Napoleon used it as his headquarters in the 19th century. Winston Churchill made it his part-time home during World War II. Nazi spies & belly dancing spooks mingled with British Army officers & movie moguls in the bar. Lee Miller, Vogue cover girl & Man Ray muse, would storm the men-only bar to flirt, drink & taunt the patrons. No, it’s not the Paris Ritz, Rome’s Grand or London’s Savoy, but Cairo’s Shepheard’s Hotel. As Egypt descends into chaos and Cairo is full of angry mobs, TREATS! looks back at the halcyon days when Shepheard’s Hotel was the place to be—before it was burned to the ground.
BY ROBERT MICHAEL
NORTH AFRICA, 1943: “I’ll be drinking champagne in the master suite at Shepheard’s soon,” Marshall Erwin Rommel brazenly remarked. The Nazi’s leader of Afrika Corps in North Africa and the so-called “Desert Fox,” Hitler’s favorite general, had been blitzkrieging his troops across the deserts of North Africa and had his eye on the prize: Cairo. He had one last battle before taking the Egyptian capitol. The Battle of El Alamein was not only to decide the fate of Shepheard’s but who was to gain the upper hand in winning the Second World War. The Allies, led by General Montgomery, knew they had one last stand to protect their desert jewel, and quickly launched Operation Supercharge, an overwhelming frontal attack of 500 tanks that broke Rommel’s forces in two days of intense desert fighting. Rommel blithely ignored Hitler’s direct order of “victory or death” and retreated his beleaguered forces to Tunisia. The Desert Fox’s once unstoppable panzer divisions had been crushed; there would be no check in at Shepheard’s, no champagne, no bath in its cavernous tubs.
At the time of Rommel’s defeat, Shepheard’s was the British Base in Cairo, and its master suite housed Winston Churchill, who liked to sit in his favorite wicker chair on the Grand Terrace at cocktail hour, his gin and lime juice elixir in hand, and watch the circus-like miasma of humanity below on Ibrahim Pasha Street, by far the most international of Middle Eastern streets. Snake charmers performing amidst the heavy thud of dusty camel hooves, the beasts lurching to and from desert adventures; dragoman’s (guides, translators) hustling tourists; gaunt strawberry vendors carrying their fat, succulent fruits on their heads; British, French, Australian and American officers scurrying from brothel to brothel, their uniforms impeccably pressed in the sweltering heat; squealing pigs in cages; cheerful monkeys riding the backs of pygmy donkeys; small leopards on leashes, hissing like cornered cats; prepubescent newspaper boys sitting on their haunches; fresh hippopotamus hides unfurled in the middle of the road; natives in colorful dress selling shawls, beads, scarabs, stuffed crocodiles and various other potions, elixirs and anathemas. Maybe even a hirsute baboon with fangs the size of small knives being led around on a chain leash.
Churchill was in town for the Cairo Conference, along with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, to strategize about the Normandy invasion, pushing the Japanese out of China, and seducing the Turkish president into joining the Allies. At the time, Cairo had a population of roughly 1.3 million and had been attracting adventurers, dark-skinned glamour girls, intrepid explorers, mapmakers, writers, princes, war correspondents, and luxe travelers for a few decades—and anybody who was anybody stayed at Shepheard’s.
To be sure, the six story 400-room hotel was not only the glamorous center of exotic Egypt but also arguably the most famous hotel in the world.
THE INTERNATIONAL BARMAN OF MYSTERY & THE VOGUE MODEL
If Shepheard’s was the most famous hotel in the world, then its bar, the Long Bar, was certainly the most infamous watering hole of its time. The men-only bar wasn’t an ornate or particularly handsome room—drab tiled floors, a staid mahogany grandfather clock behind a modest bar, small nests of wicker tables and chairs, 3o-odd foot ceilings—but was always packed with the crème de le crème of international movers and shakers: prime ministers, generals, industrialists, spies, bounty hunters, mercenaries and raconteurs of the highest order. Rene Francis, writer and adventurer, wrote of the bar:
“It is a curious place, that bar of Shepheard’s…unlike anything of its kind. It is hard to know what is the word to apply to a place the atmosphere of which is neither official or tourist, not Bohemian…just something which is comprehensive and unique and unforgettable, quite apart from the rest of Egypt, quite different perhaps from anything of the kind anywhere in the world. The unwritten chronicle of Shepheard’s bar contains most of the unwritten history of modern Egypt.”
Indeed, some of the world’s most important decrees were hatched there, including drawing up the Allied invasion of Normandy and hashing out the finer points of the Suez Canal.
One man, an Egyptian Jew and trained pharmacist, saw and heard it all. Joe Scialom (pronounced Shalom) was the head bartender of the Long Bar for fifteen some-odd years. Scialom spoke eight languages, was always impeccably dressed in a white tuxedo and black bowtie, his steel blue eyes and toothy smile a welcome sight during the war—and he could match wits with anyone. Winston Churchill, Charlton Heston, Charles de Gaulle and the Egyptian King Farouk all delighted in his company. Scialom’s motto was “mix well but shake politics” and it worked like a charm. However, like most supplies during World War II, good alcohol was hard to find and Long Bar VIPS began complaining of headaches and nausea from the lousy spirits. Scialom wasn’t deterred. The industrious chemist used his mixing skills to create the “Suffering Bastard” cocktail, a heady mixture of black market gin from South Africa, stolen British Army issued brandy, hand-picked limes, bitters concocted by the chemist across the street, and sweet ginger ale from a wealthy Greek merchant, served in an ice-filled glass. It was a big hit, and in 1942 the bar was unofficially renamed “Joe’s Bar” after he made untold gallons of Suffering Bastards for a severely hung-over British Army that fought—and won—the decisive Battle of El Alamein. After the battle, Scialom was reportedly hoisted above the crowd, passed around and serenaded. (The Suffering Bastard has gone on to be world famous, becoming a mainstay at Trader Vic’s and numerous Tiki bars around the world.)
While not much is known of Scialom’s personal life, the world’s most important luminaries seemed to trust him with their deepest secrets; however, local Egyptian authorities had their suspicions, imprisoning him as an alleged spy and eventually throwing him out of the country altogether. According to Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, author, mixologist, and a modern day heir to Donn Beach and Trader Vic, Scialom was “the most famous bartender in the world for many years.”
Berry continues: “After he was run out of Egypt in 1956, Conrad Hilton tracked Scialom down and hired him to run a bar property of his in Puerto Rico. Then Hilton moved him to Havana. Then after Castro took over he moved to the Waldorf Astoria.” (Scialom went on to invent other such famous cocktails as the “One for the World,” “The Chancellery” and “The Perfect Diplomat,” a heavy-duty cocktail of vodka, apricot brandy, orange juice and champagne.)
While Scialom entertained and imbibed the world’s power elite, it was a woman that changed the Long Bar’s etiquette forever. Lee Miller, a New York born brunette stunner, who seemed to have lady luck on her side (at 19 she was saved from being hit by a car in Manhattan by magazine magnate Conde Nast and was quickly put on the March 1927 cover of Vogue), had moved to Cairo in 1934 with her then husband, Egyptian business man Aziz Eloui Bey, eventually becoming a war correspondent for Vogue. (Miller, incidentally, was one of the first correspondents to enter the Nazi death camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, even luxuriantly soaking in Hitler’s personal bathtub in Munich.) Miller’s iridescent beauty and male attitudes toward sex (she smoked, drank and gambled) was such that she became the muse for Man Ray, was courted by Charlie Chaplin, and intoxicated the likes of Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso. Miller would often say over drinks, “I don’t waste a minute of my life…I have a wonderful time…I’m free with my ideas, with my body, and my affections.”
This motto was in full display one sweltering summer night in 1937 when she marched into the testosterone-filled Long Bar, turning generals heads in awe and disgust, sat at the bar, and barked at Scaliom, “bourbon, no ice,” becoming the first woman to ever have a drink there. The Long Bar was now “officially” an equally opportunity establishment. (Miller died in 1977 in the UK, having transformed herself in her later years into a gourmet cook at her farmhouse in East Sussex cooking for her friends and fellow artists.)
Of course, the Long Bar—and Shepheard’s—haven’t escaped the eye of Hollywood. Shepheard’s took center stage in 1996’s multiple Academy-Award winning The English Patient, starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Scott Thomas, as the furtive love nest for Count Laszlo de Almásy (Fiennes) and Katharine Clifton (Thomas). Almásy, a Hungarian aristocrat, was a real person who worked with Rommel using his expert knowledge of being a mapmaker and was eventually relocated to Turkey to help orchestrate an Egyptian coup. (After the war, Almásy returned to Egypt at the invitation of King Farouk, for a time staying again at Shepheard’s, and became the technical director of the newly founded Desert Research Institute before he died of dysentery in 1951.)
In the 1920s, swathed in an impeccable linen suit, legendary movie producer Douglas Fairbanks, who was a frequent guest at the hotel along with his glamorous wife Mary, stood at its steps and declared to the press: “I’m just mad about Shepheard’s!”
To see more from this story, subscribe or purchase now.
The post YOUR SUITE IS READY, MR. CHURCHILL: THE SHEPHEARD’S HOTEL appeared first on Treats! Magazine.