Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  ‘Now I tell you a little bit of myself. I am very well with the French and Americans. Nearly all my property is intact and the factories working on full capacity. I am one of the rare ones who got already several times a visa to Switzerland. My health is better than ever and I am full of ideas for the future. One of it is to live in England.

  ‘In May I come to Paris. Couldn’t we meet there? And how are your friends Daniel V. and all the others? Poor little Pris she was always surrounded by too many people. And Emile? Poor boy had also to suffer. You don’t know that I helped him sending him parcels to Fresnes . . .

  ‘Now darling let’s get in touch again. I know that I’ll meet you very soon again. We have so much to talk and I love to see you on the bike or swimming or guiding the car from Dijon to Paris. In my thoughts I took you so many times in my arms – oh Darling Pris. Whenever I can do anything for you just let me know. You are still a little baby and I must take care of you.

  ‘Heaps of good wishes, so long little Pris.

  ‘Otto’

  The Rue des Saussaies is a short street. The building where the Gestapo had interrogated Priscilla curves into Rue des Cambacérès with its maison de passe where Gillian first made love with Marcel Vertès. At the end of her life, Gillian came to believe that to the same maison de passe, no more than a few yards from Priscilla’s cell, Vertès took Priscilla after painting her portrait in 1939.

  Priscilla declined to go to bed with Vertès in the version which Gillian first heard from Zoë Temblaire. In her Iago-like way, Zoë later radically altered her account. In the 1960s, following Vertès’s death, she wrote Gillian a ‘nasty’ letter, insinuating that the pair had indeed slept together in Rue des Cambacérès; moreover Priscilla had boasted about it. Greatly upset, Gillian tore the letter into pieces and tried to forget Zoë’s damaging claim, but she could never snuff out entirely the punishing image of Priscilla’s transgression. ‘I discovered that in the Thirties Vertès had gone to bed with Priscilla. Neither came out well. He half-lied and only admitted in a roundabout way by saying she was frigid. After the war, I mentioned the Priscilla episode in a letter and he answered that he had swallowed far more unpleasant affairs than an hour at the Cambacérès with my closest friend. True. Nevertheless I was disappointed with both of them.’ Gillian felt that Priscilla’s behaviour had been disloyal, treacherous and ‘very shabby’; further, it broke the two girls’ cardinal rule. ‘Had I known, I would never have put her up for months at Lees Place after the war.’

  Priscilla’s suspected fling with Vertès was one of two posthumous grudges that Gillian held against her best friend. ‘What distressed me was that she had betrayed me twice. Once before the war by going to bed with a man I loved, and bragging about the fact to Zoë quite cynically. Then during the war, while I was working for my country, she in Paris was going to bed with a well-known Nazi close to Göring and Hitler.’ The man’s name was Otto.

  Gillian remembered how Priscilla was ‘very cagey about this Otto character which struck me as odd. I had always suspected the worst about Otto when she first mentioned him. It took me a long time to drag the truth out of her, bit by bit, year by year. She did not want to talk about Otto. I was determined to know . . .’

  Priscilla had volunteered few details. Otto had offices off Avenue Foch ‘dealing with export/import of various goods’. Maxim’s was his regular canteen. He had plenty of money, was not in uniform and had access to high-ranking Germans. ‘Pris told me that he presented himself to her as a Swiss businessman, a fact I never believed.’

  On holiday together in Sainte-Maxime, Priscilla let slip that Otto was Swiss-German. But this was not enough for Gillian. ‘I went on until she admitted he was a German. He was married and had a child. “Otto” was a code name . . .’ That he was ‘very present’ in her life during the Occupation was the most Priscilla allowed.

  It was their last conversation on this subject. Gillian put Otto aside for forty-five years, until my two sentences about Priscilla in the Telegraph magazine goaded Gillian to pick up where she had broken off. Gillian recalled Priscilla’s words when they embraced on the Sutros’ doorstep in October 1944: ‘I got out just in time.’ She reflected: ‘She had the fair hair and blue eyes that the Nazis admired.’ Determined to nail Otto’s identity once and for all, Gillian contacted those who had known Priscilla in Paris, among them Gillian’s sister Jacqueline and Harold Acton. ‘Next I interrogated Zoë who had met Otto. She filled in the missing facts.’

  The interview with Zoë Temblaire took place over the telephone, the first time they had spoken since 1963. ‘I told her my grievance over her deviousness between Pris and myself, telling each one nasty facts about the other. She remembers nothing. Anyway, whatever she said she regrets. She remembers Church Farm. We discussed Priscilla’s character. Zoë said, “Elle était insaisissable – she was impossible to pin down.”’

  Otto was the only lover of Priscilla that Zoë had liked. He was ‘très distingué’. Zoë had met him ‘quite a few times, always in the evening for drinks and delicious amuse-gueules and canapés, which Otto prepared.’

  ‘Where did he live?’ He had a splendid flat in Avenue Bosquet (‘probably belonging to the Jew who had fled’). There was never a maid in sight, Zoë said. ‘I imagine the flat was cleaned during the day.’ Paintings hung on the walls, she remembered. ‘They were pretty, but I did not recognise any old masters!’

  ‘Did Pris live there?’

  Zoë did not know. ‘Pris seemed to move from one place to another.’

  ‘How did she meet him?’ In Maxim’s, Zoë thought. ‘Priscilla was with her friend Emile. Pris polished off her caviar then did her usual act of going to the lavatory where she exchanged telephone numbers with her new admirer who had been staring at her with great interest.’

  What was Otto’s profession? ‘His work was to bring paintings and works of art for export. His office was near the Etoile.’

  Then, in another notebook: ‘Have discovered who “Otto” really was through reading Gilles Perrault’s book on the Occupation.’

  Published in 1989, Paris Under the Occupation provided Gillian with certain names and helped her to find out ‘what Priscilla did not want me to know’.

  Then this: ‘“Otto”, an Abwehr spy; real name Colonel Hermann Brandl. He was in civilian clothes and worked for Göring, collecting pictures with Paco, a Spaniard. He frequented the One-Two-Two’ – and pages enumerating Otto’s alleged activities, including ‘La “Liste Otto” of 28 September 1940 which resulted in 842 authors, Jewish or anti-fascist, having their books destroyed and blacklisted.’

  The former boiler-maker and bon-vivant. The all-powerful employer of Stocklin and Cornet. The Abwehr capo who for twenty months controlled the black market in France and sponsored the French Gestapo. The confidant of Marshal Göring. Gillian was convinced that in Hermann ‘Otto’ Brandl she had found the name of Priscilla’s ‘Swiss’ lover and protector. A photograph would clinch it. ‘I think I am right about Otto. If only I could have seen a photo of him it would have proved me 100 per cent right. Zoë said Otto was fair and blue-eyed. Obviously, if the Otto mentioned by Perrault was dark and brown-eyed, I would be proved wrong. But there seems to be no photo of Otto.’ Then she crossed out the previous paragraph. ‘Found photo – fair and elegant.’

  Gillian rang Zoë in Paris to tell her. ‘Zoë nearly collapsed at the end of the phone.’

  In the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I did not leave my chair after I read what Gillian had written. That night, I came home and telephoned my mother. I said that it looked as though her sister’s penultimate lover in Occupied France, who would invite her to dine at Maxim’s and dress her in Schiaparelli and Patou, may have been the prominent Nazi official believed by Gillian to have been responsible for naming and enforcing the ‘Otto’ list, in which the works of authors like Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf and Margaret Mitchell were proscribed and pulped as ‘undesirable’. Additionally, in his role as the Military Intelligenc
e colonel in charge of ‘Bureau Otto’, he had overseen the systematic plunder of France and the transportation of French art collections to Germany, cherry-picking the best paintings and sculptures for Göring’s and Hitler’s private collections, and, in Gillian’s words, ‘seizing paintings from requisitioned apartments deserted by Jews who had fled’. He was the man in the photograph seated beside the open fireplace.

  My mother heard me out. Her reaction? ‘Nothing would surprise me in the war. Absolutely nothing. It’s a question of survival. You never knew who you were going to meet and you lived from day to day. I’m sure that you would have collaborated if you had wanted to live.’

  I have no idea where Gillian found her photograph of ‘Otto’ Brandl: I have not yet seen one. She described him as fair and elegant, but there is dispute over his appearance. One source makes him tall, good-looking, with silver-haired locks curling from the collar of a naval uniform. This is not how he struck Fabienne Jamet, proprietress of the One-Two-Two. ‘A little tubby man he was.’

  In another glimpse, a rich diet gave Brandl big bones, a rubicund complexion and an incipient double-chin. Sometimes his eyes were small and black. Sometimes pale blue, concealed by puffy lids and set in a round pasty face. Sometimes his face was oval. A colleague in the Abwehr recalled him as ‘short, stocky, grey hair, slight lisp’. In one depiction, his hands smelled of cocoa butter.

  The same contradictions clouded his character. His manner was sober, refined, especially in female company. He spoke little, observed and listened a lot. He loved art, fine wine, rare stamps. But he could be violent. In June 1943, his number two, Alfred Fuchs, spent three weeks in hospital following an ‘amicable disagreement’.

  He worked for the Abwehr, the Gestapo, the SS. Sometimes he was a colonel, sometimes a captain. But rarely in uniform – he preferred the civilian anonymity of a blue suit. Practically always he was someone else. Harry Brandt, Helmut Brandt, Helmut Steir, Monsieur Otto, Doktor Otto, Otto. The characteristic that bound these personae was a formidable organising skill; plus a fondness for women.

  A notable seducer, he brought with him to Paris his multilingual secretary, a ravishing half-English girl with a Cape Town accent called Mary Jacobson. But his ‘famous generosity’ secured him other conquests. He rarely entered a nightclub or his favourite restaurant, Joseph in Rue Pierre-Charon, without an actress or a model on his arm. Some of his mistresses were Jewish whom he protected with false papers. All agreed on his fine manners. He never failed to kiss the back of your hand when he left your apartment. The mistresses we know about: Genia Roenthalis, a Russian who called herself ‘Madame Otto’; Dita Parlo, the German actress who had starred in La Grande Illusion. And also, according to Gillian Sutro, my aunt Priscilla. ‘Odd to think that both Otto and Priscilla were going around together with false names.’

  Gillian thought it even odder that Priscilla sometimes took pity on Zoë, whose husband Gustave, a naturalised French Polish-Jew, was a prisoner in Germany. Zoë was bored and hungry and clung to Priscilla. ‘So Pris would ask “Otto” if she could bring along her unfortunate girlfriend to Maxim’s for a good tuck-in. The image of that trio sitting together is my idea of black humour: the German spy, his English mistress and the French wife of a Jewish prisoner of war make a rum threesome. I’m sure Zoë suspected that “Otto” was not Swiss, but a good meal was not to be sniffed at in those difficult times.’ Gillian ascribed the same motivation to Priscilla.

  Gillian was convinced that she had discovered the answer to those discrepancies in my aunt’s story which had continued to bother her, not least Priscilla’s hurry to leave Paris after the Nazi departure. ‘Otto was the reason why the FFI were trying to get hold of Priscilla in 1944 . . . She only fled to England at the Liberation when the men of the Epuration were hot on her heels.’

  Even though altered and rearranged many years later than the events, Gillian’s perceptions made a dreadful sort of sense, and I began to wonder if Otto was the troubling secret that Priscilla had lived with after the war. Once she had found security in her second marriage, it became easy to understand why she never breathed a word to Raymond about her liaison with an influential German Intelligence officer. When I told Gillian’s theory to Priscilla’s stepchildren, they agreed. Tracey said: ‘Raymond was in Intelligence. If he had found out about Otto, he would have exploded,’ and recalled how Raymond had once stomped off in Split, preferring to go hungry rather than to sit at the same table as a German. Carleton was more emphatic. ‘If Father had known, he’d have kicked her out.’

  Which was what Gillian retrospectively did.

  She wrote: ‘What I find sad is that the childhood friend I had loved never existed. She had no ethics. Slowly, I discovered her disloyalties, her lies, her war record in Paris during the Occupation.’ Priscilla was dead, unable to defend herself, but this did not prevent Gillian from dismantling their friendship of fifty-seven years. She remembered the way Priscilla had touched John Sutro on the evening of her arrival in London. ‘Years later, after her death, thinking about Pris during the Occupation, I felt a definite retrospective malaise that the same beautiful hand stroking John must also have caressed Otto the Nazi secret agent recruited by Göring.’ And all at once, it was too much, Gillian could no longer swallow Priscilla’s affair with the famous Otto. ‘In view of her deplorable war record in Paris during the Occupation, my childhood friend Priscilla Doynel certainly deserved a stay in prison.’ Gillian now regretted the years when she had worried about Priscilla. ‘I was sorry for Pris, never realising that it was like being sorry for a cobra.’ She recast Priscilla as cunning, stupid, totally devoid of loyalty, frigid but also the polar opposite: she had la cuisse légère – light thighs, an easy lay. ‘Looking back, I realise she was just a lazy slut who went from bed to bed in order to be kept in style. Une pute de luxe. If necessary she would have had sex with a dog, was my conclusion.’

  But how correct was this posthumous account? Had Gillian documented it with a historian’s thoroughness? Or was the harsh and derogatory portrait too implausible to be true – the fruit of an unstable cocktail of alcohol, late-flowering speculation and groundless jealousy? I thought of Harold Acton’s remark when staying with Gillian and John Sutro at the same hotel in Paris. ‘I must say that with Gillian life takes on an extra dimension. She has a way of adding drama to everything. Even very uneventful things become interesting.’

  Few details are known about Brandl. The whereabouts of his fabled treasure is likewise a riddle, allegedly hidden in safe places all over Europe and South America and plundered with success only by thriller writers. In Robert Janes’s Carousel, Otto Brandl is a figure of ‘supreme power, supreme graft and everything else that went with it’ who syphons off a dozen personal fortunes and guards them with ruthless tenacity. One character warns: ‘No one crosses Otto Brandl.’ In another thriller, Michael Bar-Zohar’s The Phantom Conspiracy, Otto Brandl is responsible for ‘the biggest robbery in history . . . In three years 158 railroad cars laded with 4,174 crates of objets d’art had been sent by Otto to Göring . . . Where was the treasure?’ In these books, Brandl is the only person alive who knows the location of the Reichsmarschall’s spoils, following Göring’s unexpected suicide and the assassination of Brandl’s right-hand man in Spain. In Bar-Zohar’s menacing reconstruction, anyone trying to find out about Brandl or his treasure reaches the same grisly end, including, ultimately, Brandl himself.

  In death, ‘Otto’ Brandl was not spared the contradictions that striped his life. Brandl’s madam at the One-Two-Two believed that the calm, unruffled Brandl was killed at the Liberation in late August 1944. ‘He really oughtn’t to have been killed. Not him. He loved Paris so.’ But French historians like Jacques Delarue were swift to resurrect him. According to Delarue, Brandl had tried to cross the border into Spain in early August. After being turned back at the frontier, he returned to Paris and on 12 August drove to Germany in a lorry full of valuable objects, settling, very much alive, in Karlsfeld, in an a
partment which he shared with his polyglot secretary Mary. Over the next two years he liquidated and dispersed his assets. Precious stones and gold were concealed in fire extinguishers in a chateau in Champagne. Share certificates worth 60 million francs were safe-housed in Lisbon. Fifteen canvases by Monet, Corot, Sisley, Courbet, Cézanne and Renoir were hidden in a box on a relative’s farm near the Austrian border. Jewellery was buried in Munich in buckets of cement. Then there was the gold bracelet and 300-piece silver service that he distributed to his last mistress Elisabeth Pertl (‘an intelligent woman and without any scruples’ according to her interrogator), who did not suspect that US agents had placed her under surveillance. On 6 August 1946, she carried a bag of food to 317 Fürstenrieder Strasse where he was discovered.

  ‘What a shame I was always in a hurry,’ he had written to Priscilla, ‘but when I tell you why you may understand it now.’

  Was this the voice of an Abwehr colonel? Was my aunt an English ‘tondue’, fleeing vengeful Parisians who wanted to shave her blonde head? Did Otto, his factories working at full capacity, ever come to live in England?

  Gillian died in 1999 before she could find out more, her account still unfinished.

  In Oxford, I slept on Gillian’s revelations. The following morning, I googled Hermann Brandl and read that he had hanged himself in Munich’s Stadelheim prison on 24 March 1947. In Bar-Zohar’s thriller, his still-twitching body was discovered hanging from a rope in Cell 35 in the eastern wing. Suicide seemed improbable. ‘His mouth was gagged and his hands were tied behind his back. His head was already dangling at an impossible angle from the limp, broken neck, while his legs weakly kicked the air for the last time, in the final convulsions of a dying man.’