were with the advance fighting units that headed into the center of the city and together they climbed to the top of the Arc de Triomphe to look across all of Paris. How magnificent it must have felt to be there at that moment. Hemingway suggested that they go straight to the Ritz Hotel. Paris was the city my grandfather loved more than any other in the world. He was proud to assist the OSS in the city’s liberation and the liberation of the Ritz Hotel became one of his most memorable moveable feasts. When he arrived at the Ritz with Colonel Bruce and their band of irregulars, the hotel manager greeted them joyously and asked Hemingway if there was anything he could get for them, to which Hemingway replied, “How about seventy-three dry martinis?

Hemingway, pulling up to the Ritz with two truckloads of his French irregulars, told the bartender, “How about seventy-three dry martinis?” Later, after he and several companions had dined on soup, creamed spinach, raspberries in liqueur, and Perrier-Jouët champagne, the waiter added the Vichy tax to the bill, explaining, “It’s the law.” No matter: “We drank. We ate. We glowed,” one of Hemingway’s comrades reported. Private Irwin Shaw of the 12th Infantry, who later won fame as a writer, believed that August 25 was “the day the war should have ended.” To Ernie Pyle, ensconced in a hotel room with a soft bed though no hot water or electricity, “Paris seems to have all the beautiful girls we have always heard it had.… They dress in riotous colors.” The liberation, he concluded, was “the loveliest, brightest story of our time.” *

These two would have felt like old friends had they met just hours before. To some degree, this was because they were kindred spirits—finding ample evidence of common ground and cause for laughter in the midst of effortless conversation; but it was also almost certainly a matter of upbringing. Raised in grand homes in cosmopolitan cities, educated in the liberal arts, graced with idle hours, and exposed to the finest things, though the Count and the American had been born ten years and four thousand miles apart, they had more in common with each other than they had with the majority of their own countrymen. This, of course, is why the grand hotels of the world’s capitals all look alike. The Plaza in New York, the Ritz in Paris, Claridge’s in London, the Metropol in Moscow—built within fifteen years of each other, they too were kindred spirits, the first hotels in their cities with central heating, with hot water and telephones in the rooms, with international newspapers in the lobbies, international cuisine in the restaurants, and American bars off the lobby. These hotels were built for the likes of Richard Vanderwhile and Alexander Rostov, so that when they traveled to a foreign city, they would find themselves very much at home and in the company of kin.

None were particularly interesting, although I got a kick out of a note from the Philadelphia Zoo suggesting that since the tiger was not entirely reliable around humans, perhaps Mr. Willing would consider a leopard for his painting instead. It had been a pet until the demise (natural) of its owner and would, if not firmly admonished, climb into a person's lap, purring, and drool copiously. I pulled a sheet of scrap paper (the Stars spent a lot of time sending all-school e-mails about recycling) out of my bag and made a note on the blank side: "Leopard in The Lady in DeNile?" It wasn't my favorite, Cleopatra Awaiting the Return of Anthony. It was a little OTT, loaded with gold and snake imagery and, of course, the leopard. Diana hadn't liked the painting,either, apparently; she was the one who'd given it the Lady in DeNile nickname.I wondered if the leopard had drooled on her. None of the papers were personal, but they were Edward's and some were special, if you knew about his life. There was a bill from the Hotel Ritz in Paris in April 1890, and one from Cartier two months later for a pair of Tahitian pearl drop earrings. Diana was wearing them in my favorite photograph of the two of them: happy and visibly tanned, even in black and white, holding lobsters on a beach in Maine. "I insisted we let them go," Diana wrote in a letter to her niece. "Edward had a snit.He wanted a lobster dinner, but I could not countenance eating a fellow model.

It turned out there was something Marty did a little better. It all started with tuna casserole, or at least something RBG called tuna casserole. At Fort Sill one night, right after they were married, she dutifully presented the dish. That was her job, after all, or one of them. Marty squinted at the lumpy mass. “What is it?” And then he taught himself how to cook. The Escoffier cookbook had been a wedding gift from RBG’s cousin Richard. The legendary French chef had made his name at hotels like the Ritz in Paris and the Savoy in London. It was not exactly everyday fare for two young working parents on a military base in Oklahoma. But Marty found that his chemistry skills came in handy, and he began working his way through the book. Photograph by Mariana Cook made at the Ginsburgs’ home in 1998 Still, for years, the daily cooking was still RBG’s reluctant territory. Her repertoire involved thawing a frozen vegetable and some meat. “I had seven things I could make,” RBG said, “and when we got to number seven, we went back to number one.” Jane isn’t sure she saw a fresh vegetable until she was sent to France the summer she turned fourteen. Around that time, she decided, as RBG put it to me, “that Mommy should be phased out of the kitchen altogether.” RBG cooked her last meal in 1980. The division of labor in the family, Jane would say, developed into this: “Mommy does the thinking and Daddy does the cooking.” Growing up, James says, he got used to people asking him what his father did for a living, when his mother did something pretty interesting too.

Adolf Hitler wanted the capital of France razed to the ground before the Germans retreated. Destroying one of the great cities of the world would be a powerful “moral weapon” against the enemy, the Führer declared. He ordered von Choltitz to leave the city “a field of ruins.

While there was champagne and oysters at the Ritz, during the occupation much of the city suffered from devastating food shortages and malnutrition, perhaps as many as 20 percent of the inhabitants.

Even as late as the end of June, astonishingly few French citizens were actively resisting the German occupation. Before the summer ended, the organized resistance would swell to perhaps a couple of hundred thousand people in all of France—less than 3 percent of the population, no matter what tales of bravado anyone told later.

The Ritz bar—Frank’s domain—had been a center of the German resistance in Paris, almost since the war began.

Lighting the fuses shouldn’t be taking this kind of time. Furious with the delays, Hitler was screaming to his staff in Berlin, “Brennt Paris?”—“Is Paris burning?

Further Reading Atwood, Kathryn. Women Heroes of World War II (Chicago Review Press, 2011). Copeland, Jack. Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Code-Breaking Computers (Oxford University Press, 2010). Cragon, Harvey. From Fish to Colossus: How the German Lorenz Cipher was Broken at Bletchley Park (Cragon Books, 2003). Edsel, Robert. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (Hachette Book Group, 2009). Eisner, Peter. The Freedom Line (William Morrow, 2004). Helm, Sarah. A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (Hachette UK Book Group, 2005). Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma (Random House UK, 2014). Mazzeo, Tilar. The Hotel on Place Vendôme: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris (HarperCollins, 2015). Mulley, Clare. The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (St. Martin’s Press, 2012). O’Keefe, David. One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe (Knopf Canada, 2013). Pearson, Judith. The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Ronald, Susan. Hitler’s Art Thief (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). Rosbottom, Ronald. When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation 1940–1944 (Hachette Book Group, 2014). Sebba, Anne. Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation (St. Martin’s Press, 2016). Stevenson, William. Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (Arcade Publishing, 2007). Vaughan, Hal. Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War (Random House, Inc., 2011). Witherington Cornioley, Pearl; edited by Atwood, Kathryn. Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent (Chicago Review Press, 2015). From the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee/Target Intelligence Committee (TICOM) Archives. NW32823—Demonstration of Kesselring’s “Fish Train” (TICOM/M-5, July 8, 1945).

Mick required far less hand-holding than Michael. Signing the Stones, though, had required a full frontal assault worthy of General Patton, one of my heroes. The final battle exploded at the Ritz Hotel in Paris back in ’83. After months of relentless pursuit, I had them. All they had to do was sign when suddenly at 3 A.M. Mick goes mental and calls me a “stupid motherfuckin’ record executive.” I lose it. I reach for his throat. I have a vision of punching out all ninety-eight pounds of him. I stop myself, envisioning tomorrow’s headline—“Yetnikoff Kills Jagger.” Jagger relents, signs and from then on it’s wine and roses. It was Mick—wily and witty Mick—who later that year plotted with my girlfriend, the one called Boom Boom, to throw me a surprise fiftieth birthday bash where Henny Youngman emceed and Jon Peters, Barbra

There is a truism in the world of architecture that design creates culture.

The first thing they heard was the voices of an angry mob shouting “Salope! Salope!”—the

Ingrid Seward Ingrid Seward is editor in chief of Majesty magazine and has been writing about the Royal Family for more than twenty years. She is acknowledged as one of the leading experts in the field and has written ten books on the subject. Her latest book, Diana: The Last Word, with Simone Simmons, will be published in paperback in 2007 by St. Martin’s Press. We talked about everything and everybody, jumping from one subject to another was only women can. She was wonderfully indiscreet, and I found myself asking her the kind of things that I would hardly dare ask a close friend. I had recently been to the Ritz Hotel in Paris as Mohamed Al Fayed’s guest with Diana’s stepmother, Raine Spencer. At one time Diana hated Raine, but she had revised her opinion, and they were now the greatest of friends. As Raine worked for Harrods, the subject of Mohamed came up. Diana confessed she found him very amusing and “naughty,” and we joked that even the soap in the bathrooms of the Ritz Hotel was probably bugged. Diana was far more astute than people gave her credit for, and she knew a lot about Mohamed. He had invited her to see the Windsor House in Paris and bring William and Harry, and although she had wanted to go she had refused, saying, “Didn’t dare put my head over the parapet on that one.

Coco Chanel’s behaviour – she’d collaborated with Nazis and lived it up in the Ritz in Paris while her people were starved and brutalised by her boyfriend and his henchmen, and she sat idly by, sipping champagne, as French men and women were transported to camps under her nose – had ensured that no Jew would ever buy Chanel products again.

While staying at the Ritz in Paris, she had received word that her first grandchild, four-month-old Lawrence Brown Jr., had fallen seriously ill, and she had immediately booked passage home on the earliest available ship. It would therefore have been a rather subdued “Molly” Brown who waited on the Nomadic for the ship that would propel her into legend.

Some time ago N went over to Paris disguised as an opera singer, and he looked the part so well that the agent whom he was to meet thought he really was an opera singer and never went near him for a week. In fact, it turned out a little awkwardly, because one evening this agent saw a member of the French Cabinet dining at the Ritz and he looked so much like somebody disguised as an opera singer that this dam' fool of an agent went up and spoke to him. He was at once arrested by the French secret police, and there was nearly a most unpleasant scandal.

Oscar Wilde might have despaired of the modern plumbing, but the early American visitors praised the Hôtel Ritz as the pinnacle of new luxury hotels.

Auguste Escoffier modernized dining in Paris. With the help of Lady de Grey, he had already popularized high tea and made it fashionable—and accepted—for women to dine in public

Auguste Escoffier modernized dining in Paris. With the help of Lady de Grey, he had already popularized high tea and made it fashionable—and accepted—for women to dine in public in London. He intended to do the same in the French capital.

It was the heart of any true moment of decadence: the knowledge that an époque is already slipping from us, inexorably, even in the moment of its glory.

But in that novel he would memorialize this moment—Paris in 1898—where two cultures edged up against each other in darkness. He would set that novel in this époque, in the days when France was torn apart over the fate of a Jewish officer named Alfred Dreyfus and over the courage of an elderly writer to speak truth to power.

It was a story that, sadly, always had war at the heart of it.

They dined that night on champagne and lobster, despite widespread hunger in the capital. Overall, it was best to ignore the war as far as possible on such occasions. This was the tacit social convention. So instead of the trenches and troops, one talked of art and travels and scandal.

He already knew that, “[i]f we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

Without fanfare or ceremony, Laura Mae Corrigan began funneling all her money—an average of two thousand dollars a month—into her charity for wounded French soldiers. She would earn among those veterans the title of the “American Angel.

For most of those who lived in Paris during the occupation, however, survival depended on how adeptly one could navigate the nuances of wartime reality. At the Hôtel Ritz, the shades of gray were at their most impenetrable. In its spaces, astonishing things happened. In those gray areas—where courage and desire collided with brutality and terror—were powerful human stories.

Most of those who tell you they were in the resistance are fabulists at best. The worst are simply liars. It was a frighteningly small movement, covert, secret, and the price of discovery was monstrous. After the war, everyone wanted to believe that they had supported it. It is a collective French national fantasy.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, this palace hotel on the spacious Place Vendôme in the city’s first arrondissement, or “district,” had been an international symbol of luxury and all that was glamorous about modernity,

As the word came of the German advance, there were hushed and frantic conversations at the hotel during the second week in June 1940. To stay or to go was the pressing question

In the morning would come the last possible moment to flee Paris. That June evening, though, the party went on at the hotel like always.

The German government would soon take over dozens of hotels and private mansions across the city for use as accommodation and military offices—including other elite hotel establishments like the Crillon, the Georges V, and the Meurice. The Ritz alone among the great palace hotels of the city, however, would become a Switzerland in Paris.

The propaganda maestro of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels, famously declared that the capital would be gay and happy—or else. Orders from Berlin specified that the Hôtel Ritz would be the only luxury hotel of its kind in occupied Paris.

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, would move into a sprawling imperial suite taking up an entire floor. With him would come an entourage of German functionaries,

For those rooms at the Hôtel Ritz, the Germans would take a 90 percent discount—paying a mere twenty-five francs a day on average. As “guests” of the French people, they would ultimately send even that reduced bill to the new French puppet government of the occupation, the Vichy regime,

needed million-franc credit line at the Bank of France, required to keep the business up and running. As Hans Elmiger explained to the commandant of Paris, surely Adolf Hitler would be unhappy if the hotel were to go bankrupt and could not host dignitaries and Nazi celebrities as Berlin ordered.

Agents and spies playing deep and dangerous games of intelligence and counterintelligence also soon made their way to the Ritz.

Not everyone in Paris was awed by Sartre’s wartime politics. “Some wits,” as one historian puts it, “remark[ed] later that Sartre joined the resistance on the same day as the Paris police.” In other words: ten days before the liberation.

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.

For those who had lived as guests at the Hôtel Ritz during the German occupation, the liberation was the end of one story about luxury and modernity and Paris. It was the passing of the generation that had changed the shape of the future in the 1910s through the 1930s.

In the gray areas of the French occupation, there is always this complication: the bad guys weren’t always German. Sometimes they were French. Or British. Or American.

The Sunday Guardian, in its issue of 22 August, 2010 stated, on the basis of credible information, that a settlement took place at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and that it was worked out by Warren Anderson and a personal friend and representative of the then prime minister of India. Under this unofficial settlement, the government wanted to be paid secretly, under the table. When Union Carbide officers raised serious doubts regarding the Supreme Court’s acceptance of this unfair and corrupt settlement, they were assured that the Supreme Court was not their worry. The negotiators would manage everything. And manage, they did. The entire manifestly illegal and corrupt settlement did go through the judicial filter. A somnolent Supreme Court permitted composition of non-compoundable offences and quashed proceedings without falling under the well settled rule of quashing jurisdiction. Surely, if there was an honest and real negotiated settlement between Union Carbide and the Indian government it would require large and complex correspondence evidencing genuine bargaining prior to the settlement being finalized. Such huge claims are not settled by a telephonic talk of which no record exists. It is worth recalling here an interesting faux pas that occurred in connection with the financial settlement of the Bhopal gas tragedy. When N.D. Tewari became external affairs minister, he went to the United States to plead with potential investors to come to India. The consul general of India was present at the meeting addressed by the minister. The minister innocently referred to the Bhopal gas tragedy and the inadequate compensation received from Union Carbide. A Union Carbide representative present in the audience, stood up and caused consternation by declaring in public that Union Carbide had paid almost everything that India had asked for, but a large part of the amount was paid as out of court settlement, ostensibly for the purposes of the Congress party. If the Indian government denies the truth of the story that some people in or connected with the government swallowed a big fortune, they must produce the documents which were exchanged during the pre-settlement negotiations and until their final termination. The government must produce them even now. The people of this country are entitled to know how a claim of $3.3 billion came to be settled for a paltry amount of $475 million. However, neither has the government given any explanation, nor has the story been refuted till today.

THE GRANDS BOULEVARDS WERE EMPTY, shop fronts were shuttered, buses, trams, cars, and horse cabs had disappeared. In their place flocks of sheep were herded across the Place de la Concorde on their way to the Gare de l’Est for shipment to the front. Unmarred by traffic, squares and vistas revealed their purity of design. Most newspapers having ceased publication, the kiosks were hung meagerly with the single-page issues of the survivors. All the tourists were gone, the Ritz was uninhabited, the Meurice a hospital. For one August in its history Paris was French—and silent. The sun shone, fountains sparkled in the Rond Point, trees were green, the quiet Seine flowed by unchanging, brilliant clusters of Allied flags enhanced the pale gray beauty of the world’s most beautiful city.

the Maginot Line, named after the general who planned them.

Panicked, Charles de Gaulle fled the country, heading for refuge at French military bases in Baden-Baden, Germany. Half

fact, the battle continued less than fifty miles out of the city, and it would be more than a year still before there would be peace in Europe.

story was being broadcast over the British radio, and those with hidden transistors were finally learning the tale in tantalizingly vague bits and

All you really need to know about the Paris Ritz is this: by the middle of 1937, Coco Chanel was living in a handsome suite on the third floor, and the bartender—an intuitive mixologist named Frank Meier—had invented the Bloody Mary sixteen summers earlier to cure a Hemingway hangover.

This, of course, is why the grand hotels of the world’s capitals all look alike. The Plaza in New York, the Ritz in Paris, Claridge’s in London, the Metropol in Moscow—built within fifteen years of each other, they too were kindred spirits, the first hotels in their cities with central heating, with hot water and telephones in the rooms, with international newspapers in the lobbies, international cuisine in the restaurants, and American bars off the lobby. These hotels were built for the likes of Richard Vanderwhile and Alexander Rostov, so that when they traveled to a foreign city, they would find themselves very much at home and in the company of kin.