A Dangerous Woman

by Susan Ronald

Democracy is well and truly dead in Germany.… The stability of the regime now depends on the bayonets of the Reichswehr.

  —Lt. Colonel Edouard-Charles Chapouilly to General Maxime Weygand, June 1932

  18

  FIFTH COLUMNISTS AND FELLOW TRAVELERS

  They should know that Hitler’s triumph would be the death of the West.

  —ANDRÉ SAURÈS, Vues sur l’Europe (1939)

  Foremost among Florence’s literary set was the academician Pierre Benoit, who joined the ranks of the “Immortals” of the Académie Française in 1931. Benoit, whom Florence nicknamed “Bébé,” was utterly captivated by her, much to the chagrin of Madame Benoit. “You have no idea how he wrote the most beautiful poems to me,” Florence said, “and how he was sweet, soft, and round, like a baby. It was lovely. He was my baby.”1 The right-wing Benoit also possessed a great mind. To boot, he was a great admirer of the politics of Charles Maurras, author, poet, critic, and principal philosopher of Action Française, a political movement that was monarchist and anti-parliamentarist, and influenced Florence politically prior to the war.

  More prosaically, it was Benoit who smoothed the way for the impoverished and seemingly friendless Arletty. In October 1936, Florence agreed to forgive her old friend for Stavisky’s transgressions, on certain conditions. Arletty’s only remark about the encounter was that she had to “first make nice to Florence’s Pekingese dogs.”2 Florence’s absolution most likely took the form of financial assistance and a certain social rehabilitation among their set, for which Arletty remained silently grateful.

  Benoit also raised Florence’s hopes of a change of government to the royalists or center right, which would be a friendlier regime for business. Alas, both were sorely disappointed with the 1936 election results. That April, there was a chilling victory for the socialists and communists. Sylvia Beach reported to her father in New Jersey, “all went LEFT in a landslide that has quite scared the old standpatters and canon-merchants. Now they are trying to revenge themselves by sitting on the franc so as to flatten it out.”3

  Sylvia also wrote about the “Friends” of her struggling bookshop, which most patrons preferred to think of as a library and home away from home. While Joyce was alive—just—the glamour days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald were past. André Gide had become the guiding spirit for her French subscribers, as he was always a champion of the oppressed, and he dramatically intervened to help her attract customers by establishing the “Friends” of Shakespeare and Company and contributing to its readings during 1936 and 1937. Yet it was the unofficial friends who privately rallied to support Sylvia’s endeavors. Led by the major donor and New Yorker Marian Willard, Helena Rubinstein gave $246, while Anne Morgan, the daughter of her more famous father J.P., gave $460. Paris needed an English-language bookshop, and “We women must stand together! Pour la culture!” was the battle cry.4 Florence did not give copiously to this popular “American” cause and was apparently not a customer. She preferred the high-society de Chambrun charities of the American Hospital and the American Library.

  Shakespeare and Company survived, thanks to Gide’s efforts. He arranged for Jean Schlumberger, founder of the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française, to speak that March. Then Schlumberger enlisted his editor, the fifty-two-year-old Jean Paulhan, to read from Les fleurs de tarbes, which wouldn’t be published until 1941. Sylvia’s companion, Adrienne Monnier, likened Paulhan to a snake charmer, “the line of his voice moved toward the idea like the sound of a flute, and the idea, undulating, reared up like a cobra.”5 Paulhan’s voice did indeed rise and fall, and he moved about like a snake hoping to insinuate himself into the listeners’ thoughts, but the poem was incomprehensible to Sylvia. In what may seem an unlikely turn of events, however, Paulhan would also become one of Florence’s saviors within the decade.

  * * *

  The real threat of war was on everyone’s lips from the moment Hitler’s troops strutted into the Rhineland in March 1936, in clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Nonetheless, Paris was still swaddled in its own importance. There were spring floods, once again. Would the Seine burst its banks, or not? Looking outward, ever so slightly, did they notice, the chattering beau monde asked one another, if the spring fashions held more than a mere hint of the military about them? Meanwhile, Condé Nast tore his hair out in New York because the fashion houses bent his French Vogue—nicknamed “Frog” by in-housers—to their will, with Chanel threatening to pull her entire collection unless no fashions from competing couturiers were shown on the opposite pages.6

  The preoccupation with fashion disgusted leftist activists. How could fashion possibly matter while the bloody civil war in Spain raged on as the final proving ground for Hitler’s war machine? How indeed, when French and foreign writers swelled the ranks of volunteers to save the duly elected left-wing Spanish Republic, among them, George Orwell. The writer Stephen Spender, later a British spy, visited Shakespeare and Company with Ernest Hemingway in tow traveling as a sort of antiwar correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, on their way to fight in Spain. That May, on Hemingway’s return, he gave a reading from his new novel To Have or Have Not to help his old friend Sylvia Beach. Spender and W. H. Auden would speak there, too, that summer.7

  The national war of words between parliamentarians, communists, and socialists against royalists and fascists had been going on since the twenties. New far left and far right groups, fueled by the exile of Eastern Europeans and Italian and Spanish political refugees, served only to terrify le gratin of France. Though Florence had no friends on the left, she found many fellow travelers on the right. Hitler’s fifth columnists, headed by Otto Abetz, seemed the most well-connected group to join. Besides, the conservative center ground in France was wafer-thin, and quite unfashionable. It would take a person of extreme conviction to remain indifferent to the rolling, boiling cauldron of political ideals of the thirties. Yet the only firm passions Florence held were those that bowed to her munificence, power, and beauty. With the coming war, these passions would stand her in good stead as a powerful survivor.

  When the unlikely candidate Léon Blum, a Jew, miraculously became France’s premier in the new leftist Front Populaire government in June 1936, Florence was, along with her royalist friends, aghast. The former legal adviser to Florence’s favorite luxury car manufacturer, Hispano-Suiza, Blum held his first university degree in philosophy, his second in law. He was the author of books on Goethe and Stendhal; a devotee of Ravel’s music; adored cats, flowers, objets d’art, and modern art. He was an enthusiastic cook, recited Victor Hugo’s poems by heart, and his brother René was the director of the Monte Carlo Russian ballet.8 Yet none of this endeared him to Florence and her friends.

  Despite introducing social reforms, including obligatory paid holidays for the employed, Blum’s ministry lasted a mere year. His government fell not because of its leftist leanings, or indeed his support for women’s rights (he had three women serving in his cabinet even though they still couldn’t vote*), but rather due to anti-Semitism among the right-wing political parties. The royalists even wielded the slogan “Better Hitler than Blum,” bringing some conservative elements and socialists, too, into their swelling ranks.9

  While Florence supported a move toward the right, she was not truly anti-Semitic, boasting the Jewish poet Max Jacob, briefly, as her lover, and adopting (and later protecting) her highbrow Jewish friends. Nonetheless, years later, even some of her close friends, like writer Dominique Aury (pen name for Anne Desclos), branded Florence “an American anti-Semite.”10 On closer examination, given Aury’s knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon mindset—as she grew up in an Anglo-French home—her statement is a swipe at Americans as well as anti-Semites. In the late 1950s when she said this about Florence in a letter to her lover and editor, Jean Paulhan, the acceptable and understood face of the Jew to Americans was one who was wealthy, with a position in society, and with whom one shared a common “Christian” culture.

  Floren
ce’s qualified acceptance of Jews can best be understood through Nancy Mitford’s famous glossary definition of “U and non-U” terminology, the “U” standing, of course, for “upper class.” If you were an “upper class” Jew (meaning a Jew with money), you passed for a “U” with Florence. So rich families who seemed more secularized and integrated, like the Rothschilds and the Wildensteins, were acceptable faces in Florence’s lexicon. The poor, bedraggled Eastern European Jew, unable to speak the language, scrabbling for food or the means to make a living, devoid of friends or country, belonged to another past and future, and would never have crossed the threshold of any of Florence’s homes.

  That is not to say she shunned the poor. She was always good to her staff, who invariably arrived poor, if not Jewish. It was one of the many contradictions in Florence’s personal world, where the poor were universally rejected unless they were her poor. As for the Jews, in her own strange brand of “evenhandedness,” they were deserving of rejection, too, so long as they were not her Jews. Florence was, after all, a people collector. She chose to paste her own labels on those whom she met to suit their tastes.

  Such caveats, however, isolated Florence into an ever-decreasing minority. As the Reich squeezed the lifeblood from its Jews, many sought refuge in France. Paris’s Jewish population had doubled by 1936 to 150,000, as had the overall Jewish population of France to some 330,000 souls.* Where anti-Semitism fell away in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, because Jews served and died alongside other Frenchmen, the collective and favorable French memory became sorely taxed by the sudden influx of Jewish immigrants from Germany who spoke little or no French. The situation would only worsen as Germany made its conquests in the east.

  * * *

  The fascist press was led by Charles Maurras’s royalist and Catholic Action Française, in which it was impossible to separate culture and politics. The likes of Robert Brasillach, who edited Maurras’s most popular journal from 1937, Je suis partout, claimed that anti-Semitism was “an important element in the process of the identification of the ‘natives’ … and was a manifestation of the ‘revolt of the natives’ against the foreign.”11 This statement, expressed as French literature, turned the violent and irrational into the reasonable. Fear spiraled and overpowered the population.

  Few Frenchmen and women understood the implication of the Nuremberg Laws enacted by the Third Reich on September 15, 1935. Suddenly, anyone with a single Jewish grandparent was classed as Jewish. Anyone married to a Jew was urged, not so politely, to divorce on the grounds of the spouse being a Jew. Any children of that union were earmarked for the eventual “Final Solution,” already actively researched by the hierarchy of the Nazi party before the war. Longstanding German supporters of Hitler, like Cornelius Gurlitt, whose son was Hitler’s art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, fulminated, “My sons, I have to make statements, whether we are Aryans. This is very difficult because no one knows what an Aryan is. Was our ancestor, the monk Matinus Gorlitius, a German or a Jew? How can I deny my beloved mother? We have given our lives to Germany … there are four Iron Crosses in the family.”12

  This would become a familiar, ignored outcry throughout the occupied territories of the Reich by Jews, Freemasons, Gypsies, homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, and political opponents (including priests of the Catholic church) until the end of hostilities in May 1945. Florence most likely brushed aside the rise in anti-Semitism and horror stories from the east. They did not directly concern her. Besides, politics rubbed against the lifelong cultivated grain that Florence enjoyed: having a good time in high society.

  That was a mind-set Florence shared with many others in the “U” world of galas, gaiety, and folly. Many believed that the German fascist wave would not affect them. How could it? Granted, while Florence socialized with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, whose pro-Hitler stance made many a jaw go slack in despair in Britain and America, she was more interested in remaining at the heart of le Tout-Paris and le Tout-Riviera, surrounded by her fashionable royalist and literary friends, than considering her world was about to end.

  * * *

  By 1936, it had become increasingly impossible—even for Florence—to avoid the political turmoil. The Front Populaire of Léon Blum awakened the political spirit among her employees. At the beginning of July, all the personnel at the hotels, casinos, and restaurants in Cannes, Antibes, and Juan-les-Pins went on general strike to get their paid vacations and other improvements in employment that Blum had passed into law. The strike lasted for fifteen days. Much as during the general strike in the United Kingdom in 1926, it was all high-society hands to the deck. At the bar of the Palm Beach casino, Florence and her friends mixed cocktails themselves to the rattle of their jeweled wrists, the casino chits jingling in their pockets, and baptized their concoctions as “Bada-Blum” or “CGT King.”*

  Coinciding with the strikes, Florence decided it was time to glean her knowledge of what the politics of the future would hold, firsthand. So she acquired a taste for politicians, if not politics. The Belgian minister for transport, Marcel-Henri Jaspar, and the future general secretary for Quai d’Orsay, Hervé Alphand, were among her many conquests. Adding politicians to her litany of lovers provided her with the proverbial “killing two birds with one stone.” She felt they could give chapter and verse on what was really happening, without her having to dedicate vast swathes of time and energy to reading about it—time that was better spent on fun and her investments. What better way to mix sex with pleasure? she mused.

  Still, Florence did not give up her “pretty boys” or other friendships or her love of waterskiing, as seen in her devotion to her dim but gorgeous waterskiing instructor, Georges Ducros. Aged thirty-three, Ducros had been the European champion for the previous three years, and famously taught Florence the finer art of his “tricks” or “figures,” which included dance-steps, a ten-yard jump, and other acrobatics while waterskiing.13 Undoubtedly, the handsome Georges also taught her other tricks and contortions in the boudoir.

  As war became increasingly inevitable in 1937, Florence divided her time between the hotels, restaurants, and casinos that comprised the Gould empire, acting as its main administrator. Frank had little energy and less inclination to travel, and especially had no desire to keep up with his wife. His mental capacity was diminishing, and was intermittently fogged by the effects of his increasing infirmity. Indeed, until the war broke out, there are very few sightings of Frank in Florence’s company publicly.

  Then a peculiar and deadly incident occurred in June 1937. The Italian anti-fascist exiled in Paris, Carlo Rosselli, went to the Goulds’ hotel and casino in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne in Normandy to take a cure for his phlebitis. Rosselli not only headed a contingent of Italian volunteers to fight in Spain where he was wounded, but also developed a non-Marxist ideology he called “liberal socialism” and founded his own journal called Giustizia e Libertà, published in Paris.

  After a week at the hotel, taking his mud cure in the morning, working in the afternoon, taking a drive, then going to the casino at night, on the afternoon of June 9, Rosselli and his historian brother, Nello, who had just joined Carlo to warn him of an attempt on his life, were gunned down. An unexploded bomb was found in the car. Had Florence whispered Rosselli’s presence in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne—intentionally or not—into the wrong ears? By 1937, she was reputedly known for lacking discretion in some circles, especially after an evening of swilling champagne. Whether by design, poor investigation, fear, or her friends in high places, Florence was never questioned. The final verdict on the brothers’ deaths was that they were assassinated by the Cagoule—an extreme-right sect known for their hooded capes. They were also tied to the French secret services and the secret society CSAR (Comité Sécret d’Action Révolutionnaire).14 Given the affiliation, perhaps, too, if Florence spoke intentionally out of turn, it might have been part of the payoff demanded by the Deuxième Bureau to keep the Nice casino open. If the leak had been unintentional, then her gaffe was m
ade almost certainly after midnight, when bottles of champagne made her less circumspect—not that she was ever known for her ability to keep a secret. It is quite possible that Florence never knew the truth of the situation herself, since she had become a habitual heavy drinker during her nocturnal escapades. As she traveled throughout France in her white convertible Hispano-Suiza, visiting some of their 1,200 glacier cafés, fifty hotels, numerous casinos, chocolate factory Rozan in Clermont-Ferrand, and various other real estate investments, she would not have thought about the incident twice.

  Besides, she’d recently bought a new duplex apartment at 2 boulevard Suchet, a few fistfuls of doors away from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Ignoring Frank’s wishes that it should be traditionally decorated, she decked it out instead in the latest art deco style with sleek, clean lines and modern furniture. Frank visited her there only as a matter of necessity, preferring a small apartment he kept elsewhere in Paris, where he could recall happier times when he could lure his mistresses for trysts. Now infirmity played on his nerves, exasperating him. In ever-failing health, Frank found it increasingly hard to muster the power it took to overrule his wife.

  So her willfulness toward Frank deepened, with Florence’s nightly social events among two or three hundred of her best friends (though not all at once) increasingly absorbing her. Parties would begin at the boulevard Suchet apartment, then roll on to Paris’s nightclubs of the moment, Chez Florence or Chez Casanova or Chez Sheherazade, where the revelers would be joined by dozens of other “great friends” to dance and swizzle champagne until dawn, before adjourning to Les Halles for the mandatory onion soup.

  At her Granville casino, Florence participated in the automobile “concours d’élégance.” In Paris, her favorite haunts remained Maxim’s for dinner or the Ritz for high tea. Even the Anschluss—the unifying of Austria and Germany—in March 1938, could not dampen Florence’s social engagements, or her purchases from her friend Chanel or those of Jeanne Lanvin, a relation by marriage to Winnaretta Singer.