Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  Months passed before Didi and Armand let her drive the Rossignol 280, which they’d kept under wraps. They allowed her to take it around the track and push it up to the highest speed she could. Armand let her get a taste for it, then told her she had to work harder. I noticed the envy with which Lou watched the men sliding in and out of the driver’s seat, behind the wheel—always a problem for buxom Lou.

  My husband and brother-in-law hired a physics professor to teach Lou about gravity and motion, an engineer to analyze the geometry of the track. At Fraulein Schiller’s suggestion, they brought in a Japanese monk from a temple in the Dordogne. The monk blindfolded Lou and walked her around the course, telling her to follow his voice and feel the earth under her feet. Sometimes he would make her crawl. When the blindfold was removed, Lou lost her balance and stumbled, and the Japanese monk, the Prussian coach, the physics professor, the engineer, and my brother-in-law would laugh.

  The intervening years have long since put my own trivial problems into perspective—miniaturized them, you might say. Considering what I lived through and the person I proved myself to be, I feel I can speak more freely than I could have when Didi was alive. Also it is easier to write about such matters at a time when it is widely, if not everywhere, understood that true love can exist outside the bounds of conventional marriage.

  I loved my husband, but I also knew what kind of boys he liked. I enjoyed our evenings home alone, but when we went out together, I never had any fun. I was always on guard for that special boy. Often I spotted him first. It was more relaxing to be with artists, especially Gabor, whom I can say, also from this safe distance, was not only my great art discovery but the love of my life.

  Didi should never have married me, but he wasn’t foolish or cruel. He too had been lonely in Hollywood. He’d been thrilled to find me.

  In many ways Didi was loveable. And we loved each other. I’ve mentioned that we met at Douglas Fairbanks’s private track. Later, back in France, we joked about those soap-box derbies where movie stars played at driving. It brings a couple closer to find out that their pasts have become the same past. Who could have predicted that our marriage would turn out so much better than so many unions that burn with the flames of (heterosexual) passion and see those fires burn out?

  It was always a challenge to be with Didi and his brother Armand, knowing that Didi was cruising for boys and not knowing when Armand would spiral into some rant about Bolsheviks and Jews, about whipping one’s self bloody and surrendering to Christ. People pretended not to hear, but conversation stopped. I used to worry that someone might physically attack him, but no one ever said a word or even asked him to be quiet.

  The races were a fantastic distraction. The caustic fumes of auto fuel and burnt rubber took one’s mind off one’s problems. The noise was excruciating. We yelled along with the crowd for Lou to beat her opponents, the clock, her previous best.

  Only at the track was I able to forget my marriage, my brother-in-law, my unrequited love for Gabor, the riots, the crashing economy, the threats from Hitler across the border. There was plenty of entertainment available in Paris: the symphony, the opera, the all-boy Mikado at the Chameleon Club. But in the midst of those performances, one’s mind could begin to wander. At the track I never thought about anything but the race.

  Drivers had died at Montverre. Part of the track was a wooden bowl called the Tea Cup, another section an obstacle course, known as the Gates of Hell. And a rutted, bumpy stretch was nicknamed the Snake Pit. The course was banked so that the fastest drivers could hit 220 on the curves. I told Armand and Didi that I didn’t want Lou getting hurt, but they only made fun of me for being female and weak.

  One reason our marriage lasted so long was that Didi and I never talked about money. I didn’t ask how much it cost to rent the track so Lou could practice. Didi never asked how much I spent on Gabor and his friends.

  Once Didi did say, For all the funds I was laying out, where were Gabor’s pictures of me?

  I laughed and laughed. How hilarious. I was upset for days.

  I don’t remember how our understanding evolved: Gabor was never to take my picture. I don’t think we discussed it. He never asked me to sit for him. I didn’t want to know why. The few times I wandered into the frame, my image stayed in the darkroom. Did he fear that an unflattering likeness might affect my support? I preferred to think so, rather than to suspect that he worried a photo might reveal something too personal—too unflattering—about how he saw me. How old, unattractive, how dried up compared to his toothy tomato, Suzanne.

  When Lou began to race professionally, Gabor traveled with us. He took pictures for the auto journals and kept me company while Didi was pursuing his Swedes, and when Armand sequestered himself with Lou to indoctrinate her with his madness.

  Gabor and I stayed in the same hotels but never in the same rooms. Many nights, I couldn’t sleep, knowing how near he was. I felt we were growing closer, though I couldn’t have said how. In my mind I talked to him in such vivid detail that I occasionally got impatient with him for forgetting something I only imagined I’d said.

  Lou lost the first few races, then began to come in third, then second, then first. She was glad to reconnect with women she’d met touring the sports-association circuit. Invited to speak at regional clubs, she made many new friends, women with whom she spent the night and later kept in touch.

  Once I watched her address a cycling society in Toulouse. I was amazed to hear Lou, so taciturn in our company, talk so eloquently about the suffering and sacrifice required of female athletes. I was taken aback by the audiences who mobbed her and asked how soon she could return.

  Lou had thrived on the applause at the Vélodrome d’Hiver. She’d enjoyed meeting her fans at the Chameleon Club. She liked talking to reporters and seemed flattered by the attention. When they asked, as they always did, why she dressed like a man, she repeated that everything she did was for God and France. When they asked her to elaborate, she said it was self-evident.

  I knew my brother-in-law had told her to mention France whenever she could. I tactfully suggested that we would also like her to say more about the Rossignol. Not that it would have mattered. The reporters were less excited by our car, or a victory for France, or even by how Lou drove “like a man” than they were by how she dressed. But our name would stick in people’s minds. Especially if Lou won, the next car they bought would be ours.

  We needed the papers to print those stories. But I worried. Cross-dressing was technically illegal, thanks to some archaic remnant of the absurd Napoleonic code. And Lou had a serious enemy in Clovis Chanac.

  Around that time, Lou requested a three-week leave from practice. She claimed she was in urgent need of a medical procedure. I assumed it was some female disorder related to the male hormones, extracted from bulls, that she was said to be taking. So naturally I was irritated when I had to read in the papers that she had voluntarily undergone a double mastectomy in order to fit more comfortably behind a steering wheel.

  I never saw Lou naked. Before and after the surgery she wore the same loose jackets and jumpsuits. Obviously, I was curious. Had her operation really been entirely about the driver’s seat? Or did she want to look more like a man? Not asking felt like the right thing to do: virtuous and decent. I didn’t assume the right to pry into Lou’s personal life just because I was her employer.

  What mattered to her was racing. The seat belts were constricting; the straps had crushed her breasts. Had Armand paid for the operation? Had he and Didi known and not told me? Did they assume I would have objected? I would never have dissuaded Lou from something she wanted so badly that she was willing to face the combined assault of physical pain and vicious gossip.

  The lead-up race to Montverre was the rally at Brooklands. We accompanied Lou to England, where she spent several weeks training. Gabor experimented with angles, light, and exposures to capture the strain and exaltation on the drivers’ faces. Critics have remarked that his grimy
, sweating racers resemble the martyred saints in the work of the Spanish Old Masters.

  The Montverre Women’s International was being promoted as the contest of France against Germany, Britain, and Italy. Just as I tried to stay out of the political aspects of Lou’s relationship with my brother-in-law, so I tried to ignore their idea of racing as a nationalistic blood sport.

  A British girl, Alice Ascot, would be driving the Rolls-Royce, an Italian named Elisabetta Todino was piloting the Bugatti. But Lou’s most formidable competitor would be the German, Inge Wallser, pitting her Mercedes against Lou, in our Rossignol. My concerns about Lou’s prospects increased when I saw Gabor’s photo of Inge sitting on the hood of her car and smoking a cigarette. Only Gabor’s genius could have made it clear that behind those dark glasses were the eyes of a woman who would stop at nothing to win. Perhaps his photo alerted me to a resemblance that I would register consciously only later. Something about Inge Wallser reminded me of Arlette.

  The photo I admired most was one that I can hardly bear to look at now. It’s an image of Lou Villars, suited up, wearing goggles, peering under the hood of her car before the start of a race. To me, and to many others, that photo represented the essence of Modernism. I thought it was great art. Now I know that it was a photograph of the nightmare that would be our future.

  On the morning of the Brooklands race, I saw Gabor taking my picture as I got out of my car. I was driving the sensational bi-color black and burgundy Juno-Diane, the luxury top of the Rossignol line, the sleek but substantial coupe whose generous curves and forward slouch always made me think of a lion crouched on its paws, ready to spring forward.

  Was Gabor photographing the car? His camera seemed to be focused on me.

  This so unnerved me that the race was well under way before I could give it my full attention. How pitiful I was to be thinking about a photo as Lou Villars and Inge Wallser outdistanced the Bugatti and the Rolls.

  Lou ran second for the next few laps, never quite catching up. But during the tenth lap, Lou tromped on the gas and cut toward the inner lane, swerving and nearly sideswiping the Mercedes. For one horrific moment it seemed as if Lou and Inge might crash. At the last instant Lou swung away and pulled out in front. Inge seemed to regain control. Then her car skidded across the track and smacked into the wall.

  Lou sped on as if nothing had happened. The spectators gasped, then fell silent and stared at the twisted, smoking Mercedes.

  Inge stepped out of the wreck, straightened up, and waved at the fans. The crowd was on its feet, cheering Inge—and Lou, the new champion of Brooklands.

  The race was over, but Lou never let up as she sped through the final circuits. She crossed the finish line, then did a slow, ceremonial victory lap. Finally she coasted to a stop, climbed out of the car, swept off her helmet, and bowed. We shouted. Armand whistled. I heard myself—was that really me?—yelping like a greyhound.

  Lou Villars was a hero. Didi, Armand, Lou, Gabor, and I were champions together.

  Would we have been so delirious if disaster hadn’t been nearly averted? What if Lou and Inge were killed? It would have been a tragedy. Senseless carnage. Our fault. The death of two gifted young women drivers. The loss of a colleague and friend. And the end of our hopes for Rossignol Motors.

  All of France would have mourned Lou Villars. Germany would have worn black for Inge Wallser. It would have been another nail in the coffin of our family auto business, a warning against speed and recklessness, against the determination to win at any price.

  On the other hand, if Lou and Inge had collided and died in the wreck, many more people would be alive than are alive today.

  Paris

  June 1934

  Dear parents,

  Mama, I’ve been thinking of a story you used to tell about your courtship. Evenings you would wait for Papa at your parents’ door, and you’d smell his pipe smoke and know he was approaching, and that he’d started smoking because he loved you and hadn’t yet found the nerve to say so. You said you felt as if you’d drunk a glass of plum brandy distilled just for you by God. Don’t get married, you used to say, until you meet someone who makes you feel that tipsy.

  By that definition, I have fallen in love with a car. Race cars, to be exact. The minute we reach the track I feel a giddy intoxication. The crowd around me senses it too. We are all punch drunk with excitement. Some chemical surges inside us when the cars roar off. My heart learns a jazzy new rhythm that makes me happy to be alive! I know what you are thinking. Why does our son never sound like this when he’s talking about a girl?

  But lest you think I’ve been going to the races to squander the pennies I’ve squirreled away in this bleak economy, let me reassure you. My relationship with the races is like my connection to the brothels. I don’t go to participate but to document a way of life.

  It’s some of the best work I’ve done, and for once my interest coincides with that of the larger culture—which is very interested in fast cars and their drivers. I’ve been selling my work to a journal with tens of thousands of readers.

  Auto has money to pay an artist—me!—who would be taking the same pictures whether they paid him or not. Speed is the greatest challenge I have faced so far: how to render it in black and white and in two dimensions. I have gotten more abstract, turning wheels and windshields into arcs of light. Meanwhile my curiosity and love for everything human has inspired portraits of trainers, mechanics, gamblers, and their molls, characters as fascinating as my old friends the thieves and pimps.

  The baroness’s husband and brother-in-law are sponsoring a driver, Lou Villars, the woman in the tuxedo on the cover of my book. If I have time, I’ll send you a print I rather like: a photo of Lou checking her engine, as she does before every race.

  Last week Auto ran, on its cover, my picture of Lou winning the women’s competition at Brooklands, in Great Britain. The event occurred on the name day of Joan of Arc, which had special meaning for her. How alive Lou looks, how victorious and proud, a savage goddess painted with road grit and motor oil. France needs a heroine, as do we all. And wouldn’t you agree: better a race-car driver than a general or a dictator.

  If only Lou’s success could bring her the happiness it has brought me. But according to the baroness, Lou is a tormented soul.

  Yesterday evening, the baroness and I went to the Chameleon Club to see The Mikado sung by bearded men in kimonos. It was supposed to be hilarious, but I wasn’t laughing. I’d noticed that my photo of Lou and Arlette was missing from the wall. It gave me a queasy feeling, like glancing in the mirror and seeing I’d lost a front tooth. I searched the club. My other pictures were there. But not the double portrait.

  Clovis Chanac had insisted that Yvonne take down the photo. Arlette is his girlfriend now, and he doesn’t want her and her Amazonian sweetie, or ex-sweetie, on a wall outside a toilet in a cross-dressers’ club.

  What if my book, with Lou on its cover, is declared obscene and confiscated from the shops, where it’s still selling nicely, if not quite so briskly as before? Speaking of censorship, have I told you that my friend Lionel has been put on the literary map by his government’s efforts to prevent his memoir, Make Yourself New, from being imported and sold in the States? A judge ruled his masterpiece obscene!

  I couldn’t stop myself from asking Yvonne if she thought something might happen with my book. And what if it didn’t end there? Men like Chanac are always looking for foreigners to deport.

  Yvonne said, “Chanac isn’t thinking about you. He doesn’t care about books enough to burn them, like the stupid Germans. Lou’s the one who had better watch out. Chanac is thinking about her.”

  That same night, Lou appeared at our table drunk, though she was supposed to be in training. The Rossignols had asked her to stay away from the club. Everything depends on her winning at Montverre.

  Always the diplomat, the baroness pretended not to notice her presence. Lou asked if she and I could speak privately. We went outside for a sm
oke.

  Lou said, “Do you remember when Yvonne used to keep those disgusting lizards? Do you know she told fortunes with them?”

  I told her no, I didn’t. I knew about the lizards but not the fortune-telling.

  She said, “Is that a Hungarian thing?”

  Such is the mood in Paris now that I bristled at the word Hungarian. I said, “No, it is not a Hungarian thing.”

  Lou said, “I should have stomped the damn reptile.”

  I said, “You shouldn’t drink, Lou.”

  A few weeks later, when the baroness and I went to watch Lou practice, I spotted Chanac at the track. Having been fired from the police and subsequently elected to the Municipal Council, he had every reason to be there, to keep an eye out for foreign spies disguised as drivers and coaches.

  Chanac wasn’t looking for spies. He was watching Lou. He’d come to the track a few times and several times sent his men. They stare at Lou, and not in a friendly way. They should be rooting for her to win and uphold the honor of France.

  For the moment, we are probably safe. One can’t go around arresting people for training to race the world’s most innovative car, about which I hesitate to write in detail, in an international letter.

  By the way, in addition to my work for Auto, more American magazines are hiring me to take celebrity portraits. Last week I went to the Ritz to photograph Gary Cooper, who was in Paris to promote his new film.

  The baroness mentioned she’d known him in Hollywood. I asked her to accompany me, and at first she agreed, but at the last minute she called to say that something had come up. Should I give Mr. Cooper her regards? No, she said. Don’t bother.

  Mr. Cooper’s photo practically took itself. He was a perfect gentleman, professional and polite. He knew precisely how to pose to give the editors what they wanted. He even knew where to put the lights to accentuate his cheekbones.