Tinker, Tailor, Model, Spy
Chanel mannequin, art-world vixen, Allied spy—Toto Koopman’s
remarkable life gets resuscitated in a biography out this week.
Where does one start to tell the story of Toto Koopman?
Should we start in Paris, in the ateliers of Coco Chanel and the studios of
French Vogue, where a 19-year-old Toto preened for the grand Jazz Age
couturiers? Or perhaps in Britain on the brink of another world war, where Toto
flitted among three of the country’s most powerful men? Do we start in the
prisons of northern Italy, among Mussolini’s anti-Fascist enemies? In the
London gallery where avant-garde artists like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud
sold their scandalous works? In the green rice paddies of Java? In the lemon
groves of Sicily? In the hell of a camp called Ravensbrück?
Now largely forgotten, Toto Koopman was one of those
see-and-be-seen It girls of the early part of the 20th century—a woman who,
with her striking good looks and insouciant charm, swirled about in the eddies
of European high society, befriending (and seducing) some of the most
remarkable characters to shape the continent’s wartime culture and its
political destiny. She dallied with media moguls, palled around with
ambassadors’ wives, and bedded Hollywood actresses and war heroes alike. She
also served as a spy for the Allied Resistance and survived the horrors of the
Nazi death machine. Now her cinematic life is getting the hagiography treatment
in a fascinating and flawed new book, The Many Lives of Miss K, out from
Rizzoli this week.
The biography, by French journalist Jean-Noël Liaut, suffers
a bit from breathless adulation of its heroine, as well as a frustrating lack
of access to Toto’s own voice. (The author interviewed several late-life
friends of Toto’s, along with some relatives, but he presents only a few
letters between Toto and her closest contemporaries. As a result, the book
tends to gloss over some of her more interesting pre-war episodes.) But Liaut
is by no means alone in his extreme Toto infatuation. Indeed, he’s just the
latest in a long line of men and women who found themselves besotted with the
green-eyed model once described as “Ava Gardner’s double.”
Yet Toto’s early years hardly hinted at her future as a
grande séductrice. Born in the volcanic foothills of the East Indies in 1908 to
a colonel in the Dutch cavalry and his half-Javanese wife, Toto—real name
Catharina—got her nickname from her father’s favorite horse. Despite the
nascent stirrings of nationalism and resentment of Dutch rule percolating in
Indonesia at the time, Toto led a typically colonial childhood. Her family
lived in luxurious officers’ quarters amid tea plantations and tropical
gardens, tended to by a fleet of native servants and nannies. It was a world of
white linen, afternoons spent horseback riding (sidesaddle for the ladies) or
swimming in cool mountain pools, and military fêtes by torchlight. It was a
world far removed from the Great War ravaging the motherland.
By 1920, Europe had entered into a tenuous peace, and Toto
left Java to attend boarding school in the Netherlands. The teen had a talent
for languages—she quickly became fluent in French, German, English and
Italian—and began to ripen into a sensuous and fashionable young woman. She
also had a taste for the independent life, so after a year of finishing school
in England, the 19-year-old Toto arrived in Paris to make her way as a model (a
profession that fell, at the time, “somewhere between a cabaret dancer and a
tart”) and enjoy the raffish café society that had gripped the
Entre-deux-guerres capital.
Installing herself in the 17th arrondissement, a
rough-and-tumble neighborhood of starving artists and nightclub singers, Toto
was soon hired as a house model for Coco Chanel, though she left after a mere
six months. (Later, she said she didn’t like the way the intense, demanding
Chanel touched her during fashion show fittings.) But Toto’s career began to
gain momentum on its own. She served as mannequin and muse to the designers
Rochas and Mainbocher, wearing their elegant creations to nights at the opera
and grand galas about town. She became a favorite of Vogue photographers Edward
Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene, an émigré baron who had fled the Russian
revolution and who became a seminal force at the French edition of the
magazine. Hoyningen-Huene cloaked her in minimalist creations by the likes of
Vionnet and Augustabernard, clothing so sheer that Toto had to powder her
intimate parts to keep the fabric from clinging indecently to her curves. “We
were all exhibitionists, show-offs,” Toto reminisced years later. “One dressed
up not to please men, but to astound the other women.”
Still, plenty of men seemed pleased and astounded by the
biracial beauty. By the early 1930s, Toto had fallen in with the Mdivani
brothers, a trio of bogus “princes” and petty aristocrats from the ruined
tsarist court whose party antics and playboy conquests were the talk of Paris.
While the boys parlayed their dark good looks into advantageous marriages with
socialites and film stars, their two sisters managed to ensnare the son of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle and the Catalan painter José Maria Sert, whose passionate
ménage à trois with the elder Mdivani girl formed the basis for Jean Cocteau’s
play Les Monstres Sacrés. Toto befriended Nina Mdivani, the youngest of the
clan, and entered into a wild affair with her impulsive, alcoholic brother
Alexis, who was married to an Astor at the time. (He would later wed Woolworth
heiress Barbara Hutton before being decapitated in a horrendous car accident in
1935 at the age of 30.)
As colorful as the Mdivanis were, Toto’s other friends in
Paris were equally audacious. Her fellow model Lee Miller swanned about town
with her lover, the surrealist painter Man Ray, staging outré gags like
carrying around a dissected breast, along with a knife and fork, on a plate.
Toto was also close to the poet Caresse Crosby, who with her second husband,
Harry, ran the Black Sun Press, publishing the works of Ernest Hemingway, D.H.
Lawrence, and James Joyce, and who hosted elaborate soirees-qua-orgies at their
rue de Lille apartment, where the couple courted guests from their bathtub.
Another friend was Bettina Jones, the American wife of a high-level French
politician and future ambassador for the Vichy regime who fraternized with
Salvador Dalí and who kept a vicious little monkey, clad in a tiny Schiaparelli
coat, by her side at all times.
The high life in Paris was heady, but like many glamorous
young women, Toto felt her future lay in the movies. She traveled to London,
where the Hungarian director Alexander Korda was auditioning would-be starlets
for bit roles in the upcoming Douglas Fairbanks flick The Private Life of Don
Juan. After securing an introduction through a mutual friend, Toto was cast as
a Spanish inamorata. None of her scenes made it into the final version, and
Toto dropped out of filming halfway through, apparently bored by the endless
takes and retakes. But she still attended the movie’s premiere on the arm of a
flamboyant new lover, the American actress Tallulah Bankhead, famous for her
mordant wit and voracious appetites. (“My father warned me about men and
booze,” Bankhead liked to tell people, “but he never said anything about women
and cocaine.”)
The bourbon-drinking Broadway star had recently been branded
“an extremely immoral woman” by MI5 after she dabbled in “indecent and
unnatural practices” with six Eton schoolboys, including the sons of a lord and
a baronet. (“It is also said she ‘kept’ a negress in America,” the Home Office
noted in a confidential memo on the Bankhead scandal, “and she ‘keeps' a girl
in London now. As regards her more natural proclivities, [an] informant tells
me that she bestows her favours ‘generously’ without payment.”) Tallulah and
Toto’s tryst lasted only a few months, but it was enough to change the course
of Toto’s life. During that time, Bankhead introduced the 25-year-old ingénue
to a billionaire whose shadow would loom large over Toto’s future and her
wartime activities.
The 55-year-old Lord Beaverbrook, a Scottish-Canadian press
tycoon né William Aitken, had clawed his way up to the highest echelons of
political influence through a combination of tabloid blackmail, strategic
alliances, and an unquenchable thirst for power. As the owner of the widely
read Daily Express, Sunday Express, and the Evening Standard, he held sway over
the reputations of Britain’s most illustrious parliamentarians and public
figures. Winston Churchill derisively called him “Machiavelli,” and Evelyn
Waugh immortalized him as the imperious Lord Copper in Scoop. Serving as
minister of information during World War I, the deeply paranoid Beaverbrook
developed a taste for intelligence gathering; later, he would employ private
spies to tail the movements of his wife and children. He took Toto as a lover
in 1934, and she apparently began to eavesdrop for him in Germany and Italy,
under the guise of traveling the seasonal opera circuit. The multilingual Toto
mingled with Nazi elite and even reportedly had an affair with Mussolini’s
son-in-law, all the while taking notes on the inner circles of Fascist
intrigue. It was an advantageous relationship for Beaverbrook, but it was soon
ruined by one of his own family members.
A year into their affair, Toto began carrying on in secret
with the mogul’s son, Max Aitken. Max was as handsome and athletic as
Beaverbrook was ambitious and cunning, an aviator with the royal air force and
a notorious cad. When Beaverbrook found out about the clandestine dalliance, he
was enraged. Worse still, Max was rumored to be giddily in love and ready to
propose. Beaverbrook banned his newspapers from mentioning Toto’s name and
threatened to disinherit Max if the marriage went through. When that failed, he
offered to pay both Toto and Max large pensions if they signed a contract
promising not to wed. “He told Max, ‘I’ll give you a lot of money if you
promise not to marry that girl,’” Toto later recalled. “I said [to Max,] ‘Take
it!’ So he did, and we had a wonderful time.” Toto and Max used the cash to
shack up in a luxe penthouse on Portman Square and became a much-desired
society couple. Their relationship was an open one; Max kept a string of
lovelies on the side, while Toto seduced Max’s friend Randolph Churchill, the
spoiled son of the future prime minister.
After four years of frivolity, Max and Toto parted ways. He
would go on to become a war hero as an RAF fighter pilot and, in the mid-1940s,
a member of Parliament. Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1939, Toto headed south to
Italy to rendezvous with some art collector friends. In Florence, she fell for
a leader of the Italian Resistance and worked her social connections to help
finance his anti-Mussolini activities. She also infiltrated Black Shirt
meetings to send reports back to Max and the British government. By 1941, the
police had caught on to her stratagems and arrested her “under the old pretense
of being Beaverbrook’s mistress,” Toto wrote to a friend. “But once I was in
jail…what they wanted was to free me and I was to do some terrible dirty
work…of course, I refused flatly.”
Toto was shipped off to rundown prisons in Milan and Lazio
before finally escaping from the Massa Martana detention camp and hiding out in
the mountains of Perugia. From her refuge, she helped other former detainees
connect to Resistance networks and make their way to safety. After being
briefly recaptured by the Fascists, Toto fled to Venice, where an aristocratic
friend smuggled her into a secret suite at the Danieli Hotel. One night, the
friend learned that the Germans intended to search the premises to ferret out
spies. In a brazen gambit, the aristocrat threw an opulent dinner for the
German general in charge of the operation and seated him directly next to Toto.
Dressed to the nines and flirtatious as ever, Toto was so conspicuous that it
never occurred to the Germans to suspect her. She survived the raid, only to be
informed upon and rearrested within a matter of weeks. Infuriated by the
double-crossing debutante, the Italians sent Toto to a much grimmer location:
the all-female concentration camp of Ravensbrück in northern Germany.
The largest women’s-only camp in the Third Reich,
Ravensbrück housed a mix of political prisoners, gypsies, Jews, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, and “race defilers,” a term the Nazis used to describe Jewish women
suspected of past sexual relations with Aryans. Situated on a marshy plain 50 miles north of Berlin
and surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences, the camp served as one of the
main training centers for female SS guards. Prisoners were forced to
manufacture components for German rockets, construct new roads, work in the
brothels of nearby men’s camps, and mix the ashes from Nazi crematoriums with fecal
matter to produce agricultural fertilizer. Ravensbrück was terribly overcrowded
and unsanitary—typhus and cholera epidemics regularly swept through the
vermin-infested barracks—and after 1943, conditions rapidly deteriorated. Food
rations became severely restricted, with each woman receiving one piece of
bread and a cup of fetid soup per day, and prisoners too weak to work were
gunned down en masse or euthanized. All told, of the 130,000 women to pass
through Ravensbrück during the war, some 92,000 died there.
When Toto arrived at the camp in October 1944, the guards
were preparing for the construction of a new gas chamber and a second
crematorium. (Before Soviet troops liberated the camp in April 1945, the
Germans gassed between 5,000 and 6,000 women and children at Ravensbrück.)
Initially assigned to road repair, Toto lied to the guards and convinced them
that she had training as a nurse. She was sent to work in the infirmary, among
the camp’s sickest prisoners. There the German medical staff performed gruesome
experiments on the dying, infecting open wounds with strange chemicals and
amputating limbs to simulate soldiers’ battle scars. They carried out
sterilization measures on women and young girls—Toto would later tell her
friends she had been subjected to the “sterilizing projects of the camp”—and
drowned or starved newborn babies in front of their mothers. Toward the end of
the Third Reich, pregnant women were often forced to undergo abortions or, if
Jewish, sent directly to the gas chambers.
During her seven months in the camp infirmary, Toto smuggled
food to the sick at great personal risk and tried to ease their suffering.
Meanwhile, Randolph Churchill had learned of her plight and sent her care
packages full of onions and garlic to help ward off disease. In April 1945,
shortly before the Russians arrived to free the camp, the Nazis agreed to
release several hundred prisoners to the Swedish Red Cross. Toto was among
them. She left the camp carrying one personal effect, a cardboard portrait a
fellow prisoner had drawn of her. Relocated to the Swedish city of Göteborg,
she found herself completely alone and psychologically fragile. Churchill came
to her aid, flying to Sweden to provide her with money and clothing and to help
her secure a passport. He also bought her a wig, to hide the fact that the
Nazis had shaved her head in the camps. “I was lucky that Randolph Churchill
came here,” Toto wrote to an old friend, “and as I am an old love of [his], he
made a terrible fuss over me.”
For all her independence, Toto liked to be cared for, often
by a powerful benefactor, and this penchant would bleed into her next
relationship, the most enduring of all of her infatuations and one that defined
the later years of her life. With money from the Red Cross as well as the modest
pension she still received from Beaverbrook, Toto decided to settle in the
Swiss lakeside town of Ascona, which served as a utopian retreat for hedonistic
artist types. She drifted through a series of brief, tumultuous affairs, mostly
with women, before meeting a severe, intense German art dealer who had arrived
to vacation in Ascona in the winter of 1946.
Erica Brausen had played her own distinguished role in the
Resistance. Under the code name “Beryl,” she ran an underground operation out
of Majorca helping Jews and socialists evade Franco’s naval blockade and had
ferried the writers Michel Leiris and Raymond Queneau to safety aboard a U.S.
submarine. After moving to London in the early years of the war, Brausen had
endured considerable prejudice due to her German roots, yet was widely known
for her tireless work ethic and her unerring eye for talent. What’s more, she’d
finally convinced a wealthy investor to help her open her own space, the
Hanover Gallery in Mayfair, to exhibit the work of an unknown painter named
Francis Bacon, whose violent canvases had caught her attention.
Entranced by Toto, Brausen brought her back to London and
doted on her new amante, buying her sumptuous clothes and gifts despite a
limited budget. By all accounts, Brausen was madly in love. Toto seemed also to
have felt deep affection for Brausen, but she soon drifted back to her old
coquettish ways. As Brausen turned a blind eye, Toto circulated in public with
Randolph Churchill and even reunited with her former lover Max Aitken. But she
also devoted herself to Brausen’s gallery, working her little black book to
arrange glittering openings for the Hanover’s artists.
In the fall of 1949, Brausen and Toto promoted Bacon’s first
exhibition at the gallery. Provocative and poisonous, Bacon had been shunned by
most established dealers, but Brausen found in him a kindred spirit. Upon
seeing his Painting (1946) for the first time, with its decaying animal
carcasses and grimacing figures, Brausen offered to buy it on the spot. (Later
she sold it to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.) Bacon’s shows at the Hanover,
full of screaming popes and bloated self-portraits, shocked and titillated the
tout-London. They also launched Bacon as one of the most important postwar
painters and solidified Brausen’s reputation as a modern-art visionary. Soon,
she was representing luminaries such as Max Ernst, Lucian Freud, Marcel
Duchamp, and Alberto Giacometti.
While Bacon was the Hanover’s early star, he was also nearly
its undoing. His addiction to casinos led him to beg Brausen for stupendous
cash advances, which Toto would smuggle to him in Mediterranean gambling dens.
Bacon secretly detested Toto for her hold over Brausen’s heart, calling the
model the “Javanese whore” behind her back. Meanwhile, the Hanover’s main
investor, who disliked both the attention-seeking artist and his morbid
canvases, backed out, leaving Brausen in a precarious financial situation. The
final blow came in 1958, when Bacon, facing mounting gambling debts, informed
Brausen that he’d signed on with another gallery behind her back. Brausen and
Toto considered suing, but Bacon had never signed a contract with them.
Perhaps to escape the indignity of losing Bacon to a
rival—or perhaps to get Toto out of London and away from her many
paramours—Brausen agreed to buy a property for the two women on the idyllic
island of Panarea, just north of Sicily. Set among olive groves and rocky
grottoes, the land became a sprawling retreat for Toto, Brausen, and their
peripatetic social set. Toto decorated the house in a style that was at once
minimalist and posh and hosted stately dinner parties for a never-ending stream
of guests such as Bruce Chatwin and Alexander Calder. Brausen “went through all
her money from the gallery, money that she had worked so hard to earn over the
years” to support the Panarea property, one friend remembered.
While Toto settled into a lifestyle of drifting between
Panarea and the continent’s cultural capitals, Brausen shuttled back and forth
between the island and London, where the Hanover was flourishing. During the
1960s, everyone from Jean Paul Getty to the Beatles and Princess Margaret
stopped by the space for its renowned exhibits. But the pressure of running the
gallery and “maintaining Toto’s lifestyle” started to wear on Brausen. Already
a dour woman, she turned into a scathing harridan with friends and associates
alike. She also seemed to be growing more desperate about Toto’s affairs, the
latest of which involved a strapping Sicilian carabiniere whom Toto had
installed in the guest room of the women’s London apartment. According to those
close to the couple, Brausen found a doctor willing to prescribe heady amounts
of morphine and became addicted to painkillers. In the spring of 1968, as Toto
left town on another trip with her young Italian beau, Brausen was hospitalized
with a serious ulcer. Within five years, the Hanover had closed its doors for
good.
Remarkably, Toto and Brausen’s relationship managed to
survive the gallery’s closing and their interpersonal turmoil, and they settled
into a quiet retirement on Panarea, until they had to sell the property to pay
for Brausen’s mounting medical problems. Toward the end, Brausen became
secretive and controlling. When Toto had a stroke at the age of 82, Brausen
squirreled her away in their London home, barring friends from visiting, firing
a series of personal nurses, and subjecting Toto to the ministrations of a
doctor reputed to be a medical charlatan. Toto’s health rapidly declined, and
she died three months later. In a ghastly scene, Brausen locked herself inside
Toto’s bedroom for eight days with the body, draping the corpse in rosebuds and
cuddling next to it. In death, if not life, Brausen finally had Toto to
herself. She only relented when the state-appointed undertaker showed up to
demand that she hand over the remains. It was a shocking conclusion to Toto’s
long and remarkable life—though one that might have tantalized her old
surrealist Parisian pals—and, if anything, serves to demonstrate the cultlike
hold Toto had over her lovers. “Toto had the capacity to inflame people’s
imaginations in spite of herself,” a friend told the biographer. Decades on, she
still does.
Toto Koopman: model, muse, mistress - and spy
Toto Koopman is little known
now but the bisexual model and war heroine used to be infamous. As a new
biography is published, Nisha Lilia Diu recalls her life
Back when he was a nobody, Francis Bacon somehow got invited
to a famous model’s birthday party in Paris. She was a Vogue cover girl called
Toto Koopman, part of a fast-living gang of jet-set Parisians that included
Russian princes and American heiresses. They wore Schiaparelli, accessorised
their outfits with live parrots and monkeys, and all slept with each other. Bacon
was entranced.
He met her again 15 years later, in 1946, in London. By then
she had lived all over Europe, been mistress to the press baron Lord
Beaverbrook and Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, spied for the Italian
resistance and almost died in the concentration camp at Ravensbruck. Bacon was
still a nobody, though that was about to change thanks to Koopman’s girlfriend,
the art gallerist Erica Brausen, who launched him onto the London scene (almost
bankrupting herself in the process).
The writer Jean-Noel Liaut has unearthed an extraordinary
character for his book, The Many Lives of Miss K. It’s the first biography of
Koopman, which is odd given how famous her image is. The photograph George
Hoyningen-Huene took of her in a backless black and white gown by Augusta
Bernard (for Vogue’s September 1933 issue) has become one of the era’s most
iconic fashion photographs.
That a mixed-race woman was a model at all at this time was
unusual. She was certainly beautiful, with knowing green eyes and a languid
elegance that photographers and painters from Cecil Beaton to Joseph
Oppenheimer loved. But intense racism was an accepted part of polite society.
Koopman was born in October 1908 in Java, the daughter
of a Dutch cavalry officer and a half-Dutch, half-Indonesian mother. She was
named Catharina after her mother, and nicknamed Toto after her father’s
favourite horse. The latter stuck.
Her parents’ marriage was a scandal. As “green Dutchmen” (as
mixed-race people were called), her family was shunned. A friend of Koopman’s
who also grew up in Java, the daughter of a Chinese sugar magnate called
Hui-Lan Wellington-Koo, wrote angrily in her memoirs about the discrimination
she faced. But Koopman, as Liaut points out, “had mastered the art of selective
memory” by the time she reached adulthood.
Her stories were of tea plantations, rice fields and exotic
pets brought home from her father’s travels. She had a kangaroo and even a baby
elephant, a gift from the King of Siam. Unlike the actress, Merle Oberon, who
was so ashamed of her Indian mother she passed her off as her maid, Koopman
flaunted her ethnicity, telling people about her part-Chinese great-grandmother
who had (apparently) been part of the Sultan of Solo’s harem.
She flaunted her sexuality, too. In 1934, she attended the
premiere of Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Don Juan in London on the arm
of Tallulah Bankhead, with whom she was having a fling. Koopman didn’t lack
attitude. When Coco Chanel hired her as her in-house model, their formidable
personalities clashed so badly Koopman quit after six months. She never
revealed exactly what had happened, saying only that she “didn’t like the way
Chanel touched me during fittings”.
It was Bankhead that introduced Koopman to Lord Beaverbrook,
the immensely wealthy and powerful owner of the Express and Evening Standard
newspapers. She was 25 and notorious, he was 55 and married – but they were
soon in a relationship. Koopman was a lifelong opera fan and travelled
constantly around Europe attending the best performances. By some accounts, her
trips through Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy throughout 1935 had an additional
purpose: gathering information from her high-society circle for Beaverbrook.
Their cosy set-up blew up spectacularly when Beaverbrook
found out that Koopman was also sleeping with his son, Max Aitken. Liaut
defends her behaviour, saying that Toto was merely “behaving like a man”. But
Beaverbrook was so furious that he used his papers to run a series of
scandalous stories about her, successfully ejecting her from London society.
Aitken refused to give her up, though. He had fallen madly
in love with her and the pair lived together in Portman Square for four years.
They eventually broke up when Koopman refused to marry him – she’d signed a
contract with Beaverbrook promising not to, in exchange for a lifetime’s
pension.
She left for Italy in 1939, where she fell in love with a
leader of the resistance. He quickly realised she made the perfect spy: she had
no family ties, no fear, was fluent in six languages, and had impressive
international contacts. Yet her years as a spy were forever off-limits to her
friends. “Nobody ever dared ask her about the espionage,” her friend, Lady
Deirdre Curteis, told Liaut.
However, we do know that she sold her furs and jewellery to
help fund her lover’s activity, and that she was imprisoned and escaped twice
from the Fascists. In October 1944, her luck ran out. A few days before her
36th birthday, she was captured by the Nazis and deported to Ravensbruck.
Between 1938 and 1945, 132,000 women were sent to Ravensbruck of whom 90,000
were killed.
By the time the camp was liberated in April 1945, Koopman
was in terrible health, emaciated and mutilated by medical experiments.
Randolph Churchill, who had been her lover ten years earlier in London, came to
find her. He brought her money, clothes and a wig for her shaved head and
arranged for a new passport. When he attended the reopening of the Royal Opera
House in Covent Garden the following year, he took her with him.
Churchill wasn’t the reason Koopman had returned to London,
though. While recuperating on the shores of Lake Maggiore she had met a German
art dealer called Erica Brausen. Brausen worked for London’s Redfern Gallery
but wanted to strike out on her own. She was excited about a shocking artist
she had just discovered: Francis Bacon.
The couple opened the now-legendary Hanover Gallery. Brausen
put on shows by Lucian Freud, Henry Moore, Marcel Duchamp and countless others.
The extravagant openings were attended by the likes of Penelope Tree, Rudolf
Nureyev, Jean Paul Getty and Princess Margaret. Of course, the art was first
rate but this was a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence, and “people
also came out of curiosity,” says a friend of Koopman’s who Liaut identifies
only as F.C. “They wanted a first-hand look at the unusual lesbian couple about
whom so many stories circulated.” According to another friend, Malitte Matta,
“Toto was aware of it but pretended not to notice. I don’t think it even
bothered her. Toto never really cared about how others saw her.”
By all accounts, Koopman was devoted to Brausen – they
stayed together for the rest of their lives – but a leopard doesn’t change its
spots. Koopman travelled incessantly and had endless affairs. One, with a much
younger Italian carabiniere, went on for years. She even moved him into a
bedroom at her and Brausen’s home in The Boltons. Brausen had her own affair,
with a banker’s wife (“Toto liked Erica’s mistress so much she often invited
her to lunch,” says Liaut) but was not quite the free-living hedonist her
girlfriend was.
A friend from the art world, Gianna Sistu, told Liaut, “I
could see that Erica was much more in love than Toto was, and that Erica was
really terrified at the thought that Toto might ever leave her.”
She indulged Koopman’s every whim. In 1959, Koopman bought a
property on the Italian volcanic island of Panarea and embarked on an enormous
construction project. She built six luxury villas and had soil and water
shipped in from Naples for her terraced gardens. She entertained lavishly there:
the Sicilian jeweller, Fulco di Verdura, Luchino Visconti’s sister, Ida, and
Marina Volpi, the daughter of the founder of the Venice Film Festival, were all
Panarea regulars.
“Vegetables, butter, milk and cheese were all brought in
from Naples and cost them a fortune,” says F.C. “One day, I calculated that it
would cost them less to live at the Ritz.” As their friend the French Vogue
editor, Edmonde Charles-Roux, put it, “Toto was expensive”.
Age eventually caught up with them. They closed the gallery
and lived a (slightly) quieter life until they passed away within 18 months of
each other in the early 1990s. When Koopman died in 1991, aged 82, Brausen
locked herself in a room with the body for eight days, emerging only to buy
fresh roses that she would arrange around Koopman’s face every morning – a
macabre and suitably bizarre epilogue to an astonishing life.
'The Many Lives of Miss K: Toto Koopman – Model, Muse, Spy’
by Jean-Noel Liaut is published on Tuesday (Rizzoli; £15.95)
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Toto Koopman: She made the perfect spy: she had no family
ties, no fear and was fluent in six languages
Photo: GETTY
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