Puttin' on the Ritz

August 27, 1944

Paul jerked and shuddered at the sound of the salvo of gunfire that penetrated through to his cell from across the courtyard.

He looked around the small cell. Stone floor, walls, and ceiling. a cot suspended down from chains on the wall at one side. A drain in the corner with a chamber pot next to it. The Ritz it was not. This was anything but putting on the Ritz. He'd come down far and quite suddenly in the world, and he was somewhat bewildered at the judgment of "collaborator." He'd lived in a dream world, floating above Paris in the occupation. The others living in the Paris Ritz had been the same. And most of the others were still doing the same, going on with a carefree life of excess and denial in the lap of luxury that was the Ritz.

He really had little idea why he had come to this. He was completely apolitical. But then maybe that was the problem. But he'd had his run at it, hadn't he?

He heard the key turn in his cell door and the scrape of the metal as the door opened.

"It's time," his jailer, who was standing in the door, said. Just that. That was all that could be said at this end of Paul's life. A Catholic priest stood behind the jailer, pretending to look sad and concerned.

Another salvo of gunfire sounded from the courtyard, and Paul winced.

* * * *

June 14, 1940

The aspect was one of stark contrasts. A trim, young, ethereal, platinum-blond figure floated above the swarthy, dark, heavily hirsute, slightly bloated, older body on the double bed, sheets and coverlet all awry, in the shadow of the large, loft room in Paris. Paul Stainer, nineteen-year-old second son of a Chicago meat-packing empire magnate, had come to Europe to pursue the free Bohemian lifestyle. Specifically, he had come in search of the artistic lifestyle. He himself was a gifted painter, albeit in need of brushing up against art icons. And, more specifically, he had come in search of artists with big cocks and the want of a young man in their bed. He came craving the notoriety of having been the lover of some of the most brilliant mid-twentieth-century artistic minds on the Continent. He came with the need to overcome the shadow of being a second, embarrassment, son.

It was exactly because of what Paul openly sought that his parents were content with the young man doing, as they put it, "an extended European tour," even at his young age, and were happy to wire him the money that kept him in Europe.

Noell Giroux was a notable French charcoal artist and sculptor of forty-two, with a big cock.

Both were naked on the bed, Noell Giroux, like a reclining black bear, on his back, his hands holding the beautifully proportioned figure saddled on his hips at the waist, and the ephemeral white-marbled skin of the "David" undulating above him, slowly rotating his pelvis and rising and falling on the thick, long cock buried up inside him. Only the slight quickening of the young man's pace on working the cock in every direction, the faster stroking of his own cock with his hand, the strain apparent in the intense look on his face, the backward arch of his back, and the white-knuckled grip he had on a knee of Giroux' raised and bent legs betrayed how close he was to spouting his seed.

"Are you near to coming?" the pelted bear murmured.

"Yes," Paul hissed through set teeth.

"Then I will too," Giroux said.

And then they did come nearly simultaneously, Giroux, by his ability to control himself, exhibiting his long experience in fucking young men. Despite the age, near obesity, and hairiness of the sculptor, Paul was satisfied by him sexually. Giroux

was

a recognized artist, he had a very nice cock, and he was an accomplished cocksman.

Minutes later Paul was at the oversized glass French doors across the room—the only window in the dimly lit attic loft, back pressed against the left door frame, right leg bent, foot lifted against the frame, smoking a cigarette, and looking out at the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris across the Seine on the ȋle de la citè. The view of the cathedral was magnificent, as well it should be, as it was one of three requirements Giroux had had in choosing this garret to live in: He had to have space and ceiling height to be useful as an art studio, he had to have a clear view of Notre-Dame, and he had to be able to afford the rent himself so that he could bring young men home and fuck them in peace.

"Hold that pose," Giroux growled from the bed through the lit cigarette between his lips as he reached for his sketchbook and charcoals.

Paul bent the arm holding the cigarette and supported it under the elbow with the other arm. "Yes, just like that," Giroux said. "Lovely long, elegant lines. And the right leg hides the genitals. This will be commercial. Has anyone told you that you have a ripe, young, fuckable body?"

"Not since Tuesday," Paul answered in a flat, bored voice. "It's quiet down there. Much too quiet."

"What do you expect?" Giroux asked as he sketched. "Most of the city is gone. You should be gone as well. You could go. I worry that you will not go."

"Go where?" Paul asked. "And why, after all I had to do to be here?"

"It's inevitable that the Americans will come into the war against Germany," Giroux said. "The Germans are entering the city today. Can't you hear the rumble of their tanks? You may not be safe here for long."

"How long is long?" Paul asked. "Is it beyond today? If so, it can wait."

"You are trying too hard at this Bohemian lifestyle, I believe. I may not be here much longer myself. What will you do alone in the city?"

"Are all of the men of Paris going to disappear? Not a single rich and notable queer in need of a bed warmer staying on?"

"Most of the men who can will be gone, yes. And certainly the men who sleep with men; the Germans are known to be prudish and brutal toward such men."

"I think German men are much like any others—that they say one thing and do another. As long as the money keeps being wired, I'll be fine," Paul answered. "I was with Allard the portraitist before you. No doubt there will be a man for me after you too."

"You are a little whore, aren't you?"

"I do what I can," Paul said in the same tired, bored voice.

Both men were surprised by the sound of a loudspeaker from the streets below announcing a curfew for 8:00 p.m. that night and every night for the foreseeable future at the risk of being shot.

"And so the Nazi occupation of Paris begins," Giroux said in a heavy voice. "Life here will never be the same as it was. You really should leave, Paul. Life is not going to be easy in Paris now for a beautiful and promiscuous young gay American. German soldiers can be brutal, and I believe that you are correct—that their supposed hate for homosexuals can only enhance the brutality with which they fuck them."

"Are German soldiers known for having big dicks?" Paul asked, and then he laughed. He had come out of his pose when they'd been surprised by the loudspeaker broadcast. "Shall I—?"

"No, I'm finished with the portrait now," Giroux said and then, with a sigh, "So much is finished in Paris now. What you can do is come back here and ride my cock again."

And so Paul did, riding the cock in reverse, pointed at the foot of the bed, arms hugging Giroux' bent and spread legs, while Giroux, propped up on pillows at the head of the bed, smoked; ran a hand over the young man's well-sculpted back and buttocks, assigning the curves and crevices to his memory for the bronze he would sculpt; and letting his mind work on what was to be done now that the barbarians were, at last, inside the gates of Paris.

* * * *

August 28, 1940

Like so many rich Americans before him, Paul Stainer's life in Paris revolved around the Paris Ritz hotel, opened by Charles Ritz in 1898, and from its first night the center of the arts and intellectual life in Paris as well as political intrigue. The opening of the Ritz was couched in the blowback to the anti-Jewish movement of the Dreyfus affair by the novelist and political commentator Victor Hugo, who mobilized support from the cream of Paris' world that revolved around the hotel.

The hotel was a magnet for expatriate royalty from the capitals of Europe, headed by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, formerly England's King Edward VIII and the American socialite Wallace Simpson, as well as stage and movie stars, like Sarah Bernhardt, artists such as Pablo Picasso, and novelists and journalists of the like of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The comment of Hemingway, who returned to the hotel as soon as Paris was liberated from the Germans, was, "When I dream of an afterlife . . . the action always takes place at the Ritz Paris." Winston Churchill was almost perpetually a guest of the hotel in the months preceding the fall of France as he attempted to bolster France's resistance to Germany's invasion.

For a decade in the 1920s, the premier social maven, Elsa Maxwell, earned her international reputation by putting the queens and kings of society together in the party room and salons of the Ritz Paris. Future celebrity even held forth at the other end of the social class scale at the Ritz. A busboy in the hotel's dining room in the 1920s eventually became a superpower defeater by the name of Ho Chi Minh.

Whereas some evacuated from the hotel during the Second World War, such French luminaries as the fashion designer Coco Channel; the journalist and leading politician, Georges Mandel; and sultry French film star Arletty, stayed on through the war. In the case of Channel and Arletty—and Paul Stainer, as well—this decision would come back to bite them.

Unlike most of Paris, the Ritz Paris, fronting on the beautiful Place Vendôme in a former royal palace backed by a more modern addition, didn't miss a "social heights" beat or a champagne and lobster dinner during the 1940--44 German occupation of the city. Several of the permanent hotel residents stayed on, continuing to attract the cream of the artists, literati, movie stars, social leaders, and politicians who remained in the city, but these were moved from the premium rooms in the former palace to the hotel's back section. In their stead, the military leaders and administrators of the German occupation moved into the front of the hotel, ensuring that the Ritz remained at the center of what was important in the life of the city.

Even more significant, the hotel became the center of the various competing spy and resistant forces that was so convoluted that even a guide to who was doing what to who couldn't be deciphered.

Until late August 1940, following the June occupation of the city by the Nazis, the leading socialite in residence, occupying the Imperial Suite of living room, dining room, kitchen, and three bedrooms and three baths, taking up an entire floor of the old hotel wing, was Laura Mae Corrigan, one of the world's richest women, who had come from nowhere to marry an American tycoon who conveniently died early in the marriage. When Laura Mae, until recently a waitress in a diner, wasn't accepted in American society, no less than Elsa Maxwell, having previously termed Laura Mae the woman who had gold dug her way from waitress to queen in six months, joined Laura Mae's corner when she left the United States and made her the leading society hostess in Paris.

As more than symbolic of the Ritz' refusal to accept that the occupation of Paris would mean a belt tightening at the Ritz, on August 28, 1940, barely two months following the fall of the city to the Germans, Laura Mae threw one of the most lavish parties of the 1940s in the Imperial Suite, amid a décor of packing boxes. The boxes represented her banishment to the back building pending the arrival on September 1st of who would be the hotel's premier resident for the next three years, Germany's top-echelon military leader, Luftwaffe Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

Along with many of the other artists still in the city, Noell Giroux was invited to the party, as was Paul Stainer, partially because of his American connections and Laura Mae's interest in having her victory in Paris passed back to the American society that had shunned her but mostly as the ornamentation for the party his youthful beautify and sensuality provided.

"Of course we're not going," Paul had said.

"Of course we are," Giroux had countered.

"But you despise what the Ritz and people like Laura Mae Corrigan represents" Paul said.

"I have my reasons. We're going. And you will be nice to people there,"

"Yes, sir," Paul had said.

They didn't go straight to the party; they stopped at the hotel's bar, the rue Cambon bar, famous for all of the celebrities who had once hung out there, still hung out there, and would continue to hang out there in the future. Even more than the Ritz lobby, the rue Cambon bar was the center of activity in not only the hotel but the city at large. And now, as throughout the occupation, it was the center of spy activities, from all sides.

It was later to be revealed that the Operation Valkyrie plot to assassinate Germany's führer, Adolph Hitler, in the summer of 1944 that was hatched among German military leaders convinced that the German leader had gone crazy, was birthed and nurtured in the rue Cambon bar. The principle courier of messages between these military leaders and the French Resistance as well was the senior bartender, Frank Meier.

It was Meier who Noell Giroux had come to see under the guise of attending Laura Mae Corrigan's glitterati party upstairs to mark her eviction from the Imperial Suite, and when they came into the bar, Giroux established Paul at a table and went off to confer with Meier.

Paul wasn't alone very long. He never was alone very long where the hedonist members of society gathered. In short order, he had on the one side of him the novelist Michel Paquet, a permanent resident of the Ritz, whose novels were fed by the gossip in the hotel; on the other side of him sat Paquet's current boyfriend, the expatriate Polish count and dandy, Jan Bukowski; and, across from Paul, the count's "wanted to be and sometimes was" boyfriend, the darkly handsome French stage actor, Bres Moulin.

The three, notorious bisexuals all, flirted with and propositioned Paul shamelessly, and it wasn't long until Paquet and the count each had a hand on one of Paul's thighs and Moulin was rubbing a toe on Paul's ankle.

Paul was flattered. He knew of all three of them through the network of artists he floated on the edge of, but he had not been with any of them sexually yet. He was packing in as much experience with the leading artists and intellectuals of France as he could. Paul was in France to grasp the Bohemian lifestyle. He knew he was a strikingly handsome and sexy young man, and to him sex had become nothing more than a pleasurable body function and an "in" with the glitterati. Having the cock of a novelist, count, or famous actor inside him was his idea of ecstasy and achievement.

Paul had been trembling with the anticipation of being handed to an ejaculation right there, in the bar of the Ritz, below the surface of the table and then carried off and debauched by three men in one of the fabled hotel rooms above. He didn't need to take his men sequentially; he could handle them in consort. Grasping hedonism, he'd previously sheathed two men at once. Paul was long past protecting his virtue, and he was never as much alive as when he had a desirable man's cock—or two—churning inside him, knowing that he had enthralled and reduced to a level of primeval want and need some of the most brilliant and celebrated minds of the age.

Here he was, in the Ritz Paris, the seat of the intellectual glitterati of Europe, about to add one or three more notable names to his list of experiences—maybe in tandem; maybe in consort.

He would have gone with the dashing and handsome count in a moment, having heard he was a superb cocksman, and he had a hand on the exiled—exiled from Poland because of his sexual excesses with young men there—nobleman's inner thigh, moving it higher toward the royal jewels in assurance the count's intentions were welcome. And he had exchanged kisses with both the count and Paquet, when Giroux returned and virtually jerked Paul out of the middle of what was becoming a tryst.

"If you are going to open your legs for anyone tonight," Giroux said as they mounted the stairs to the Imperial Suite, "it should be for someone of use to us."

"Use to us?" Paul said. "I don't understand."

"There's no reason for you to understand yet," Giroux answered. "I will introduce you to anyone of interest to us at the party."

The room was crowded when they arrived, the noise was raucous, the drinks were free flowing, and the upper level of the room was covered in a fog of smoke. The packing boxes strewn around were a bizarre touch.

Paul met many of the celebrity residents of the hotel in passing, most of whom showed an interest in him and became prospects or useful contacts, even though Paul didn't have a notion what they were useful for. The artists, of course, were useful to Paul himself. He wasn't in Paris just to fuck around. He was a serious art student and was quite talented at it. There was much he was learning from Giroux, which, in addition to the size of the man's cock, was why Paul was staying with him. But Paul was open to liaisons with equally talented artists in exchange for help with his art. He would have died to be taken under the wing of Pablo Picasso, who was known to frequent the hotel and Laura Mae's parties, but he wasn't in evidence this evening.

The champagne was flowing, a rarity in occupied Paris, and Paul had lost count of how many he had and that the buzzing in his head was really in his head and wasn't being produced solely by the conversation in the crowded room, when Giroux introduced him to Claude.

"Just Claude," Giroux said. "No last name needed in Paris. You should get to know him. At some point he probably will be a lifesaver for you."

Giroux didn't say what Claude did and why he'd be of use to Paul. Neither did Claude after Giroux had wafted off and left the two to talk with each other. Claude was a handsome, gray-haired man. Tall and elegantly dressed in his evening dress, he could be a movie star, in Paul's view. His hands were expressive, the fingers long and supporting several expensive-looking rings.

He had a talent of touching Paul on the back or arm and coming in close to talk with him in a way that made Paul tingle a bit and that, in his near drunken stupor, Paul found arousing.

One moment Claude was drawing Paul away from the party and down a corridor of the Imperial Suite, mumbling about something he had to show Paul, which Paul didn't fully grasp because of the buzzing in his head from the champagne and that Paul saw no reason to guard against because of the same buzzing. The next moment they were both naked, on the bed in one of the three bedrooms of the Imperial Suite, Paul on his back, his legs spread and bent, and Claude lying on him, between his legs, Claude's hands caressing Paul's marble-white thighs, causing them to spread wider for him.

Paul, in his haziness, struggled a bit in a perfunctory way, but once Claude had his long cock deep inside Paul's ass channel, the young man just lay still, head turned to the side, while Claude began to pump him. The vigorous pumping brought Paul to life after a few minutes, and he raised his hips to Claude, grabbed Claude's waist, and began his own counterthrusting.

Laughing, Claude raised more up on his knees, held steady, and let Paul fuck himself on the cock, with upward thrusts of his hips and revolving them on the cock, panting and whispering, "Yes, yes, give it to me. Come inside me," as Claude kissed and chewed on the hollow of his throat.