The Gilded Chalet

by Padraig Rooney

  For royal families in the real world, a Swiss education allowed a degree of neutral distance from the politics of the Great Game. The crowned heads of Persia and Thailand, for example, were careful to keep the English and the French at loggerheads with each other. A Swiss education, furthermore, guaranteed spoken French, the indispensable lingua franca of diplomacy and sophistication before the Second World War swept all before it on a vulgar tide.

  The ephemeral education of the finishing school – both Princess Diana and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall are finished girls – with its emphasis on social polish, attracted that mistress of comedy, Muriel Spark. In her final novel, Finishing School, she skewers the pretensions of College Sunrise in Lausanne and the slick self-confidence of its mixed-race co-ed students. They have free rein, their parents are crooks of one sort or another, and the line between academics, etiquette and entertainment is blurred: ‘Tilly was known and registered at the school as Princess Tilly, but no-one knew where she was Princess of.’ Spark’s trademark wickedness satirises the relationship between wealth – however ill gotten – and education: ‘Your jumped-up parents (may God preserve their bank accounts) will want to see something for their money.’25 With its view of the lake and the Alps, College Sunrise seems more like a luxury hotel. Indeed, many of Switzerland’s hotels have morphed from spas treating tubercular patients, to schools, to hotel management schools and back to hotels again with the changing seasons and the economic climate – from dire health to dire wealth. Spark defines her terms:

  The Posthotel Rössli in Gstaad, 1880, where Hemingway wrote part of A Farewell to Arms

  ‘You are listed as a finishing school. What exactly is a finishing school?’ said Israel.

  ‘Generally,’ said Rowland, ‘it’s a place where parents dump their teen-age children after their schooldays and before their universities or their marriages or careers.’

  Giovanna said, ‘Polished off?’26

  Like royalty, Fitzgerald and Hemingway thought of Gstaad and its environs as a refuge from the world. Descending through the outlying chalets, noting security systems and quadruple garages set into the hillside, I try to imagine the glamour of that lost decade, overlaid with many a fresh fall of snow. But all I can think about is Fitzgerald’s phrase: ‘this careless, dominant class’. Above Gstaad the Palace Hotel commands the rise like a Bavarian castle. The Posthotel Rössli, where Hemingway stayed, is the true heritage building in town. It sits on the pedestrianised main drag of bedizened designer outlets and ski equipment stores, diminished, smoked like an old kipper.

  Another dirndled waitress seats me at the Stammtisch and brings hot chocolate. The panelled interior is decorated with sepia ski photos and antique wood and leather skis that have an orthopaedic look. I flick through a local magazine: Roger Moore strolls the streets of Gstaad without his toupee. Julie Andrews is secreted up one of the valleys. So is Roman Polanski – perhaps he knows where the whorehouse is? Tucked away like so many tarnished rhinestones from Tinseltown, they are our modern Dick Divers, our Scotties and Zeldas.

  During the First World War, Swiss neutrality gave birth to a different kind of writing from the flash American of the Lost Decade. Noir-ish, double-edged, it was peopled with spies and detectives. While empires fell and fascism rose, Switzerland became a playground of a different kind. The good days in Gstaad had come to an end. ‘“Good-bye, Gstaad! Good-bye, fresh faces, cold sweet flowers, flakes in the darkness. Good-bye, Gstaad, good-bye!”’27

  8

  THE PLAYGROUND OF EUROPE

  I spy with my little eye: Fleming, Maugham, Glauser and the Krimis

  Sean Connery plays James Bond in a 1961 Sunbeam Alpine convertible

  The Swiss well knew that their country was the scene of all manner of intrigues; agents of the secret service, spies, revolutionaries and agitators infested the hotels of the principal towns.

  Somerset Maugham

  A lascivious sea breeze entered the parent–teacher conference room in Rome as Ursula Andress stepped across the threshold. Those famous breasts wool-clad against the Roman winter perked up in a number of teachers’ minds. The snake-length hair was matronly coiled. She was remarkably well preserved and carried herself with an awareness of what hips can do to a room. She must have been touching sixty – a late mother, with all a late mother’s care. Her son, Dimitri, was seventeen, shaven-headed, with the sleek bronze looks of the Roman tough. He would nonetheless go on to study Philosophy at Princeton and from there to the piranha pool of minor West Coast celebrity. More than one male teacher might have hummed ‘Underneath the Mango Tree’ sotto voce. The cold Ponentino swirled through the umbrella pines of La Storta, fluttering paperwork on the desks.

  Andress was the original Bond girl, Honey Ryder in Dr. No. Born in Ostermundigen, a suburb of Bern from which the capital quarried its greenish-bluey-grey sandstone, she was half-Swiss, half-German. Her father, a German diplomat, had been expelled from Switzerland for unexplained reasons and disappeared during the Second World War. Impressively multilingual, the starlet spoke with a Swiss accent in English and so her early films were dubbed.

  Bond himself is a Swiss confection. Born in Zürich to a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix from Vaud, and a Scottish father from Glencoe, Andrew Bond, the hero was orphaned early, like Superman, Batman and Harry Potter. Superman, hailing from the planet Krypton, is raised by Kansas farmers. Batman loses his parents in Crime Alley in Gotham City. James and Lily Potter suffer the Killing Curse. Bond Senior is a company rep in Switzerland for Vickers armaments manufacturer. Not quite in the same league as Krypton and Gotham City. But for Agent Bond, born to the arms world seems apt. Bond, like Switzerland, is a kind of brand.

  Bond’s parents were killed in a climbing accident outside Chamonix when the boy was eleven, a back-story invented much later when Fleming’s spy series had taken off. Agent 007 grew up to become a suave money-spinner, with a finger in the paperback and movie pies and an eye for merchandising. Like his Rolex Oyster Perpetual Submariner and Mont Blanc pen, Swiss luxury is grafted onto the English notion of a gentleman – even though technically half-Scottish. Fleming created Bond in Jamaica at the rate of 2,000 words a day in February 1952. Like Switzerland itself, Bond is synonymous with wealth, stealth and the good life.

  Following trouble with a skivvy at Eton and a spot of gonorrhoea at Sandhurst, the nineteen-year-old Ian Fleming was dispatched to Kitzbühel in the Austrian Tyrol to bone up for the Foreign Service exams. There he came under the wing of Ernan Forbes Dennis, a diplomat and MI6 Head of Station for Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia – on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Fleming perfected his German at the University of Munich and enrolled at the University of Geneva as an external student in 1929 in order to put manners on his French. He left a very light academic imprint on his two universities.

  The young blade drove a black Buick and wore an old Etonian tie: Bond branding had begun. In Geneva he joined the jeunesse dorée of the early 1930s. The Crash, then as now, didn’t hit them the hardest. By twenty-one Fleming had adopted the debonair persona of the Englishman abroad, incarnated by his fictional hero and by a suite of well-spoken actors since. Fast cars, tailoring and blonde bombshells change, but the clean-cut gentleman has staying power.

  Decades later in 1963, in a series of articles commissioned by the Sunday Times, Fleming wrote about Geneva as one of his thrilling cities:

  For to me Geneva, and indeed the whole of Switzerland, has a George Simenon quality – the quality that makes a thriller-writer want to take a tin-opener and find out what goes on behind the façade, behind the great families who keep the banner of Calvin flying behind the lace curtains in their fortresses in the rue des Granges, the secrets behind the bronze grilles of the great Swiss banking corporations, the hidden turmoil behind the beautiful, bland face of the country.1

  Simenon, creator of Detective Maigret, ended his days living in Switzerland for tax purposes; not much wielding of the tin opener there. Elsewhere, Fleming notes ‘the
banal beauty of Switzerland’. This conception of the country as a façade of rectitude and beauty, behind which high finance goes about its murky business, predominated after both world wars. Switzerland was by turns admired for its tenacious neutrality and suspect for the compromises that neutrality entailed.

  Fleming focuses on the pillars that hold up a country ‘with only services to sell’. Of course, since 1963 Britain, too, has become an economy of ‘tat and service industries’. London, in particular, has learned much in the way of financial services from the Swiss model. We could see Switzerland in the vanguard of where the rest of Europe is heading: a grand old wagon-lit for the rich and ailing, producing nothing but luxury items and high-end service.

  In this century they have turned their attention to hotels and sanatoria (with the defeat of tuberculosis they are cannily switching to the modern managerial diseases resulting from stress and tension) and to the creation of the solidest banking system in the world.2

  Fleming pulls no punches. Nor is there an iota of nostalgia for his pre-war student days in Geneva. Like his spy-writer compatriots Maugham, Greene and le Carré, he has a jaundiced view of Swiss wealth and banking. Only towards the end of the twentieth century were the country’s wartime dealings – particularly the question of unclaimed Jewish assets – frogmarched into the light.

  The reason why fugitive money, in its search for safe repose, has poured into Switzerland in such a continuous torrent, particularly since the war, is due to the sympathy of the government for money which is more or less hot (if it was not, it would not be on the run).

  Fleming traces Swiss banking secrecy to the act passed on 8 November 1934, shortly after Hitler’s accession to power. This law made it a crime to reveal the name of a Swiss account holder. As a consequence, Switzerland is ‘universally acclaimed the safe-deposit box for the world’. It is not surprising that all-comers are welcome:

  Modern Switzerland has gathered to its bosom a new kind of refugee – the fugitive from punitive taxation. The political refugee still exists in the form of fugitive royal families, Italian, Rumanian, Spanish and Egyptian, together with a handful of sheikhs. These sad orphans of the world’s storm, evicted from their palaces, have found shelter in the Palace Hotels along the shores of Lac Leman, and there hold strictly mediatised tea and bridge parties and are courted by the local snobs.3

  Switzerland hosting a royal tea party is a bit hypocritical, coming from a writer ensconced on his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica. But it is the oily royalty – jumped-up generals, Macbeths, carpetbaggers, sundry keepers of the desert flame – who find Switzerland’s fastness most congenial. The ambient view of such people has grown benign, not just in Switzerland but in the world of spectacle. Celebs, royals, glitterati – we forget that they are often merely thieves in ermine. For well over a century, Switzerland has kept this class of people in tea and cream cakes.

  The arrest of Hannibal Gaddafi and his wife in July 2008 for allegedly beating their servants in a Geneva hotel illustrates the delicate balancing act between oily money and the rule of law. There had been earlier violence in 2005 when Hannibal was studying in Copenhagen. Claridge’s Hotel in London also had to deal with screaming, blood and bodyguards. Muammar al-Gaddafi reacted to the arrests with characteristic huff. He cut the Nestlé contract, arrested a couple of Swiss businessmen and withdrew $5 billion from his Swiss accounts. At the G8 summit in 2009, Gaddafi called for Switzerland to be carved up between France, Germany and Italy. Hannibal Gaddafi, living up to both his names, said he would ‘wipe Switzerland off the map’. A couple of years later his father lay in a meat safe in the Libyan desert and he himself was on the run. It’s a tough world. Hannibal now lives in Oman. We might reasonably ask where the $5 billion has ended up.

  However, the more low-key are salting it away too. Fleming reserves his spleen for Geneva, the town that taught him French and Social Anthropology. He sees Geneva as Calvin’s town in the way that Mecca belongs to Mohammed and Las Vegas to Liberace.

  The spirit of Calvin, expressed in the ugly and uncompromising cathedral that dominates the city, seems to brood like a thunderous conscience over the inhabitants. In the rue des Granges adjoining the cathedral, the great patrician families, the de Candoles, de Saussures, Pictets, set a frightening tone of respectability and strait-laced behaviour, from which the lesser Genevese take their example. The international set – the delegates, staffs of the various organisations and staffs of foreign businesses – do not penetrate even the fringes of Genevese society.4

  This split between old money and the new international order (global business cheek by jowl with global organisations and NGOs) has been a part of the Geneva landscape since the émigrés of the late nineteenth century. Before that the Huguenots fled persecution in France during the second half of the sixteenth century and in turn became the status quo. Many of them were skilled goldsmiths, watchmakers and bankers. Switzerland has a long tradition of owing its prosperity to immigrant skill.

  Calvin’s belief that ‘Christ died on the cross not for all mankind, but only for the elect; that God does not will all men to be saved’ has given an edge to Swiss materialism. Wealth can seem to be merited – a view much propagated in the United States as well. Conversely, poverty is self-inflicted. This Protestant ethic married to the spirit of capitalism – ‘this holier-than-thou attitude’, as Ian Fleming describes it – establishes an absolving link between the storing up of earthly goods and godliness. While new money slowly turns old money, oil wealth is alive and well and living in Geneva.

  Fleming’s is not a flattering picture of Switzerland but one consistent with the way Swiss writers – Glauser, Dürrenmatt, Frisch and Zorn – see their own country, warts and all. Fleming reveals a qualified affection for Switzerland only towards the end of his article:

  I was partly educated in Switzerland – at the University of Geneva where I studied Social Anthropology, of all subjects, under the famous Professor Pittard. I was once engaged to a Swiss girl. I am devoted to the country and to its people and I would not have them different in any detail. But, as I said at the beginning, Switzerland has a Simenon quality, an atmosphere of still-water-running-deep, which is a great temptation to the writer of thrillers. If I have revealed a wart here and a wen there and poked mild fun at the reserved, rather prim face Switzerland presents to the world, this is because the mystery writer enjoys seeing the play from back-stage rather than from out front, in the stalls.5

  Ian Fleming’s gravestone bears the inscription: ‘Having enjoyed all life’s prizes, you now decay.’ It could be read as hedonistic or as moral: the writer enjoyed it both ways.

  Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes spawned the Swiss spy novel genre in the first decade of the twentieth century. Somerset Maugham moulded his own experiences as a spy in neutral Switzerland during the First World War and turned tradecraft into intrigue. Friedrich Glauser’s 1930s detectives started a home-grown tradition of noir writing. John le Carré cut his spy teeth in Bern at the beginning of the Cold War. All of these writers wrote from the peculiar vantage point of Swiss neutrality, surviving by hook or by crook through two world wars, surrounded by the great powers.

  Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928) follows the cross-border sleuthing of an English spy playing the Great Game; an Austin Powers for the spats and cocktail set. Ashenden hops on and off trains between Bern, Geneva, Lausanne and Zürich. He’s on Her Majesty’s Rail Pass, first class of course. Ashenden is a precursor to the shadowy agents of Graham Greene and John le Carré. All of these writer-spies take the imperial measure of the Englishman abroad among hostile powers, and turn it into fiction.

  It’s a polyglot world, rather like Switzerland itself. Maugham, Fleming, le Carré and Greene – unlike their modern compatriots – move easily among languages and cultures. Maugham was born in the British Embassy in Paris and attended the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Le Carré enrolled at the University of Bern and speaks faultless German. All were recruited to Her
Majesty’s Secret Service when young and became paid-up spies during the twentieth century’s wars. Extensive travel and writing junkets masked their clandestine activities. They examined a certain kind of perfidious Englishness – its pompous, imperial snobbery – against a background of Swiss neutrality.

  Somerset Maugham worked for the Intelligence Department, precursor to MI6. The writer and dramatist had fluent French and good German but also, crucially, Russian. In 1917 he was in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution. Very much the man about town, darling of the West End, Maugham had perfect cover. The American State Department was also interested in hiring him. Here is Ashenden crossing on the ‘stodgy little steamer’ from Thonon in France to neutral Geneva:

  Lake Leman, on fine days so trim and pretty, artificial like a piece of water in a French garden, in this tempestuous weather was as secret and menacing as the sea. He made up his mind that, on getting back to his hotel, he would have a fire lit in his sitting-room, a hot bath, and dinner comfortably by the fireside in pyjamas and a dressing-gown.6

  Maugham deploys the same duality as Fleming: behind the pretty landscape lurks a menacing secret. Switzerland is a sanctuary – a pipe, slippers and hot bath nation. Ashenden has been in Thonon to deliver his reports and receive instructions. He evinces sang-froid for the Swiss authorities: