Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Soon, Stocklin had opened offices in Switzerland, Belgium, Spain and Portugal. His lorries transported textiles from all over Europe to the docks in Saint-Ouen. He sold on his textiles at mark-ups of five times the original price and pocketed the commission. Between 1940 and 1943, BEMIC/‘Bureau Guy Max’ generated 200 million francs, ‘making important profits for the SS, the Todt organisation and the German navy’ – and personally earning Stocklin an estimated 20 million francs.

  In 1941, Stocklin expanded his operation into silk stockings and perfumes. He controlled a multitude of companies, including ‘Bas Marny’ stockings and ‘Parfums Marny’ – bought for a derisory sum off a Jewish owner who had fled Paris. The prosecution maintained that an office opened by Stocklin in Monaco to sell these perfumes was a cover for money-laundering (Cornet’s decision to move to Monaco after the war may be explained by his familiarity with the Principality when working for this office). Stocklin’s partner Jacques Horteur was one witness who might have corroborated the charge, but he had been murdered in front of 74 Champs-Elysées on the night of 17 August 1945 ‘in circumstances we have not not been able to elucidate’. If you knew about Stocklin’s operations, you did not tell. But did Priscilla know?

  Priscilla in a fur coat on the slopes of Megève. Priscilla dining at the cabaret restaurant Le Baccara. Priscilla speeding up Rue Lord Byron. According to the journalist Alfred Fabre-Luce: ‘Anyone with a car is under suspicion of having dealings with the enemy . . .’

  It is not possible from existing sources to get hold of a detailed idea of Priscilla’s knowledge or involvement. The only way to gauge this is to see who she mixed with. The prosecution asserted that leading a similar elite lifestyle, while the rest of the population queued in the cold streets for ten ounces of bread, was another associate of Stocklin, a haughty young Moscow-born aristocrat called Marie. ‘Stocklin had in his service for some time la Comtesse Marie Tchernycheff-Bezobrazoff who installed a purchasing agency in the next two rooms, mainly of rubber products that were transported in German lorries driven by a member of the Gestapo.’

  Marie had moved in the same pre-war circles as Priscilla and Gillian. A former mistress of the young Philippe de Rothschild, she had modelled for Chanel and worked as a vendeuse for Schiaparelli, before turning to film, acting an unremarkable part in Marc Allegret’s Zouzou, as a music-hall singer who takes a Brazilian lover. By the end of 1941, she was a divorcee living in Rio. Fact had imitated the dowdy cinematic fiction.

  Boredom returned her to France. She was intelligent. She was attractive. Nostalgic for her days as a future film star, she pined to be at the centre of things. In December 1941, this was Nazi-occupied Paris. That winter at the Hôtel Lutétia, she met an agent working for Brandl. When she asked who was this Max Stocklin everyone was talking about, he led her up four flights of stairs to the BEMIC office and introduced her to its dandyish chairman, whom she found elegant ‘in the gangster mode’.

  Stocklin rented Marie a room next door to set up her own purchasing agency. Alternately known as ‘the Red Princess’ or ‘Mara’, and often to be observed tugging behind her a poodle that answered to the name of Dingo, she proved to be a more talented businesswoman than actress. She was extending her reach into alcohol and textiles when Stocklin took her to a reception at 93 Rue Lauriston hosted by his former cell mate from Cépoy, the tall cunning man with the startling girlish voice.

  Henri Chamberlin was the French criminal who had guided Stocklin safely to Paris. A mere draft-dodger and thief when he befriended Stocklin, he had become, thanks to Stocklin, the undisputed chief of the French Gestapo – and for the French Resistance, Public Enemy Number One. Aged thirty-eight, the multi-aliased Chamberlin was the person on whom the film director Louis Malle later based the character of Lucien Lacombe.

  Chamberlin, or ‘Monsieur Henri’ as he was respectfully addressed, has a place in Priscilla’s story because he embodied the milieu into which she was swept up – first by Cornet and then by her important friend Max Stocklin and his blonde sidekick Marie. It is only surmise, but due to the small size of this community, both geographically, encompassing no more than a few streets near the Etoile, and in the number of individuals involved, it is inconceivable that Priscilla and Chamberlin did not know each other. One of Chamberlin’s mistresses lived directly below Priscilla in 11 bis Rue Lord Byron. Chamberlin’s right-hand man lived in the same building as Daniel Vernier, to which Priscilla was a regular visitor. Gillian Sutro had little doubt that Priscilla met Chamberlin.

  If not Stocklin, Chamberlin was the second of three likely candidates with the clout to strong-arm the French and German authorities to leave Priscilla alone.

  ‘Is there anything more horrible than the French Gestapo?’ asked Raymond Aron in his four-volume Histoire de L’Epuration. Who they were and how they fitted into the power ladder was encapsulated by the chief of the ‘Gestapistes français’ or ‘Lauristondienst’.

  On arriving with Stocklin in Paris, Chamberlin had initially recoiled from working for the enemy. He tried to get back his old job as manager at the Préfecture canteen, but an inspector there – Albert Priolet, who in 1917 had arrested the German spy Mata Hari – threatened to charge him for desertion. ‘He threw me out like something dirty,’ Chamberlin complained at his trial in December 1944. If in that moment the Resistance had made Chamberlin an offer, he would have seized it. ‘But in the summer of 1940, the Resistance, there wasn’t any. The word didn’t exist!’ In that moment, ‘I simply had the desire not to die, to live.’ He had to survive as he could. ‘There was the Hôtel Lutétia, where I had made friends, thanks to my Swiss chum, Max Stocklin. I paid him a visit and he said: “Let’s see, we’ll find something for you.”’

  Chamberlin had even more reasons than Cornet to be grateful to Stocklin. Without Max Stocklin, there would have been no Henri Lafont, as Chamberlin now became known in what was his most lethal incarnation. After Chamberlin boasted that he could track down goods not available on the open market, Stocklin installed him with his new alias in a shop in Rue Tiquetonne to buy food, clothes and furniture for the Abwehr.

  The instinctive revulsion of the French towards anything associated with Germany made it hard for German outsiders to procure goods and negotiate with suppliers. They depended on native informers with local knowledge, and Chamberlin became one of these quintessential French middle-men, protected by the Gestapo and doing the dodgy work.

  As Henri Lafont, Chamberlin prospered. To nourish the Reich, he bought wheat in Normandy, butter by the lorry-load, furs, cattle. But he lacked henchmen, and so, with the Abwehr’s connivance, he released from the cells of Fresnes prison 27 convicted felons to act as extortioners. Chamberlin’s gang soon exceeded a hundred in number. Stealing, intimidating, making unauthorised house-searches of the wealthy, and buying only when necessary, his ‘auxiliary police’ chivvied out merchandise which the French population had attempted to conceal, and stored it in shops, garages, abandoned apartments. His Abwehr bosses were impressed. He flaunted a gun and a German police identity card, and eventually forty-four uniformed German officers were detailed to assist him. Six months on, he was indispensable to the Abwehr and exercised more power than Max Stocklin – it would be Chamberlin, on Brandl’s orders, who sent Stocklin to Algeria with a radio transmitter. He had grown ruthless, rich.

  Chamberlin’s HQ was a three-storeyed hôtel particulier in Rue Lauriston, a short walk from Cornet and Priscilla’s apartment. A clutch of receipts rescued from the premises during the Liberation showed that between April and December 1941, Chamberlin’s gang amassed goods worth 142 million francs. Among the valuables were nine necklaces, seventeen gold bars and 159 kilos of children’s clothes.

  The boy who had left his Paris slum at eleven and subsisted out of dustbins now drove a white Bentley. White flowers were another obsession, orchids and dahlias especially. Chamberlin endowed 100,000 francs for a dahlia prize. ‘Send me flowers’ – his reply when those he had helped enquired how t
hey might repay him. He could not bear to see a flower die.

  When Göring outlawed the black market in March 1943, Chamberlin, now in the Gestapo, exchanged hunting down goods for hunting down Jews, Allied airmen, members of the Resistance. His men visited the One-Two-Two following a mission against maquisards in Haute-Savoie. Fabienne Jamet, the brothel owner, described in her memoirs seeing Frenchmen dressed in German uniforms sitting downstairs with a magnum and a few girls, boasting ‘Did you see how I hit him? He’ll be pissing blood for a week, that poor bugger . . .’ She said of Chamberlin’s gang: ‘They’d beaten people up, tortured people, and there they were, laughing about it . . . We saw them all at one time or another. Horrible creatures.’

  At his requisitioned home in 93 Rue Lauriston – which was equipped with cells and ‘where torture was a daily practice’, wrote Gillian Sutro – Chamberlin entertained journalists, industrialists, actresses, politicians, German leaders. He knew personally Hitler’s Ambassador to Paris, Otto Abetz. He was on tutoyer terms with Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval. He was ‘untouchable’ said one police inspector after being locked up in a cell on the second floor. Chamberlin boasted to Fabienne Jamet’s husband: ‘If you have any mates inside you’d like sprung, you’ve only got to ask. I can fix it.’ If anyone could have authorised Priscilla’s freedom, it was Chamberlin.

  Chamberlin’s toxic influence over the Paris police is reflected in a Police Judiciaire report of 30 August 1944. ‘Chamberlin-Lafont dictates his wishes to the office of the prefect of police and his demands are met, contrary to state security.’ An Inspector Metra verified that Chamberlin’s gang had taken him from his house to the Quai des Orfèvres, where Chamberlin ordered Metra to release a group of criminals. Four other inspectors and the police commissioner in Neuilly registered similar abuses: Monsieur Henri did what he wanted. In one hearing at the Court of Appeal, ‘he freed an arrested woman he knew, drawing his pistol and threatening anyone who opposed him.’

  The police report failed to reveal the identity of the woman he rescued, but Chamberlin’s taste, which is what convinces me that he knew Priscilla, was for semi-aristocratic women married to useless husbands. The post-Liberation press titled them the ‘countesses of the Gestapo’. Blonde, often bisexual, the countesses found the irascible Chamberlin hard to resist and queued up to debase themselves: the Marquise de Wiet, a former hairdresser who lived below Priscilla and Cornet; Annie de Saint-Jaymes, the separated wife of a gay antiquarian, who furnished 93 Rue Lauriston with antiques provided by her husband; Vicomtesse Marga d’Andurain, a former mistress of Mussolini; Evanne, the opium-addicted Princess Mourousi; Sylviane, the soi-disante Marquise d’Abrantès. Then there was the authentic Marquise d’Austerlitz, who taught Chamberlin to ride. In his interrogation, he described this ginger-headed equestrian as ‘a crazy woman and a bitch’, with absolutely no restraint in her choice of lovers.

  Chamberlin’s most representative mistress – the woman who had first unleashed in him his appetite for attractive titled blondes – was Max Stocklin’s protégée: Comtesse Marie Tchernycheff-Bezobrazoff. When Stocklin introduced them at Chamberlin’s reception it sparked an improbable coup de foudre.

  The hothouse flowers. The foie gras. The tasteful gilt furniture – courtesy of Monsieur de Saint-Jaymes. And muffling any scream from the library, the laughter of guests, the fluting voice of her host. How could a bad actress have responded other than she did when Monsieur Henri gave Marie a tea-service that had once belonged to the Empress Eugénie – part of a carve-up of the American’s ambassador’s silverware collection; not to mention a laissez-passer which allowed her to circulate in Paris after the curfew, to visit him.

  Marie moved into Henri Chamberlin’s bedroom in Rue Lauriston, and in December 1942 set up, under his protection, her own purchasing emporium. When Marie was imprisoned in Fresnes in March 1943, during the sudden round-up of black-marketeers, Chamberlin went to see both Helmut Knochen, chief of Gestapo operations in Avenue Foch, and Karl Boemelburg, director of the Gestapo in Rue des Saussaies. Marie was let out after fifteen days.

  Could Henri Chamberlin have done the same for Priscilla and stopped Roger Le Meur from prosecuting her?

  All that Priscilla was prepared to admit to Gillian about Emile Cornet’s racketeering was that his jacket was lined with expensive gold watches smuggled out of Switzerland. Her ignorance was almost plausible, but it begs some pretty tantalising questions. Was ‘Monsieur Henri’ himself one of Cornet’s ‘very odd friends’ – and, if so, how much did the knowledge that Cornet might be engaged in something illicit and violent appal or even excite her? In Belle de Jour, Joseph Kessel writes about Séverine: ‘In order to stimulate her desire for Marcel she had increasingly frequent recourse to imagining the dangerous and mysterious circles in which his young life moved . . . She hoped to watch him in the underworld and revive in herself, if only for a while, the sense of fear which was at the core of her sensuality.’

  Moody, with a long thin nose and the piercing black eyes of a goshawk, Chamberlin was not a person whom Priscilla would forget; and Chamberlin, with his taste for young comtesses, would not have overlooked my blonde twenty-five-year old aunt.

  Chamberlin liquidated all records of his gang, as did his contacts in the Préfecture. When it came to investigating what had gone on during these years, anything to do with the French Gestapo was sensitive. According to the book on the Occupation which Gillian used for her research, the officers charged with the inquiry discovered the rottenness to be so far-reaching that they were under orders to close the files on the grounds that the nation’s morale, already severely weakened, ‘would not support the shock of such devastating revelations’.

  In December 1944, Chamberlin was hastily executed to ensure that he took with him to his grave as many embarrassing secrets as possible. He was sanguine about the death sentence, telling his lawyer that he had lived two lives and could afford to lose one. ‘For four years I had what l love most in the world, orchids and Bentleys. So I don’t regret anything.’

  Max Stocklin was tried thirteen months after Chamberlin was shot. The court reconvened on 19 January 1946, to hear the verdict. There is no record of what Emile Cornet said in defence of his friend, only his reaction. Stocklin was sentenced to ‘forced labour in perpetuity for espionage and commerce with the enemy’ – a penalty which included ‘degradation and national indignity’ and the confiscation of his goods, valued at 20 million francs, once these could be located.

  Cornet wrote immediately to Priscilla: ‘Some time or another Max will be let out and he can go to Switzerland.’ He predicted accurately. The last document in Stocklin’s police file was a clipping to say that Max Stocklin had been amnestied on 23 June 1952.

  24.

  RESORTISSANTE BRITANNIQUE

  One July morning in 1942, early on in their relationship, Priscilla ran away from Emile Cornet after he tried to rape her.

  She telephoned Daniel Vernier as soon as Cornet left the apartment. ‘I had to lock myself in the lavatory all night, I was so frightened.’ Vernier dropped everything, picked her up at 10 a.m. and, stopping briefly at the police station in Place Charles Fillion – this is the occasion when she signed for a month in advance – drove her to a small hotel in the Dordogne. At some moment on the road to La Roque Gageac, she revealed the reason behind Cornet’s assault: she had admitted to her jealous lover her previous romance with Vernier.

  They arrived at the hotel at nightfall. Several actors were also staying there, shooting a film. ‘The leading lady turned out to be a friend of Emile’s and an acquaintance of mine. I had to explain to her that I had left Emile and did not want him to know where I was.’

  The days passed. The weather was warm and Priscilla bathed in the river. Vernier stayed a few miles away in his father-in-law’s chateau, Domaine de Mirabel. He came over for lunch. Gradually, Priscilla recovered.

  ‘Then one day I received a letter from a friend in Paris telling me to expect Emile’s visit as
he had found out where I was.’ The actress had betrayed her. ‘I determined to hide, so I stayed in my room for a few days having briefed everyone carefully. Emile turned up and lunched in the hotel. He asked if I was known there and they all said “No”, so he went away puzzled.’

  Cornet had threatened Priscilla, saying ‘You cannot escape from me.’ In La Roque Gageac, his words preyed on her. She wrote a note to Vernier and took a train to Paris, lodging with Zoë Temblaire at 31 Boulevard Berthier. Then Zoë betrayed her, contriving a meeting at which Cornet turned up. ‘As soon as I saw him, I couldn’t help myself. I was still in love and however awful life was with him it would be worse without him. So I went back.’

  In our century, Priscilla would have recognised in Cornet’s blazing jealousy, punctuated by outbreaks of physical violence, the symptoms of domestic abuse. But he was a violent and dangerous man with violent and dangerous friends who offered her protection. For the next eight months, the couple resumed what she called ‘their cat and dog existence’ – to the despair of Daniel Vernier.

  If Priscilla felt powerless to break her Belgian lover’s stranglehold, Vernier most certainly did not. Outraged by Cornet’s brutal attack on Priscilla and by the obsessive manner in which he kept her captive, Vernier vowed not to rest ‘until he had got Emile banned from France and sent back to his own country’.

  An anonymous letter to the Gestapo in Rue des Saussaies, reporting that Cornet continued to work in the now banned black market? A word in the wrong ear? Priscilla never did find out how Vernier achieved it. But an entry in Gillian Sutro’s notebooks salutes his success. ‘Germans came twice to search the flat. The second time Emile was seized and sent back to Belgium. Pris fled by back door.’

  The Gestapo had come for Cornet early on a cold day in March 1943. Priscilla heard their footsteps on the stairs, grabbed her coat and left by the porte de service on the first floor, which was close to the kitchen. Many years later, I stood opposite the side doorway out of which she slipped, and followed her route.