Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [41]
Almost everyone in London with a good excuse made sure of a trip to Paris as soon as possible after the Liberation. Like many from the OSS office in London, Evangeline Bruce, a future ambassadress but at that time responsible for creating personal histories for the false papers of secret agents, hiked a pillion ride on the back of an OSS motorbicycle for a tour of central Paris.
One of the sights to be seen at the Ritz was Ernest Hemingway. His room was the first port of call for Mary Welsh, who had worked for the London bureau of Time, Life and Fortune throughout the war, and managed to reach Paris in time to cover de Gaulle’s triumph down the Champs-Élysées. Another star of the Ritz was Marlene Dietrich, who used the hotel as her Paris base while she travelled back and forth to the front, singing to American troops. Hemingway had known her for ten years and they were still close – she used to wander into his bathroom in the Ritz and chat to him while he shaved – but he emphasized that he had never slept with her.
Hemingway did not stay only at the Ritz. He also used the Hotel Scribe, near the Opéra, which had been taken over as a centre for war correspondents. The lines of olive-green US army staff cars and jeeps with large white stars made the place look like a headquarters, an impression reinforced by the cluster of Allied flags over the entrance. The Parisians were envious of its privileged rations. Simone de Beauvoir, who visited the Scribe with a French journalist on Combat, wrote disapprovingly: ‘It was an American enclave in the heart of Paris: white bread, fresh eggs, jam, sugar and Spam.’
The Hotel Scribe rapidly became a subject of folklore. The rooms were full of military impedimenta – jerrycans of petrol, ration packs, waterbottles, weapons and ammunition. One visitor recalled seeing in every window of the central light-well a journalist in an army shirt with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, tapping away furiously.
During the course of that autumn and winter, the Scribe’s inhabitants included Robert Capa, William Shirer, Bill Paley, Sam White, Cy Sulzberger and Harold Callender of the New York Times; William Saroyan; Helen Kirkpatrick of the Chicago Daily News; Janet Flanner, the New Yorker diarist for Paris since 1925; Virginia Cowles, who had covered the fall of France in 1940, and her friend Martha Gellhorn.
George Orwell, a much later arrival, was delighted to be in Paris in uniform. Having heard that Hemingway, whom he had never met, was also at the Scribe, Orwell went to his room and knocked on his door.
‘I’m Eric Blair,’ he announced hesitantly.
Hemingway was packing. He looked up, displeased at seeing a British war correspondent – he was going through a strongly anti-British phase. ‘Well, what the ying hell do you want?’
‘I’m George Orwell.’
‘Why the zing hell didn’t you say so?’ bellowed Hemingway. He pushed the suitcases aside, bent down under the bed and emerged with a bottle of Scotch. ‘Have a drink. Have a double. Straight or with water? There’s no soda.’
Orwell had more in common – including the same tutor at Eton and a love of Dickens, Kipling and Hopkins – with the philosopher A. J. Ayer, who was also in Paris at the time. Freddie Ayer, the author of Language, Truth and Logic, had been an SOE officer and had a roving commission reporting on the liberated areas of France. For this task, he had acquired a large chauffeur-driven Bugatti in which he installed his army radio transmitter. He had now returned to Paris to work as an attaché at the British Embassy, where