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!”
OPERATION GALA
It’s hard to believe that the man who dreamed up such a luxurious and glamorous jewel of a hotel was not only a poor orphan from the dreary English Midlands, but also a mutinous sailor—and, ironically, a sworn enemy of the British Empire. With just a schilling in his purse, the wandering misfit finally made his way to Cairo, where he became a middle manager at the British Hotel. Meet Samuel Shepheard.
Shepheard was quite the character around Cairo, often appearing in full Egyptian garb, his trademark pipe dangling below a prickly moon-shaped face; he had the demeanor of a gruff uncle mixed with touches of a desert Santa Claus. According to Edwin de Leon, the American consul in Cairo, Shepheard was “a John Bull of the old type, both in looks and manner, independent and brusque to the very verge of rudeness and often beyond, no respecter of position or of persons, yet full of geniality and generous impulses, concealing a heart of gold under the rough husk.”
Cairo was the perfect lawless outpost for the scrappy sailor. He mingled with the elite of Cairo, networking himself into the inner sanctum of Egypt’s ruler, the Khedive Abbas, who was schooled in Europe and, at least publicly, supported the British rule of Egypt. They both shared a love for boar hunting and on many hunting trips they bonded. After one such trip, Shepheard persuaded Abbas to give him a swath of land to build his own hotel. In July 1851 Shepheard’s Hotel checked in its first guest.
However, the hotel was certainly no international attraction—at first. In Andrew Humphreys’ book, the Grand Hotels of Egypt, de Leon describes the original hotel as “a grim old barrack…with its stone walls four feet in thickness…capable of standing a long siege if necessary. The balcony in front was narrow, uncovered and paved with stone slabs…windows that won’t shut when open and won’t open when shut.”
As if that was not bad enough, another early—and important—visitor, Mark Twain, had this to say: “The worst on earth!” But it wasn’t all bad news. Humphreys notes that the hotel had “excellent plumbing, cold beer, large bedrooms, and ice-cold water served in jugs—and a dazzling staff of international creed: A French cook, Hungarian head waiter, Greek second waiter, an English head-coachman and a Bavarian carpenter.”
Shepheard proved to be a shrewd hotelier: In 1855 he secured a contract to house the troops in Egypt as a kind of way station between India and Crimea. He wrote to his brother: “The 10th Royal Hussars remained in Cairo for six weeks and ran up a devil of a bill. The officers were right good ‘uns for the bottle and knew how to drink champagne as well as if they had lived in Egypt for 10 years.” (According to Humphreys, the officers skipped on their bill and, proving his bull-like tenacity, Shepheard tracked them through the desert to the trenches of Sevastopol to collect his bounty.)
However, for the champagne-swilling, overweight and severely arthritic hotelier, the harsh life of living in the desert was taking its toll. In 1857, his infant son died of cholera, and his wife soon moved the rest of the family back to the UK. Shepheard finally sold the hotel in 1860 to Philip Zech, a savvy Bavarian hotelier for a reported 10,000 pounds.
As the 19th century was coming to a close, Cairo was beginning to have the makings of an European-like metropolis. The Suez Canal became a reality, and other lavish hotels—Continental-Savoy, Gezira Palace, Windsor, Winter Palace—began to dot the city, and a second throng of savants, industrialists, counts, statesmen, dignitaries and writers steamed down the Nile in search of mysterious adventure—most staying at Shepheard’s. The infamous American man of letters, Charles Dudley Warner, wrote:
“We are at Shepheard’s…it is a caravansary through which the world flows. At its table d’hôtel are all nations: German princes; English dukes; American sovereigns; explorers; they have come for the climate of Cairo, they are going up the Nile…they have come from India, from Japan, from Australia, from Europe, from America.”
They came and went in unbridled luxury: The Prince of Wales, King Faisal of Iraq, King Albert, Crown Prince of Sweden, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Duke of Gloucester, Lord Rothermere and several dashing Turkish princes. (When one of the princes found out his wife was having an affair with another hotel guest, he challenged him to a pistol duel on the terrace; they both missed.) And with the flow of wealthy and discerning internationalists, Zech knew he had to up the ante. In 1890, he tore down the hotel in favor of an Italian-like structure, replete with a grand façade facing the now thronging boulevard, a lush courtyard garden, fountains, rare, imported pelicans and wild flamingos, and more verdant gardens.
The new 340 room and 240 bathroom hotel rivaled that of any in the world—setting the template for such future masterpieces as the Grand in Rome, the Ritz in Paris and London’s Savoy. Shepheard’s resonant bathrooms were often described gleefully as “like sitting in the central chamber inside a pyramid.”
The hotel was on full display on a cool March night of 1928. The Faerie Cingalaise gala rivaled any of its time. According to Nina Nelson, the author of Shepheard’s Hotel, the glittering night goes down in hotel infamy.
“Guests walked into a tropical rainforest. Palm-trees, their fronds reaching up and spreading over the ceiling, lined the walls against a background of trailing vines and evergreens. Demon masks, lit up from behind, were carved in trees. Lifelike models of animals, high-lighted in green, were everywhere: lions, tigers, gazelles, and baboons. The windows were draped in pale pink brocade and illuminated from behind. Snakes swarmed around the walls. The enormous Ismail chandelier, hanging from the center of the ceiling, had been converted into a huge temple-bell.”
THE WAR PHOTOGRAPHER, HITLER’S BELLYDANCING SPY, AND THE BLACK PEARL
In the early-to-mid 20th century, Bob Landry was a staff photographer at Life magazine—and widely regarded as an intrepid traveler. Landry was at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked, capturing some of the most striking images; he snapped ghostly photos of D-day (all the film was lost!); and he shot The Desert War in Egypt.
In his beige desert khakis, thick JFK-esque sweep of brown hair, squinty smile and darkly tanned skin, Landry looked every bit the part of a movie star war photojournalist. As he flitted from assignment to assignment, Landry always returned to Egypt, often staying at Shepheard’s (he once stayed in Churchill’s suite). Landry photographed the hotel more than any other photographer, especially in its halcyon days during World War II. His sepia and black & white photos of red capped porters hustling luggage at the entrance of the hotel, officers dancing with floor-length gown wearing ladies at the nightly garden dances, martini-imbibing gentlemen huddled in clusters at the Long Bar, the cavernous dining room packed with revelers on New Year’s Eve, and the 24-hour spectacle outside the hotel’s entrance, provide the most indelibly romantic images of Shepheard’s.
The spies flocked to Shepheard’s like moths to a flame. The dark seductress, Hekmet Fahmy, Hitler and Mussolini’s private belly dancer and secret spy, reportedly exploited her curvaceous charms in seducing British officers in the dark corners of Shepheard’s Moorish lobby, gaining important information on the Allies plans for the Desert War. Along with Johannes Eppler, the head German intelligence officer in Egypt, who went under the nom de plume Hussein Gafaar, they would infiltrate Shepheard’s in search of drunken prey. On weekends, Eppler, who lived on a houseboat on the Nile, would snatch Fahmy after her nightly routine at the Kit Kat Cabaret and head to the hotel. The info they gathered was sent directly to Rommel. Their espionage act worked well for a time but by 1942 the jig was up: Fahmy was arrested outside Shepheard’s one late night and imprisoned. Eppler silently retreated to Alexandria.
Not to be outdone, Josephine Baker, the world famous cabaret and exotic dancer (and Allied spy), elicited her own information via Shepheard’s. From her base in Morocco, Baker and her entourage would make forays into North African cities under the guise of entertaining the troops, and would return with the information she gathered hidden in her underwear. She became fast friends with King Farouk of Egypt, and would often dine with him at Shepheard’s dining room before disappearing into the Cairo nightlife in search of intel.
In early 1941, Christine Granville, born Krystyna Skarbek in Warsaw, Poland, arrived in Cairo via Turkey. The daughter of an aristocratic family, Granville, a Miss Poland winner at the age of 17, was a rising star for the British intelligence service. With her dark beauty and the ability to fluently speak several languages, she posed effectively as a fashion war correspondent. During her days, she would train deep in the deserts in tomboy fatigues, her long silky black hair hauled back in a strict bun, running the obstacle course, parachuting out of airplanes, and learning to shoot. By nightfall, she was the drinking and smoking Ava Gardner vamp, melting into the Cairo nightlife. On weekend nights, Granville used Shepheard’s, and following Miller’s lead, the Long Bar, to seduce, sweet-talk and coax important information out of its crossroads of visitors. In 1944, Granville was parachuted into southern France and was used as a courier, using the code name Pauline, to deliver messages back to Cairo that could not be delivered via telegraph. She played a vital role in providing intel to and from North Africa and is widely credited as one of the best woman spies of all time, earning a French Croix de Guerre award, a medal from Poland, the George Medal for special Services and the Order of the British Empire. (After the war, she settled in London working at a club; one night in 1952, an obsessed ex-lover stabbed her to death.)
SATURDAY, BLACK SATURDAY
After changing ownership a few times, it was the Swiss born Charles Baehler who ended up commander and chief of Shepheard’s. He had formed an impressive array of properties and hotels in the Middle East—he built the glamorous King David Hotel in Palestine—and by the 1930s was the largest hotelier in Egypt, presiding over 4,000 beds, including those of Mena House, which lies at the foot of the Pyramids and was the first hotel in Egypt to have a swimming pool, and the dashing Continental located in the middle of Opera Square. A hulking figure of over six-feet-five, with an imposing handlebar mustache, Baehler had a swagger and confidence that would not let Shepheard’s be outshone by any of their competitors; he was obsessively first class the whole way, down to the napkins and towels, which had to have the appropriate thread count and eggshell white coloring. The manager of the Savoy, then Shepheard’s most heated rival, once complained, “When the big steamers arrived with 50 to 70 visitors booked for the Savoy, out of about 250, the rest going mostly to Shepheard’s. Soon after the steamers had left New York we received cancellations almost daily, so that only about a quarter of those originally booked for the Savoy arrived. The reason was that when they asked other travellers where they were staying in Cairo, all they heard, ‘Shepheard’s,’ Shepheard’s,’ ‘Shepheard’s.’”
Baehler died unexpectedly in Switzerland in 1937, his sons taking over operations of the hotel. In his New York Times obituary, Baehler was called “one of the world’s greatest hotel men” and was eulogized as Egypt’s “king of hoteliers.”
With Baehler’s passing and the end of the war, the rich, infamous and decorated slowly began to migrate elsewhere. Although the Long Bar was still serving Suffering Bastards, there was funeral air about the place. By 1950, the hotel had not only been surpassed by Paris’ Ritz, London’s Savoy and Rome’s Grand—all hotels that once stood in the shadow Shepheard’s—but by hotels just down the road in Cairo. Around this time, tensions between local Egyptians and the colonialists had reached a fervor pitch, and Shepheard’s became the ugly symbol of old British rule. On January 26th, 1952, the match was lit.
The streets of Cairo were ablaze with anti-British rioters, ebbing and flowing from one foreign owned business to another, setting fires and leaving ashes in their wake. The air was choked with black smoke, the smell of burning wood and rotting trash, and with the cries of “freedom, freedom, freedom.” Like most European establishments, Shepheard’s battened down the hatches, closed the shutters and barricaded guests inside. Soon, however, Molotov cocktails began flying into the garden, then the rooms and terrace, the wicker furniture igniting, one after another. Guests began jumping from their rooms, escaping to the gardens, scrambling to the rooftop for safety. Finally, the mob broke through in a rush of fury and more flaming cocktails: up went the dining hall, the once grand lobby was now heavy with fire, suffocating thick smoke making its way up the soaring staircases and into the rooms. An American journalist named Kenneth Anger, who was there, described the chaotic scene in Life:
“When I got to Shepheard’s I found a huge mob of people shouting and waving their arms as they watched the blazing remains of Egypt’s most famous hotel collapse. Each time a timber crashed or a wall fell they cheered.”
Joe Scialom now watched in horror as another kind of potent cocktail, one fiery bottle one after another, crashed into his beloved mahogany roost, turning it into a crematorium of memories. Scialom escaped with only minor injuries but his bar, and the hotel, were nothing but a wretched ash heap by morning.
GLAMOROUS PURGATORY
Today, the original site where Shepheard’s once stood in grandeur is home to a drab high-rise bank. However, there is still a Shepheard Hotel in Cairo, a half-hearted and generic nod to its ghostly ancestor. It sits on the banks of the Nile, rising up like a bejeweled and gaudy Vegas monolith, now home to corporate meetings and weddings, mainly. There’s no languid terrace to sip cocktails and gossip; no stuffed crocodiles or hippopotamus hides to be bought; no silken Polish spies to bed; and the Long Bar is now the Napoleon Bar with nary a Suffering Bastard in sight.
So while London’s Savoy still oozes with the old-fashioned glamour of spirits like Frank Sinatra, Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe, and Errol Flynn, and its Grill Room still flows with champagne, the historic 3-foot art-deco black cat sculpture—Kaspar—still presiding over the room for good luck, and the Hotel Ritz Paris still houses the Imperial Suite ($17,770 a night), where the Shah of Iran, Herman Goring and Princess Diana all slept in a replica of Marie Antoinette’s four-poster bed, and its bar still serves legendary barman Frank Meier’s “Rainbow” cocktail (anisette, mint, yellow chartreuse, cherry brandy, kummel, green chartreuse and cognac), Shepheard’s once grand phantoms have vanished like cigarette smoke on the Grand Terrace or a spy going MIA in the dead of the night never to be seen again.
The hotel that time forgot.
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