For some unexplained reason the Ritz Hotel left me off the invitation list for its slap-up centenary dinner. I blame Sir Peter Ustinov. The last time I had tea in the Ritz’s famed Palm Court (in fact the only time, to be honest) he queried the bill. Well, what he actually said to the head waiter was: “You appear, young man, to be under the illusion that we are paying for everyone in the room.” I also seem to recall that, for reasons known to himself, he delivered this line in an “amusing” German accent, though it might have been Russian. That was 20 years ago. But the head waiters of swanky London hotels tend to have long memories.

Never let it be said, however, that this column bears a grudge. The Ritz is 100 years old, and we should celebrate the fact. What interests me is not so much the hotel itself, but the word “Ritz”. There are some brand names — a very select band — that become bywords for entire categories of human behaviour. Hoover is one. Google is another. And Ritz is a third. Within a few years of the hotel opening, its name had become a sort of shorthand on both sides of the Atlantic for a standard of luxury, exclusivity and prestige to which only those at the very top of society’s pile had access.

What’s remarkable is how quickly that happened. César Ritz — “king of hoteliers, hotelier to kings” — opened his Paris hotel in 1898, and the London version (gilded and beaux-artified to look as Parisian as possible) eight years later. Led by Edward VII, who found it a useful bolt hole from his dowdy little pile on t’other side of Green Park, the Establishment flocked to preen and prance in its unashamed opulence.

For a while the First World War must have dampened this ostentatious flaunting of wealth. But it’s clear from contemporary references that, although Ritz himself died in 1918, the phrase “putting on the Ritz” had spread through the English-speaking world by the early 1920s. It was a useful way of saying that someone was strutting about in a superior manner that neither their breeding nor achievements justified. One typical usage occured in the Nevada State Journal as early as November 1923: “Financially Raymond Weaver may be a bum without a dime in his pocket,” the paper wrote, “but he certainly knows how to put on the Ritz.”

So Irving Berlin was some years behind conversational slang when he wrote his monster hit song Putting on the Ritz, probably in 1927. Yet those lyrics offer a fascinating insight into the era’s social attitudes. What Berlin originally penned was a snide ditty inviting rich whites to go to Lenox Avenue, Harlem, on Thursday nights and snigger at black maids (on their only night off) dressing up and pretending to be “real ladies”. Remarkably, such a racist sentiment hardly raised an eyebrow at the time.

But by 1946, when Fred Astaire sang the song in a movie, the mood had changed — at least in the northern states of the US. Millions of black GIs had fought bravely in the war. So Berlin cannily rewrote the song. Lenox Avenue in Harlem became Park Avenue in downtown Manhattan. And the offensive line “That’s where each and ev’ry Lulu-belle goes, every Thursday evening with her swell beaus, rubbing elbows” was replaced by the racially neutral “Dressed up like a million-dollar trouper, trying hard to look like Gary Cooper, super-duper!”. Only one thing stayed the same. This send-up of people pretending to be something they weren’t was still called Putting on the Ritz.

You don’t hear the phrase much these days, nor the once-ubiquitous adjective “ritzy”. But the curious thing is that nothing seems to have replaced it. There are plenty of grotesquely expensive luxury goods, hotels, wines and gadgets around. But I can’t think of any whose name alone would conjure up a life of exclusive, pampered privilege in the same way that the word Ritz did for my grandparents. Why is that? Partly because in areas such as jewellery, clothing, hotels, holidays and food, it is harder and harder to discern the difference between what’s available to the super-rich and what the moderately affluent can afford. Partly because London is now home to so many palpable crooks and graceless oiks with millions stashed in their offshore bank accounts that the very concept of luxury, privilege and exclusivity has been irredeemably tarnished. But also, perhaps, because when compared to the homogeneous Edwardian age, with its shared values and tastes, the culture of 21st-century Britain is so fractured and contradictory that there is no longer any general agreement about what constitutes the ultimate desirable luxury.

Still, preposterous snobbery is never out of fashion with people who are susceptible to that sort of pomposity. Which is why that immensely grand hotel in Piccadilly, with its rigid jacket-and-tie dress code, is still doing very nicely, thank you, in supposedly relaxed, egalitarian Britain. Well, good luck to it. If you fancy “putting on the Ritz” yourself in this centenary year, I see that the place is offering special weekend packages for two . . . starting at £1,500. Super-duper, as Irving Berlin might have said. But I’m afraid that a hotel bill like that would have me crooning another classic inter-war song. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Let's hear it for the ... others

OK, so Britain’s sporting heroes didn’t quite fulfil our wildest dreams in the World Cup or at Wimbledon. But don’t you think we should be overjoyed for our fellow Europeans — the French, Spanish, Swiss, Belgians, Portuguese, Italians and Germans — who outplayed the rest of the world and comprehensively dominated the latter stages of both competitions? No, me neither. Infuriating, wasn’t it?

A true inspiration

An eloquent Times obituary last Friday paid fitting tribute to the American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who has died at the tragically early age of 52. Forgive me for adding a personal note. I never met her, but her singing — so intense, so honest, so infused with life’s joys and shadows — touched me as deeply as anything I have ever heard in a concert hall or opera house. Twice in my life, by strange coincidence, I found myself reviewing performances by this brave woman, who continued to sing while fighting cancer, at times when members of my own family were seriously ill. Somehow, the example of her transcendental courage and the grace of her artistry steadied my own nerve and renewed my spirit at a dark time. Does that sound trite and sentimental? I hope not, because it happens to be true.

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