“The Barman at the Ritz”, by Philippe Collin, Albin Michel, 416 p., €21.90, digital €15.
Listening to Philippe Collin tell us what led him to write his first novel, The Ritz Bartender, we note familiar expressions to listeners of his shows on France Inter and his spectacularly successful podcasts, such as the series on Simone de Beauvoir or Léon Blum. For example : “What you have to keep in mind is that…”this ankle which allows him to collect information which sheds light on such an aspect of his characters. Regarding the Barman at the Ritzif necessary “have it in mind” something, it is in particular the proximity that the author feels towards his model, Frank Meier (1884-1947), whose career first touched him“social advancement”, “the tearing away from social, religious and geographical roots in order to achieve fulfillment”.
For Philippe Collin, the geographical “uprooting” took place when, at the age of 23, he left Brest, where he was born in 1975 in a ” modest middle “ (his father is a submariner) and where he defended a master’s degree in history, for the capital. Reading Paris is a partyby Ernest Hemingway (Gallimard, 1964), gave birth in him to a « petite fascination » for the Ritz. He only dares to set foot there the day a professional reason gives him the opportunity to do so. “legitimacy” : in 2002, when he had just joined France Inter, he had to interview the singer Yoko Ono.
From that day on, he returned regularly to Bar Hemingway. THE bartender Colin Field, in office from 1994 to 2023, tells him about his predecessor, Frank Meier, founder of the hotel bar in 1921. “He had created there an extraordinary world of elegance, refinement, civilization. A cosmopolitan place, where diplomats, actresses, writers met…”
Philippe Collin began researching Meier, born in Austria to a Jewish family from Poland, who left for New York in 1898 where he became a famous bartender, before returning to Europe, making a name for himself in Paris, joining the Foreign Legion in 1914, surviving the fighting and then being hired by the Ritz. “I then wondered what he had done between 1940 and 1944.” There, he discovered that the hotel was not forced to close, in the name of Swiss neutrality – the nationality of the owners. During the four years of the Occupation, Frank Meier, grandson of a rabbi, ran the bar where the Nazi elite stationed in Paris met, starting with Hermann Göring.
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