The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

  He was lying face-down and crumpled into something smaller than himself. Pieces of twisted metal and rubber lay scattered across the track from where the Guyot had struck the tree; a smouldering wheel protruded, lolling sideways, from a bush; another was poised with odd delicacy on the corner of what looked like an iron bed-frame. It was impossible to believe that all these pieces had, until a few minutes ago, been bolted and welded into a single unit. She twisted the scarf around her hands, tightening it into a rope as she watched the ambulance men lift what was left of Henri de Courcelles on to the stretcher and carry it towards the back of the van. Distantly, she heard the whine of cars. Mongin held her arm, marching her towards the ambulance. Behind the acridity of spent fuel and burning leather, she identified the rusty smell of blood.6

  Afterwards, somebody told her that the ambulance driver had been so bewildered that he set off in the wrong direction, straight into the face of the speeding cars. Louis Chiron, the young Monaco driver, had won screams of excitement from the crowd when he wrenched his Bugatti out of the danger-path and hurtled on past the wreckage, chasing Albert Divo, the winner of the day. She hadn’t heard a thing. Sitting with Mongin in the back of the ambulance, she stared down at the hands which a pious doctor had folded on Henri de Courcelles’ chest. They were the hands she had always known, long-fingered, narrow, making her think of one of those wooden saints in churches. She remembered how gently they had touched her. It was impossible to look at the face again, after the first shocked glance. Death had been quick for poor Couc: that ought to be a comfort.

  Car designers seldom, if ever, take responsibility for the death of a driver in their fragile machines. In 1929, two years after the tragedy, Guyot abandoned car manufacture to become a consultant engineer to Citroën. In 1947, for reasons which were never apparent, he killed himself with cyanide, while sitting among a large group of friends in a restaurant. To Hélène, remembering the honourable and gentle Henri de Courcelles, Albert Guyot’s closest friend and most loyal supporter, the only puzzle was that he should have taken so long about it.

  5

  THE DANCER

  ‘J’adore des danseuses. Je demande des danseuses.’

  FERNAND DIVORE, LE JOURNAL DU PEUPLE, 1929

  During the spring of 1926 Hélène had moved to a new apartment on the small and elegant rue Saint-Senoch in the 17th Arrondissement. On 10 May she gave this as her address when signing a contract. Possibly, René Carrère, with his theatrical connections, had put her in touch with the man to whom she now agreed to pay a thousand francs a month, while he prepared a series of dances for them to perform together. Celéstin Eugène Vandevelde signed the contract with his stage name, Robert Lizet; Hélène, for the first time, boldly added the name by which she intended to make herself known as a star.

  Hellé Nice; Belle et Nice, Elle est Nice or Hellish Nice to her American fans; Hellé (with an accent emphasising that final ‘é’) to her lovers and her family; Hell on Ice to those who crossed her. Nice, to French ears, was a word full of promise: she’s good, it hinted. She’s fun.

  And she was. Lizet, who had been searching for a satisfactory partner for some time, was charmed by her liveliness, amused by her assurance and impressed by her determination. She had no modesty; when he suggested that her role as a Greek nymph might be more convincing if she took the sequinned bandeau off her breasts, she pulled her skirt off as well and went through the rest of the rehearsal in her knickers. Just as well, he must have thought, that he didn’t feel the attraction of women’s bodies; an affair would have complicated their partnership.

  Hélène and her partner, Robert Lizet, in his adaptation of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloë, 1926–7.

  Lizet, whose name has now been forgotten, was a celebrity of sorts in the mid-twenties. He had featured in a few silent films, although the roles were small; his appearance in the romantic dance sequences which were then a regular part of music-hall entertainment seldom failed to draw admiring gasps for such a splendid physique. Muscular thighs and a misleadingly saturnine expression were his chief attractions; without a partner, however, they were useless. The last had returned to Hungary without warning, leaving him with three important contract dates and no leading lady. Hélène, with her brillilant smile, her training at a Paris ballet school and her offer of a thousand francs a month, had seemed to drop from heaven. He hadn’t wasted a moment in signing the contract. By the time he had finished with her, he promised, she’d be making more in an evening than she was paying him for the entire twelve weeks.

  The publicity shots were ready to be sent out by July. It’s astonishing what had been achieved in such a short time, to transform the scruffy, cheerful tomboy who ran about the country with Couc and Mongin into a poised young lady whose manner conveys an exciting hint of wildness. Dark hair neatly bobbed in the style of Louise Brooks, she steps out in a foxtrot, takes up an arabesque position in a tutu, froths up a ballet skirt with a kick which conveys a hint of La Goulue’s famous can-can, or leans confidently back from Lizet’s muscular embrace, angling her head at a well-rehearsed angle to gaze at the viewer. He’s handsome; she has something more, an ease, a radiance, the manner of a girl born to perform.1

  Lizet had chosen his programme with care, blending art with titillation. The music, a Chopin nocturne, a Brahms waltz, a dark and moody composition by Massenet followed by a frothy operetta song, was just original enough to make the audience feel clever for recognizing it. The numbers, all with a classical theme, were based upon celebrated dance models. Costumes, although scant, were rich in texture, scraps of velvet and gauze which sparkled with bright beads of coloured glass. Nudity, as Lizet explained to his new dancing partner, was only vulgar if one went in for the fruit-and-feather-look, like the capering La Baker and her banana skirt; nakedness, at the upper end of the market which they aimed to please, was softly lit and always in the best of taste.2

  He was right. Society audiences loved them. As the fame of the couple’s act spread through the social network which has always governed Paris, they were even suggested as the perfect afterdinner show for a New Year’s Eve charity ball at the Ritz, raising money for a monument to gas victims during the war. Interviewed for the commission by the Ball’s president, the beautiful young Princess of Belgium, and sensing reservations about her suitability, Hélène drew a small muslin square from her crocodile bag and dabbed her eyes. To one who had herself lost a brother at Verdun, she might have murmured, the honour of performing would bring such happiness, such pride: she decided not to argue about the disappointingly modest fee. It was less than she usually received, but an appearance at the Ritz, and in such a respectable cause, would do her career nothing but good.3

  Shortly before midnight then, in the presence of the Archbishop of Paris and enough aristocrats to fill a fourteenth volume by Proust, Hélène Delangle appeared on stage at the Ritz’s Reveillon Ball, a radiant nymph in Lizet’s adaptation of the Ravel ballet, Daphnis and Chloë.* Her white body gleamed through a spider’s web of gauze as, after being carried on to the stage over her partner’s naked shoulder, she was gently released to enact her love. Her expression was enchanting, her movements were heartbreaking in their grace. The audience was under her spell; seldom, wrote an excited young reporter from Le Journal, had he been privileged to witness such perfection. Was he alone in remembering when Tamara Karsavina had first danced as Chloë in 1912? When would they be fortunate enough to see this ravishing new dancer again? Who could predict what her future might not be?4

  Le Journal’s reporter was not alone: the press fell in love with Hellé Nice wherever she appeared in that miraculous year. She was described – the comparison was a popular one with dance critics – as showing the grace of the delicate Tanagra dancing figurines prized by rich collectors of antiquities. There was a poignancy, a delicacy about her line, the way she inclined her head and raised her eyes, which made the fact of her near-nudity seem as appropriate as for the statue of a Greek girl athlete.

  Li
ttle was ever said in reviews about the girl’s male partner and choreographer, but she was not yet ready to leave him behind. In January 1927 the couple were offered a contract to appear onstage at the old-fashioned Olympia music hall, soon to become a giant cinema. The show, in which they were to provide a romantic interlude between a comic act and a circus turn, was being directed by the theatre’s owner, Paul Franck. It was sheer luck that Hélène, scantily dressed as the nymph for their pas de deux, should have caught the bulging and appreciative eye of Colette’s ex-husband, a man who was still one of the most influential theatre critics in Paris, and on her first appearance. Gauthiers-Willy, ‘le bon Willy’ to his colleagues, had fond memories of the days when his wife Colette had appeared in this same theatre, under the direction of the same Paul Franck. Even the role she had played, skipping on to the boards as a semi-naked faun, was evoked as he watched this pretty, smiling, large-eyed girl work the audience. Disinclined to waste space on descriptions of dancing performed in a light so subtle that his rheumy old eyes could hardly follow the steps, Willy confined his tributes to her looks. ‘And with what a pretty little garden this charming Hellé Nice keeps herself from us,’ he wrote, alluding to the silk flowers with which she covered two pubic inches. ‘What a delight.’5

  Willy’s opinions were always noticed: another dance critic, Paul Varenne, repeated the sly compliment while adding a eulogy of his own to the gorgeous nymph, ‘cette naïade, renversée, abandonnée, ballante [dangling], toute nue et toute fleurie’.6

  It was pleasant to be admired for the full length of a column for her perfect technique and unspeakable grace by the local critic in Bordeaux (‘la grâce acidulée, la technique parfaite’), but a casual phrase from a celebrated journalist in Paris was far more useful. The time had come to increase their demands. By the spring of 1927 Lizet and Hélène were in a position to command 4,000 francs a night; in May, she was approached by the dynamic little owner-manager of the Casino de Paris and offered solo billing in his up and coming revue. The wages were 250 francs a week, take it or leave it, Léon Volterra told her. She signed, and allowed Lizet to vanish into obscurity without, so it appears, a second thought.

  Volterra, taking over the shabby old Casino de Paris in 1917, had spent a fortune on turning it into the most glamorous music hall in the city. His first show, Laisse les Tomber (Drop Them, Then), used squealing saxophones and revolver shots to mock the Big Bertha guns being trained on the landmarks of Paris. In 1919 he put the first naked dancer into action on a stage. The nudity craze caught on; by 1927, even respectable actresses such as Cécile Sorel were willing to come and bare their breasts at the Casino.* A spectacular ten-metre high staircase, a tank big enough for the performance of aquatic ballets and an outsize cinema screen on which, in 1922, amazed spectators watched frail Pearl White circling the Eiffel Tower in a monoplane, were among his more extravagant ways of drawing in the crowds. By 1927, the Casino de Paris stood alone. Stravinsky, Raymond Radiguet and Cocteau came here to watch an arrestingly beautiful transvestite, Barbette, performing in queenly drag on a trapeze. The surrealist poet Paul Eluard, under the spell of the dazzlingly efficient Hoffman girls who could swarm up a backdrop of ladders as dashingly as they could imitate a cageful of wild animals, paid tribute in verse to their acrobatic skills: ‘You glorious creatures, able to dance in the ether like angels . . .’

  Paris–New York was the revue in which Hellé Nice first appeared at the Casino de Paris in 1927. (Volterra’s titles were not imaginative; the shows of 1927 and 1928 included Bonjour Paris, Paris en Fleurs, Paris qui Chante and Tout Paris.) The attention she attracted was slight; the audiences who came to the show were less interested in a pretty soloist or a troupe of brand-new Russian dwarfs than the city’s favourite clown, woolly-bonneted Raimu, and, topping the bill at an extortionate fee, the Dolly Sisters, defying the passage of time with immaculate costumes and heavy make-up as they went through their charming but slightly dated song and dance routine. All was forgiven; the Dollys had recently become the darlings of Paris when they sued Mistinguett and the Moulin Rouge for 550,000 francs, won, and gave the entire proceeds to charity.

  It is not altogether surprising that Hellé Nice’s name did not feature in the revues with which Volterra followed Paris–New York in 1927. Henri de Courcelles was killed in July and Hélène was devastated. But she had already begun to make friends in the easygoing raffish world of the music halls; instead of spending the rest of the summer with Mongin and Carrère, she went along with the Casino’s regular performers to enjoy an extended holiday while spreading publicity. The cuttings books show her on the move from the northern beach resort of Le Touquet down to the Riviera, joining in bicycling competitions against her fellowperformers, or entering one of the increasingly popular gymkhana car shows which paired a celebrity or a socialite with a handsome new machine. For a high-spirited young woman of twenty-eight who enjoyed attention and loved driving, there was no hardship in spending an afternoon showing off her skills, even if they only consisted in demonstrating how elegantly she could swing her legs out of a car, or how swiftly she could drive it between a row of fixed posts. The pay was good; the publicity value was excellent. It passed the time.

  She had already made a handsome sum of money, but the show which turned her into a star was Les Ailes de Paris (Wings over Paris), Léon Volterra’s final spectacular before he sold out and took up racehorses. The show, written by the frighteningly productive team of Saint-Granier and Albert Willemetz, was a staggering 48-number showcase for the talents of Maurice Chevalier, one of the Casino’s favourite stars. Chevalier, too, had been enjoying a summer on the coast and perhaps – his promiscuity was legendary – a brief affair with the pretty newly blonde dancer who was given star billing in his show. Hélène’s name was far more prominent in posters advertising Les Ailes de Paris than it had been for previous Casino appearances.

  Most people went to the show for two reasons. One was to see and hear Chevalier, whose number ‘Quand On Revient’ had become an instant hit. The second was to see a cruelly funny imitation of The Dolly Sisters, performed by two ravishingly handsome Norwegian boys who called themselves The Rocky Twins.

  A dapper Maurice Chevalier, with an eye for the girls.

  The Dollys were said to be furious; Hélène, who had not, perhaps, enjoyed being eclipsed by their celebrity, ganged up with their mimics and became The Rocky Twins’ new best friend. For a time, at least, she, the Twins, and a pretty, sports-loving singer called Diana became a devoted foursome, spending all their time together and, since they were all startlingly attractive, receiving plenty of press attention.

  In her old age, Hélène liked to pretend that she had been among the greatest dancers to perform on the music-hall stage.7 When the names of other performers of the 1920s were mentioned, she described them as her friends while letting it be known that none, with the exception of Josephine Baker and Mistinguett, had been on her level. The truth was that she had never quite been on theirs. The dancer who attracted the most attention at the time in Les Ailes de Paris was dark-haired, fleetfooted Miss Florence, former leader of the remarkable Hoffmann Girls dancing troupe. Hellé Nice, appearing as Madame de Sévigné, as The Queen of the Night and, with her friends the Rockies, as a Greek March, was top of the second flight. It is, however, fair to note that at least one newspaper critic, for Presse magazine, noted that she had a ravishing body and danced with such skill and grace that a bigger role would have been justified.

  The show was a phenomenon. It made the names and fortunes of many of its young stars and three million francs for Volterra, quite a triumph for a man who had started out selling programmes in the aisles of the Olympia. Most importantly, in an age when there was no support from the state for performers, the success of Wings brought invitations to appear outside Paris, at better rates of pay, and to audition for films. It would not have escaped the attention of Hélène, especially if she had been briefly involved with him, that Maurice Chevalier was off to
Hollywood; everybody who worked in the theatre during the late twenties was plotting to expand into cinema work. The Rockys had already been in a film and so had Diana. The Gaumont Company, turning out as many as three films a day in their Paris studios, were always looking for new talent.

  Later in life, during the years when her name had lost its magical resonance and the trappings of wealth – the furs, the yacht, the magnificently opulent Hispano-Suiza touring car which she bought on a whim – were gone, the old lady clung with pathetic tenacity to the programmes and photographs which kept the memory of her glorious youth.8 The walls of the tiny lodging provided to her by the actors’ charitable institution were hung with pictures taken in her dancing years. Anybody who showed an interest in them was invited to admire the pages of two heavy booklets, glossy with illustrious names. The Gala, she explained when her visitors looked blank. The Gala. You didn’t get asked to take part in that event by being a nobody.

  Indeed you did not; nothing, during the first years of her fall from grace, stood Hélène Delangle in better stead with a charity devoted to the care of dancers, singers and actors than the fact that she had given her services in this cause.

  The Gala Union of Theatre Performers was put together shortly after the war. Its object, at a time when no help was available for performers too old or too frail to work, was to raise money for their care. In a city which was joyfully addicted to every form of theatrical entertainment, from the café-concert, at which singers entertained customers, to the ambitious works of the Ballets Suèdois, the Gala had a captive audience. By 1928, it was established as one of the great social events of the Parisian year. To be invited to participate in the Gala was an honour extended only to the cream of the performers. Hélène was among them.