The Ability to Kill (23 page)

Competition among the ladies was keen and feuds common. Emilienne d’Alençon became so irritated by
La Belle
Otero’s massive displays of jewellery that she herself made a dramatic entrance one night wearing no jewellery at all, but followed by her maid carrying her jewel case on a velvet cushion. The joke was hilariously applauded. Otero seethed. But time brought her revenge.
La Belle
was able to retire luxuriously to her own villa in Nice. Emilienne d’Alencon married an impecunious jockey and sank into obscurity.

However, she must have been improvident. Most of the Maxim’s ladies were able to feather their nests comfortably enough. With a male clientèle which included the Tsar Nicholas II, kings (Victor Emannuel II, Oscar of Sweden, Alfonso XIII, Leopold II), grand dukes (Vladimir, Boris, Michael, Dimitri), various princes, the wealthier nobility of Europe as well as a whole flock of ordinary millionaires, it was not too difficult. Maxim’s was for the prodigal spender and, until the newcomer knew his own way about, the management was always there to help him.

For instance, Hugo, the head waiter, kept track of the ladies’ various liaisons and entered the results of his observations in a little black book. Thus, the disposition and availability of any particular lady could be checked before overtures were made, so that mistakes embarrassing to both sides might be avoided. Some of the discreet notations employed by Hugo in his book became famous. ‘RAF’ meant ‘nothing doing’ (
rien à faire
). ‘AF’ (
à faire
) meant the opposite. ‘PLM’ (
pour le moment
) advised against any permanent arrangement, as did the disapproving ‘FSB’ (
femme seule au bar
), and the regretful ‘E2A’ (
entre deux âges
). ‘YMCA’ (
il y a moyen de coucher avec
) was a seal of approval, with reservations.

Eccentricity was tolerated unflinchingly. The Grand Dukes, fearsomely uninhibited men, could roister to their Russian hearts’ content; and when an American, a Mr McFadden, ordered a nude girl covered with pink sauce to be served to his guests on a silver salver, not even an eyebrow was raised in protest. Unhappily, we have no record of the scene in the kitchen when the order was received, nor of the kind of pink sauce the chef decided to use; but the dish was duly served and Mr McFadden paid the bill.

The efficacy of Maxim’s arrangements for its patrons’ comfort sometimes had remarkable results. A provincial grocer
who had made a fortune out of army contracts came to Paris for a week, without his wife, and went to Maxim’s. The evening was a success and he kept on going to Maxim’s. His wife did not see him again for three years. He only went home then because he was penniless.

In 1907 Eugène Cornuché and Chauveau sold out to a group of London business men who set up a British company, Maxim’s Ltd, to take over. Gustave Cornuché, Eugène’s brother, became manager. But nothing else changed. The gentlemen of Europe and America came and went; James Gordon Bennett, Louis Renault, Caruso, Chaliapin. The customers danced the
maxixe
, the tango and the one-step. True, there was some staff trouble; Rigo, the gypsy orchestra leader, eloped with the Princess de Caraman-Chimay (née Clara Ward, a beer heiress from Detroit); but it was easy enough to replace him. Maxim’s became more and more glamorous. Franz Lehar wrote it into his operetta,
The Merry Widow.
Playwrights wrote plays about it—Feydeau with his
La Dame de Chez Maxim’s
, Mirande with
Le Chasseur de Chez Maxim’s.
Maxim’s and
La Belle Epoque
flowered together.

The petals fell in 1914. During World War I, Maxim’s, like an Edwardian matron, E2A, went into decline. As a meeting place for young Air Force officers on leave, it managed to preserve a certain gaiety, but nothing there was ever quite the same again. The names which decorate that period of its history are significantly drab: Mata Hari and Bolo Pasha, both executed at Vincennes on charges of espionage, Madame Humbert, the confidence trickster, and so on. Maxim’s glamour had degenerated into notoriety.

The process continued after the war. The successors to Liane de Pougy and
La Belle
Otero were very much
femmes seules au bar
; the Grand Dukes had given place to paunchy business men
from the Levant; and if the bar made money, the restaurant lost it. In 1932, a man named Octave Vaudable bought in a majority of the shares from the London company, and took over the management.

Like the original Cornuché, Vaudable was a man with imagination. A successful Paris restaurant proprietor of great experience, he had the wit to understand that the shares of Maxim’s were worth more than the dismal statement of accounts appeared to indicate. What he perceived was the existence of a vast reserve of invisible assets: the twenty-year-old ghosts of
La Belle Epoque.
He set about making them work for him. After a period of trial and error he found the means.

Maxim’s second period of prosperity began with the arrival there of Albert Blaser as maître d’hotel.

Albert came from Ciro’s and was famous before he set foot in Maxim’s. He had his own strict ideas of what the clientèle of a fashionable restaurant should be. He brought with him not only ideas but the clientèle, too. They fitted Maxim’s perfectly, and the ghosts came out to welcome them. But ghosts on their best behaviour. No nude girls covered with pink sauce, no boisterous Grand Dukes smashing champagne glasses, no Hugo with his sinister black book, no
grandes cocottes
to trouble the respectable married woman dining sedately with her husband; just the cosy, pleasurable memories of those far-off things in their original setting. Maxim’s had learned how to capitalise on nostalgia.

War came again, and Maxim’s, still a British company, was placed by Hitler under the sympathetic supervision of Herr Horcher, a Berlin restaurant owner of appropriate distinction. Göring, Göbbels and other senior Nazis came to dine with the ghosts and be received by their representative, Monsieur Albert. Maxim’s had acquired the status of an ancient monument.

It still retains it. For American tourists in the upper income brackets it is a ‘must.’ You are from Los Angeles? How nice! Let me be your guide.

The keepers of Maxim’s today are Louis Vaudable (the son of Octave) and his wife Maggie, a law graduate of Lyons University. However, we shall not ask to see them. They are charming people, but very busy. In addition to owning sixty-five per cent of the shares of Maxim’s Ltd, they also supply ready-cooked meals to Pan-American Airways and run a frozen sauce business in New Jersey. Perhaps we shall wave to them across the restaurant.

The big night at Maxim’s is on Friday, when the women are in evening dress and the men must wear dinner jackets. It will be necessary, too, for you to reserve a table. I will meet you in the bar at nine-thirty.

The bar is upstairs above the restaurant, and is where the private rooms (no more of that) used to be. Beside it, there is a charmingly decorated dining-room called the Imperiale, much favoured by the younger set, and those who find the grandeur below a little stifling. I shall have a champagne cocktail. And, by the way, I want one thing clearly understood—the drinks in the bar (which are moderately priced) I shall pay for. You can pay the bill downstairs.

Well now, if you are ready, let us go down and face the music.

At the entrance we are met by the plump, pudgy Monsieur Albert.
^*
His dewlaps quiver slightly as he greets us in fluent, faintly Cockney English, and makes up his mind which table he is going to give us.

The restaurant is divided into three parts; a small front room, a large back room and a broad connecting passage, with tables along both walls, called the ‘Omnibus.’ The back room
is for celebrities, the nobility, the rich and the very fashionable; the Omnibus takes care of the less exalted; the front room is for the rest. At least, that is the theory. It is Albert who determines where you belong. It has been said, I know, that his decision has nothing whatever to do with your social standing or financial consequence, and that a five thousand franc note will get you a back room table right next to ex-King Peter of Yugoslavia, if that is where you want to be. This is a monstrous suggestion, and absolutely untrue. Only an envious cad in a badly cut suit, and without a five thousand franc note to his name, would make it.

However, we need not worry. Your wife is young and attractive and looking incredibly
chic
tonight in that little thousand dollar dress you bought her at Balenciaga’s. Albert has an eye for glamour. She will be our passport.

We go in.

Eugène Cornuché decorated Maxim’s in the style which we call
art nouveau
, but which the French perversely describe in English as ‘modern style.’ The walls are festooned wildly with loops and arabesques of some dark, bilious-looking wood, and writhing ornaments of lacquered brass. The lighting fixtures, too, are of lacquered brass, grimly fashioned into the shape of calla lilies. And there are the famous Cheret and Capiello murals. We pass one depicting a large, pale-pink lady about to dive into a river. We are now approaching the back room.

I said earlier that we were going to face the music. This was no idle figure of speech. The music—provided by a string orchestra which would be more at home playing selections from
The Tales of Hoffman
than the samba it is grappling with at present—
has
to be faced. It is deafening. For this discomfort, the acoustics of the back room are said to be responsible. It was the courtyard of the old house until Cornuché covered
it with a stained glass roof. The roof makes every sound reverberate. While the orchestra is playing, all conversation is conducted by shouting or in sign language. As it is difficult to talk for the moment, we may as well consider the gay cosmopolitan crowd before us.

Over there between those two pillars is the famous table number sixteen. Princess Margaret and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (Maxim’s still has a weakness for royalty) get number sixteen when they go to Maxim’s. Tonight it is occupied by a party which includes Miss Marlene Dietrich. All, except Miss Dietrich, are having a rough time, as there are no less than four press photographers at work on her, and their elbows are sharp. A middle-aged man at the next table is getting furious because one of the photographers keeps butting him.

Now who else is there of note? That decrepit-looking couple over there are a French count and his countess. They are regulars and fill up on champagne every night. That man with hiccups in the corner is an obscure Irish peer. Mr Onassis, the shipping magnate, you may not have met. As for the rest, I can see that you have already noticed something familiar about them. Exactly! They were all with you on the boat coming over—the couple from Hagerstown, Maryland, that charming pair from Muncie, Indiana, those two who are now bribing one of the photographers to get them in a picture with Miss Dietrich—you know them all. Of course, the women have been to Dior and Balmain, and look different tonight, but the men are just the same. That one on the dance floor who is laughingly pointing an imaginary gun at his friend and making clicking noises with his tongue; was it Texas he said he came from?

Yes, except for the food, it is all very much like home.

When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made a film of
The Merry
Widow
, they asked Lorenz Hart to rewrite the lyrics. This is what he gave Jeanette MacDonald to sing:

He must have dined there on a Friday.

Brooke Street, in the City of London, lies off Holborn, amid the tangle of narrow lanes between the law offices of Gray’s Inn and the diamond market of Hatton Garden. Nowadays, the greater part of one side of it is taken up by the pseudo-Gothic office building of an insurance company, but the other side is still very much as it was sixty-two years ago. There are small shops with offices above them and, at the far end, warehouses with loading platforms and wall derricks on the upper floors. It is a commercial street. At night it is silent and deserted.

The policeman who walked slowly along Brooke Street late one night in the February of 1889 must have been very bored. The fact that on the third floor of No. 24 there was a lighted window could not have interested him; he would have assumed automatically that it belonged to the office of some solicitor’s clerk or bookkeeper catching up on arrears of work. It was not until well after midnight that the policeman entered history.

He was approaching the corner of Leather Lane, when he heard, coming from the darkness behind him, the sound of a door being flung open, a shout and then the quick scuffling of running feet.

He turned quickly. As he did so, he twisted the slide of his bull’s-eye lantern and flashed the light in the direction of the sounds.

What he saw was a man running towards him; a short, fair, hatless man with a straggling moustache and a wild look. The man dashed up breathlessly.

‘Come quickly, Constable!’ he gasped. ‘Come and see!’

The policeman was young, cautious and mindful of his training. ‘Now just a moment, sir,’ he began; but the short man had no time for explanations.

‘No, no! Come and see! I’ve got to show you what I’ve done.’

The policeman tightened up inside. ‘Something you’ve done?’

‘Yes, that’s it!’

The policeman began to walk back along the street. The short man capered ahead of him chattering excitedly.

‘You see, I’ve only just this minute done it. And I don’t mind telling you I was scared. But I managed it, and though I dare say it’s very foolish of me, I feel I’ve just got to show someone.’