My editor once said that he’d classify me as a ‘generalist’ biographer and historian. I took slight umbrage at my fresh cubbyhole. So, I told him this very short story that I’m now sharing here. When I was young growing up in Los Angeles, one of my dear school friends was a daughter of the actor Burt Lancaster. One day as we were walking through the kitchen with some board games to go to her room, I heard her father say to his then wife Norma, ‘I do not want to be type-cast. I want to do what I want to do.’ Obviously it stuck with me. My editor said well life isn’t that simple in publishing anymore. What an understatement!
I would rather think of myself being an historian, biographer and especially a widely interested opportunist. I like to follow a story, see when it was last told – if at all – and whether it would make a good non-fiction book or novel. What does that have to do with the title of this piece you ask?
My last article was about how I jumped a few centuries from the Elizabethan Age to the Second World War in a single bound. Life interfered with my well-planned Elizabethan trajectory. When I was researching Hitler’s Art Thief my husband (and much better historian and researcher) accompanied me to twenty-three archives across Europe and the United States in search of who Hildebrand Gurlitt really was. The most amazing coincidence struck us both. Next to the ‘Gurlitt’ name everywhere, except in the French National Archives, was the name ‘Gould’. At first I thought these entries were about Frank Jay Gould, the youngest offspring of Robber Baron Jay Gould, who lived on the Riviera during the war. Not so.
Further digging proved it was his second and gold-digging wife, Florence Lacaze. Good old Flo was born in San Francisco to French immigrant parents and wanted to be an opera singer. She was beautiful, somewhat talented – not with a voice like an angel – and very intelligent. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 her mother and grandmother upped sticks and headed back to Gay Par-ee, where she became a bit of a GiGi who needed to be sold to the highest bidder to keep the older women in the style to which they thought they deserved. Papa only visited once before he died back in Frisco.
But they hadn’t reckoned with the American government. Apparently back then, rather than tax Expats to smithereens like the US government does today, they simply lifted your nationality if you did not return to the US within an allotted timeframe. Flo’s grandma, mother and even Flo would be unable to inherit grandma’s cash stashed in a San Francisco bank – or Flo’s father’s estate. Florence had the answer in one. Start corresponding with their former neighbour who was sweet on her as a child. And – hey presto – he toddles over to France, is led by the nose to the altar, and returns to California with his bride on his arm. Florence was able to become American again by virtue of marrying the boy who was once upon a time next door.
And yup, you can predict what happened next. Not only does she get grandma’s, her mother’s and her father’s inheritance, but she walks away with a sizeable chunk of hubby’s dosh too within fifteen months of arriving. So, armed with lots of cash and investments, Florence returns to her mother in Paris where she meets – the alcoholic and dissolute Frank Jay Gould.
Together the Goulds help make the French Riviera a year-round destination. They build hotels and casinos – becoming one of the first people to own a chain of them. They tried unsuccessfully to buy up the hotels and casino in Monaco, were investigated by the French Secret Service, but nothing was ever proved for some reason. This, even though, they had known Cuban Mafia connections and had some sort of involvement with the sordid murder of one of these Cuban Mafiosi at one of their properties.
Then came the capitulation of France in June 1940. Frank, by now in rather poor health, stays on the Riviera, while Flo parties on in Paris. She takes a dashing German pilot as her lover, who Frank likes. She determines who her ‘Aryan’ business manager will be, hands over their chocolate manufacturing business to the German Navy and has a free laissez passer between the Occupied and Unoccupied Zones. Flo’s weekly salons become the only square meal most of her artistic and literary friends have during the Occupation. She knows all the generals and the gestapo and saves a few stranded Allied airmen too, burnishing her postwar credentials. Better still her lover entertains her and their friends in his flat which he had ‘coopted’ from the Jewish owners who were. . . he had no idea where.
The war was good to Flo and her lover. She traded in looted art with the Wildensteins and Gurlitt, amassing a fortune in her own name that she could protect from her greedy step-daughters on Frank’s death. She even became the banker to Hermann Goering in Monaco.
I thought it was a good story, and so did my editor. We called it A Dangerous Woman. I contacted the New York charity she had endowed with over $180 million on her death to let them know I was writing the book, but they had ‘no comment’. After all, Florence Gould Hall in New York speaks loudly of her great philanthropy as does the purpose of the charity for Franco-American amity. It is very closely affiliated with the French government’s cultural affairs.
My book came out, was well-reviewed, then the bombshell came. All the Alliance Bookshops (which are effectively cultural arms of the French government in the US, banned the book). A French embassy official came to hear me speak in New York and said afterwards that she was appalled at the action and ‘just wanted me to know’ not everyone agreed. An old friend who ran the events north of New York City said it was nonsense, and she’d get me to speak to her Alliance. I’m still waiting.
Best of all, was the unsolicited request from the French American Library in Paris. I agreed to go. A week before I was due to fly to this sell-out event, a lady telephoned quite upset. The lady explained she was compelled to withdraw the offer to speak. I asked if the Florence Gould Foundation was their main benefactor. She replied they were the library’s only benefactor. I thanked her very much and said to avoid embarrassment for themselves it would be best to say that I had pneumonia or something equally life threatening (this was pre-COVID) which kept me from coming to my sell-out event.
C’est la vie!