Books: Hotel Man

CÉSAR RITZ—Mme Marie Ritz—Lippincott ($3.5).

Cesar Ritz was a Swiss peasant who at 17 became a waiter in a Paris restaurant. Fifteen years later he was managing the most luxurious hotels in Europe. By the 90s when the Hotel Ritz opened in Paris, he had made himself a Pied Piper to royalty and the international upper crust, and had given the world the adjective “ritzy.” But for most readers the big news in his 70-year-old widow’s biography will be that he really existed.

An anecdotal parade of Ritz’s ritzy friends and of his famous staffs (called the “Academicians”), Madame Ritz’s biography also recalls many a mouthwatering feast, describes with nostalgia the innovations which earned Ritz’s unchallenged fame as the “king of hotelkeepers.” Herself a member of a family of famed hotelkeepers, Madame Ritz is by second nature discreet. In her account, the closets of the Ritz hotels are as free of skeletons as they are of dust. Her only intimate anecdotes are those which point to her husband’s subtle tact, his priestlike devotion to his guests’ whims. (According to his wife Ritz invented the slogan: “The customer is always right.”) Such is the anecdote of a water closet specially altered for Edward VII (the seat was too low), of a lovers’ quarrel patched up by a specially aromatic dinner.

In inventing the luxury hotel, Ritz perforce had to pay attention to plumbing, and this led him to an interest in hygiene in general. At a time when even palaces stank with clogged drains, Ritz put in modern plumbing; in addition he threw out heavy, germ-catching furnishings, gave every room a southern exposure. Within a short time the Paris Ritz became known as the best sanatorium in Europe.