Martini by Frank Moorhouse

Author:Frank Moorhouse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2007-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

Liberating The Ritz

In 1944 Hemingway was covering the war in France for Colliers magazine. He heard that the Germans were retreating from Paris, so he armed himself with a Sten gun – a British lightweight sub-machine gun from S and T, the initials of the inventors’ surnames, Shepherd and Turpin – gathered together some ten French ‘irregulars’, and joined up with an American OSS (espionage) officer, Colonel David Bruce, who himself had about thirty men and some stray soldiers.

They set off into Paris, which was being liberated from the German army by American soldiers and French Resistance.

There was still some sniper fire, but most of the German soldiers had retreated.

Hemingway led the group to the Ritz Hotel, where he and Bruce had stayed before the war. The Germans who had been using the hotel as a base had fled and it was empty.

The manager of the hotel, M. Ausiello, recognised them and greeted them. M. Ausiello said to Hemingway, ‘Can I get you anything?’

Hemingway looked behind him at the men gathered there, and said, ‘How about seventy-three dry martinis?’

The manager and barman lined them up on the bar, and the group of soldiers and irregulars drank to the ‘liberation of the Ritz’.

There is no record of the proportions or ingredients of the martinis.

Hemingway took two prisoners, a couple of elderly German orderlies who had been left behind doing the laundry.

The Ritz commemorated this event by naming the bar Bar Hemingway. But when I was in Paris for the opening of the new Ritz bar last year along with Voltz and the usual riff and raff, I found there is some controversy about all this. There is the bar in which Hemingway drank as a regular – the Ritz bar – and the Bar Hemingway, which was the bar he ‘liberated’ on that day in 1944.

Voltz argues that to sense Hemingway, it is best to drink in the Ritz bar, despite the memorabilia in the Bar Hemingway.

I argue that the Ritz bar has been so extensively renovated that it is not really the same bar where Hemingway drank, and that it is difficult to sense Hemingway there now.

Voltz says, ‘And another thing. Did they drink the martinis as they were made or wait for all of them to be made before drinking them? If they waited, wouldn’t the seventy-three martinis have all been at vastly varied temperatures?’

I prefer not to discuss this with Voltz.

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