by Susan Ronald
Léon retaliated, yet again. It was time to lower the tone of those gambling in the Gould’s palatial establishment. “Shady looking characters” were seen penetrating “Gould’s shrine” rubbing shoulders with European aristocracy. Of course, Frank roundly blamed the appearance of these people of “questionable reputations” on his competition, since they not only comported themselves as anything but gentlemen, but also wore “dirty shirts and soiled waistcoats.” Inevitably, “such an element mixing as it does with haughty crowds in the baccarat rooms and on the dance floor have ruined the atmosphere of the place.” The local gendarmes evidently agreed. “Anyone trying to gain entrance who is not completely attired in formal dress, will be ejected by the husky gendarmes.”23
The war between the casinos had begun.
14
HOLLYWOOD CALLING
Beauty is a very tangible asset in these days of fluctuating values.
—ELIZABETH ARDEN advertisement, 1932
There were other riskier, hidden challenges facing Florence and Frank than the casino war. Florence believed the problems on the Riviera were no more than a mere bagatelle in their business affairs. In many ways, she was right. Frank hadn’t touched his share of the inheritance from his father since the family lawsuit over a decade earlier, making him a multimillionaire through the family trust alone, despite the 1929 crash. Their casino woes could easily be resolved by the Gould millions, as Florence reminded Frank. Besides, hadn’t she fixed countless things for them in the previous ten years? Although aged thirty-eight, she looked—and acted—ten years younger. Frank, on the other hand, was aging rapidly.
Florence needed the excitement of being admired, and of carnal love, something Frank was increasingly less able or willing to provide. Her trips to Paris became more frequent, and her sexual partners more varied. During the Parisian season of June 1930, she attended all the fancy-dress balls. After all, if she didn’t, it would be almost uncivilized. Entertainment in the capital was always serious stuff, and something Florence had longed to be a part of since reading about the exploits of the rich and noteworthy as a child. Still, the 1930 season was unusually frenetic, phantasmagoric, and mostly foreign. Those relatively unaffected by the Crash were anxious to prove they still had their cash. The stylish Daisy Fellowes, the niece whom Winnaretta Singer had raised from childhood after the death of Daisy’s mother, Isabelle-Blanche Descazes, hired publicist Elsa Maxwell for one of the largest and most memorable masquerades of the season, where men cross-dressed as famous women. Florence attended the White Ball, where her friend Jean Cocteau won accolades with his wigs and white-plaster masks. All the formal balls by the Jewish bankers, the Rothschilds, were given in a single week, and were ironically dubbed la Semaine Sainte, or the saintly week. Much more to Florence’s liking, however, was the As-You-Were-When-the-Autobus-Called Party, again designed by Elsa Maxwell, but this time on behalf of Señora Alvaro Guevara, the former Meraud Guinness.* Invitees were warned that “a charabanc would call for them at no specified hour” and that they “were to come in whatever attire was theirs when the chauffeur tooted his horn.” Guests in varying degrees of “undress” included a lady who had only “exactly one side of her face made up, a gentleman clad in shaving soap and a towel, and several ladies in half-fastened skirts … the great life-class atelier of Montparnasse, is still discussing the charabanc party.”1 No matter where she went, or with whom, the child Florence, who’d been always on the outside looking in, was no more. Paris widely admired her, at long last, as a great “American” beauty.
By 1931, Florence had come into her own as a femme fatale and woman of the world. Cosmetics queens Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden were preaching what Florence had known since the age of fourteen: a woman’s economic potential could be measured by the allure she created. As the Great Depression gripped the world, and the Goulds were faced with the competition striking at their great “Venetian palace” in Nice, Florence’s allure became ever more significant in their business and personal affairs. After all, Hollywood was in its heyday of escapism, setting the scene—so she thought—for her kind of woman. The booming Hollywood film industry created a new archetype: a glamorous woman on the make.2 It was as if the image were tailor-made for Florence.
She wore large jewels fit for a queen, most notably her pearl necklace valued at some 20 million francs. Admirers remarked on how they could hear the rumor of her pearls swaying against each other as she slinked, catlike, into the room. Frequently decked out in black satin or sequined dresses clinging to her shapely body and capping off the effect with thick luxurious furs of dark sable or mink, Florence completed her Hollywood image by donning fashionable, heavy mascara and eyeshadow, adding the finishing touch by painting her seductive smile with dazzling red lipstick. Combined with her wit and risqué humor, she became the almost-attainable version of Jean Harlow or Marlene Dietrich—the women most lusted after by men of the day.3
* * *
Of course, back on the Riviera, the Goulds’ enemy, René Léon of SBM, spread gossip that Frank had been ruined by the U.S. stock market crash. So Florence went on more buying sprees, and was reported in the gossip columns regularly. Faced with what many newspapers in France and the United States called the “ruin of the Gould fortune,” Frank readily ensured their future publicly by buying Florence more diamonds and properties to show the world that they were far from bankrupt. She was his picture of opulence, sent into the public arena of Paris to defy the Riviera gossipmongers.
Florence, the consummate actress, played her part well. The Goulds continued to give to charities and put on charity events locally, too, splashing their names endlessly in newsprint. The loud noises that they were going bust withered to a mere whimper. Hadn’t they invested $2 million to make the roads passable at Breuil in the Maritime Alps for their new hotel project there? Florence asked, the ever-present champagne glass in hand, rattling her outsized emerald and diamond bracelets. What other private investor would put money into such a vast infrastructure project when the government refused to participate?4
They were kind to their friends, too, Florence purred. Hadn’t she arranged with Charlie Chaplin’s brother Stanley, now retired in Nice, to keep Charlie in the news when his career was failing? It was quite a stunt they pulled, too. The president of France’s train was running late for an important reception in Nice, so Chaplin—“little baggy pants”—was called in at Florence’s behest on short notice to be President Gaston Doumergue’s understudy. Unlike the tennis tournament in 1926, Chaplin’s involvement proved a notable publicity coup.5
* * *
For Chaplin, it was the beginning of his love affair with Florence. While still famous around the world, he was no longer the box office smash from the days of the Keystone Cops. Back in 1914, at the start of his Hollywood career with Keystone, he made thirty-five films. The following year, he made fourteen. Six films per year was his total output in the next two years, then a total of nine films over the next five—including The Kid in 1920.
His first film for United Artists, the film production and distribution company founded with Mary Pickford and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, was unusually a comedy of manners entitled A Woman of Paris, based on the life of Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a collector of many husbands, wealth, and jewels. Chaplin wanted to show the rest of us how the rich lived. It made him the first director to bring a comedy of manners to the big screen—albeit in a silent film. While not successful in America, it was greeted as a great film in Europe. His single great hit afterward was The Gold Rush, although it ran into some costly production delays. After The Gold Rush, he produced only two other films until 1931. Desperate, Chaplin saw something in Florence, eight years after the release of A Woman of Paris, that made him wonder if Florence could not become his newest inspiration.6 For him, that must include lovemaking.
That said, love and “progress” had cost Chaplin dearly. His divorces from his two teenage brides were cruel blows to his bank balance. His lack of f
aith in “talkies,” or talking pictures, as movies with soundtracks were then called, was even more devastating. Talkies had taken the moviegoing world by storm three years earlier, but they were just a flash in the pan, he argued. Other comedians were less shy of their voice boxes, and Chaplin was rapidly eclipsed in front of the camera by witty newcomers like W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Eddie Cantor, and the Hal Roach comic-duo Laurel and Hardy. To boot, these comedians had no skeletons lurking behind locked doors, like marrying underage girls or fights with their production companies. It was these comics who became the new American icons as the Great Depression deepened.7
Chaplin, however, like Florence, was an artful gambler. He had thrown three years’ production costs into his newest film, City Lights. Worse still, his own United Artists told Chaplin he was charging too much to get the film into the movie houses. Chaplin gambled and hired his own private New York theater and raised the admission price from fifty cents to eighty-five cents to shouts of “What!?” from his business partners. After three weeks running in New York alone, Chaplin recovered all his production costs, and the film went into profit.8 Still, it was a salutary experience. Chaplin was no longer number one in Hollywood. It had also been a long time since he had been in front of the camera, rather than producing and directing. So, searching for solid ground, he went to Europe and his ever-faithful fan base. In Germany, he discussed politics with Albert Einstein—as you do when you’re Charlie Chaplin. After Berlin, he paid an extended visit to his brother Stanley in Nice. Evidently, he intended to renew, too, his relationship with the Goulds.
Florence’s mise-en-scène with “Charlot” (as the French called him) paid off. A month later, the new premier Aristide Briand decorated Chaplin with the Legion of Honor medal for his services to comedy. Chaplin played boules and tennis with Florence and posed for photographs with the Goulds. He gambled at the Gould casinos, dancing the rhumba with Florence held closely in his arms—their hips swaying in sync while the Latin rhythms played into the wee hours of the morning—enchanted by her. Before leaving, Chaplin called on them to advise who he should meet to remain in the European limelight. In Monaco, it was the king of the Belgians, the Prince of Wales, and the ubiquitous publicist Elsa Maxwell. In Rome, Chaplin was ushered into a two-minute session with Benito Mussolini, the fascist Italian premier. Chaplin was unimpressed.
Despite everything, it was Florence who held his interest while he was in the south of France, and later in Paris. Other, younger women came and went during his Grand Tour, but Florence was always more than a simple one-night stand. Chaplin had decided to embark on the great wooing of Florence Gould. Besides, the oomph had gone out of the Goulds’ twelve-year liaison. Florence may have felt that the excitement of Hollywood—not to mention the draw of a highly sexed, internationally famous movie star—was too great an opportunity to pass up.9
Newspaper articles began to appear across the United States that September. Charlie said that he had offered Florence a starring role in his next film, and he would write the script to suit her many talents. A week after this was leaked, a second report was sent out across the wire services by United Press International that Frank and Florence Gould were in amicable divorce talks. Lawyers for Mrs. Gould stated that “the chief obstacle in her accepting Chaplin’s purported offers was understood to have been an agreement with Gould that she would not appear in any public performance after their marriage.”10
Frank, so Florence declared, would give her a divorce, but she could lay no claim on the Gould millions despite her very active role in making his French hotel and casino enterprise a success. At the time of their marriage, they declared that their “fortunes” prior to marrying would remain separate. Florence could easily agree to that back in 1923, but years on, with all the work she had put into their “French Empire,” the injustice would have stung her deeply. She could always claim that she had given birth to his French companies, but with no children to inherit, her position was weakened in law. She could try to fight Frank, of course, but she had seen how far that had gotten his second wife, Edith. So Florence thought about Hollywood and her “Charlot” and realized her heart belonged to Frank and his millions. She told the Little Tramp as much, too.
Chaplin understood. It had been worth a try, and there were no hard feelings on either side. He returned home to Hollywood, without his Florence, and the intensifying Great Depression. That’s when he got the idea for his great social drama, Modern Times. Never one to be long without a woman at his side, Chaplin began to groom his next paramour, the former Ziegfeld girl Paulette Goddard as his new leading lady. In a logical next step, he made Goddard his third wife.
Florence never alluded to their affair, though she later made many references to “giving up her career” with regret. Years later, she told friends that after the fire had gone out of her sexual relationship with Frank about this time, she’d nearly married a wealthy Romanian. Perhaps the fiction was to help her wounded pride, since Chaplin wasted no time in replacing her with Paulette Goddard. As ever the actress, and to give the illusive, rich Romanian some veracity, Florence told an admirer after Frank died that he had agreed to divorce her, with a small proviso. “Alright then. Let’s not talk about it any further,” Frank allegedly said. “And if, in a year from today, you still want to divorce me, then we will divorce.”11 Before the year was out, Florence had forgotten the “Romanian’s” name.
15
THE PHOENIX RISES
Now I will believe/That there are unicorns …
the phoenix’ throne, one phoenix
At this hour, reigning there.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest
Chaplin could be forgiven for trying his luck. By the 1930s, Florence’s beauty, charm, and fabulous wealth had become a deadly man magnet. She had already acquired a reputation as a lioness, devouring the men she wanted at will, but never allowing her head to desert her golden life with Frank. Strangely, he thought the way men fell for his wife slightly comical, naming them her “noblemen servants.”
Among her admirers were the young and handsome French journalist Robert de Thomasson; Armand de la Rochefoucauld, the aristocratic president of the Jockey Club; and the Mumm champagne king, Melchior de Polignac. Still, Hollywood haunted her thoughts, and shortly after her liaison with Chaplin, Florence was seen everywhere with the Parisian matinee idol Henri Garat.1 It was her old friend Mistinguett who discovered the dashing Garat at the Moulin Rouge. While he was a mediocre actor, he had the “Hollywood look” and a seductively deep voice that made women weak at the knees, and when Garat and Florence were out and about together, his young fans swooned before their screen idol. Theirs was the first—and last—relationship in which Florence would find herself on the wrong side of a violent temperament. It was a stormy and brief affair, ending with Garat’s threat of blackmail and the publication of Florence’s love letters. The ungrateful actor forgot that Florence had made his entrée into Hollywood possible in the first place, but remembered all too well that she refused to follow him there. Garat also misunderstood the extremely tolerant nature of her relationship with Frank, and misjudged her entirely when he tried to claim money from her by threats. It is easy to imagine Florence telling Frank how “blackmail” was such a nasty word, but there it was—straight from Garat’s beautiful lips. As her anger rose, she fulminated how she would not stomach anyone treating her so shabbily. She would have her revenge. She let it be known to her numerous and powerful Hollywood friends that they would be doing her a great favor if they no longer felt the obligation to give Garat work, since he was an untrustworthy lover. So, it came as no surprise to Florence when Garat’s Hollywood days ended abruptly in 1933.2 Still, once Garat was down and out, she doled out a few hundred francs, when the mood struck, to her former lover. Considering that she usually cold-shouldered needy discarded lovers, she must have felt conscious of some guilt.
* * *
Of course, Florence still paid attention to the Goulds’ business
affairs in the early 1930s. The Palais de la Méditerranée and Hôtel Provençal on the Riviera remained profitable, and their casino and hotel at Bagnoles-de-l’Orne had recently reopened. Aletti made sure that their Vichy investments ticked along quite nicely, too, while Frank occupied himself with his Madison Avenue publicity hounds spicing up the latest round in the casino war, and promoting the newly opened hotel and casino at Breuil in the Alps above Nice.
The Depression had hit France late but hard. As American banks called in their debts, the beau monde searched for someone to bail them out. Florence was flying high, buying luxury real estate at massive discounts in Paris. Her great amusement was visiting pawnbrokers, auction houses, and discreet jewelry shops for bargains, gleefully palming her bejeweled steal-of-the-day into her nondescript tin that once held Lucky Strike cigarettes, before sashaying away.3 For a woman like Florence, who could sing the birds from the trees, her “rescue” of her more marginally wealthy friends appeared as generosity beyond the call of duty. They were blind to Florence’s motives: armed with Frank’s millions, this keen businesswoman knew that by holding Paris real estate for a while, the values would one day skyrocket. In buying their jewels and artworks, she was merely satisfying her personal pleasures.
While everyone else’s eyes were trained on salvaging their fortunes, that rather loud, impassioned leader of the NSDAP (Nazi) party in Germany, Adolf Hitler, was ominously on the road to seizing power. Florence was too confident, too cocky, too savvy, to allow such political rumblings to disturb her fun. Besides, France—and all of Europe, for that matter—was facing the stark choice between fascism and communism. Like any good capitalist, the possibility of the communists winning out was unthinkable to Florence. So her parties continued unabated. Her Paris chums, ranging from Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier from her old Folies Bergère days to the actresses Marie Bell and fellow road racer Arletty, were often thrown together like a fine French salad, mixing with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s distant diplomat cousin and descendant of Lafayette, René de Chambrun, and his wife, Josée; Baron Maurice de Rothschild; Sir Oswald and Lady Cimmie Mosley; and other friends in the coterie of the future Edward VIII, known as David to his friends. Simply put, Florence was having a whale of a time.