0:00Welcome back everyone to 1000 One Heroes, Legends, Histories, and Mysteries Podcast. This is your host, John Hegdorn. There are stories we tell because they're important, and stories we tell because they're unforgettable. At every once in a while, we find one that's both. Back in the early days of 1000 One Stories for the Road, when this whole adventure was still young and we were discovering what these shows could be, there was a little gem of a tale that listeners never forgot. A story about Ernest Hemingway at his most outrageous, most sentimental, and most gloriously larger than life. It was the summer of 1944, Paris was trembling on the edge of liberation. The Nazis were retreating, the Allies were advancing, and Papa Hemingway, armed with a press pass, a stubborn streak, and a small band of monkey fighters, decided he wasn't

1:01going to wait for permission to enter the city. He had a mission of his own. He wanted to save the Paris Ritz. This was the place where he had laughed and drank with friends like Cole Porter and Gary Cooper, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the years before the war, a place that held memories, stories, and ghosts he wasn't willing to let the Nazis destroy on their way out. So he swapped press passes with his wife, who was also a correspondent, slipped past the rules, and headed straight for Paris. But not before getting chewed out by General Patton himself, of course, because only Hemingway could manage to get scolded by a four-star general for trying to liberate a hotel. What follows is one of my all-time favorite stories we've ever told. It's reckless, romantic, funny, and somehow, in that strange Hemingway way, deeply heroic, and today, we're bringing it home to 1,000 one-heroes where it belongs. This is the story of the day Ernest Hemingway saved the Paris Ritz. Enjoy.

2:03The advertisement for the Paris Ritz Hemingway Bar reads like this. Cole Porter would spend up to nine hours a day in the Hemingway Bar. He said to have composed, begin the begin here. Nevescott Fitzgerald had his favorite seat. Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper made it the epicenter of their life in Paris and would sit and talk for hours. The legend has long since been written, but here, it comes back to life every night. Head barman Colin Peterfield's incredible creations are a reference for cocktail lovers the world over, and while guests flock to this warm intimate alcove to see what he's shaking up, they also return again and again for the heady, arty spirit that still lingers in this magical place. The night begins and ends at the Ritz Paris. The story hotel on Paris's Plas Vendom was closed for four years for a $350 million renovation. But when it reopened just last year, all the old memories came with it, along with

3:07the $1,500 per night room rate. But like Hemingway once said, the only reason not to stay at the Ritz is if you can't afford it. Blunt, but true, like most of his writing. There are a lot of stories out there about Hemingway and his exploits, but this one takes the cake. As the story goes, his wife, who was also a journalist and just as competitive as Hemingway was, if it had taken an assignment for Collier's magazine in 1944 to cover the Allied invasion of Normandy, and Hemingway somehow camped on it, managing a ride in on D-Day while his wife, Martha Gellhorn, drew a ticket on a tender loaded with explosives. Knowing who they had aboard, the commander of Hemingway's craft delayed his arrival until the beaches were under Allied control. The initial assault, as everyone knows, was brutal, and for that first day no one was sure of the outcome. After Day 1, they were still only 50 percent sure.

4:07Once he was on land, Hemingway was of course given strict orders to follow all the rules that Corresponders had to live by, those being not to carry a gun, to stay with the group he was assigned to, and to follow orders from anyone who outranked him. Determined to fight his way all the way to Paris for the express purpose of liberating the Ritz bar, which held years of memories for him, Papa Hemingway used his bluster and personal powers of persuasion to surround himself with a volunteer cadre of independent warriors, including a Colonel in the OSS, two military historians, two seasoned resistance fighters, and a dozen or so mockingly-song guerrilla fighters, men who had escaped the V-sheet government and fled to the hills to fight Nazis. Only loaded a motorcycle and side-car with whiskey and weapons, and headed toward Paris. But it wasn't exactly a free ride, as the small but well-armed band of brothers would discover, and they had to encounter resistance in and around a few smaller villages along the way,

5:08one being St. Pois, near which a shell exploded ten yards from the motorcycle, threatening to end their journey, and worse, ruin their liquor-stash. We'll return with our story right after these sponsor messages. And now, back to when Hemingway saved the Paris Ritz. When they reached the next town in one piece, Hemingway himself cleared one cellar of stubborn Germans with a hand grenade, probably to liberate the champagne. When word finally made it up to grapevine to patent that Papa was playing soldier and interfering with his troop movements, there was hell to pay. One morning the renegade band was awakened to find their camp had been encircled by a corps of military police, with patent present to provide the chewing out. So Patent said, if any of you bastards make a move toward Paris before our troops do, I'll court-module each and every one of you. That took some of the wind out of Hemingway's sales, enough that he wasn't the first into the city, and not the first journalist either. He had liberated a few wine cellars.

6:12One man counted 65 bottles of champagne in Hemingway's Jeep by the time they reached the scene. Meanwhile, at the Paris Ritz, the only hotel in Paris that the Germans had kept open during the occupation, things were in high gear. Half of the hotel was reserved for high-level Nazis, like Hitler's second in command, morphine-addicted cross-dresser Herman Gehring, who lived in the Grand Suite. While the other half was open for sympathetic celebrities, socialites, and citizens of neutral countries. To keep themselves busy, Hemingway's band went on night raids and pushed on during the day where one comrade reported, he didn't talk about anything else but to be the first to the Ritz. He also said, when I dream of afterlife in heaven, the action always takes place at the Ritz. One of the men with the bunch later said that the men around Hemingway were starting to take on his personality, speaking in clipped sentences, and taking on his habits and mannerisms. And why not? At age 45, Hemingway was already an

7:17award-winning novelist and journalist, and a worldwide celebrity, his novels, like for whom the bell tolls and a farewell to arms, had been made into movies. His hard-drinking, plan-boying style, and his adventure his life was already the stuff of legend. These men no doubt felt lucky to be in his company. As the Allies moved closer, with LeClerc and Pat and Ann Montgomery all grumbling for the right to be first to cross the finish line under the Arctitriumpth, Hemingway now attached to the French Second Army Division, was itching to enter Paris too. When they got close, Hemingway managed, using his name and with the help of the American Army, to wrangle a meeting with French commander General Philippe LeClerc, his request to be given enough men to go and liberate the Ritz's bar. To the writer's surprise, he got a frosty reception and was curtly dismissed. It was expected that General LeClerc, in command of the Allied troops with regard to the entry

8:18of Paris, would be first on the scene, marching up the Abou de la Grande Armee with a full regalia of tanks, artillery, flags, and vans. The well before LeClerc could get there, a jeep came corining up the avenue, zipped under the Arctitriumpth, down the Champs-Alice, and across the plows de la Concorde, then skitted to a stop in the plas-vendom at the entrance of the Ritz. Hemingway, guns slung in the Crogobes arm, was in command of that jeep. He had taken charge of the motley group in the vehicle, the same bunch who had fought with him all the way from the beaches. Hemingway, as we already know, called him his irregulars. He led them into the Ritz, proclaimed its liberation, took command of the bar and ordered champagne for everyone. Soon the renowned combat photographer Robert Kepa later killed an Indochina, came driving up to the Ritz, thinking he was miles ahead of anyone else, but he was amazed to find that Hemingway had beaten

9:20him to it. Archie Pellke, Hemingway's driver, was standing guard at the entrance. Hello, Kepa! Pellke said. Papa took Cotel, plenty good stuff in cellar. Go on in. According to his brother Lester Hemingway, Hemingway searched the cellar with his men, taking two prisoners and finding an excellent stock of Brandy. They also rang up a bar tab of 51 dry gin martinis. He wore the uniform and gave orders with such authority that many thought he was a general, the Ritz's head bar man Colin Field remembered. And so, in August of 1944, a legend was saved, not by Hemingway, but by the Allies' rugged determination to defy and exterminate the Nazi threat. What Hemingway saved was a storehouse of memories, which he had helped to build. When broke and struggling, he had enjoyed the company of F. Scott Fitzgerald in that bar, and enlisted the services of bartender Bertine to create a cure for the hangover, which Bertine did,

10:24by creating the Bloody Mary. He was the home to George Bernard Shaw, and Madame Ritz, of kings and queens, of the Barrymores, of Valentino, of Coco Chanel, of Proust, of Noah Coward, of Cold Porter and Gershwin, and so many more. So many memories, and all of them, worth fighting for. This is our host and storyteller, John Haggadorn. See you soon.