A Dangerous Woman

by Susan Ronald

  * * *

  The mighty external forces rolled on. In the summer of 1942, French POWs remained in camps until a peace treaty with France could be signed. It was a peace treaty that would never come. Pétain blamed France’s defeat on “our laxity. The spirit of enjoyment destroyed what the spirit of sacrifice had built.”13 Forty percent of all French production had gone to the Germans by the autumn of 1940, offset in part by the “cost of maintaining the occupation.” The percentage could only increase once Pierre Laval struck his deal, called the relève, that came into effect in June 1942. Three Frenchmen were sent to Germany to work in exchange for the release of one French prisoner of war. Seeing that there were 1.58 million able-bodied men held prisoner, it was a deal that defied basic mathematical logic. For every Frenchman employed by the Germans, a German was freed up to become a soldier. Over 30,000 German guards were released under the shortsighted scheme and transferred to active combat duty.14 René de Chambrun helped structure the appalling trade.

  As summer took hold, and the tiresome demands of the occupiers increased, Florence had Vogel arrange an exemption for her from weekly reporting to the police. Dated July 3, 1942, and addressed to her at Hôtel Bristol, though she then lived at avenue Malakoff, the order is signed by the German commander of the police and internal security, SS Obersturmfuehrer Nährich. Without too much inconvenience, Florence became exempt from any reporting to police until further order.15

  Florence, however, wove an alternative tale after the war. She swore that she was “interrogated” by Colonel Garthe for the first time in July 1942 because she had “taken up singing and was engaged by the Opéra-Comique. I never even made my debut because Mr. Gould did not want me to.”16 Yet Heller wrote that Garthe, under his alias “Colonel Patrick,” had barged in on Florence in her boudoir in March 1942, interrupting his and Jünger’s visit, ministering to Florence and her broken leg.17 Had she confused the dates, something which she claimed she never did? Or was it rather a classic case of misdirection, since she rambled on nonsensically in the same statement, declaring, “I have nothing in common with Mr. Gould’s preceding wife, who under the name of Gould went to dance in a music-hall. Mr. Gould in a lawsuit had her forbidden from using his name.”18

  In truth, Garthe was taking an active interest in the Goulds and their fortune. While Florence was personally protected from arrest, relations with the United States were hostile, and there was a great clamor in the Nazi hierarchy to Aryanize, or put under administration, all the Gould assets. For Florence that meant that it was time to consider directing her own personal Aryanization program to stay one jump ahead of the Nazis, much as her good friend Wildenstein had done. It was time to call on Vogel again for help.

  23

  THE OCCUPATION, 1942–1943

  Light … does not always illuminate an agreeable spot.

  —ERNST JÜNGER

  Vogel ferreted out the most appropriate and pliable of Aryan administrators for the Gould assets in consultation with the German restaurateur and hotelier known only as Mr. Horscher, who had taken over as the Aryan manager of Octave Vaudable’s famous restaurant, Maxim’s. In the 1930s, Horscher had bought a franchise from Vaudable for his own Maxim’s restaurant in Berlin. Horscher was well connected in the international hotel and restaurant trade, and was intimately aware of those whom the German high command would tolerate. The “suggestion” of Hans Dietrich Warzinski was accepted by Florence, once a Wildenstein-style negotiation took place over a period of several days.1 Florence was fortunate indeed to have such good friends as Vogel, Madeleine Manigler, and Roger Dequoy operating on her behalf. The scurrilous rumor told by artist Marie Laurencin to author Paul Léautaud on their way home from one of Florence’s Thursdays that the Vichy properties had not been Aryanized until June 1944 was entirely untrue.2

  Other Americans, and friends of Americans in France, fared less well at precisely the same moment. René de Chambrun’s mother, Clara, kept the American Library in Paris open under watchful German supervision and strict orders not to lend books to Jews. His father, Aldebert, worked tirelessly with Dr. Sumner Jackson to keep the American Hospital in Paris free from any investigation into its underground network for downed British airmen. Both remained, however, under the gravest suspicion. Meanwhile, René was blamed by the American government for instigating the reinstatement of Pierre Laval as prime minister in Pétain’s government. Although Laval was at his desk again, henceforth he would share only a mutual distrust with Pétain.

  Meanwhile, there were some 173 American men imprisoned at Compiègne in January 1942. René de Chambrun was instrumental in appointing André Masson as a new liaison for returning French prisoners of war. The hope was, if they stayed silent about their maltreatment as slave laborers, more prisoners would be released. Chambrun’s thought process was also behind the beginning of the ill-conceived relève. At one time a close friend of Time magazine’s owner Henry Luce, Chambrun received America’s disfavor when Luce published his name on the black-list of the “Frenchmen condemned by the underground for collaborating with the Germans.”3 Florence, however, did not rate a mention.

  That July, Florence was told by Vogel to hide out on the Riviera, and not to return to Paris until he let her know it was safe. She, in turn, warned her old part-time lover, journalist Robert de Thomasson, that there would be an attack on his friendly maquisards resisting in the Free Zone, before she packed her bags and the salon went on holiday.4 Vogel had been privy to information regarding how to deal with résistants and suspected that it would not be long before there would be an escalation of hostilities between occupier and occupied. He was right. As the United States rounded up alleged fifth columnists at home, the Nazi occupiers in France seized their opportunity.

  During the summer, the Nazis hardened their position regarding the résistants and hatched a plan to imprison the highest-profile Americans possible. This would afford them the best bargaining tool for a trade of German spies, captured in the broad net cast in America. Beginning on September 24, 1942, the Nazi occupiers rounded up 1,400 Americans. Among them was Dr. Sumner Jackson of the American Hospital in Paris. Other Americans included Charles Bedaux and his son, Philip. Bedaux had been working with the Nazis to build a trans-Sahara pipeline. Infamously, in June 1937, Bedaux and his wife put their chateau at the disposal of the former Edward VIII and Mrs. Wallis Simpson—now the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—for their June wedding.5 Charles Bedaux would end his war in another prison, this one in Miami, Florida, accused by the Americans of trading with the enemy and treason.

  That September 24, Madame Fern Bedaux joined Sylvia Beach,* painter Katherine Dudley, and actress and radio commentator Drue Tartière, known in America as Drue Leyton, alongside 350 other women taken by “salad basket”—as the French called the police vans—to the monkey house at the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, near Dr. Colonel Bosse’s Villa Brandt. “Mrs. Bedaux said in a very loud voice,” Drue Tartière recalled, “that she did not expect to be with us long, and that she was waiting for Otto Abetz … to come and get her and her sister released.” Other American women who were not well connected to powerful politicians or big business in the United States were also arrested. Sylvia Beach observed that, “There were Americans coming from every kind of milieu.… A number of artists … a number of French war-brides of American soldiers from World War I, some teachers, some whores, some dancers, a milliner or two, a poet or two, a lady who lived at the Ritz.”6

  Madame Bedaux was right. Before the women were settled in their internment camp at Vittel in Lorraine near the German border, well-dressed French collaborationists accompanied by German officers came to release her. They even helped her pack her bags. As for Sylvia and the others, they were marched from Vittel’s train station to Frontstalag 194, where the British women, interned since 1940, greeted them with wild cheers and songs.7

  Of course, Florence knew what had happened that September. But it did not concern her as much as Coco Chanel�
�s mad affair with her German lover, Spatz. Equally, Florence kept up to date with the latest in Arletty’s steamy romance with her German lover, Hans Jürgen Soehring. Both friends lived at the Ritz, as all the best arch-collaborators did. That October, Florence, too, longed to be reunited with Vogel and reestablish her salon.

  * * *

  On November 8, the Allies invaded North Africa while the Battle of Stalingrad was still raging. In retaliation, the Nazi occupiers of France invaded the Free Zone of Vichy. The choice of the date of November 11, 1942, was no accident, for Hitler loved symbolic gestures. Armistice Day for World War I was to be remembered forever by the French as the invasion of the Free Zone by German and Italian forces.

  Frank, at Juan-les-Pins, was trapped by the Italians who had taken over Corsica and the Riviera as far as Toulon, and parts of France north to the Swiss border. In Paris, nothing had changed, except the thirst for knowledge of what precisely was going on.8 Florence relied heavily on information from Vogel and Oberg for her news, when she was unable to glean stolen tidbits from loose-lipped Nazi officers frequenting her gray mice network. She took her usual break to be with Frank at Christmas, but she never mentioned what, if anything, was different on her voyage south.

  On February 22, 1943, the office of the prefect of police wrote that it was unable to ascertain “any information whatsoever about the racial quality” of the Goulds. The note found its way into General Carl Albrecht Oberg’s in-tray. Oberg, already well acquainted with Florence and her circle, had masterminded the anti-Jewish policies throughout France. So he sent his top man, Walter Odewald, SS Sturmbahnfuehrer of the Kripo, or criminal police, to question Florence.9 In order not to alarm her too much, Odewald, who took a lively interest in black-market activities in addition to sending Jews and enemies of the Reich to their deaths, asked to be introduced to Florence by Vogel.

  Evidently, Odewald fell victim to Florence’s many charms, since his first request for information went unanswered. On April 19, then again on May 31, a second and third request for the same information about their “Jewish race” were made in identical, patient language. By June, the official report was filed. “As far as the racial quality [of Frank Jay Gould] is concerned, an investigation which permitted us to establish his Aryan race was undertaken in the United States by our [Vichy] Ambassador, Mr. [Gaston] Henri-Haye. The conclusions reached by the ambassador are on file with the Interior Ministry at Vichy. As for his wife, who was originally French, her first and middle names and her maiden name allow us to suppose that there is no Jewish blood in the family.” The same report also mentions that Frank, too, was exempt from reporting to the police.10

  The most interesting part of the story, however, was that Frank’s birth certificate had a blank space where his name should have been. More than likely, his parents hadn’t agreed on a name at the time of his birth, and forgot to fill it in officially. Frank’s birth certificate resided at the passport office in New York City along with an affidavit from his sister, Helen Gould Shepard, attesting that the blank birth certificate for the December 1877 birth of a baby boy was indeed that of her brother Frank Jay Gould. It is difficult to imagine that Frank was ever under any real threat by the Nazis in these circumstances. The Germans did not investigate very hard, since if they had, they would have found abundant tittle-tattle by Wall Streeters that Jay Gould was Jewish, and best friends with Jesse Seligman, head of the Jewish banking family.11

  Still, that was not the end of the affair. In July 1943 a certain Mr. T. Rombaldi, the new Italian chief of the regional directorate of the IEQJ, wrote a note suggesting that despite the documents provided via the Swiss legation and Vichy ambassador Henri-Haye, there remained a strong belief that the Gould family had converted from Judaism. Rombaldi requested that the IEQJ director judge personally if the genealogical family tree in his possession was the same as the one indicated by the Swiss legation and the French ambassador. The file reached General Carl Oberg’s in-tray again to investigate.12

  The problem was that Oberg, who worked from the Maisons-Laffitte estate owned by the Goulds, had an increasingly more tolerant opinion toward Jews. That January, his boss, Heinrich Himmler, demanded that Oberg remove 100,000 “criminals” from Marseille as prisoners and blow up the “crime district.” Oberg knew Germany was losing the war, and was disinclined to carry out yet another war crime. Odewald was consulted again, and a meeting was set up with the troublesome Italian Rombaldi in Lyon.

  Meanwhile, Colonel Helmut Knochen, senior commander of the Sicherheitsdienst and Sicherheitspolizei, and the most powerful of Florence’s part-time lovers, was aware of the French irritation with the Italian occupation. Laval complained to him directly about Italian interference, after telephoning the Italian embassy in Paris. Laval was adamant that the Italians could not “stand between the French government and citizens of third countries on French soil” and asked Knochen to intervene.13 Had René de Chambrun put the Vichy premier up to the calls?

  Knochen was wrestling already with how to cultivate an anti-Jewish sentiment among the French, and concluded it was impossible to succeed without some sort of pecuniary interest. “The offer of economic advantages much more easily excites sympathy for the anti-Jewish struggle,” Knochen claimed. He wondered in his memos, too, if it should be the Italians who ought to offer money to the French. While enlisting the Italians could only mean trouble for Florence, it is unlikely that he ever shared these thoughts with her.14

  Instead, Florence was alerted to the danger through Vogel. She quickly arranged to “hitch a ride” with Colonel Garthe, Vogel, and Odewald as far as Lyon.15 Frank had been examined under the microscope by Schaeffer of the Reichsbank ever since the occupation began, Florence told them. Surely the German high command held sway over the occupying Italians? Of course, they did, Garthe replied. Florence was urged to be patient.

  On September 8, 1943, as part of a bigger slap in the face, the Italians retreated from their French occupation, leaving the Nazis in charge. With the Allied invasion of Italy, they had real wars to fight at home. Frank remained happily exempt from reporting weekly as an “enemy alien” to the police and was not troubled ever again by the Germans.

  * * *

  German power was rocked back outside of France, too. With the fall of Stalingrad to the Soviets that February, the North Africa campaign won by the Allies in May, and the invasion of Italy that September, French fascists took up the cudgels on behalf of their German masters. Their nefarious paramilitary organization was called the Milice. Originally formed as the “only French Legion representing civic, social and moral action between the wars,” Xavier Vallat, the head of the IEJQ, claimed that by 1942 the Milice had become the eyes and ears of the Vichy government. Charged with the serious duty of keeping its ear to the ground for any rumor of public opinion, the Milice also became the mouthpiece of Maréchal Pétain’s government.

  Pétain stated that it was their “duty to transform the physiognomy of the country.” Long before the German takeover of the Free Zone, the Milice was the enthusiastic French arm of the Gestapo, wielding its own raids, or rafles, to rid France of its Jews and perceived political enemies.16 There is no record anywhere in the archives of this distinctly French network that the Milice took any special interest in Frank or Florence. The Goulds remained under the protection of the German Sicherheitsdienst, the SS’s security arm.

  Nevertheless, the ever-resourceful Vogel tried to persuade Frank that he could secretly fly him to safety at any time he wished. Was this behind Vogel’s flights to Germany—twice with Florence—to inspect German military airfields? Was Florence’s use of a false identity and passport during these trips also aimed at helping her husband? Hardly. The reason for Florence’s sojourns into the heart of the Reich was purely to be alone with her lover Vogel. Interestingly, too, Florence never passed any of the crucial Luftwaffe information learned on her trips to her résistant friends de Thomasson or Marie Bell. It might have saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. Desp
ite her claim that from December 1943 she was working clandestinely as part of the OSS in France, her failure to pass on information regarding the German airfields and the movement of aircraft to the OSS demonstrates that she never worked officially for them.17

  * * *

  Throughout it all, the gaiety of Florence’s salons continued unabated. Jünger visited her apartment on May 8 upon her return from a Riviera sojourn, in the usual company of their friends. She was ebullient, quoting Frank as having enjoyed On Marble Cliffs, and claimed he said, “Now, here’s someone who can make dreams a reality.” Jünger judged that was a pretty intelligent remark coming from an American millionaire. Two evenings later, he returned to avenue Malakoff to be alone with Florence.18 June 23, July 6, July 20, and August 4 were also spent at Florence’s avenue Malakoff apartment enjoying the fruits of her black-market table and sparkling conversation.

  Interestingly, Jünger and Florence also had the thriving Parisian art market in common too. On May 13, he had dinner with Heller at the Chapon Fin at Porte Maillot, a stone’s throw from Florence’s apartment. Their invited guest was Dr. Erhard Goepel—the avaricious art dealer who worked with Hildebrand Gurlitt (one of Hitler’s four official dealers) and Kajetan Mühlmann, the greatest looter of Poland and the Netherlands. They discussed the Paris art market in some detail, including the Oppenheim collection, and how Oppenheim made his greatest coup after buying Van Gogh’s White Roses. Goepel agreed that possessing great works of art conveyed “a real and considerable magical power.”19 Undoubtedly, Jünger shared this conversation with Florence, along with many other similar conversations, for Goepel was invited to Florence’s home on at least one occasion.