A Dangerous Woman

by Susan Ronald

  * * *

  Had Florence and her pals realized that Hitler’s fifth columnists were infiltrating their ranks? Did they even care? Coco Chanel, while a brilliant couturier, was essentially a snob and headstrong, like Florence. Unlike Florence, she was a raging anti-Semite. Chanel did precisely as she wanted, when she wanted, with whom she wanted. As Europe plunged headlong toward war, Chanel’s friends like Florence, the fashion editor Marie-Louise Bousquet, the expressionist painter Marie Laurencin, and society hostess Marie-Laure de Noailles were all adopted as part of the “führer’s social brigade” sponsored by the “charming blond, blue and starry eyed” Otto Abetz. Foremost among this social brigade attached to the German embassy was an aristocrat, Baron Hans von Dincklage, nicknamed “Spatz” by his friends. The only problem was that von Dincklage had been in Paris since 1933, working as an agent for Hitler’s intelligence operation, the Abwehr. Spatz was also among the many Aryan Germans to dump his Jewish wife, and subjugated French women to his clandestine work. In a 1935 Deuxième Bureau report, his maid, a member of a Nazi cell in Paris, apparently spied from von Dincklage’s Riviera home at Sanary-sur-Mer. His villa was conveniently placed for espionage on all naval movements in and out of the military port of Toulon across the bay.15 By 1938, he was Chanel’s newest lover. Pillow talk traveled from Chanel’s Place Vendôme apartment straight to Ribbentrop, and on to Hitler.

  That said, Otto Abetz was the primary conduit to Ribbentrop, taking the literati of Paris into his web. It was easy for him to get to know writers and publishers, since his wife, Suzanne, was secretary to the influential right-wing journalist and owner of Notre Temps Jean Luchaire. In the guise of saving France from its socialists, Luchaire and Abetz became friends. Through the work of writer Annie Jamet, they founded the Cercle Rive Gauche, which organized conferences and discussion groups including the likes of Drieu de la Rochelle, Brasillach, Maurras, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, and Henry de Montherlant, as well as teams from the right-wing press. Many were published, wined, and dined in Germany throughout the autumn of 1938, and were thrilled with their newfound German market.

  With a modicum of foresight, much less hindsight, the six-week-old Munich Agreement, declaring “peace in our time,” was shattered by the events of Kristallnacht. Although the mass destruction of synagogues, Jewish places of work, and the rounding up of Jews throughout Germany were theoretically in retaliation for the shooting in Paris of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by a Polish Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, Florence and many of her friends believed the latest anti-Semitic violence had little to do with them.

  Foresight, however, prevailed. When Abetz returned to France at the beginning of April 1939, he met his loyal followers of the CFA at the Hôtel Crillon on place de la Concorde. Among the invited guests were Gaston Henri-Haye, ambassador to the United States, and Melchior de Polignac. They were under observation by the French Deuxième Bureau, Henri-Haye said. Abetz was stunned by the uncomfortable questions posed by René de Chambrun and Pierre Benoit among others, and sensed that the CFA as “an instrument of propaganda and spiritual conquest” would implode. In May, it held its last heated meeting with the membership divided between closing down and continuing with its Franco-German rapprochement, now that the Nazi flag flew over Prague in an overt act of war. That June, Abetz was asked to leave the country, pronto.16

  On July 1, 1939, without so much as waving Abetz good-bye, Florence and others in the “führer’s social brigade” were among seven hundred close friends of the American hostess Elsie de Wolfe (married to the retired British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl) invited to de Wolfe’s “circus party” in Versailles. In fact, only le Tout-Paris was invited, with the septuagenarian Elsie dressed to the nines as the circus ringleader with a diamond and aquamarine Cartier tiara, brandishing her whip, “as if to defy the fates” amid elephants draped in their Indian finery, led by handsome herders dressed scantily in only a loincloth.17 Florence planned her entrance meticulously for weeks, ordering her costume from Lanvin.

  But she hadn’t reckoned on Frank arriving from the Riviera and demanding that just the two of them dine alone that same evening. Later her story was that there was no scene, no counter-demands, nor any fuss. She did just as Frank commanded, accompanying him to the Café de Paris, and afterward to Les Ambassadeurs before returning to their mansion at Maisons-Laffitte. That evening was the first of many “important” discussions about how to face the coming war and what their options might be. New York was back on the table for Frank, if not for Florence, and leaving Europe was a prospect both needed to reconsider. Again, according to Florence, he kissed her good night asking her to please be ready at eleven in the morning. For her disappointment, hidden so well the night before, he reputedly rewarded her with a visit to Cartier to buy her a magnificent diamond.18

  19

  FALL OF FRANCE

  There are three non-military objectives to be controlled right away: Communism, the haute banque, the NRF.

  —OTTO ABETZ, 1940

  There had been two false alarms in preparing for war in France, the first in March 1938 when the British refused to back the French calls to intervene militarily to protect Czechoslovakia, and the second six months later, in September, with the Munich Crisis. Many viewed the August 26, 1939, alarm as another drill. It wasn’t. On September 3, 1939, both France and the United Kingdom declared war on Hitler’s Germany for invading Poland. The soldiers who gathered at Paris’s Gare de l’Est railway station, decked out in their uniforms and steel helmets—but still carrying family blankets, clean socks, and handkerchiefs along with food from home—headed to their northern and eastern fortresses. Not for long. During the “Phony War,” which lasted until May 10, 1940, soldiers watched and waited. Parisians, no longer able to kid themselves that war could be averted, nervously tried to get on with their daily lives.

  The winter of 1939–1940 was one of the most ferocious on record in Europe, with temperatures in northern Spain reaching zero degrees Fahrenheit. While housewives complained of frozen spigots, soldiers at the front—watching and waiting—were freezing in the Siberian winter. Society ladies contributed what they could to relieve the suffering of France’s soldiers, and foremost among these was Florence Gould. “We keep warm as best we can,” Pierre Dux, a former member of the Comédie-Française, wrote in thanks to Florence, “with whatever falls into our hands, like vandals, including old furniture … parquet flooring, and by emptying the rum barrels that our Marianne of war sends to us, the generous Mrs. Frank Jay Gould.”1

  Yet before the real fighting began that spring, Florence suddenly rushed back to Nice on hearing that her mother had been hospitalized. They had remained close, if not always confidantes, or in each other’s company. Florence had fulfilled her mother’s dreams of their living well and becoming part of le Tout-Paris. If Berthe still disapproved of her daughter’s wilder side, there is no record of any rift between them. On the contrary, Berthe lived among the Riviera’s high society thanks to Florence’s, and of course Frank’s, largesse. Sadly, Berthe died on April 16, 1940, of heart failure before Florence arrived. Both Florence and Isabelle, dressed in designer black with black veils covering their faces, accompanied their mother’s body back to Paris for burial at the Montparnasse Cemetery—allegedly in the same crypt where their father had been transported back for burial in 1911. For both, it was the end of an era, if not an end to the fictitious family history.

  Isabelle, dark and slender, had never married. It is possible that her sexual preferences did not lie in that direction. Equally, she may well have preferred to live close to Frank, without commitment, and with his millions at her disposal. Many wagging tongues presumed that she had moved to the south of France to keep Frank company, rather than to look after her mother. Often, Isabelle could be heard at le Tout-Riviera parties, taunting her sister, wondering what artworks, books, or money Florence would leave her when she died. After Berthe’s death, Isabelle was often seen at La Vigie in Cannes, or in Frank�
�s company, walking along the beach.2 Cécile Tellier would, of course, remain in Florence’s employ, and was sent to make herself useful to Frank, ensconced at Juan. The increasingly infirm Frank was surrounded and catered to by Florence’s staunchest allies. First and foremost was Magdeleine Homo, and now, Cécile Tellier.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, France was facing its greatest threat. So, like many of the Parisian gratin, Florence responded to the national cry for volunteers to help make ready for the inevitable, preparing medical supplies, stockpiling food for the troops, working alongside her friend Hedwige princesse Sixte de Bourbon-Parme. As soon as the fighting began in May, she volunteered at Paris’s Val-de-Grâce Hospital as a nurse. Arriving each day in her blue Bugatti, she was adorned with her ever-present pearls and bedecked with emerald and diamond brooches, jeweled rings, and gold bracelets to take up her duties. Florence claimed that one day when they ran out of bandages, she cut up her Lanvin blouse. Often, she would bring her chauffeur into the wards to help dispense champagne and foie gras to the wounded—of course flaunting the early food and fuel rationing. At times, she spontaneously gave jewels she had put on that day, or brought bottles of Joy perfume,* or some “old” evening gowns (worn a handful of times at most) to the staff nurses. Florence exuded an air of unreality and gaiety that must have made the staff nurses and patients wonder if she was some scary apparition or a fairy godmother. Even Frank moaned that “we used to talk about sports and parties in this house, but today we only talk of medicine and surgery.” Still, Florence’s parties continued undampened in spirit.3

  In mid-May, the French ambassador to Madrid and “Hero of Verdun” Maréchal Philippe Pétain was recalled to a Paris in meltdown to become France’s new prime minister. A military hero was just what was needed to lead France’s army—the largest in Europe. The Goulds must have taken heart at Pétain’s appointment. He was their next-door neighbor in Juan.

  When the fighting began, defeat piled upon defeat and within days Florence and Frank cabled their legal team in New York. Their bags were packed; their passage booked; and they wanted to return home. When the reply came, they could be forgiven for reeling: The Internal Revenue Service awaited their arrival to discuss nonpayment of taxes. The cable may not have added “to take you in for questioning,” but given the tax battles that followed, it was something that would have preyed on their minds. What could they do? Stay in France facing an extremely uncertain future, or return to the United States to face humiliation or worse. Perhaps things wouldn’t be so bad after all with Pétain? At the end of the day, France had Europe’s most powerful army. Perhaps, too, Florence could charm the old womanizer Pétain if need be?

  While they mulled over their bleak horizons, by the end of the first week in June it was obvious that France would fall. Within days, the unthinkable happened. The French Army and the British Expeditionary Force were crushed in just six weeks after Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium fell to Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. The only saving grace in the helter-skelter retreat to Dunkirk was the rescue of over 340,000 French, British, and Canadian soldiers by a ragtag flotilla of small ships that joined the Royal Navy. There were 469,000 casualties—including British forces—in the Battle of France. Approximately 350,000 French casualties including 112,000 dead, 225,000 wounded, and 12,000 missing in action in the short campaign, marking the bloody statistic for posterity. By June 14, it was all over. The Swastika flag of the Third Reich was raised along the Champs-Élysées and elsewhere in Paris. The city, however, had become a ghost town of empty streets and closed shutters to welcome Hitler’s heroes.

  As the German philosopher and writer Friedrich Schiller said, “No Emperor has the power to dictate to the heart.” Millions of French citizens fled before the Wehrmacht’s onslaught, often with less than an hour to spare in their race to freedom. Those who had time packed their scant belongings onto carts or baby buggies or simply took to the roads acting as their own packhorses. Unfinished meals were left on tables, as cherished family photographs were scooped up in the rush to escape. The northeast city of Lille, a bustling metropolis of 200,000 souls, lost over ninety percent of its residents in one afternoon. There would be no heroic Battle of the Marne in this war. By three a.m. on June 10, outriders had cleared the way for the government cavalcade to reach the small town of Gien on the River Loire, following the national art collection and other treasures into exile.4 The Belgian gold treasury, sent to France for safekeeping, had been shipped to Dakar, capital of the French colony of Senegal. France sent its own gold reserves to the United States.5 On June 17, 1940, Pétain’s voice crackled over the airwaves. The old man spoke as if reading from a crumpled note. At the request of the president, he announced he’d taken over the leadership of the government of France. “It is with a heavy heart,” Pétain continued, “that I tell you today it is necessary to cease fighting.” It was a unilateral decision, taken without consulting his generals or Churchill. Much of the government fled into exile again, this time to French North Africa.6 Only Pétain and his henchman, former premier Pierre Laval, remained to form—they hoped—a new government in cooperation with the Nazi occupying regime.

  Watching from the American embassy windows, the U.S. ambassador to France, William Bullitt, observed that the Nazis’ “hope is that France may become Germany’s favorite province—a new Gau which will develop into a new Gaul.”7 Bullitt, who had a radiant smile to match Florence’s, and oozed old money from Philadelphia, rented the Parisian ambassadorial residence from her. Naturally, since Bullitt was footloose after his divorce from journalist Louise Bryant,* he had hardly asked his landlady to help show him the social ropes in France before becoming one of her conquests. Frequently seen with Florence at her favorite haunt, Maxim’s, and at embassy balls, Bullitt was previously the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union before he was selected by President Roosevelt for the important follow-up assignment in France. He was Florence’s kind of guy, too. Not only was he fun-loving, intelligent, and handsome—if balding—but he had FDR’s ear. What made him even more attractive was that Florence, after receiving the bad news from the IRS, hoped Bullitt might be the man who could smooth the choppy waters hampering the Goulds’ return to the United States.

  Yet it was not to be. While Bullitt was the latest politician enlisted into her own private army for survival, he was a man aware of his loss of power in the maelstrom. When Bullitt told Florence about the wholesale looting of private collections across Europe by the art dealers working for Hitler, she asked him to please take two valuable tapestries into the embassy vault for safekeeping before the Germans took Paris. The compliant Bullitt was more than happy to be of service.8 Later, however, Florence would tell a different story.

  * * *

  As was often the case, Florence’s contradictory behavior frequently engendered confusion in peoples’ minds. Yet in studying her actions rather than her words, some of her contradictions melt away. After the war, Florence claimed that she had taken part in the “exodus” of the tens of thousands from Paris with the nursing service of the Val-de-Grâce Hospital to Bordeaux, and “then went to the Caserne de Chanzy at Bergerac.… On 22 August 1940, I left Bergerac with my family to go to Juan-les-Pins where I remained until September 1940.” Florence then said that she “returned to Paris at the time that the officers belonging to the reserve were recalled.”9 France had all but capitulated by the time of the exodus, so her claim that the French officers were being recalled was intended to mislead.

  In fact, much of what she later claimed was hardly more than a thin tissue of lies and half-truths. In the particular instance quoted, if, as Florence alleged, she left the stricken capital with the nursing services in mid-June, when and how did she come to find her “family” when private lines of communication were at their worst? More important, why would she have told her friends after the war that she had been at Juan-les-Pins at the time of the fall of Paris?10 Worse still, how could a Yugoslav officer known only as Vionovitch write her laissez-pass
er from the Occupied Zone to Juan-les-Pins, which “arrived in an envelope in the mail coming from Vichy,” as she told her interrogators after the war?11 There was no such mail service at the time. Her statements stand out as bald lies when considering that the new French government at Vichy came into being on July 10, 1940, by which time shadowy Vionovitch was allegedly in London with the Gaullist “government in exile.”12

  These are only the first of many dozens of serious contradictions that Florence would later swear to under oath to the Allies. What is clear is that as France was being carved into “Occupied” and “Free” zones, Florence and Frank decided, perhaps reluctantly, that they would take their chances with the Germans. After all, America was not at war with Germany. But the occupation decree of late June 1940 that “French nationals who had fled the country between May 10 and June 30” no longer had any rights enjoyed by French citizens, and that “their property could be seized and liquidated for the benefit of the French ‘Secours National’” might have influenced their decision to remain.13 While Vichy opposed the decree, believing it still represented France’s independent voice, their protests served no purpose.

  By mid-July, Frank would have been contacted as the local agent for the Banque de France by its new master, Karl Schaeffer. Schaeffer was now the most important person in the economic occupation of the country. Appointed to his post on July 8, 1940, Schaeffer either sent an emissary to see Frank or contacted him personally. Known as the “Eye of Berlin in Paris” he never wasted any time in exercising all his powers of investigation and action, as any experienced national banker in similar circumstances would do.14

  * * *

  Florence’s fellow travelers took different routes to find shelter, regroup, and try to make sense of the catastrophic turn of events. Countess Marie-Laure de Noailles* refused to leave her Parisian mansion for fear of losing her art collection of Veronese, Goya, and Rubens paintings to the looting Nazis.15 Coco Chanel paid for Jean Cocteau and his actor partner Jean Marais to live in luxury at the Ritz, and soon joined them in her own suite as soon as the fighting began. Only those sympathetic to the Nazis could live there. The couturier also immediately closed her Paris fashion house. It was not the time to consider fashion, Chanel said.16