Checking Out: Kate Moss at the Ritz Paris
I have stayed at the Ritz Paris during Fashion Week and the haute couture since 1988. Upon arrival, the fashion editors who install themselves at the legendary hotel know that Karl Lagerfeld sends the most opulent red roses in heavy baskets from Lachaume on Rue Royale nearby.
A favorite memory is the year I spent Christmas there, when the hotel created a special miniature tree for my room, decked out in artificial snow. The staff even prepared a roast hen with chestnut stuffing for my solo Christmas Eve dinner served en suite. At one point, the squash court was my favorite place, though it was eventually replaced to make room for treadmills and StairMasters. (I used to run into Tom Cruise, in navy gym shorts, and Nicole Kidman, in black knee-length stretch pants, working out side by side.) Back in the day, my squash instructor, Alexis Denis—now a friend and co-owner of L’Avenue and La Société—would meet me at 7:00 a.m. “ ’Eet the ball!” he would say in his deeply accented English.
My friend São Schlumberger and I would have lunch in the old Espadon on the Cambon side after her Chanel fittings, but she never came through the back door, the way I do, to get quickly to Chanel. She loved the bamboo-like carved dining chairs, which are rigged with brass hooks so a lady does not have to put her handbag on the floor. L’Espadon has also been the place I’ve had breakfast with Haider Ackermann and, later that same day, lunch with Stefano Pilati during one spring season. The late Mrs. T. Charlton Henry, one of the most incredible couture clients, who was photographed by Diane Arbus, used the hotel as her meeting place. I once interviewed her there between fittings at Givenchy couture.
In the great days of Versace couture shows, Gianni would cover the pool for his collections, which he conceived as an opening night in Hollywood, while Donatella would take over the Windsor Suite on the first floor. The superpacks of models would often end up in her suite after an 8:00 p.m. show and celebrate until the early morning hours. My best fashion moment was in 1996, when Karl took over the entire first-floor Imperial Suite for his couture show, to observe the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mademoiselle Coco’s death. He had two shows that brisk January day, and between them Naomi Campbell, Shalom Harlow, and Kate Moss came to my room—a simple one with two armchairs and the bed in a neoclassical alcove—and took naps. Karl and I walked in to find them all lined up asleep under layers of fine piqué sheets, like fairy princesses, false eyelashes still in place.
When Oscar de la Renta was designing Balmain couture, he, his wife, Annette, and I would wait for the room-service trolley of grilled fillet and sautéed spinach for dinner. The lobby and bar downstairs was more the scene: Valentino and his entourage always had a center table near the grand piano for lunch during Couture Week. In the summer, the garden was the place to be seen, where the French sparrows think nothing of alighting on the iron rail of a chair. A highlight was running into Amanda Harlech in some floating coat or dazzling Chanel creation, flying through the lobby to work or to a dinner or to catch the Eurostar, greeting everyone with a quick hello or chat, and maintaining in her inimitable way the idea that the Ritz is a haven of glamorous guests dressed to the nines.
Room 454 at the Ritz has been my home in Paris since 1998. What has made it so is not so much my familiarity with the dimensions of a room with a pair of clumsy pillars and its carpet garlanded with flowers but the meticulous attention of the staff who have gone to such pains to accommodate my strange requests—I sleep in my own sheets, for instance, 1920s heavy linen with embroidered pillowcases. My great-aunt’s carnation Spanish shawl is spread over a sofa, and the rest of the furniture is removed before I arrive. My couture collection is reverently hung in the wardrobes, and my photographs are placed in the right order on the marble mantelpiece below a vast gilt framed mirror—my old blue whippet Lupin, Lucian Freud and a fox cub, sunset at Shrawardine, Tessa Traeger’s moving black-and-white image of a tree bowed by winter gales. My shoes are laid out in a row in the fireplace, heels standing at attention.
The meaning of the Paris Ritz for me is the many hands that make it work—that paint a cornice in the dead of night so as not to disturb the guests, or cook my notorious green soup (a puree of garden vegetables) and launder my clothes with such infinite care. One man I will always remember is Serge, one of the doormen. I asked him what he will do when the Ritz closes. “Oh, I don’t know. Retire, I suppose. But I will miss all of you so much . . . you . . . the clients . . . you are my life!”
The Ritz Paris has always been a symbol of comfort and celebrity and that special hard-diamond glitter that only chandeliers (rigorously rinsed of dust and thumbprints) can radiate. It was always a hotel where Americans could break into English with the staff without hesitation. The bar in the winter and the adjoining terrace in the summer even felt geographically as if they were mid-Atlantic—as casual as a posh American country club and as elegant as an Yves Saint Laurent showroom. I once had lunch there with Tatum O’Neal and her then husband, John McEnroe, who seemed to be in a rage all the time and kept leaving the table. The calm hush of the thick, spotless napery and the exquisite service were able to upstage and somehow cocoon the tennis star’s tantrums and his movie-star wife’s despair.
Now the Ritz is slated for a major refurbishment, which will finally haul it into the present and give it a definite style, not that amorphous rich-person, special-occasion look composed of gold and velvet and thick carpets, the look everyone secretly likes and publicly sneers at. It always seemed to exist in the realm of ambassadorial reception rooms, Swiss-bank party rooms, and Saudi royal residences—so featureless and unimpeachable it was a bit tacky, with its reproduction Louis XVI furniture and swagged drapes.
The chic rooms (or preferably suites) were on the second or third floors with a view overlooking the Place Vendôme. I can remember a rich art collector from Chicago I knew bewailing his fate because his cost-conscious father had banished him to the maids’ rooms on the top floor, which were still no bargain since they’d been redecorated in the eighties and brought up to the height of luxury (and of luxurious prices).