The Life
of Florence Gould: American Beauty, Noted Philanthropist, Nazi Collaborator
by Susan
Ronald
 |
A
Dangerous Woman Born in
turn-of-the-century San Francisco to French parents, Florence moved to Paris,
aged eleven. Believing that only money brought respectability and happiness,
she became the third wife of Frank Jay Gould, son of the railway millionaire
Jay Gould. She guided Frank’s millions into hotels and casinos, creating a
luxury hotel and casino empire. She entertained Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald,
Pablo Picasso, Joseph Kennedy, and many Hollywood stars, like Charlie Chaplin,
who became her lover. While the party ended for most Americans after the Crash
of 1929, Frank and Florence refused to go home. During the Occupation, Florence
took several German lovers and hosted a controversial salon. As the Allies
closed in, the unscrupulous Florence became embroiled in a notorious money
laundering operation for fleeing high-ranking Nazis.
Yet after
the war, not only did she avoid prosecution, but her vast fortune bought her
respectability as a significant contributor to the Metropolitan Museum and New
York University, among many others. It also earned her friends like Estée
Lauder who obligingly looked the other way. A seductive and utterly amoral
woman who loved to say “money doesn’t care who owns it,” Florence’s life proved
a strong argument that perhaps money can buy happiness after all. |
A
Dangerous Woman is Susan Ronald’s revealing biography of Florence Gould,
fabulously wealthy socialite and patron of the arts, who hid a dark past as a
Nazi collaborator in 1940’s Paris.
Florence,
aged sixteen, thought of herself as La Parisienne, that gigantic statue
representing modernity, fashion, and glamour at the Exposition Universelle of
1900. The statue, sculpted by Paul Moreau-Vauthier, was the exhibition’s focal
point. All visitors walked into the Paris fairgrounds through the Porte
Monumentale, where they were greeted by this female colossus, La Parisienne, in
all her glory. She was modern, like Paris, stunningly beautiful, outfitted in
Jeanne Paquin’s haute-couture gown. She was quintessentially French. She was no
Marianne, the allegorical, martial, patriotic symbol of France. La Parisienne
invited all visitors, French and foreign, to enter and see a new, contemporary
Paris, released from the shackles of tradition and the scandals of the Third
Republic, to revel in the excitement that Paris represented to the world in
culture, invention, and science.
Florence
saw herself as a living, breathing La Parisienne, modern, glamorous, sexy, a
future Gaby Deslys, star of the Folies Bergère. Unlike Gaby, Florence wanted to
find her feet in the rarefied world of opera. While she learned only about La
Parisienne in school, Florence could easily relate to both La Parisienne and
the designer of her haute couture, Jeanne Paquin. The House of Paquin was the
rising star in the fashion world, noted for wooing away clients from the
aristocratic, traditional designs of Gaston Worth. Despite Paquin’s short
ascendency, she eclipsed the established, male House of Worth with her daring
and innate feminine understanding of what women wanted to wear. Beautiful in
her own right, Paquin had risen from humble origins to become first a model,
then a designer, and finally the owner of her own fashion house. It was that
kind of upward mobility that Florence admired and yearned to emulate, up to a
point. Where Paquin was happy for her fashions to shine in the limelight,
Florence needed the oxygen of the limelight shining directly on her.
By 1900,
money, or the lack of it, had become a gradually determining factor in social
status. While land ownership still mattered, and marked an enviable noble
heritage, the landed gentry throughout Europe were finding the new, raw
capitalism of the early twentieth century hard to fathom, and harder still to
adopt. The titled aristocracy were on the hunt for American heiresses born to
wealthy robber barons of the ilk of the Vanderbilts, Morgans, and Goulds; or
even, if the need absolutely dictated, daughters born to manufacturing giants
like Isaac Merritt Singer, inventor of the first evenly stitching sewing
machine.
In
Florence’s Paris, it was a commonly known fact that all Americans were equally
unacceptable in society, but their money was a necessary evil to be envied and
plundered, so European aristocracy could plow on regardless. It was the
American search and need for belonging in European society, coupled with the
European requirement for new money, that changed many heiresses’ and
aristocrats’ futures. Consuelo Vanderbilt was coerced into her marriage with
the Duke of Marlborough by her mother, saving Blenheim Palace and the duke’s
other assets from oblivion. Marie Alice Heine, born in the French Quarter of
New Orleans to a Jewish banking family, converted to Roman Catholicism to
become the Duchess of Richelieu. When Alice was widowed as a young woman still
of childbearing age, she remarried well, becoming Her Serene Highness of
Monaco, Princess Alice. Jennie Jerome,
the first American-dollar “princess,” and mother of Sir Winston Churchill, also
gave her inherited fortune to underpin her husband’s political career for the
dubious pleasure of becoming Lady Randolph Churchill.
Florence
ached to belong to the treasured circle of these elite society women, but
despite her private school education, she lacked the money and connections to
meet, much less marry into, such illustrious circles. While Charles Loeb toiled
to obtain satisfaction through the California courts, Florence was,
momentarily, relatively penniless. Dreams were one thing, reality quite
another. Still, the sixteen-year-old was already a remarkable beauty, and knew
it. Florence had also become a frightful snob—something everyone who met her
remarked upon—and could not see herself living forever in obscurity, much less
in poverty.
Certainly,
Berthe instilled in her daughter an awareness that such beauty should provide
Florence—and by extension her family—with an international passport to glamour,
wealth, and happiness. As for the protagonist in the story Gigi, written by
Florence’s near contemporary, the French author Colette, it was Florence’s duty
to marry well and share her newfound wealth with the family. For Berthe, while
it mattered if Florence’s future was that of a demimondaine or an opera singer
or the wife of a millionaire, she was a practical woman. If Florence could not
marry well, then a world-famous opera singer would be her next choice for her
daughter. Failing that, Florence would need to consider becoming a successful
demimondaine.
The
searing question was, could Florence marry well? Florence’s world was changing
rapidly. By 1913, the first self-made millionairess was a Polish Jew, Helena
Rubinstein. Rubinstein had become rich from her mail-order business, which sold
face cream to sun-ravaged Australian women in the Outback. Now Rubinstein owned
beauty salons in Melbourne, London, and Paris and was searching for a salon in
New York. “Beauty is power” was an early Rubinstein advertising slogan, and
Florence decided that her beauty might provide her big break into the
international high-society set of Paris. While Florence thought she had the
business sense to run an international company like Rubinstein’s, it was not,
yet, her passion, and it remained an unproven skill for some years to come.
Society
and glamour, on the other hand, consumed her every waking hour. Back then,
glamour was not about cosmetics and a slash of red lips for Florence. That was
for later, when it became the fashion. It was about power, sexuality, and the
unadulterated pleasure it could bring her. It was about luxury and excess. It
was about living without the conventions or expectations of classical
femininity. Above all, it was about heady sensuality and reveries beyond the
ordinary, creating her own boldness, her own world of risk and self-assertion,
and tipping the scales of an unequal male society in her favor. If her beauty
could give her a leg up into that society so she could create her own world of
glamour, so much the better. Certainly, her other great asset—her singing
voice—gave another string to her bow, creating an aura of the exotic, the
dangerously alluring.
Even at
sixteen, Florence was a young woman on a mission. She combed the society
columns, soaked in every bit of gossip and news about le Tout-Paris—the city’s
fashionable elite—and gleaned every crumb she could about the public and
private lives of the salonnières (society hostesses) who might be susceptible
to her charms. So, when she thought she was ready, Florence cajoled her old
music professor into introducing her into the salon society. Alas, it seemed
that the professor was found wanting in his connections to the salonnières whom
Florence was determined to know. Perhaps, too, Berthe could no longer afford
his lessons, and hence his failure to do as he was bid. But Florence would not
be defeated. It seemed only natural that she should try to cultivate the
American salonnières who had made Paris their home. Aside from her near
neighbor Gertrude Stein, who was dowdy, masculine, and perhaps hideous to
Florence’s beautiful green eyes, there were, fortunately, others.
Born and
raised in the United States, SUSAN RONALD has lived in England for more than
twenty-five years. She is the author of several books, including A Dangerous
Woman, Hitler’s Art Thief, Heretic Queen, The Pirate Queen, and Shakespeare’s
Daughter.
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