Checking Out: Kate Moss at the Ritz Paris

Room 454 at the Ritz has been my home in Paris since 1998. What has made it so is not so much my familiarity with the dimensions of a room with a pair of clumsy pillars and its carpet garlanded with flowers but the meticulous attention of the staff who have gone to such pains to accommodate my strange requests—I sleep in my own sheets, for instance, 1920s heavy linen with embroidered pillowcases. My great-aunt’s carnation Spanish shawl is spread over a sofa, and the rest of the furniture is removed before I arrive. My couture collectsion is reverently hung in the wardrobes, and my photographs are placed in the right order on the marble mantelpiece below a vast gilt framed mirror—my old blue whippet Lupin, Lucian Freud and a fox cub, sunset at Shrawardine, Tessa Traeger’s moving black-and-white image of a tree bowed by winter gales. My shoes are laid out in a row in the fireplace, heels standing at attention.

The meaning of the Paris Ritz for me is the many hands that make it work—that paint a cornice in the dead of night so as not to disturb the guests, or cook my notorious green soup (a puree of garden vegetables) and launder my clothes with such infinite care. One man I will always remember is Serge, one of the doormen. I asked him what he will do when the Ritz closes. “Oh, I don’t know. Retire, I suppose. But I will miss all of you so much . . . you . . . the clients . . . you are my life!”

The Ritz Paris has always been a symbol of comfort and celebrity and that special hard-diamond glitter that only chandeliers (rigorously rinsed of dust and thumbprints) can radiate. It was always a hotel where Americans could break into English with the staff without hesitation. The bar in the winter and the adjoining terrace in the summer even felt geographically as if they were mid-Atlantic—as casual as a posh American country club and as elegant as an Yves Saint Laurent showroom. I once had lunch there with Tatum O’Neal and her then husband, John McEnroe, who seemed to be in a rage all the time and kept leaving the table. The calm hush of the thick, spotless napery and the exquisite service were able to upstage and somehow cocoon the tennis star’s tantrums and his movie-star wife’s despair.

Now the Ritz is slated for a major refurbishment, which will finally haul it into the present and give it a definite style, not that amorphous rich-person, special-occasion look composed of gold and velvet and thick carpets, the look everyone secretly likes and publicly sneers at. It always seemed to exist in the realm of ambassadorial reception rooms, Swiss-bank party rooms, and Saudi royal residences—so featureless and unimpeachable it was a bit tacky, with its reproduction Louis XVI furniture and swagged drapes.

The chic rooms (or preferably suites) were on the second or third floors with a view overlooking the Place Vendôme. I can remember a rich art collectsor from Chicago I knew bewailing his fate because his cost-conscious father had banished him to the maids’ rooms on the top floor, which were still no bargain since they’d been redecorated in the eighties and brought up to the height of luxury (and of luxurious prices).

The Place Vendôme itself had been the scene of so much violence in history that it’s hard to imagine it was once not the well-bred, nearly private preserve it’s become. The victory column in the center, which those expensive rooms look out on, was erected by Napoléon out of cannons from conquered armies. After Napoléon was ousted, the column was torn down, then restored by Napoléon III (his nephew) and toppled again by the great painter and antimonarchist Gustave Courbet. When the government restored the column yet again, it decided Courbet must pay the huge sum; Courbet fled to Switzerland rather than pay up and died almost immediately.

More recently, of course, the Ritz Paris has been haunted by another kind of violence. On August 31, 1997, Princess Diana, who was dating Dodi Fayed, the son of Mohamed Al Fayed, owner of the Ritz Paris, died in a car accident after leaving the hotel. The couple had just had dinner up in the Imperial Suite, the grandest room in the place. Dodi’s father later suspected a Buckingham Palace plot to eliminate Diana, who’d become an embarrassment. The French courts, however, concluded after an inquiry that the chauffeur, Henri Paul, deputy head of Ritz security, was drunk and stoned on antidepressants. He drove at weirdly high speeds and sent the car hurtling into a column in an underpass near the Pont de l’Alma. Diana fanatics believe that the gold flame up above the site of the wreck must be an homage to the wayward princess; in fact it’s a detail from the torch of the Statue of Liberty and has been there for years.

The Ritz Paris has been a golden hive swarming with legends ever since it was founded in 1898 by a Swiss hotelier, Cé-sar Ritz, who installed the hotel in the 1705 private residence of the Gramont family. Ritz was the first hotelkeeper to provide a bathroom for every guest room. He wanted to create a hotel where a prince would feel at home. He teamed up with Escoffier, the greatest chef of the day, and they attracted the world’s elite. Proust often dined alone at the Ritz, though he also hosted large dinners there. Several of his friends, unable to heat their huge town houses during World War I, moved into the hotel full time. As Ghislain de Diesbach wrote, “In this gray Paris during the third year of the hostilities, the Ritz was like a great ocean liner de luxe in the midst of the fog of the North Atlantic.”

Proust fell in love with a young Swiss waiter at the Ritz, Henri Rochat, and invited him to live with him. The headwaiter, Camille Wixler, noticed that young Henri was suddenly wearing well-made suits he could not possibly have afforded on his salary. Proust explained to Wixler that he was buying the garments: “He gave me to understand that certain kinds of human beings were not made as others were.” Eventually Rochat drove Proust mad with his expensive demands, his bouts of venereal disease, and his sullenness, and Proust asked him to move out (he gave him a handsome farewell gift of cash).

When Proust became very ill and was slowly dying, he gave up eating but still sent to the Ritz for the iced beer from its cellars. Even after the war Proust continued to give large dinner parties at the Ritz, though now he mixed literary critics in with his titled and artistic guests; he wanted the critics to spread the word about the masterpiece he was publishing volume after volume.

Coco Chanel lived in the Ritz for some 30 years, even though she had an apartment nearby on the rue Cambon. She was living there when the Luftwaffe and Goering made the Ritz their headquarters in 1940. Her lover was a Nazi officer and spy, Hans Günther von Dincklage; in fact, it is alleged that she was a spy herself. Today the Ritz still maintains a Chanel suite; in the salon is a large lacquered Coromandel screen, incised with Chinese scenes and decorated with gold. Such screens were the first objects Chanel had collectsed when she had some money.

The Paris Ritz, then, has had a troubled history, but it has always pretended otherwise. As the poet Léon-Paul Fargue once wrote: “First of all the Ritz is a peaceful palace whose ceremonies are disturbed only by a mistake in a place setting or a dropped fork.” One wonders if in its next incarnation it will be able to maintain this tranquil illusion.