Answer to "Who is she, and what about that hotel and that chef?"

The short answer:  Well... there IS no short answer, but she's Margaretha Zelle, aka Mata Hari; arrested at the Hotel Plaza Athénée, where the executive chef is Phillipe Marc, who is of French citizenship. The Hotel was used in an episode of Sex and the City, with a scene of Carrie Bradshaw stepping out onto the balcony wearing a black and white dress.

That sounds simple, but read the following story... 

When I started this Search Challenge, I thought it was going to be pretty straight-forward. I knew that Margaretha Geertruida Zelle-McLeod had a complex life, but a straightforward death.  Arrested by French police, tried under suspicious (and not especially legal or honest circumstances), then executed by firing squad.

But I didn’t know that Margarethe’s story of her life as Mata Hari would be so interwoven with myth after her death. Though I should have known better...

To pursue this challenge... It’s pretty easy to look up Margarethe Zeller and find that her stage name was Mata Hari.  (Don't get lost at this step: She has another interesting interesting life to read about!)  

But when you start looking for the story of her arrest, it quickly becomes tricky.  

I read the Wikipedia entry on Mata Hari, found the name of the hotel, and then second-sourced that version of her arrest story elsewhere.  This is when things started to get tricky.  

Version 1 (English Wikipedia):  Mata Hari is arrested for suspicion of spying on February 13, 1917 at her room in the Hotel Plaza Athénée.  That’s the EN Wikipedia version.  Many texts agree (e.g., the book “Mata Hari” by Sam Waagenaar (1965), and several others)

Version 2 (French Wikipedia): BUT... the French Wikipedia entry says: "Six semaines après son retour de Madrid le 13 février 1917, le contre-espionnage français fit une perquisition dans sa chambre de l'hôtel Elysées Palace sur les Champs-Élysées (actuellement siège de la banque HSBC France).”   ("Six weeks after her return from Madrid February 13, 1917, the French-espionage made ​​against a search of her room at the Hotel Elysées Palace on the Champs-Elysees (currently the headquarters of HSBC France).")

That would indicate that she was arrested at the Hotel Elysées!  Ooops!  The English and French Wikipedia entries disagree.    

There’s support for this elsewhere.  According to Shipman’s book (Femme fatale: love, lies, and the unknown life of Mata Hari,  2007), Mata Hari had, by the time of her arrest “moved out of the Plaza for the cheaper Castiglione hotel and then to the even cheaper Hotel Elysée.” The Mata Hari museum in the Netherlands (a place with, presumably no axe to grind) says that  “On 13 February 1917 she was arrested in her room at the Elysées Palace Hotel.”

There is lots of support for both versions--both hotels seem to have credibility as the arrest location. The question is, which one is right?  To further confuse things, there are other variations.

Version 3:  The BBC has it that she was captured on a train near Paris.  

I can go on like this for a while. (I don't want to tell you how long I spent reading about Mata Hari.)
It all gets a bit funny when you compare the different accounts since it’s clear that her story has had lots of.. um... enhancement over time.  

A recent article in the New Zealand Herald is typical reportage about her life: 

“In February 1917, a French judge and a dozen police officers barged into Suite 113 in a luxurious hotel on the Champs Elysees [the Elysee Palace]. The beautiful female occupant appeared - naked, according to one account - and handed around chocolates in a captured German helmet.”

Surely, Mata Hari didn't really need 12 police officers AND a judge to arrest her. There's something more to this story than just a simple espionage arrest.  

In other versions of the story, she was either naked at her arrest AND execution, blew a kiss to the firing squad beforehand, or was wearing an elegant gray outfit that she had made for the occasion.

You know things are getting whacked when some stories have her in Room 131, while others have her in Suite 113.  She was nude either at her arrest, or her execution, or both.  


As they say, we must go deeper.  The only way to resolve this is by looking for the original arrest report.  How are we going to get THAT?  

It turns out that the original report is quoted in the book, Mata Hari: songes et mensonges, by Fred Kupferman (2005).  He wrote this from France while looking at original documents.  

From the official police report : 

"La fille Zelle Marguerite, dite Mata Hari, habitant au Plaza Palace Hôtelp, de religion protestante, née en Hollande le 7 août 1876, taille 1,75 m, sachant lire et écrire, est prévenue d’espionnage et de complicité d’intelligence avec l’ennemi, dans le but de favoriser ses...”  

Okay.  It’s the “Plaza Palace Hotel,” which I take is the same as the current  Hotel Plaza Athénée.  

NOW... we can figure out the rest.  

Or.. can we?

When I wrote this question, I'd done a search and found that Alain Ducasse was the Executive Chef. After all, there's a restaurant at the Hotel Plaza Athénée with his name on it. His own website mentions that he "entered the Hotel Plaza in 2000."

A quick check on Wikipedia for Ducasse's biography, and--voila!--we find the newspaper article saying that he switched his citizenship to Monaco for tax reasons.

I'd been stung by the difficulty of Mata Hari, though, so I triple-checked my source with a simple query: [ executive chef Hotel Plaza Athénée ] That led me to the hotel's own website, http://www.plaza-athenee-paris.com/restaurants-bars which says that he's the executive chef.

Except I did a little more clicking around on the hotel web site...

I ALSO found this page on the Hotel web site that says Phillipe Marc is the executive chef... and that this position was given to him by Alain Ducasse!

More contradictory stories.

The question now is, who's the current executive chef? Ducasse (Monaco) or Marc (France)?

When checking on current employment, a handy trick to know is to check other "professional" sites. When I found Phillipe Marc on LinkedIn, I figured I was done. His listing is "executive chef at the Hotel Plaza Athénée."  

And now, going back to Ducasse's website, it's pretty clear he's the "executive-executive" chef. He's covering not only the Athénée, but about a dozen other places as well.

Final analysis: Ducasse (French) is guy doing the work at Athénée.


I'll save the Extra Credit for my next post. (Luckily, THAT wasn't too hard!)

Search lessons:  There are many morals one can take from this tale... but the big one for me is that myths tend to amplify over time.  And in the age of the web, it's too easy to copy/paste stories from one place to another.  Take note when you see the same text over-and-over again... that suggests poor scholarship on someone's part, and you should be suspicious.  

And when you're trying to run down the details of someone's life (details that, if salacious, nearly always tend to be exaggerated!), you have to have multiple very different sources.  The best sources are the primary sources, as in this case, the police report.  I'd be happier if I could see the original report, but what I found is pretty good.  

Seach on!  Ever more deeply...