Ritz of the Ritz

The affair was Paris' biggest and smartest since the liberation. In the refined splendor of the Hotel Ritz garden last week, some 1,500 diplomats and millionaires and their ladies gathered to sip champagne and nibble pastries in honor of the hotel's 50th birthday. None contributed more glitteringly to the glitter than a white-haired little woman who greeted them at the entrance in fluent French, English or Spanish. She was 81-year-old Marie Louise ("Mimi") Ritz, widow of the man who founded the hotel--and thereby made his name a synonym for ultra-fashionable.

Ambitious son of a Swiss herdsman, Cesar Ritz left home at 15 for a job emptying slops in small Paris hotels, moved on through other jobs till he became a manager. He quit to start at the bottom again in Paris' famed Restaurant Voisin, an international hangout for royalty and gourmets. There young Cesar's instinct for the personal touch drew the attention of influential customers. During the siege of Paris in 1871, food was so scarce that the city zoo slaughtered its two elephants, of which Voisin's got the trunks. Thanks partly to the style with which Ritz served them, trompe sauce chasseur became a mouth-watering success.

Cold Cigars. From Voisin's, Ritz moved on to successively bigger jobs in Nice, San Remo, Lucerne, Rome, BadenBaden, Vienna. He remembered and carefully catered to the whims of such tourists as Cornelius Vanderbilt (who liked to chew cold cigars), John Wanamaker (who asked "are you leading a Christian life?"), the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII (who liked his beef well-done). On one of the jobs, Cesar Ritz formed a lifelong partnership with an obscure chef named Auguste Escoffier.

When London's swank Savoy got into trouble in the 1890s (its stock slumped from -L-5 to a few shillings), the management asked the partners for help. By lavish spending on gaudy entertainment (for one party, they flooded the main dining room, served dinner on gondolas to the music of imported Venetian gondoliers), they boomed the value of the stock to -L-20 a share in three years. This and other triumphs prompted Ritz's millionaire friends to back his fondest dream--a hotel of his own in Paris, which would be "the summum of elegance." Ritz himself saw to it that the new hotel on the Place Vendome was comparatively small (only 225 rooms), exquisitely furnished (mainly Louis Quinze and Empire), meticulously serviced.

Boas in the Bath. Within weeks after the Ritz opened in 1898, the world had become the guest of dapper Cesar Ritz. His intense efforts to please his patrons led to a breakdown in 1911, death seven years later. After that, his personally trained assistants ("the Academicians") and Mimi ("counselor to the management") saw to it that the Ritz tradition was maintained. Though Ritz had had an active hand in London's Carlton and a dozen other big European hotels, and had less actively sponsored the tri-continental Ritz-Carlton group, no other hotel ever achieved the rococo elegance of his Paris pride.

Not that everything always went smoothly. To keep the Marquise Cassatti happy, the maitre d'hotel himself had to fetch live rabbits for the two boa constrictors she kept in her bathroom. Once the management had to insist that the Countess de Salverte move out because her pet lion had grown too big. To survive World War II, the Ritz had to knuckle to such boorish guests as Hermann Goering. It salved its conscience by wheedling more food from the Nazis than it needed, supplying a lower-priced restaurant for Frenchmen around the corner.

A Sort of Hobby. Nowadays, the fully-booked Ritz is as fashionable as ever--but not because of its prices ($4 to $20 a day). Even at that, the hotel manages to make a "reasonable" annual profit (which is never announced by the private ownership), maintaining a record that has been unbroken except for two years during the depressed '30s.

Nor do the owners want more. Last fortnight, Hotelman Conrad Hilton, combing Europe for possible links to add to his U.S. chain, was cold-shouldered when he asked if the Ritz could be bought. Said able Managing Director Claude Auzello: "Being a Ritz stockholder is a sort of hobby . . . The Ritz is an old tradition. It is not for sale."

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