"You'll never make anything of yourself in the hotel business," his boss at one of his very first jobs, in Brieg, Switzerland, had told him. "It takes a special knack, a special flair, and it's only right that I should tell you the truth: you haven't got it."

The dapper young Swiss hotelier was effortlessly multilingual (if heavily accented), and never forgot a name or a face. Not only that, he also took careful note of his clients' whims and desires: who preferred what for breakfast, who required a carafe of water on his bedside table at night.

Ritz was also a showman, an orchestrator of evening entertainments and gala dinners.

He had advertised both the hotel and restaurant extensively, printing lavish brochures, and installed electric lights above the terrace, twinkling in the branches of the plants and trees. He was soon attracting a glamorous crowd.

Ritz had been serving the Prince and Princess of Wales since the early 1880s; the royal couple had come to the Hôtel de Provence with their five children the previous year over Easter, and had addressed him as a friend. They had stayed for two weeks, their royal patronage a most valuable endorsement of Ritz's new venture: where the prince went, others invariably followed. And the prince was loyal…

The prince was a man of great appetites and good taste, and he traveled often. He was Ritz’s most important client. But it wasn't only English aristocrats who favored Ritz's hotels and who D'Oyly Carte hoped would come to the Savoy: there were "the Roman Princes, Rudini, the Crispis, the Rospigliosis, the Radziwills, and so forth," Ritz continued —all the great royal families of the Continent..

"He says I am one of the titans of the hotel and restaurant world," Ritz said, laughing. "And he's right in thinking that my name now has a certain value. It will attract the crowd he wants - but it won't keep them. He hasn't the least idea how much work and care, how much imagination and effort, go into the proper running of a hotel."

Just as he had at the theater, D'Oyly Carte planned to eliminate all extraneous charges at the hotel, aiming for smoother and less irritating service. "No charge for Baths, Lights, or Attendance," announced the full-page advertisements for the hotel that D'Oyly Carte took out in the London papers. Such charges for basic services were common at most hotels, and infuriated him endlessly.

Americans were coming to London in ever-greater numbers, crossing the Atlantic in ever-larger and more luxurious ocean liners, and they had money.

D'Oyly Carte knew that they would be one of the keys to his success. At the same time, he needed to convince the old guard of London society to leave their private clubs and entertain in a more public venue—and to do so alongside these wealthy Americans.

Now he was drowning in last-minute logistics—scheduling, deliveries, staffing, supplies; everything late, expensive, and not quite right. It was just like a play: yes, it would all come together in the end. Opening night, they would be ready.

Not every show succeeded; he knew that. You launched them as well as you could and hoped for the best.

Ritz had never seen anything like it. London was a metropolis of five and a half million people-—more than twice the population of Paris, the next-biggest city in Europe, and far bigger than New York City, Canton, Berlin, Tokyo, Vienna, or any other city in the world, for that matter.

Ritz saw announcements of his arrival in London in a number of papers, and he was flattered and impressed with D'Oyly Carte's uncanny ability to win the attention of the press. It made sense, given his background in theater.

Ritz knew better than anyone the importance of the kitchen in creating a truly luxurious hotel experience. He had built his success in the hotel business in tandem with the brilliant chef Auguste Escoffier.

At the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo and the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne, where they had both worked for years, Escoffier had dazzled guests with his cooking, inventing new dishes and finding new ways of presenting classics. Ritz often thought that Escoffier, in fact, was the key to his own success. The Savoy's Charpentier was not on the same level.

It will not succeed. Not under its present management. The equipment is excellent. The staff is fairly good, and could easily be whipped into shape. Needs a little weeding out, that's all.

The cuisine... is uninteresting. It should be much better. The directors are eager to make a success of it and seem very generous in their ideas. But, in my opinion, the management and organization will have to be improved, or the thing will not be successful.

Marie Ritz was twenty-one years old. She had grown up in the hotel business, working at her mother's modest, old-fashioned Hotel de Monte Carlo, and at her aunt and uncle's luxurious Grand Hotel, also in Monte Carlo.

He had no regrets about turning down the job D'Oyly Carte had offered. Ritz had spent years working for others and was now, finally, a hotel owner himself.

Of course he had investors and, yes, his hotels were small, but they were his. And seeing the wealth in London, and the many travelers passing through, only reinforced his desire for independence and his confidence in his own success.

It was only a few months later, in the late fall of 1889, that D'Oyly Carte contacted Ritz again. The board of directors at the Savoy had come to the conclusion that Hardwicke, the manager of the hotel, was not up to the job. They wanted Ritz to take over. He could name his own price.

Once again Ritz was flattered, and once again he explained to D'Oyly Carte why he could not take the job: he had just opened two hotels; he had just gone into business for himself. 

It wasn't simply a matter of money, of "naming his own price," as the board of directors had proposed.

He would bring his own team to London and be given free rein to organize the staff at the Savoy as he saw fit. Most important of all, he would continue to run his hotels in Cannes and Baden-Baden, and he would stay in London for only half the year, leaving his deputies in charge at the Savoy during the winter. He would, in other words, maintain his independence.

What made it all work were the complementary high-travel seasons for the various groups of leisurely and aristocratic clientele Ritz catered to: in London, the social season ran from spring to summer; in Baden-Baden, as in the Swiss Alps, the high season was summer; in Cannes, the high season was winter and early spring.

"Never bother a guest with too much attention-people like to be served, but invisibly! They like when in hotels to have some peace!" he declared.

Service ought to be unobtrusive for the most part, anticipating what people wanted before they asked for it, yet also responsive to any request they made. "The customer is always right" was one of his oft-repeated maxims. Service should be unquestioning and solicitous and swift. This was in many ways the secret to Ritz's success: speed. His nickname as a waiter back in the 1870s had been "César le Rapide.

This assembly-line process achieved two things, both enormously important: speed and quality. The time it took to get a dish out, from order to delivery, dropped from fifteen minutes to five.

Meanwhile, the checks and balances of the interlocking responsibilities demanded a high level of cooking precision. Dishes were more uniform, and subject to more oversight by the chefs de partie. The difference was nothing short of revolutionary: better food, served faster, and at the right temperature.

Every morning, Ritz gathered his staff for a meeting, looking at the day ahead. Who was checking in? Who was coming to dinner? Were there any special events, private parties to be planned? Ritz had established this formal, all-hands morning meeting at both the Grand and the National, and made it the foundation of his management.

It was a novel concept: to include the entire staff, and to welcome anyone to raise any pertinent topic or question. It was a democratic meeting in which all were heard. With one exception: Ritz did not invite the accounting or finance staff. The morning meeting was not the venue for talk about budgets and money.

When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something?

So, how am I going to get past this bouncer who told me that I can’t come into this nightclub? How am I going to start a business when my credit is terrible and I have no experience?

You’re constantly looking for what is possible in a kind of MacGyverish sort of a way. And that’s your approach to the world.

You have revolutionized hotels, you have revolutionized the habits of society. But alas, you can't change England! The law is no respecter of persons —particularly of actors! And nothing would convince the English that it is not wicked to dine in public on Sundays.

But Coquelin was wrong: Ritz had begun a campaign to change the law, enlisting the Savoy board members and every important contact he could muster to apply pressure…

They did succeed, and the result was that dinner at the Savoy was now legal on Sunday, which soon enough became the most popular and fashionable night of the week at the restaurant.

The nouveau riche were welcomed at the Savoy, their dinners and parties often even more glamorous and expensive than those of royalty. Indeed, they were among the earliest to gravitate to the new hotel.

"Trust them to find out new luxury hotels at once," thought Ritz. "American millionaires will do the same."

But it wasn't their money Ritz was after, though he welcomed it of course. No, it was something else: there was a sense of theater that accompanied these men. They spent their money in exceedingly public ways. They took pleasure in their wealth. They may have been considered tasteless by some members of English society, but they carried themselves with panache.

The thrill of the Savoy was its embrace of the modern. London at this moment felt like the future, and nowhere more so than in the dining room at the Savoy.

And of all the social, cultural, political, and technological changes under way, none was more important than the emergence of women on the public stage. At least, none was more important to Escoffier and Ritz, whose new brand of cosmopolitanism fueled and was fueled by this shift.

By the end of the summer season of 1890, the Savoy was booming, its central role in changing fin de siècle London assured.

The shareholders present today, D'Oyly Carte explained, were welcome to inspect the books themselves. The accounts were on a table at the front of the room. They would see that the company's income was growing quickly: "The takings for January were £6,504; for February, £6,205; March, £6,999; April, £8,167; for May, they were £10,511; and for June, they reached the large sum of £15,848.”

Ritz had never been happier. He had also never been more frantic. He was managing three hotels and two restaurants in three countries: a recipe for always needing to be somewhere else.

I maintain that for service, there is no hotel in the United States to compare with the Hotel Savoy in London.

Ritz was sure the board of directors of the Savoy would be interested. The board wanted to expand, and had every faith in him as hotelier. But he was merely an employee —a situation that was beginning to rankle. He had engineered the Savoy's success after its rocky start, and yes, he was well paid, but his authority would always be superseded by that of D'Oyly Carte and the other owners.

Was this his chance to put himself on more equal footing? If the Savoy's Rome project came to be, he was determined to own a piece of it. And if the Savoy said no, then he might find investors of his own to launch the hotel.

The Savoy agreed to the deal, and met Ritz's demands for ownership. They formed a new company, the London and Foreign Hotel Syndicate, to develop and run the Rome hotel, which they named the Grand.

Working just as hard of course, and more successfully than ever, but the gaps in his knowledge seemed more consequential now, reminding him that however much he looked the part, it was a part he was playing.

He was the elegant and cultivated César Ritz, mastermind of luxury, but he couldn't escape the feeling that he might be revealed, at any moment, to be an impostor, nothing more than a servant.

The truth, he feared, was detectable in the size of his hands and feet.

They were large, peasant-size hands and feet, he was convinced, and he did everything possible to keep them hidden.

He wore his shoes a half size too small. This was painful, of course, but preferable to ridicule.

Still, he felt a stab of shame, of dismay, at the thought of abandoning his own hotels, especially the Provence.

Baden-Baden: fine. He had no qualms, really, about selling the Restaurant de la Conversation and the Hotel Minerva. Business was business. He had done well with both but now did not have the time to run them properly.

But the Hôtel de Provence in Cannes was different. It was more than a business. He had a sentimental attachment to the place. The Provence was where he and Marie first lived as a married couple; it represented his independence, the end of his many years as an employee in Lucerne and in Monte Carlo. The Provence was his and his alone. It was almost impossible to explain to Marie what that meant to him, how deep that feeling went.

She had grown up in a family of hoteliers, but for Ritz, owning his own hotel was the signal achievement of his life, marking his escape from his past.

Ritz began to cry a little. He was looking down at his son's hands and feet. Charles's hands and feet were tiny, and he held them gently in his own hands.

"Thank God he will have small hands,” he said to Marie. "He has inherited his hands from you, not me. He will not suffer as I have because of peasant hands!"

Marie always made light of César's shame and vanity, and his too-small shoes, but now her eyes filled with tears.

Yes, they would sell the Hôtel de Provence, Ritz said again, but he would fight twice as hard for his independence, for Marie, for Charles.

He would not resign himself to being D'Oyly Carte's employee. He would own his own hotels again, in London, in Rome, maybe even in Paris. It was destiny.

Alfred Beit, the south African gold and diamond magnate who was a regular at the Savoy, would regale Ritz with stories of his exploits, always encouraging him to think big. 

There was a dearth of great hotels the world over, Beit said. Why, with the right backing, a man of Ritz's quality could open a luxury hotel in every capital in Europe—and in Africa, too.

It was exhilarating to imagine the possibilities, the conversations fueling Ritz's ambitious dreams and his persistent sense that he was undervalued by the Savoy.

What had started as idle talk soon became more than that. Ritz's contract with D'Oyly Carte had always left him free to pursue his own business dealings, as long they took place abroad. He had made sure of that.

The Savoy was running like a Swiss clock; now was the time to expand his portfolio, to reassert himself. His dealings over the past year with other hoteliers and hotel companies in Europe had only galvanized his determination. He was far and away the most respected hotel manager in Europe, yet he did not have a hotel of his own.

In early 1896, Ritz began approaching some of the wealthy businessmen who frequented the Savoy about the idea of forming a new company. It would be called the Ritz Hotel Syndicate Ltd.

Some of these potential investors were shareholders in the Savoy, and they knew firsthand how talented Ritz was, that he'd been instrumental in making the hotel a success. Ritz's arrangement with D'Oyly Carte, they knew, allowed him his independence. He worked at the Savoy for only six months of the year.

Ritz hosted a series of small lunches and dinners in the restaurant's small private dining rooms, at which he described his plans to open luxury hotels in numerous cities.

The Savoy kept Ritz busy, as did his plans for the Ritz Hotel Syndicate. He was looking for a building in Paris. This was the dream: to open his own hotel in the capital where he had started his career as a waiter. The most beautiful city in the world, and one sorely lacking in luxury accommodation, Paris was the perfect place to launch the first Ritz hotel.

The very idea of a hotel called "Ritz" filled him with pride and trepidation. To bring such attention to himself was gauche, he knew, yet he felt elated at the prospect.

He had redefined luxury over the past decade (with the help of Escoffier, of course), and his name meant something. He had earned the right to put it on a hotel, hadn't he?

As he entered the building, he knew immediately that it was the one. It had the right scale. There was a beautiful curving staircase, just as he had envisioned.

Ritz wanted his hotel to feel like a home; an elegant home, to be sure —the home of a gentleman, a nobleman, a prince—but not a grand, impersonal palace. Beautifully decorated, breathtakingly luxurious, but above all, intimate.

Number 15 Place Vendôme was perfect. It was also expensive.

Back in London, the Ritz Hotel Syndicate quickly spun off a new company that would own the Paris hotel; it was named the Ritz Hotel Development Company Ltd., with starting capital of £120,500. This was less than the £200,000 the Savoy had raised eight years earlier, but it was enough to build a hotel.

Ritz was the managing director; he took no salary but was allocated deferred shares amounting to a quarter of the company. Escoffier and Echenard were also granted shares.

They were owners now. They had a building in Paris. The Ritz hotel, the dream, would soon be a reality.

D'Oyly Carte got right to the point: Ritz and Escoffier, he said, had "forgot they were servants, and assumed the attitude of masters and proprietors."

It was clear, he continued, speaking to Ritz directly, that "you have latterly been simply using the Savoy as a place to live in, a pied à terre, an office, from which to carry on your other schemes." Ritz stood silently.

By a resolution passed this morning you have been dismissed from the service of the Hotel for, among other serious reasons, gross negligence and breaches of duty and mismanagement. I am also directed to request that you will be good enough to leave the Hotel at once.

"My hotel must be the last word in modernity," Ritz told Mewes.

"Mine will be the first modern hotel in Paris; and it must be hygienic, efficient, and beautiful."

Beyond the desire that it be state of the art, Ritz did not have strong opinions about the design or décor of the building. He did not consider himself to be educated or sophisticated enough to talk about such mat-ters. He was a philistine. "I know nothing, really, of periods of architecture and furniture," he said to Mewès. "You shall teach me."

Of course, the truth was Ritz knew what he wanted.

In late March 1898, César and Marie Ritz moved into an apartment on the top floor of the unfinished hotel on the Place Vendôme.

The building was a construction site. There were painters, electricians, carpenters, masons, plasterworkers, and gilders all over the place during the day, all hard at work.

They hadn't planned to be living in the hotel, needless to say, with two small children, before construction was complete. But it made sense: the renovation was far enough along to make the building habitable, and Ritz was obsessed.

She had never seen her husband so intent and relentless as he was in the weeks and months after leaving the Savoy.

Ritz was pushing himself to the limit to get his hotel opened on schedule, that summer, and to make it perfect. He had always been a perfectionist, but this was different. Everything was riding on the success of the Hôtel Ritz. His pride, his self-confidence, his very spirit depended on it, Marie understood.

And there were moments when he was overwhelmed by doubt. A black mood would descend. I'm getting old, he would say. This was a constant refrain. He was so full of energy and ambition, yet also prone to melancholy. 

They asked the furniture manufacturers and merchants to give them the furniture for free, with the understanding that the hotel would sell any item in the lobby to any guest who inquired. Or they would refer the guest to the manufacturer or merchant directly. Knowing just the kind of clientele Ritz would attract to the hotel, the furniture suppliers readily agreed.

It was a similar money-saving impulse that led Ritz to another seemingly strange idea: to solicit advertisements for the deluxe brochure he planned to publish to promote the new hotel.

The "booklet," as he referred to it, to be called The History of the Place Vendôme, would be a lavishly produced celebration of the hotel and its Paris neighborhood and would be given for free to the hotel's first guests.

The cost of printing and binding a few hundred copies of the brochure came to one hundred francs a piece — far too much. And so Ritz approached all the supplies of the art objects and decorative items found in the hotel and asked if they would like to advertise in the back pages of the booklet.

He also visited the luxury shops in the neighborhood: Cartier, Worth, Charvet, all businesses that scorned advertising, on principle, as beneath their dignity. Nevertheless, they agreed to buy ads, and instead of costing money, the promotional booklet made a profit.

There was no competition in Paris for a hotel that offered truly modern luxuries and conveniences—private bathrooms in every room, for example. Ritz took out advertisements in British newspapers to make his case.

HÔTEL RITZ, Place Vendôme, Paris.

UNDOUBTEDLY the most perfect Hotel in Europe.

In 1896, as he was setting up the Ritz Hotel Syndicate, Ritz heard about a new hotel under construction on the corner of Haymarket and Pall Mall, to be called the Carlton.

The initial developer of the building had run into financial trouble, and a new group of investors planned to take over the site. Among them were a number of Ritz Hotel Syndicate shareholders, including Henry Higgins and Lord de Grey, and they urged Ritz to get involved. They wanted him to run the place, but at the time, that was impossible. Ritz was free to pursue his own affairs, but working for a competing hotel in London was out of the question, per his agreement with D'Oyly Carte.

Soon after their tumultuous departure from the Savoy, as they were preparing to open the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, Escoffier and Ritz had agreed to go into business with the Carlton once it opened the following year.

Ritz would organize and staff the hotel; Escoffier would do the same for the restaurant.

A new company was formed, the Carlton Hotel Ltd., with Ritz and Escoffier on the board. (There was significant overlap in the ownership of the Ritz Hotel Syndicate and the Carlton Hotel Ltd., but they were separate companies.)

As Ritz prepared for the launch, he found that it had become easier. There was by now a formula. Everything he had learned at the Savoy and then at the Rome Grand and the Hôtel Ritz would be brought to bear at the Carlton. There was truly no one in the world better equipped to open this sort of hotel and restaurant than César Ritz and Auguste Escoffier.

They had invented a new form: The state-of-the-art building. The very best restaurant. The cosmopolitan clientele. Most of all, the sense of drama that infused the enterprise.

There was an explicitly theatrical quality to Ritz's hotels: to enter the lobby, to walk into the restaurant, was to step onto a stage of sorts.

At the Carlton, Ritz found an opportunity to heighten this feeling: going over the plans for the hotel, he'd seen a way to put the restaurant a short flight of marble steps above the Palm Court, which was at street level.

"This is an expensive idea of yours, Ritz!" said Mr. Waring, of Messrs. Waring, one of the construction firms working on the building.

"You take away the street steps and then put the steps at the other end, on the dining room side. It doesn't make sense. What's the idea?"

"So that ladies entering the dining room or leaving it may do so dramatically," said Ritz.

He was, as always, thinking like a director (and also, as always, not concerning himself too much about costs). A woman in evening dress, sweeping down the stairs into the Palm Court, all eyes on her... Yes, as far as Ritz was concerned, the lobby and the restaurant constituted a stage set.

The Paris hotel was booming: it was on track to make a significant profit in its first year, £10,555, which the Savoy certainly hadn't done.

Indeed, the Hôtel Ritz would be paying a 7 percent dividend to ordinary shareholders. More important, all the Savoy's best clients came to the Hôtel Ritz when they were in Paris: Nellie Melba, the Rothschilds, the Goulds, the Vanderbilts.

The Prince of Wales had come to the Ritz, breaking his long tradition of staying at the Bristol when in Paris, and numerous members of the Marlborough House set came too. Ritz had every reason to expect his clients would follow him to the Carlton when they were in London.

Yes, the Carlton was magnificent. Grander, taller, more elegant than the Savoy, it was a true palace hotel.

At the Carlton, the cancellations poured in--by messenger, post, telephone, and telegraph. Every room, table, and window in the entire hotel had been booked, and now needed to be unbooked.

Ritz and Echenard handled the onslaught. Ritz told Escoffier to stop all preparations in the kitchen, and to cancel any orders for provisions that he could. Of course, most everything for the gala dinner had already been delivered. Ritz also canceled the orchestra booked for the week. No one would be in the mood for waltzes.

Ritz remained serenely calm as he unwound the elaborate event. He was in shock. At about three o'clock that afternoon, in the middle of a conversation with his staff, he collapsed, unconscious, falling to the floor.

Ritz receded into a twilight of melancholy, brought low, at age fifty-three, by mental illness and exhaustion.

Escoffier, meanwhile, continued to run the kitchens at the Carlton, and did so for years. They both looked back with amazement at what they had achieved together in the 1890s, how different the world was then, how they themselves had changed it.

It was Ritz who had brought them to London, who cajoled and convinced Escoffier to take a risk, to gamble on the unknown. And it was Escoffier who had ensured their success with his elegant, superior cooking.

Together, just as Ritz had promised, they had conquered London and the world, alchemizing food and luxury into a new kind of glamour, a cosmopolitanism for the twentieth century and beyond.

It was Marie who oversaw the proliferation of the Ritz hotels in the early years of the century—in London, Budapest, Madrid.

In 1906, the Hamburg-America Line, a German shipping company, approached the board of directors of the Carlton about licensing the company's name for a restaurant on board a new ship, the Amerika.

They would call it the "Ritz-Carlton Restaurant." Escoffier, a member of the board, supported the idea; he would be hired by Hamburg-America as a consultant to the restaurant.

Marie Ritz also agreed, allowing the use of the Ritz name, and thus was born a new luxury brand, one that was soon also licensed to a British-American hotel company, which opened the first Ritz-Carlton hotel in New York City in 1910.

The building, on Madison Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street, was designed by Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore, the architects who would design Grand Central Terminal a few years later.