I remember the Marquise Casati, whom we provided with live rabbits to feed to her pet boa constrictor. Another guest habitually dined with his Chow, the two of them in identical dinner jackets, shirts, and ties, tailored by Charvet. The socialite Mrs. McLean would request live pigeons for her hooded falcon. I remember one guest who, wanting to serve something very special to his 20 dinner guests, asked for a main course of elephant’s feet. We bought a surplus elephant from the zoo and served the feet. I tried the meat, and it tasted like something between sponge and flannelette.
Rudolph Valentino, often, with the long cigarette holder and white spats, his delicate face, so pale it was almost pure white, with the smoke curling around it, sharper in my mind than any other face I have ever seen.
John Barrymore and his many moods, sometimes with Dolores Costello, sometimes with his brother, Lionel, talking for hours. Mrs. Roosevelt, only once. Amelia Earhart once also, shortly before her disappearance. Heavyweight champion Gene Tunney, but for a soft drink only.
Many writers. Somerset Maugham after writing Of Human Bondage. Graham Greene, who favored very dry martinis. F. Scott Fitzgerald, sometimes with Hemingway as his guest. Fitzgerald was rich and famous at first; Hemingway, poor and little known, living in cheap quarters on the Left Bank. As I observed them, my impression was: Fitzgerald is tranquil, Hemingway always in motion. I came to know Hemingway quite well over the next 30 years, and my early impression was right—action is at the heart of him. And the heart of him was like an artichoke—one leaf for everybody.
Very often, a Philadelphia industrialist named Dreiser would come into the bar and order a plate of caviar. He had his own invention for testing its freshness. He would take from his pocket a solid-gold ball, suspended on a thin gold chain. He would hold the ball at eye level and let it drop on the caviar. If the ball went through the caviar and touched the plate, according to Mr. Dreiser’s theory, the eggs were old and did not have enough strength. He would send back the caviar until he received a mound of it that could keep the gold ball from touching the plate.
In those early days of the Ritz bar—the first bar, as far as I know, to be established in a hotel—my clients began to discover that I was a comfortable ally to have for tackling the intricate problems that arise in Paris. For example, there was the Saturday night when, at nine o’clock, Cole Porter phoned me and asked whether I could find a grand piano for him and have it delivered to the home of the American millionaire Gould Jennings. Mr. Porter had just that day completed the score for his newest show, and he wanted to surprise the guests at Mr. Jennings’s party by playing it for them. The piano had to be there before 10 o’clock, when the guests would begin to arrive. Of course, all the piano-renting establishments were closed, as well as all the piano-moving firms, but I recalled that my neighbor had a grand piano that was kept in tune because his daughter took lessons. He readily consented to my renting it. But how to get it to Gould Jennings’s house before 10? I grabbed a taxi and went to the Gare du Nord, which is located in one of Paris’s roughest sections. There I found an old man seated at the wheel of a truck. I contracted for his services, but I still needed the brawn to tote the piano. I approached a group of toughs who were drinking Calvados in the railway bar, offered them a good price for the job, and at 10 minutes to 10 they were staggering up the steps to Mr. Jennings’s house with the piano on their backs. Afterward, as I was paying them off, one of the mob, an accomplished second-story worker, confided to me, “You know, Monsieur Georges, this is the first time I ever carried anything into a fancy joint like this.”
From Vanity Fair
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