Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  He insisted that he and the baroness had separate rooms and behaved like sister and brother. Did he mean the incestuous siblings in Les Enfants Terribles? He said the baroness was too old for him. Somehow I found this a comfort. I never asked myself if someday I would be too old for him too. In fact, I was lucky in this regard, as I was with everything about the man who would become my brilliant and loving husband.

  A wealthy American woman would have been less of a threat. But the baroness was French. We’d learned the same tricks from the soil in which our food grew, from the air and wine and water. If a woman complains about another woman and waits for her lover to agree, she has already lost. The only way to win was to pretend not to notice or care.

  The only person I could tell was my friend Ricardo. Stay calm, he said. Be brave.

  I examined Gabor’s photos of the track for covert messages from a man who didn’t yet know he was planning to leave me. After the war, these images were published in a volume entitled At the Speed of Light. But more time would have to pass before I could look at them without recalling how I’d come home from a day of teaching to share a meager supper with Mama, knowing that my lover and his beautiful patron were at the Savoy in London, dining on tiny succulent lamb chops and discussing Lou’s prospects.

  Only now can I say with conviction: they are not my husband’s best work.

  For several years I fought to suppress his portrait of Inge Wallser, the repulsive Nazi goddess. But the legal case—argued for some reason in a Danish court—dragged expensively on. Perhaps it was better that I lost. Today, anyone can see wicked Inge perched on the hood of her Mercedes: a pinup that, I’ve heard, adorns the bedroom walls of the most violent right-wing adolescents.

  On principle, I still avert my eyes from that photo. I was angry at Gabor for taking her picture—though at the time for the wrong reasons. You can’t be a photographer’s girlfriend and object to pictures of beautiful women.

  Was Inge Wallser beautiful? Cute is the word I would use. Cute as a baby snake. Why should pictures of Inge bother me more than photos of Lou Villars? Was it that Lou was French? Or that Gabor never found Lou attractive?

  In retrospect, the book’s title (not my choice) says it all. Speed and light were the stars of the drama Gabor caught on film. The drivers, mechanics, and spectators were only supporting actors. How airless and one-dimensional the world of racing seems compared to that of the brothels, the gangsters, the cops, all those shimmering incandescent ghosts haunting the Paris nights.

  It wasn’t only Gabor. Everyone was obsessed with Montverre. Times were tough, the races were a welcome change from the Depression. Newspapers everywhere ran interviews with the drivers.

  At the Speed of Light contains Gabor’s only known portrait of the baroness Lily de Rossignol. Taken at Brooklands, it shows her getting out of her convertible. Over her shoulder, one can see the magnificent Juno-Diane with its hood ornament fashioned in her image, a tribute to her glamour and her sense of style. On the prow of the car, as in life, her profile slices the air. Her hips are slung forward, her handsome head arched like a cobra preparing to strike. Though she often went to the track dressed in a fashionable version of the protective gear worn by the drivers, she is wearing a filmy, feminine polka dot dress and a velvet hat in the shape of a mushroom.

  Clearly she has no idea that her picture is being taken. Alone in the world, purely self-possessed, she acts the part of a beautiful woman, a star performing for her fans, even though no one is watching. No one but the photographer, whom she loves. If she’d been aware that he was nearby, she couldn’t have thought about anything else. But for that one fleeting moment, she didn’t know he was there.

  Even after everything that happened later, events that would so drastically alter my view of the baroness, the image still fills me with the dread of a woman who fears that her lover will leave her for the woman in the photo.

  From The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

  BY NATHALIE DUNOIS

  Chapter Nine: A False Memory?

  LIKE ANY ARTIST, the biographer has moments when the creative process taps directly into the unconscious, forging new associations or repairing old ones, dredging up buried memories silted over by time. One such memory surfaced when I was writing this part of my book.

  I have written that I first heard the name of Lou Villars spoken in hushed tones, at the home of my great-aunt, Suzanne Dunois Tsenyi. But one morning, while writing, or trying to write, I rose from my desk and sleepwalked down to the corner café. With shaking hands, I lit a cigarette. I ordered a café filtre and, as I drank it, recalled a story my great-aunt told my mother about having been hired by a certain baroness to accompany Lou Villars to an exclusive mental asylum outside Paris.

  The story had appealed to me for all the reasons it would fascinate the romantic girl I was then. An asylum for wealthy lunatics with glamorous nervous conditions! Just the word baroness was enough to inflame my imagination. Somehow I intuited that my aunt and this baroness were rivals for the same man. It is at once heartening and depressing to discover that our ancestors have been in fixes much like those in which we find ourselves, decades later.

  Lily de Rossignol paid my aunt a large sum to help Lou search for her brother, whom the baroness’s agents had tracked to the hospital in the suburbs. Why had Lou needed the baroness? Why did a woman who could race cars at terrifying speeds lack the wherewithal to locate her own brother? The only logical answer is that, all her life, Lou exhibited a strong, even self-destructive respect for authority, tradition, and established institutions.

  The baroness must have known what Lou would discover. She didn’t want Lou going alone but had no desire to go with her. And so the baroness offered my aunt an unpleasant job in return for a fee that she knew my aunt would accept.

  When my aunt and Lou arrived, they were told that the brother was dead: a victim of powerful seizures. In the café, that phrase came back to me: a victim of powerful seizures.

  Apart from this early memory of my own, I have been unable to find any evidence proving that these events occurred. Shockingly, there is no record of the fate of Robert Villars after he was admitted to the Institute Notre Dame de Miséricorde, which in the 1980s was dynamited to make way for a hideous mall. What happened to those children during the Occupation? How can we live in a country in which such things are “not known”?

  Nor do we know for a fact that this traumatic discovery was made in the company of my aunt, whom Lou may have held responsible—as people do, blaming not only the messenger, but also the witness. Even in the absence of conclusive documentation, it seems likely that learning this sad truth, in such a shocking way, would surely have contributed to the person Lou became and influenced how she treated my aunt when their paths crossed again.

  For a long time I pictured Lou being told the bad news by a clerk. I imagined Lou refusing to believe it and searching frantically through the wards, yanking the blankets off slumbering catatonics, staring into the faces of slobbering psychotics while my aunt trailed helplessly behind, until a team of guards subdued Lou and ushered her out. Perhaps I found it easier to sympathize with Lou than I might have, were I not an only child, unacquainted with the mixed feelings siblings can inspire.

  In any case, my impression of this scene—not of the emotions involved, but of the circumstances—changed when I happened to find, in a flea market, a vintage postcard, thick as cardboard, softened by time. A sepia image, lightly stained. A group portrait of the nursing staff at Notre Dame de Miséricorde.

  Not only does creative work mine the rich veins of the unconscious, but it also has an uncanny ability to obtain what the artist needs, from the world. My shock on discovering the postcard was so obvious to the vendor that he charged me ten times what it was worth. I paid without protest, then retreated to the nearest café, where I ordered a coffee to calm my nerves but continued to tremble as I stared at the hospital: a looming dark brick castle, in the English Victorian style.
In front of the hospital stood two rows of women in white robes and enormous starched winged headdresses, like satellite antennae.

  Which was the one who informed Lou about her brother’s death? Lou could not have looked at these women without remembering her time with the nuns, Sister Francis saving her life and then handing it on to her brother. The sight of the nun would have triggered Lou’s reflexive, schoolgirl obedience. Instead of punching the messenger, Lou thanked the sister for her trouble. She and my aunt rode in silence all the way back to the city.

  Paris

  November 1934

  Dear parents,

  Last week I had a visit from Clovis Chanac, our former prefect of police, who came under a cloud of scandal but was soon back in power and now heads the Municipal Council. Chanac asked to see the prints of every shot I took at the track. He flipped through them, pausing over my pictures of Lou. He said he had agents and operatives whose secret identities would be compromised if anyone saw them in a photo taken at the race course. I didn’t see how this could be true, but I nodded as if it made sense.

  I wish I could tell you that I was mature enough to keep silent as he shuffled through my work like a deck of playing cards. But finally I couldn’t bear it.

  I said, “What are you looking for? Why?”

  He said, “Do you think this is Communist Hungary, where every comrade is entitled to a detailed explanation of secret government affairs?”

  Papa, you could have set him straight. I myself was speechless, which was probably just as well. Just before he left, he saw a photo of Lou hanging from the clothesline, a picture I took just after her victory at Brooklands. Chanac tore down the print, threw it on the floor, ground his heel in it, and spat on it for good luck.

  Mama and Papa, pray for Lou. Chanac wants to destroy her. We are all uneasy. We live in frightening times. It calms me to think of you, and of all the changes and upheavals that you have survived.

  Your loving son,

  Gabor

  From A Baroness by Night

  BY LILY DE ROSSIGNOL

  MY BROTHER-IN-LAW INSISTED that every outing, however informal, be choreographed with all the pomp and rigmarole of a military parade. Perhaps he’d watched too many newsreels from Italy and Germany, gotten too many overheated letters from his British friend Oswald, heard too many reports from like-minded acquaintances who’d been to Berlin and developed crushes on Hitler. He’d loved his time in the army. I sometimes forgot that about him.

  Whenever Lou competed, Armand demanded that we all arrive at the race course together. Though it would have been more convenient for us to take separate cars, our short trip to Montverre became a precision maneuver. Armand and his driver picked up Didi and me, then we stopped for Lou, whose cottage was down a dirt path half a mile from the track. Maybe Lou would have liked to walk. But Armand said she should ride.

  It was a beautiful morning in June. The grass glittered in Lou’s front yard.

  Lou always looked her best before a race: bright eyed, confident, calm. But that morning, she looked tired. That morning, of all mornings! Armand noticed too. Even Didi remarked on it, though my husband was hardly the most observant creature.

  “Did you sleep?” Armand said as Lou climbed in the car.

  “Like a baby,” Lou said.

  “Meaning you woke up screaming every hour,” said Armand. Everyone laughed politely, though I always felt that Armand’s references to children were veiled criticisms of Didi and me for not doing our part to increase the pureblooded French population. It was a source of great sorrow for me that Didi and I never had children, a pain that ebbed and waned unpredictably, over time.

  Lou’s path joined the main road not far from the track, near the parking area, surrounded by forest. We were turning the corner when we saw the scatter of black police cars angled like toys thrown down by a careless child and left wherever they landed.

  As we drove up, the police fanned across the road with their weapons pointed at us. Through the window I saw Clovis Chanac, flanked by a gang of cronies.

  Didi said, “Disaster.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Armand.

  But I knew that Didi was right, and I sensed that Lou did too.

  We got out of the car. Armand’s driver remained at the wheel. As Chanac twirled his mustaches like a melodrama villain, his men grinned at the spectacle of how distraught we were.

  I put my hand on Armand’s arm.

  The cops gripped their guns as they watched Lou march up to Chanac. It was satisfying, but disquieting, to see him take a step backward. We were too far away to hear. I don’t know why we didn’t go closer. We were stunned, I suppose. Chanac produced an envelope and handed it to Lou, who stared at it. She was never a confident reader. Lou asked Chanac something. Then he said something else, and Lou shouted, “You bastard!” releasing us from the spell.

  My brother-in-law asked what the problem was. Chanac gestured at the envelope, which Lou handed to Armand.

  “Read it aloud,” Didi said. But Armand read it silently and summarized its contents. It was an official document revoking Lou’s license to compete in public athletic events, starting with, and including, today’s race.

  I said, “Did she have a license?”

  Didi and Armand nodded.

  “Right,” I said. “This is France.”

  Armand said, “Don’t be unpatriotic, Lily.”

  I noticed Chanac regarding me with malignant interest.

  “Whether or not she had a license,” Chanac said, “she doesn’t have one now.”

  “And why not, may I ask?” said Didi.

  “Look at Mademoiselle Villars,” said Chanac. “Look at how she’s dressed.” We all did, as if we didn’t know that Lou was wearing trousers and a blazer. Before the race she would change into her jumpsuit, helmet, and goggles.

  Chanac said, “It goes against the laws that Napoleon passed down to us and are part of the heritage of France.” I expected that to wake up Armand. The heritage of France. But he was poring over the document.

  Armand said, “It’s not just Chanac. It’s the French Legion of Decency, the Movement for the Family, the Cross of Fire, the Order of the Legion of Joan of Arc, the French Women’s National Athletic Association, etcetera and so on.” All these groups had joined together to protest the threat that Lou Villars posed to the morality of the nation in general, and to young French women, in particular.

  Armand belonged to at least two of these organizations. Why hadn’t someone warned him? Chanac’s power was on the rise. No one wanted to cross him over a female pervert in trousers.

  “We’re calling our lawyer,” Armand said. “If you’ll let us by, we’ll phone him from the track.”

  “Call anyone you want,” Chanac said. “Your girlfriend—or should I say your boyfriend?— isn’t driving today.”

  Armand said, “This is treason! Who will drive for France?”

  Chanac motioned toward his black sedan. Arlette got out of the car, wearing a black leather trench coat unbuttoned to the base of her cleavage. What did the Legion of Decency have to say about that? Arlette’s lips and cheeks were slashes of red, her lashes a shelf of mascara. Life with Chanac had been unkind. Her face had grown harder and sadder.

  Lou and Arlette looked at each other, then looked away before I could decipher what, if anything, passed between them.

  Armand said, “Who is that?” No one bothered answering. Even Didi knew.

  Armand said, “You’re joking. Is she driving?”

  Chanac said, “I am joking. Maybe she’ll drive in the future. France doesn’t need to win this race. France will win all the rest. We will win when it’s important.” He’d brought Arlette along to mock us. She was never going to drive. He didn’t want to go to bed with the muscles she’d need to compete.

  Didi said, “Our lawyer will contact you.”

  “By all means,” said Chanac. “We have the government behind us.”

  Lou stood there, trembling, mu
rderous. I thought about the referee she’d punched in Belgium. But Lou was not an idiot. Her career was at stake. She was the first to get back into Armand’s car.

  Armand’s instincts had been correct. It was good we were all there, so we could retreat together. His chauffeur made a smooth full turn. He was an excellent driver.

  Later, people sometimes asked how things happened the way they did: Hitler breathing down our necks, threatening France, and the French doing nothing but fighting among themselves. When they asked, I’d sometimes tell the story of Lou’s expulsion from the athletic federation. How her license was revoked because she dressed like a man.

  I’d say, That was what we were focused on as Hitler made plans to surprise us.

  From Paris in My Rearview Mirror

  BY LIONEL MAINE

  WHEN THE DESK clerk said I’d gotten a 4:00 A.M.. call from Jersey City, my first thought was that something had happened to Beedie or little Walt. The caller left a number. Hooray, it wasn’t theirs.

  When I phoned back, a secretary informed me that I had reached the desk of the international editor of the Jersey City Herald. I assumed he wanted to interview me about my book. How had my life changed since Make Yourself New was banned by the court? Had my purity been tarnished by fame? Did it bother me that my American audience was limited because my publishers, the Pixho brothers, refused to pay the second round of legal fees? Why waste good money they could spend on white wine at lunch? What did they care if a famous American poet—now mostly forgotten but at the time touted as the new Walt Whitman—had written that Make Yourself New should replace the Gideon Bible in every hotel room?

  If the editor in New Jersey asked, I’d say I was writing a sequel filled with filthy stories I’d hesitated to put in my first book. Now I had nothing to lose. I was more determined than ever, thanks to the ban imposed by the New York judge whose brain had been softened by backed-up sperm. Thanks also to the lovers of literature who smuggled Make Yourself New home in their luggage. I’m going to tell everything in the second volume. If the truth is too obscene for my fellow Americans, so be it.