The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

  Soon after passing her driving test in 1920, Hélène Delangle decided to spend her earnings from modelling on taking her little Citroën out of Paris and off on a thousand-mile tour of France. It was the beginning of a love-affair which lasted for the rest of her life.

  At approximately the same time, she discovered a new and fashionable car accessory shop on rue Saint-Ferdinand, up at the west end of the Champs-Elysées. Carrère is likely to have mentioned it to her, for the shop was owned by one of his closest friends, a former fighter-pilot called Henri de Courcelles.

  No heroes, in French eyes, matched up to the men who had engaged in aerial combat during the war; something of the awe with which they were regarded is communicated in Jean Renoir’s film La Règle du Jeu, where the airman is both the popular hero and sacrificial victim, too noble for the corrupt world in which, after the isolation of the skies, he is as bewildered as a child. Their exceptionally swift reactions enabled them to become some of the finest racing drivers of the postwar era. These were the men who frequented the Saint-Ferdinand store. Young Philippe de Rothschild came here as a car-mad boy of fifteen, swaggering in the shadow of his aviator brother, James; so did André Dubonnet, the heir to a vermouth fortune, and Frédéric Coty, of the cosmetics empire. Robert Benoist was a former pilot whose father had been one of the Rothschild gamekeepers at their estate near Sainte-Mesme. Albert Guyot, older at forty than any of this group, was a hero to them all, a man who had raced for Sunbeam, Delage and the American Duesenberg on the brick circuit of Indianopolis and performed exhibition rolls and spins in a Blériot biplane, high above Russia, back in the innocent, pre-war years of flight. His new passion, however, was for manufacturing cars.

  The store owner, Henri de Courcelles, was a gangling, squashy-nosed man in his late thirties. His smile was shy but unexpectedly wide; his charming eyes often wore an expression of secret amusement. A stranger might have been surprised to discover that ‘Couc’ had won a Croix de Guerre with five palms as a Sopwith fighter pilot; nothing in his appearance suggested this kind of heroism. His taste in clothes was awful – his preferred style of off-duty dress was a check shirt, baggy shorts and Scottish-style knitted socks, turned over just short of sturdy knees. His ancestry was elegant, reaching back to the Norman Conquest (there are still members of his family spread around England), but the money had disappeared long ago. The shop was the means by which he helped to finance an expensive taste in sports cars, about which, as he was the first to admit with a cheerful smile, he knew absolutely nothing except that he enjoyed driving them. For the mechanical side of things, he relied on his business partner, a burly man with broad, slightly Asiatic features and an imperturbable manner. This was Marcel Mongin, considered by many to be one of the best sportscar drivers around.* He had an agreeably playful side: a sketch by René Carrère shows Mongin laughing as he strums a banjo.

  These three men, Carrère, Mongin and Courcelles, became Hélène’s closest friends and allies in her twenties. Mongin’s curious, almost gloating photographs of her naked body stretched on a bed, and hers of René Carrère peeping over the edge of his bath, leave no doubt about the intimacy of their relationship. The photographs of Courcelles outnumber all others; she kept sheaves of them stowed away in her trunk. He, it seems reasonable to assume, was her first great love. There is no clear indication that it was requited.

  It is simpler to perform the physical act of leaving home than to escape the invisible, sticky web of family obligations. Hélène did not find it painful to walk away from the house at Sainte-Mesme. Her mother, grieving for Lucien, could take comfort from her new companion, Jean Bernard. (The daughters, whose relations with him were not warm, always alluded to Bernard as Monsieur Père.) It is possible that she missed Henri, the young brother she always called ‘Didi’, but he had none of her ambition and drive. The job which he took in Paris as an upholsterer’s assistant never prevented Henri from returning, week after week, to the reassurance of his familiar surroundings in the village. He was, by all accounts, a gentle young man.

  Solange had nobody. Questioned about her ambitions, she curled up like a winter leaf and said she had none, other than a steady job in the postal service which had been offered to her because of her family connections. Hélène, fuelled by dreams of glory, found this tragic; Solange responded that it was secure. But how, her sister wondered, could anybody want to settle for safety when they had never taken a risk? Returning home on a rare visit, she watched Solange grimly hauling on the water-wheel at the back of the house, dark hair pinned up in an untidy knot, skinny legs scratched from clambering up and down the river bank with the week’s washing. It seemed a miserable existence. Impetuously, she decided to improve it.

  The photographs kept and erratically annotated by Hélène in her old age do not suggest that Solange was especially grateful for her sister’s efforts; on the contrary, they hint that her invitations were accepted in the spirit of a martyred guardian. One picture shows Hélène, curly-haired and laughing, on the beach at Le Touquet; Solange appears as a streak of darkness in the corner of the shot. Another is of a group, lounging on a vine-shaded terrace, chairs and hats tilted as the models offer sleepy smiles to the camera. Solange stands in the shadows, towards the back of the terrace. She looks isolated, sullen and bored.

  It can’t have felt agreeable to be beholden to a brighter, cleverer younger sister; Solange may not have wanted to be pulled into Hélène’s giddy orbit. But there was no escaping her kindness, or her need. Leading an increasingly peripatetic and unstable life, Hélène wanted somebody she could depend on and in whom she could confide: one of the most surprising facts to emerge from ‘Totote’s’ infrequent communications with Hélène is her remarkable familiarity with the gang of lovers between whom her younger sister casually shared her favours. Solange knew everything about them, their gossip, their business lives, the details of their finances. She dined with them in Paris when Hélène was away; she sympathized when they complained about her sister’s refusal to commit, her frightening rages, her voracious childlike need for praise and reassurance. The sisters spoke to each other on the telephone more often than they exchanged letters, but one thing is apparent from the correspondence which has survived. Hélène never took a final decision until she had consulted Solange.4

  Mongin and Couc took Hélène on her first journey out of France in the autumn of 1921; the occasion, for which both men had entered themselves in Grégoire cars to be supplied by an agent on their arrival, was the 200-mile race at Brooklands.5 They started off with a visit to Brighton, where Courcelles dutifully photographed his companions standing side by side outside the new garage of the Old Ship Hotel. We don’t know whether it was he or Marcel Mongin who took the pictures of Hélène naked and fast asleep in what is clearly a double room. We don’t know which of the two men occupied the brass bed which is visible behind that taut and muscular body. Some of the photographs seem to hint that this may even have been an easygoing threesome.

  The two Frenchmen were scratched from the race when their cars – Grégoires were notoriously problematic and the firm closed in 1923 – failed to show up. But Courcelles had a friend in the race, and Mongin was curious to see what the circuit looked like since being reopened after the war; taking Hélène with them, they drove across the Downs in Mongin’s Voisin.

  Created in 1906 because of the English interdiction on road-racing, Brooklands in 1921 was still the most exciting and advanced circuit in Europe, a two-and-a-half mile track of pebbled concrete with banking that rose to a dizzy 1 in 2 gradient. Hélène’s only experience of a race at this time was a faint memory, preserved from childhood, of a monstrous machine, enveloped in dust as it roared downhill and away across the plain of the Beauce. Now, she found herself in a jostling, beery crowd of tweedy men in flat caps, rosy-cheeked yapping girls in sturdy knickerbockers and unflattering rubber boots, all gathered in a vast paddock at the centre of what looked like a modern amphitheatre.

  Distantly, outside t
he clubroom, a brass band crashed into a cheerful medley of marches; above the paddock, a Sopwith plane wheeled, swooped and flipped over on to its back before soaring away over the banking. The marshal’s yellow flag, apparent in the distance, rose, waited for the rev of engines to rise to a hungry scream, and dropped, to be instantly hidden in a cloud of acrid black smoke as the cars, spitting fire as they raised their engine revs, spread out across the track. Two, crossing the black painted line, climbed rapidly towards the concrete rim where only a line of straggling bushes separated the circuit from a grey sky. Hélène stared as a third climber, identified by Mongin as a Salmson and one of the lightest cars in the race, spun round, rocked, and came skidding down the bowl to hit the inner kerb with a crack like a pistol-shot. Courcelles, taking his pipe out of his mouth for a moment, wondered whether she ought to be taken back to the clubhouse. A quick glance at her face reassured him; her lips were slightly parted, her eyes narrowed as she watched two blue cars screaming around the circuit at the top of the banking. Bugattis, he told her; good taste, just what he would have picked for himself to drive in this field.

  Left to right: Marcel Mongin, Hélène, still with her natural hair colour, and Henri de Courcelles (‘Couc’) in leisure clothes, at an unidentified location.

  Top to bottom: Hélène, Henri de Courcelles and Marcel Mongin, holidaying in North Italy and the Lakes in 1925.

  ‘And for me?’ She was still watching them intently. He jabbed his finger down at the regulations printed on the back of her programme: no women. Not permitted at Brooklands, not in a man’s race. He saw her scowl, and sighed. There’d be no rest on the journey back to Brighton that evening.

  Their confidence astonished and enraged her. What made these drivers so sure that women were inferior? What about the hours most women worked, the weights they carried in domestic tasks, carrying gallons of water up flights of narrow stairs for a gentleman’s bath, or a week’s supply of sheets and clothes down a steep riverbank for the wash? Dancing had shown her that women were more flexible, quicker, lighter.

  Smiling, her two friends changed the subject. Rules were rules; the discussion was pointless. If she really wanted to get involved, there were rallies, hill-climbs, gymkhanas. But grand prix driving? Had she ever considered the cost, the hiring of the mechanics, the transport arrangements?

  Hélène’s quick temper was seldom under control for long: listening to them, she lost it. They didn’t believe a word of what they were saying, she shouted; they just didn’t like the idea of being beaten by a woman, that was all. But now she had gone too far and her tone was growing shrill and they were bored of the conversation. Quietly, in the light voice which always sounded as though he was about to laugh, Couc put forward an idea for an expedition they might make down to Nice before the end of autumn. And, since there was plainly no way to win this argument and a visit to the Riviera was always good fun, she leaned forward and kissed the back of his neck.

  A casual observer of Hélène’s life during the six years which followed her first visit to England might have taken a bet that this charming, fearless girl specialized only in having fun and living dangerously. Photographs, presumably taken by René Carrère, show her always in the company of Mongin and Courcelles, always laughing. They spent their summers on the Riviera or the Côte Fleurie, at elegant resorts which never imposed a constraining influence on Hélène’s high spirits. Sent to get herself photographed for passport purposes before joining her friends on a trip to inspect the new Italian circuit at Monza outside Milan, she decided to do outrageous impressions of Josephine Baker; skiing for the first time at Superbagnères in the winter of 1924, she threw up her arms and shouted in delight after beating her companions, both fine sportsmen, in a race. The fact that she had almost killed herself by taking a short cut through a clump of closely planted pines bothered her not at all.

  Her fearlessness was admirable – and terrifying. Retrospectively, Mongin saw the fierce intentness of a competitor who was only ever interested in winning. So too was his friend Courcelles. In 1923, Couc entered the first Endurance race at Le Mans with a massive Lorraine-Dietrich and brought it in at 8th place; the following year, he came 3rd; in 1925, partnered by André Rossignol, he won; in 1926, Mongin and he took 2nd place. It was, for an amateur driver in his late thirties, a triumphant record. While Courcelles enjoyed this late blossoming and continued to break records on his runs between Paris and Deauville, Hélène charted out her own course of victories in the Alps. Bobsleighing and skiing in the winters, she spent each summer with Kléber Balmart, one of France’s finest skiers, climbing L’Aiguille Verte, Le Greppon Blanc and Mont Blanc. In 1925, she noted with satisfaction that she had climbed Mont Blanc again, and by the most dangerous route; photographed at the end of the climb, she beamed down at the camera, glowing with the pleasure of a goal achieved. When Mongin and Courcelles tested their car brakes by driving on an icebound lake at the end of the year, Hélène demanded a trial drive on her own. Mongin grudgingly acknowledged that her control was exceptional. He remained puzzled by her motivation. If asked, she laughed and said that she had always liked winning; it wasn’t a sufficient answer. It occurred to both him and Couc that their friend might, in some way of which she was only half-conscious, have assumed the role of her older brother, the boy who had died at Verdun and of whom she always spoke in a different, gentler tone. But neither man was given to pondering the mysteries of the female psyche for longer than most of their sex; contemplation usually ended with a shrug and a laugh. She had a will of iron when she set her mind to meeting some new test of her athletic prowess; that was all they knew.

  Hélène on top of the world, with a climbing team, 1925.

  As an athlete, she had reached her peak; in 1926 she suddenly announced that she had decided to pursue her dancing career and give up the dream of racing. Her friends, surprised but relieved, drank to the new plan and took her out to dinner. They toasted her future. She would – anybody who spent time in her company felt it – become a real success on stage. She had the shining authority, the charisma, the presence. Her dancing, even to an untutored eye, was wonderfully graceful; she had, above all, a charming manner, a way of looking at you as she tilted her head and lifted her arms. Neither Mongin nor Couc was prepared to risk her wrath by saying so, but they felt, nevertheless, that dancing was a better, and safer, choice of career than the race-circuit for such a pretty, lively creature.

  In 1927 Henri de Courcelles fulfilled a long-held promise to his friend Albert Guyot and agreed to race one of his cars in a free formula* contest being held on the new track at Montlhéry just outside Paris. Despite the month, July, the weather was grim. Rain sheeted down on the small crowd of spectators who included Mongin, Guyot and a svelte blonde Hélène, taking time off from a rehearsal in her new career. Mongin was in a bad mood. He had driven the car, worked through the night on improving it and ended with a feeling of nagging dissatisfaction. The last time a Guyot Spéciale had run, it finished three laps behind the nearest competitor; his own view, trenchantly expressed, was that the steering was still defective. Guyot received his verdict with a tightlipped smile; Courcelles, graceful as always, embraced the carmaker before going down to the pits and waving away the crash-helmet which he had been offered.

  His spirits had never been higher. The Guyot was not a highly regarded racing machine, but he seemed to see no possibility of being defeated by opposition which included Albert Divo, driving for Talbot, professional Louis Chiron in a supercharged 2.3 Bugatti – the car was owned by Freddy Hoffman’s Nerka Spark Plug company and Chiron was having a flamboyant affair with Hoffman’s wife, Alice – or by the big Sunbeams being driven that day by two outstandingly courageous drivers, Louis Wagner and Charles Grover, using his racing pseudonym of ‘Williams’. But Guyot and Couc were confident of a victory; plans had already been made for a celebratory dinner at Maxim’s that night, when Couc sauntered away from the pitstop and swung himself into the low driving-seat. He stretched his l
egs, shifted his weight, looked up once at the grandstand, and raised his hand in a salute. It was just past ten in the morning; rain hissed in the gutters and rattled on the racing bonnets like pistol shots. Shivering suddenly, Hélène pulled up her coat collar, dug her hands deep into the pockets where her clenched fists would not be seen.

  Perhaps, after all, there was no cause for the feeling of sick apprehension which had gripped her as the cars moved away. The Sunbeams were forced to pull out of the race with mechanical problems before the end of the second lap; the Guyot appeared to be holding its own when it roared past the pitstop for the third time without stopping. Courcelles, his face masked by the Meyrovitz goggles, raised one hand briefly, as if he scented victory. Mongin was bending to say something to her when she saw the pointed tail-end of the Guyot swerve across the track, jittering, out of control. She gripped Mongin’s arm as the car skidded from view, towards a distant row of trees. She heard a crack, like a cannon shot. Guyot, ashen-faced, was looking upwards, raising an arm to point. She followed the line, to where the rain had thickened like smoke, obscuring the heavy mass of the Château Sainte-Europe. A van with a cross painted on its back began to circle the track, moving fast; away in the distance, she saw two flags being raised and waved, white and yellow, signalling the drivers to be on guard. Mongin was pushing his way down; limping on her high heels, she followed him, tugging at the scarf around her neck and twisting it round her hands, ready to use it as a bandage.