Liberating France Hemingway's way / Following author's 1944 reclaiming of the Ritz Hotel

EH 6974P 1944 Ernest Hemingway (center) in France, 1944. Col. David Bruce is at the far left of the image. Others not identified. Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston. less EH 6974P 1944 Ernest Hemingway (center) in France, 1944. Col. David Bruce is at the far left of the image. Others not identified. Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, ... more Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Liberating France Hemingway's way / Following author's 1944 reclaiming of the Ritz Hotel 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

2004-08-22 04:00:00 PDT Paris -- No, this is not another story about the 60th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. This is about another 60th anniversary -- the anniversary of the day Ernest Hemingway and his private army invaded Paris and liberated the Ritz hotel.

It was in Paris that Ernest Hemingway and his copains of the Lost Generation had nurtured the myth of the rugged expatriate writer during the 1920s -- Sylvia Beach and her bookshop; lurching through the bars with Scott Fitzgerald; literary teas with Ford Madox Ford; earnest chats with Gertrude Stein. The Ritz was the fabled 19th century hotel on the Place Vendôme where Hemingway, before he was a best-selling author, could afford to drink only once a week. Later, after the royalties started rolling in, he more than made up for lost time.

In August of 1944, Hemingway was itching, if not dying, to get back to the "moveable feast" of Paris, particularly since the "Krauts," as he liked to call them, had rolled into Paris in 1940 and commandeered his beloved Ritz to quarter their generals. This did not sit well with the hotel's most famous prewar guest.

"My own war aim at this moment," Hemingway wrote in one of his dispatches for Collier's magazine in the fall of 1944, "was to get into Paris without being shot. Our necks had been out for a long time. Paris was going to be taken." And he was going to do it.

Hemingway had already had a brief sortie at the D-Day landings -- he was in a landing craft that zoomed into Omaha Beach on the seventh wave before charging back out to the relative safety of a transport ship, where the landing craft skipper could offload his famous passenger. Six weeks later, Hemingway made his way back to Normandy, by plane this time, and followed the infantry as it slogged down through northern France.

Ten years ago, during all the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, I went to France to research the tale of how Hemingway landed in France and took his own particular route to the liberation of Paris. The timing was right: Many of the people who had been with the author during this part of the war were getting on in years and were eager to share their reminiscences, and some of those interviewed have since passed away.

Staging ground

To see how Hemingway got back to the Ritz -- that is, "liberated" the Ritz -- you have to go to Rambouillet, a town about 30 miles southwest of Paris. This was Hemingway's staging area for his assault on Paris, the place where he formed his little army of partisans and Resistance fighters, numbering anywhere from 10 to 200, depending on the account. Here he was, the world's most famous writer, barreling down country roads in his Army jeep, clad in steel helmet and fatigues and running an arsenal out of a French hotel.

Nearly everybody who encountered Hemingway in that week before the liberation said the man was completely in his element -- sticking his neck out, testing his bravery, sweating and drinking and toiling around with soldiers.

"He enjoyed that whole time," Evangeline Bruce, then 74, told me, "more than he had enjoyed anything." Her late husband, OSS Col. David Bruce, who later was the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Paris and Bonn, was with Hemingway on the way into Paris.

"On nineteenth (of August 1944), made contact with group of Maquis who placed themselves under my command. Because so old and ugly looking I guess," Hemingway wrote to his about-to-be fourth wife, Mary Welsh. "Clothed them with clothing of cavalry recon outfit which had been killed at entrance to Rambouillet. Armed them from Div. Took and held Rambouillet after our recon withdrawn. Ran patrols and furnished gen (intelligence) to French when they advanced. They operated on our gen with much success."

I wondered how much of this was Hemingway on a roll, fiction getting mixed up in fact? What was he like as an ersatz commando? The best way to find out was to talk to some of the people who were with him. Some of the answers came from retired war correspondents and ex-OSS members now scattered around the United States. I found others in the countryside where Hemingway spent that week.

Several people around Rambouillet, a city of about 25,000, remembered the liberation quite clearly, but few knew about Hemingway. One of them was Jean Miserey, who had flown P-38s for the Royal Air Force. Miserey took me on a driving tour of the town, pointing out the Nazis' headquarters (now an office building) and the Hotel du Grand Veneur, where Hemingway and his band holed up (it's now a bank). Then, after about an hour, he said, "You know, you really ought to be talking to Monsieur L'Allinec. I think he may have met Hemingway."

Then 74, Jean-Marie L'Allinec and his wife, Jacqueline, live in a comfortable country house in a small town west of Rambouillet. A gardener was trimming the hedges when I drove in.

"Ah," L'Allinec smiled, "I'll bet you're here to talk about Hemingway. Of course. You know, we went to Paris together. To the Ritz!"

Finding L'Allinec was like striking gold. At a table on his terrace, he pored over a Michelin map showing the route he and Hemingway took from Rambouillet to the Ritz.

"It was all he could talk about," L'Allinec said of Hemingway's obsession to get back to the Ritz. "It was more than just being the first American in Paris. He said, 'I will be the first American at the Ritz. And I will liberate the Ritz.'

"He was wonderful to be with," L'Allinec said. "He was very sympathique, he was loud, he was drinking -- he'd tell me, 'Come on, have a drink. Hey, Jean-Marie, unless you have a drink, there'll be distance between us. We have a few drinks -- it closes that distance.' "

Playing soldier

Hemingway did love to drink -- his march on Paris seemed to be punctuated with long, winey stops at this cafe or that hotel. It's a wonder he ever got to the Ritz.

"A guerrilla chief named C said, 'Have a drink of this excellent white wine,' " he wrote in Collier's about his sojourn with the troops. "I took a long drink from the bottle and it turned out to be a highly alcoholic liqueur tasting of orange and called Grand Marnier."

By now, Hemingway, who seemed to have an aversion to sleeping in ditches with the rest of the troops, had already found the best place in town, a small hotel with a good wine cellar.

The renowned author annoyed his colleagues in the working press. They were both awed by his fame and furious that he was playing soldier, in violation of all the standing rules about correspondents staying out of the war, even though the reporters were very much a part of the war effort.

"He was very gung-ho," Hans Trefousse recalled. Trefousse, now a history professor at Brooklyn College, was then a 22-year-old Army prisoner-of-war interrogator. One day, he said, as he was quizzing some reluctant Germans in Rambouillet, "This man comes along and says, 'My name is Hemingway.' I said, 'Ernest Hemingway?' and he said, 'Right. What are you up to?' "

The slightly startled Trefousse showed Hemingway how you get recalcitrant prisoners to talk: He would hang signs saying "Russia" around their necks.

In his helmet and sweat-drenched fatigues, and with his weight at close to 250 pounds, Hemingway looked more like a hefty master sergeant -- he had turned 45 that summer -- than a world-heavyweight writer. He had hooked up with David Bruce of the OSS and Army historians Lt. Col. S.L.A. Marshall and Lt. John Westover, and he was having a ball.

"He loved soldiering ... being in an armed camp exhilarated him, and he had a natural way with the military," Marshall wrote later. "He loved playing soldier on the grand scale, with shooting irons. Yet in him, it was not a juvenile attitude. I truly believe he played at it more because he enjoyed the game than because he was interested in studying men under high pressure."

Liberation libations

On Aug. 24, Hemingway, Bruce and the guerrillas left Rambouillet and started up the back roads toward Paris. Along the way, they ran into Marshall and Westover at a cafe on the outskirts of Paris. According to Marshall, Hemingway charged in and yelled, "Marshall, for God's sake, have you got a drink?" Westover found a bottle of Scotch in their jeep. The liberation of Paris -- or, at least, of the Ritz -- would have to wait.

That night, they camped near the Seine, and at noon the next day, Aug. 25, 1944, Hemingway and his partisans, along with several American officers, drove their jeeps across the river at the Pont de Sèvres. Dodging occasional German sniper fire, they made their way toward the Arc de Triomphe. Near the Bois de Boulogne, they came under fierce fire and immediately took cover. When one of their band finally looked up, he saw Hemingway on a third-floor balcony, yelling at his companions that the Germans were in a nearby house and to get the hell out of the way because French artillery was coming up to demolish it.

The Hemingway crew, which included Col. Bruce, stopped by the Arc de Triomphe for a few minutes, waited for sniper fire to end, then drove down the deserted Champs-Elysées and pulled up at the Travellers Club, a private men's club housed in a rococo 19th century mansion built by one of Paris's more famous courtesans. Task Force Hemingway chugged down a bottle or two of Champagne.

The libationed liberators piled into their jeeps and raced through the empty streets to the Place de l'Opera, where they stopped briefly at the Café de la Paix for another drink. Finally, they pulled up at the Rue Cambon entrance of the Ritz.

Storming the Ritz

"History says he jumped out of the Jeep, saying he'd come to liberate the Ritz," said Claude Roulet, a Ritz executive who doubles as the hotel's historian. "Of course, the manager, Claude Auzello, who had known him for years, said 'Leave your gun by the door and come in.' So Hemingway went to the bar and drank his first Champagne in Paris. Nobody knows what bar it was in, but we think it was the little bar." (Actually, it was his second bottle of Champagne -- maybe even his third, at the rate he was going.)

The "little bar" at the Ritz is a tiny alcove -- less than 300 square feet -- tucked away on the Rue Cambon side of the hotel. On the bar is a bronze bust of Hemingway, and on the walls are photographs of the writer and his son Jack, along with a big game fish of some sort, taken in the 1930s. "Bar Hemingway" is dark, and if you are quiet and you use a little imagination (and several martinis) you can picture Hemingway sitting over there in the corner, arguing with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had introduced him to the Ritz in the '20s.

("Many years later at the Ritz bar, long after the end of the World War II," Hemingway wrote in "A Moveable Feast," "Georges, who is the bar chief now and who was the chasseur (bellhop) when Scott lived in Paris, asked me, 'Papa, who was this Monsieur Fitzgerald that everyone asks me about?' " Hemingway told Georges his pal Fitzgerald was "an American writer" who "wrote two very good books" and came to the Ritz bar a lot.)

L'Allinec, the Resistance fighter, said that when they got to the Ritz that day, "The manager was delirious, he was so happy. He said, 'We resisted the Germans -- we kept the best premiers crus from them. We saved the Cheval Blanc! ' Papa looked at him for a moment. Then he said, 'Well, go get it.' They brought up some bottles and Papa started slugging it down. Imagine! This great old Bordeaux, and he's slugging it down like water."

Literary license

And so by the afternoon of Aug. 25, the Ritz had been liberated by Ernest Hemingway. Paris, too, had been liberated, by Gen. Jacques Leclerc's 2nd French Armored Division and a number of American units, and there was bedlam in the streets. Marshall later said that by the time his jeep had crawled through the mob scene of ecstatic French citizens and reached the Seine, it had 67 bottles of Champagne in it.

"That evening," Westover, a 76-year-old retired history professor, told me, "Marshall and I went down to the Ritz and joined up with Hemingway and Col. Bruce for dinner. We all passed around a paper and each person signed their names. We said we were the first people (from the outside) in Paris." Carlos Baker's biography, "Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story," says the writer decreed, "None of us will ever write a line about these last 24 hours in delirium. Whoever tries it is a chump."

After dinner, Marshall wrote, the waiter "slapped a Vichy tax on the bill. Straightaway we arose as one man and told him: 'Millions to defend France, thousands to honor your fare, but not one sou in tribute to Vichy.' "

The next day, Hemingway hosted a lunch at the Ritz with several writers he knew -- Ira Wolfert, Irwin Shaw, Time-Life's chief of correspondents Charles Wertenbaker and Helen Kirkpatrick, a Chicago Daily News reporter.

"He was a loose cannon," Helen Kirkpatrick Milbank told me. "He had gathered all these forces around him. He was totally illegal, but that didn't bother him. The interesting thing was that both Marty (Martha) Gellhorn, who was then his wife, and Mary Welsh, who was later his wife, were in Paris at the same time. First, I'd hear from Marty what an impossible man Hemingway was to live with, and then Mary would be saying how impossible Marty was being.

"During that lunch, I said I wanted to go watch the victory parade and Hemingway said, 'What for? You can always see a parade, but you'll never again lunch at the Ritz on the 26th of August, the day after Paris was liberated.' "

Later, Hemingway would write letters to Mary Welsh, telling her about fighting the Germans, but those who knew him say that when he talked about how many Germans he had killed he was simply exercising his creative juices.

"Sure, he always had a pistol," L'Allinec says, "but he never killed any Germans."

In the end, though, it's Hemingway the writer that everybody remembers --

or almost everybody.

On the convoy into Paris, Trefousse recalled, Hemingway was in a jeep behind him, and "I told the French there was this great writer in the jeep back there and they said, 'Never heard of him.' Still, it was pretty amazing. Hemingway and Paris on the same day."

If you go

Hemingway Bar, Ritz Hotel, 15 Place Vendôme, Paris. 011-33-1-4316-3070, www.ritzparis.com. Open 6:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. Semi-formal attire requested. Doubles in the six-story luxury hotel start at 1,340 euros (about $1,657 US).