A Dangerous Woman

by Susan Ronald

  Wherever Florence looked, there seemed to be pockets of artists, writers, and musicians. “The length of the entire coast,” the crafty literary critic and novelist Cyril Connolly wrote, “from Huxley Point and Castle Wharton until Cape Maugham small colonies formed where giants thundered in literary exasperation.”14 D. H. Lawrence haunted Vence in the hills between Antibes and Nice, while Colette, by now the successful novelist of the bestselling Cheri, shocked the tiny fishing village of Saint-Tropez with her presence. What else could you expect from Colette? Her marriage to her second husband, Henri de Jouvenel, the editor of Le Matin, had ended the year before, due—so the gossip columnists said—to her affair with her sixteen-year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel.

  Aside from Picasso, his great rival, Henri Matisse, had just taken an apartment in Nice to scour the new Victorine film studios for models. Painters Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Moïse Kisling, Max Beckmann, sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and Dadaist sculptor Marcel Duchamp (known for his urinal entitled Fountain) were well-known faces descending on patrons and friends, like locusts, in or out of season. American photographer Man Ray and his Montparnasse muse Kiki (born Alice Prin) scouted locations for his first film. Then, of course, where would those great gay colonies and home to the American Sixth Fleet, Cap Ferrat and Villefranche, be without the inimitable Jean Cocteau, its local artist and playwright? Whispers of the Riviera through the Mediterranean pines are hinted at in many of these artists’ works from this period.

  The Goulds learned all that they hadn’t already known about this international beau monde from Antoine Sella, the owner of Hôtel du Cap. As incredible as it sounds today, Sella, a hotelier with an amazing sixth sense for trends, first kept open his hôtel de grand luxe on a trial basis for the summer season of 1923 with a skeleton staff—primarily for the Murphys. Like everyone who met them, Sella was utterly charmed by Gerald and Sara, and joined the ranks of those who wanted to give them anything they asked—just to be part of their lives. Their friend Archibald MacLeish remembered how “Person after person—English, French, American, everybody—met them and came away saying that these people really are masters of the art of living.”15 The hotel’s summer “opening” was such a success that by the next year, Sella made Antibes–Juan-les-Pins a year-round resort. Simply to know the Murphys seemed to capture their friends in their successes and reflected golden glow.*

  Florence may have envied them, but she could easily, in her opinion, better them. By then, she’d become a woman whom people daren’t refuse, thanks to her sexually charged allure and Frank’s millions. The novelist Pierre Benoit met Florence in those heady days, and fell madly in love with her. Benoit knew she was a man-eater with dozens of conquests already, but simply couldn’t help himself, “as she could offer everything … of herself, and she was bored sitting on her pile of gold,” Benoit sighed, “perhaps she thought she was Aphrodite, collecting lovers at her pleasure.”16 Still, she hadn’t recognized—nor ever would—the difference between inviting illustrious friends as beloved equals to share in your golden sphere, as the Murphys did, and entertaining them at vast expense as your financial inferiors. Nevertheless, Florence set her mind to becoming a person whose art of living would become the envy of all—even the Murphys. To do that, Juan would become her first experiment. Although she was untrained, Florence remained a natural and extremely talented businesswoman. She saw clearly that by investing in Juan in 1925, just as it was attracting an international artistic clientele, the possibilities for fun and glamour were just beginning to unfold. With Frank’s money and her flair, they could create a paradise on the grandest scale.

  Like Jay Gatsby, Florence believed that her life could only “keep going up.” So they bought a walled neo-Gothic villa called La Vigie with its own beach that had views to the east and west along the narrow promontory on the edge of Juan. Frank was in his element, scouting the competition, learning what people liked, what they didn’t, and what the area needed for the future. They traveled the coast between Nice and Monte Carlo to see how other people with money passed their time. Casinos and luxury screamed out at them. It was the new way to get rich, just as railroads and power generation had been twenty years earlier. The French Mediterranean coast with its lavish, hedonistic lifestyle begged them to conquer the Riviera.

  11

  AN AMUSING INTERMEZZO FOR MILLIONAIRES

  We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.

  —CYRIL CONNOLLY

  Frank was especially interested in the Monaco model of casino. While Florence gambled incessantly at its roulette and baccarat tables, her jeweled bracelets rattling like dice as she observed the punters and those who hung back from the action, Frank studied with envy how, nearly sixty years earlier, François Blanc created the modern-day Monte Carlo. For him, it was an amazing feat, and soon enough, Frank had Florence agreeing that bettering Monte Carlo would become their aim.

  Blanc was the man Frank Gould longed to outshine. The famous clipping “Monaco is an earthly paradise, a fairytale land” from the influential newspaper Le Figaro dating from February 23, 1865, was beautifully framed and hung discreetly in the lobby of the principality’s Hôtel de Paris. It hailed Blanc as Monte Carlo’s founder: “M. Blanc has transformed this region, once pleasing rather than rich, into a veritable California; only he does not discover gold mines, he creates them.”1 So did Frank Gould.

  François Blanc and his twin brother, Louis, learned their craft of misdirection at the feet of the former lawyer turned casino owner Jacques Bénazet, who owned the two most profitable private gambling clubs at the Palais-Royal in Paris: Frascati’s and the Cercle des Étrangers. These clubs, like all the 180 leasable units used for gambling, prostitution, intrigue, or other vices, were called les enfers—hells—by the French. Blanc swiftly became expert at financial forecasting, casino security, and publicity and understood from the get-go that the only way to win in a casino was to become the house.

  So, when the landgrave Ludwig of Hessen-Homburg advertised that he was willing to sell the exclusive rights to gaming in his territory, François struck a deal to build a Kurhaus (spa) in exchange for the thirty-year lease for the landgrave’s casino. Chronically underfunded, the brothers still managed to make it work and turned the backwater of Bad Homburg—which was no more than the landgrave’s castle, a few hundred dependents’ cottages, and a small inn—into the “must sample” resort fit for kings, their consorts, and millionaires.2 It was their single-zero roulette tables, offering the best odds in Europe, that attracted the wealthy and aristocratic to their resort—rather than the spa—as most would later claim. The Russian royal Romanov family stalked the roulette tables, as did Queen Victoria’s princely sons. Even Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a man who should have known better, amassed huge debts at Blanc’s tables in the 1860s. The Blancs, naturally acting as the house, were the only ones to truly win time and again at the gambling tables. At Bad Homburg, François Blanc was crowned casino royalty.

  Blanc realized soon enough that Bad Homburg’s spring and summer season needed an overwintering business partner. The principality of Monaco—spanning a mere 499 acres, or half the size of Central Park in New York—beckoned. In September 1855, Société Anonyme des Bains de Mer et le Cercle des Étrangers à Monaco (The Sea Bathing and Foreigners’ Circle of Monaco Company), known as SBM, was created, making Monaco the first place to offer gambling on the Mediterranean coast.3 Still, Monaco was a tummy-rumbling three-hour coach journey from the railway terminus at Nice along a narrow mountain road, which was also frequently peppered with armed highwaymen. Coupled with French and Italian saber rattling that threatened war, Blanc chose to abstain from the bidding for the Monaco concession. Instead Pierre Auguste Daval bought the lease for 1,208,000 francs. Then, almost immediately, Daval lost everything to the duc de Valmy when his casinos were forced to close in the political Franco-Sardinian Alliance against the Austrians. Blanc was a man who could r
ead the future, Frank believed.

  Fortunately for Blanc, as German politicking and talk of unification loomed, the political situation for Monaco became peaceful. The Comté de Nice was now part of France, stretching as far as Menton. By the time the casino called Les Spélugues on Monaco’s plateau had opened its doors in February 1863, Valmy sat across the table from Blanc offering the lease on the casino for 1,860,000 francs. After ruthless bargaining, the deal was sealed for 1,129,000 francs—less than the price of the original lease eight years earlier.4 That April, Blanc signed the contract for exclusive rights to operate games of chance in Monaco for the next fifty years.

  Blanc immediately set to work with the Grimaldi prince’s enthusiastic approval to build “a whole town,” which he did, and of course named it after Prince Charles*—calling it Monte Carlo (Mount Charles). It was a perfect symbiotic relationship. Monaco shed its poverty while Monte Carlo became more than a mere casino. Blanc created an emotional bond between his gambling visitors and the town that enriched everyone beyond the sum of its gambling rooms. Blanc’s advertising depicted a whole new way of life, a new patrician outlook for a fading aristocracy seeking relevance in a modern world.

  Soon SBM, under Blanc’s guiding hand, built Monte Carlo’s Hôtel de Paris adjacent to the casino, modeled on Paris’s Grand Hôtel on boulevard des Capucines. Café de Paris followed a few years later. Soon enough, Monte Carlo offered boules, water sports, a marina, four steamers to ferry guests between Nice, Genoa, and Monaco—and an omnibus to take gamblers to the front door of the casino along a fragrant avenue where mimosa wafted on the breeze.5 Monte Carlo became, in fact, the first luxury destination resort, freeing its visitors to spend as lavishly as they lived, while they enjoyed Blanc’s carefully crafted experience. It was this vision, the completeness of Monte Carlo in its François Blanc heyday, that lured Frank and Florence into the casino and hotel business.

  * * *

  Florence undoubtedly had more to do with Frank’s decision to invest in casinos than the traditional role being the woman behind the man. If he were to make a full recovery in the move to the South of France, she recognized that he’d need an interest as all-consuming as racing his thoroughbreds had been at Maisons-Laffitte. During his illness and long convalescene, she had to face up to the bold fact that should Frank die, she would receive only the widow’s portion of one-third of his French estate under French law. Her well-honed self-preservation naturally kicked in. Frank had two daughters, several established households in France, a substantial American inheritance, and a business of unknown proportions in the United States. If he died, without changing his will in her favor, she’d have a mere million or two, tops.

  They had been married only eighteen months when Frank underwent his serious operation. She knew full well that her slice of the pie on his death was not—just yet—a slice worth the sacrifices she was making. Besides, Florence rightly thought, Frank’s daughters, Helen and Dorothy, were young women now, and married. Chances were, there would be a battle for the third Mrs. Gould to get what she so richly deserved.

  It would be underselling Florence to believe that she somehow was not at the heart of the decision to own casinos and hotels. Indeed, her widow’s one-third portion of a thriving casino business could be worth more than all the rest of Frank’s French estate. Fortunately for Florence, Frank’s near brush with death and continuing illness made him more pliable and eager to please his lovely wife, who had, after all, nursed him back to health.

  In Frank’s eyes, casinos and hotels were great wealth generators. He had always invested in what was “new,” and inevitably, it served him well. Frank knew the checkered history of gambling in the United States—from corrupt state lotteries in the mid-nineteenth century to the riverboat gamblers. It left horseracing as the only form of accepted gambling stateside, despite the practices of drugging horses or substituting horses bound to lose—and thereby chalking up huge odds—with winning “ringers.” Frank also knew New Mexico and Arizona had to abandon gambling to gain statehood.6 Still, the Goulds’ vision for Juan would be different. It was gaming for people who should know better. It was gambling for those who could afford to lose their shirts.

  Casinos and hotels as Blanc saw them—what the industry calls “destination properties” today—were an extension of the upper-class desire to travel in comfort. The Train Bleu, officially called the Calais-Méditerranée Express, which had been running again to Nice since December 1922, exclusively catered to first-class passengers. Frank and Florence did not gloss over the substantial fact that both casinos and hotels were huge cash businesses, where—if you knew how to manage it—only a portion of the income needed to go “on the books” to be reported for tax purposes. Florence was ever mindful of Frank’s aversion to the taxman to other officials trying to dip their fingers into his hard-earned profit pie.

  Florence’s lovely green eyes widened at the possibilities. Her winning smile burst into life, too. With gambling tables, hotels, and restaurants, Florence’s salon in the south of France aiming to capture the newer Tout-Riviera would be recalled long after she was gone, and on a canvas larger than any in Paris, where the competition was greater. She would turn their Mediterranean venture into entertainments that would even make her friends, the Étienne de Beaumonts and the Faucigny-Lucinges, green with envy. With Frank’s money and her vision for entertainment and fun, all of Juan-les-Pins would become her party. Thereafter, who knew—perhaps Cannes or Nice? Indeed, Florence could become the uncrowned Queen of the Riviera, with all Parisian society clamoring to be admitted to her Mediterranean court. Still, dreams were one thing, and gambling houses and hotels another. So Florence and Frank set to work on their project with the diligence of students studying for a doctorate.

  * * *

  The Goulds, a pair of natural-born gamblers, settled on a casino as their first venture. Frank invested in the Casino de Juan-les-Pins, with his French business partner and restaurateur Edouard Baudoin as its director and day-to-day manager. Aside from Baudoin’s expertise in running the casino along the lines Blanc had devised, he understood the importance of greasing palms and close friendships—particularly when it came to the mayor of Antibes–Juan-les-Pins, Charles Guillaumont.7 Frank had learned the art of crossing state lines and bending the local political will to suit his business needs from the master, Jay Gould. At Juan, Baudoin would be the public face and take all the inevitable flack for the Goulds’ actions.

  Even Baudoin was amazed at how easily permissions to operate a casino and build a large luxury hotel came through the friendships he cultivated with Guillaumont and others in the corridors of political power. From the mayor’s perspective, it was even more incredible how easily he was reelected with Gould money sloshing around in his campaign fund, not to mention Gould influence brought to bear on the press.

  So, in 1925, together with Florence, the trio wasted no time and planned the construction of Hotel Provençal at Juan—a 256-bedroom luxury property fit for millionaires. In less than a year, all approvals were in place; and the hotel, set within its own parkland, rose to its full height on the Juan skyline adjacent to the casino. Considering that it took Henri Ruhl, the man who gave Deauville its “incomparable éclat,” several years of negotiations plus two years to build his casino in Cannes some twenty years earlier, the Goulds had succeeded beyond all imagining.8

  Of course, brickbats were hurled, mainly from the Ambassadeurs Casino’s owners in Cannes, who saw the Goulds’ project as dangerous and unwanted competition. While the accusations of corruption against Guillaumont were directly linked in the Nice and Cannes press to Baudoin, the Goulds, as the money behind the man, remained unscathed. In fairness to Guillaumont, he recognized—with the help of the Goulds and Baudoin—that gaming had transformed the fortunes of the bankrupt Grimaldi dynasty over fifty years earlier. Guillaumont argued forcefully that all he wanted was the same quality of life for the people of Antibes–Juan-les-Pins as that of those who had once been poor i
n Monaco.

  Gambling in France had been closely regulated since the law of 1907. The Deuxième and Septième Bureau of the Sûreté (the detective investigation branches of the civil police) demanded approval over casino directors and their accounts. The government was mindful of the casinos’ ability to create traceless cash transactions—and thereby avoid taxation–or use the casinos as meccas for criminality and illicit wealth generation. Its response was to legislate. Casinos needed to be owned by French companies, sufficiently capitalized, and with French directors operating them.

  While Frank remained American through and through, Florence could still be considered French by the government, given the right circumstances, and so she held shares in her own name and was on the board of directors. Frank had yet to meet a man who didn’t find her persuasive, and knew she was a great asset. Besides, he naturally preferred to stay in the background, masterminding investments, sharing an architectural vision with Florence while both pampered their ever-present Pekingese dogs in public. Ultimately, both allowed others to run the tedious day-to-day routine of their businesses for them.9 Florence reasoned that one should be mingling, animating, and encouraging everyone to enjoy themselves and spend, spend, spend. Frank’s strengths lay in acquisitions and finance, not operations. What the French government hadn’t come to grips with from Frank’s perspective was the common practice of skimming money from construction contracts and hidden ownerships. In fact, Frank and Florence would become adapt at money laundering.