Recalling such an event during the 1960s, by which time there was nothing comparable, she spoke wistfully of the fun, the excitement of the two weeks of preparation at the Cirque d’Hiver. The evening was held in an amphitheatre, and it was presented as a circus. The joke and the fun of it lay in the fact that, for this one night of the year, even the most serious performers of Paris showed themselves in a completely different light, swinging through the air on ropes, dancing on trampolines, riding on elephants, sending dogs through paper hoops. And the audience, jewels blazing under the pink arc lights as they settled into their seats just after midnight, played along, clapping like children as Miss Dolly Davis wobbled her way up a free-standing ladder to perform a series of handstands, laughing with pleasure when the corps de ballet from the Opéra, last seen an hour earlier in Swan Lake, came shimmying and tapping across the ring to the backing of fourteen pianos playing Cole Porter and Gershwin in perfect unison.
Brightening as she recalled those distant days, the old lady was eager to show off the programme she had kept, and to point out her own name, teamed with the two biggest attractions of the evening as Les Harrys, two men and a girl, dazzling the crowds as they foxtrotted over a trampoline. Here she was again, at the Gala of 1930, up on a high wire and, she would like it to be noticed, performing without a safety net, after less than two weeks of training.9
In 1928, the two ‘Harrys’ who danced alongside Hélène on the trampoline had been celebrities. André Roanne, sometimes described as the most handsome man in French cinema, was already under contract to appear in G.W. Pabst’s new vehicle for Louise Brooks, Diary of a Lost Girl, and to co-star with Constance Talmadge in a sports spoof, Venus. Harry Pilcer had established himself as one of the best-known dancers in France in a long partnership with Gaby Deslys, creator of the much-copied Gaby Glide; by 1928, he had acquired a Riviera home, a yacht, a magnificent touring car and a second nightclub, Les Acacias, which was said to be the best in Paris. José Noguero, with whom Hélène appeared as Les Stefano at the Cirque in 1930, was a smoothly handsome young Spaniard who was playing, with great credibility, the role of a charming gigolo in the theatrical hit of the spring season, The Weaker Sex, and who built up a successful film career over the next decade.* An unkind visitor might have been tempted to comment on the way Hellé Nice always managed to appear with the best-looking men.
Reviews of the two galas in which she participated suggest that Hélène did well in her new circus roles. Audiences – Colette and Anna de Noailles were among the enthusiastic regular attendants – were much freer with their opinions than they would have been in a theatre. They could, and did, show when they thought that a performance was feebly prepared or conceived. They booed pretty Miss Spinelli in 1930 when her troupe of performing baboons wilfully declined to dance on stilts. But Hellé Nice, boldly exposing herself on the high wire in a gold bandeau top and smaller shorts than had ever been seen in a real circus, drew warm applause, for her lack of fear – a professional trapezist had been killed in a fall only a few weeks earlier – and for a welcome return, after almost a year of absence from the stage.
Visiting her favourite resort, Megève, at the beginning of 1929, Hélène had suffered an accident which changed her life. She was skiing off piste when she heard the ominous rattle of stones behind her.10 Speeding sideways as she tried to escape an avalanche, she attempted a leap which she would never, in normal circumstances, have risked. Saving her life, she damaged the cartilage of her knee, the worst fate that can overtake a dancer. Unable to participate in the annual Gala, she was forced, by the summer of 1929, to accept that she would never again be flexible enough to resume a professional dancing career. One reason for the warm applause which greeted her appearance at the Cirque d’Hiver in March 1930 was that the audience knew of her misfortune, and of the pain she must still have been in as, poised above the fixed bar, she slowly extended her legs to perform the splits.
Hélène herself would never have acknowledged the fact, but the accident was timely. She was nearing thirty, and if any reviewers were still comparing her to Karsavina when she danced, they kept the thought to themselves. The praises she received in 1929 were for her charm, her rapport with the audience and her beautiful body. One photograph which has survived from the late 1920s shows her in what appears to be a cabaret turn, dancing naked, with a white dove. Enchanting though she looks in the picture, it does not suggest that a glorious future of stage work stretched ahead.
There was another route. Hélène had already shown uncommon skill as a competitive driver. She had been excited by cars since the age of twenty. Fortunately for her, she was living in an age when the world of theatre was intimately connected to that of sport. The car-makers needed glamour to sell their machines; the stars saw the machines as a perfect accessory to their own good looks. With her wonderful smile, an unforgettable name and a genius for publicity, she was well-placed to attract a sponsor. First, however, she had to prove herself. She did so, quite spectacularly, through the remarkable occasions which were known as the Actors’ Championships.
THE RACER
6
‘LA PRINCESSE DES ALTITUDES, REINE DE VITESSE’*
‘And now there was nothing – nothing on earth between her and victory save the hazard of the road.’
GILBERT FRANKAU, CHRISTOPHER STRONG (1932), P.120†
On 10 June 1928 ten sporting balloonists agreed to be chased across country for a day, starting from Saint Cloud in a race against ten actresses mounted on Voisins, Peugeots and Ballots. (The balloonists won.) A month earlier, crowds had cheered on the waiters of some of the smart new brasseries of Montparnasse, running the length of a boulevard while they held heavily laden trays at shoulder height.
France has always loved competitive sports. In the spring of 1928, you could, when bored by steeplechasing, have taken bets on a newsboys’ race, a newsgirls’ race and a bakers’ race. Between shows, the music halls hosted roller-skating competitions and issued endurance challenges to couples who were prepared to Charleston until they dropped. (The oddest of these events took place in complete silence as the smartly dressed competitors foxtrotted for twelve hours to the rhythm of ‘Vitaphones’ which transmitted radio music into their black plastic ear-muffs.)
Sylvia Beach, dragged away from her bookshop to the Vél d’Hiver by Ernest Hemingway for a true Parisian experience, was unable to decide which were the madder, the men who cycled around its banked wooden sides, day and night, for almost a week; or the spectators. ‘Fans,’ she wrote, ‘went and lived there for the duration, watching more and more listlessly the little monkey-men, hunched over on their bikes, slowly circling the ring or suddenly sprinting, night and day, in an atmosphere of smoke and dust and theatrical stars, and amid the blare of loudspeakers.’1 Similar events drew crowds to the Parc des Princes out at Auteuil and to the wooden-banked bowl of Stade Buffalo at Montrouge. This was where Ernest Hemingway, during a period when he became obsessed by the city’s sporting events, saw a motorbike racer crash and die. His skull, Hemingway wrote with ghoulish precision, had crumpled under the crash helmet with the sound of a hard-boiled egg being cracked against a stone to peel it on a picnic.2
Hemingway, one of many young Americans who had been attracted to Paris by a truly magnificent exchange rate of almost 13 francs to the dollar (in 1921) saw the bicycle stadiums as battlefields. The velodromes had also, since 1923, been the setting for the city’s most charmingly absurd competitive event, the Actors’ Championship.
The Championships had evolved from the Bataille des Fleurs of the 1890s, an annual parade of flower-decked carriages, driven by beauties of the stage and high society. These parades had split in two directions after 1918, the car show and the competition. The first, the Concours d’Elégance, provided Hélène Delangle with plenty of attractive employment during her dancing years. The treasured collection of photographs and cuttings was thick with glamour-shots from those days. As an old lady, she loved to show them off, a finger mov
ing slowly over the blurred prints as she pointed out the splendour of the machine beside or in which she was gracefully posed. The cars, the Rosengarts, Ballots and Voisins, were returned to the showrooms after the show; the jewels and furs and dresses, on the other hand . . . it all depended on which designer you were dealing with. Paul Poiret was a sweetheart, too generous for his own good, especially if you’d been dressed by him for one of the revues. Madame Schiaparelli, on the other hand, checked that everything came back, down to the last button. Still, one or two little bonuses had come her way, a spotted silk dress which she was still wearing ten years later, a glorious fur collar, a couple of expensive hats. But the main benefit of the Concours d’Elégance, as she was happy to explain, was the publicity.3 The more appearances you made, the better the Casino de Paris liked it, and the better your name was known, the more money you could begin to demand. It made sense. And it was fun, a lovely day out. How many car shows had she been in? Too many to count, when you took account of the summer shows for holidaymakers held at Le Touquet, Trouville, Lyon, Limoges, Deauville, Cannes, Nice: thirty? forty? She couldn’t begin to remember.4
Actress Maria Dalbaicin at the Actors’ Championship 1928.
The Actors’ Championships, always scheduled to take place over the same June weekend as the car show at the Parc des Princes, was even more fun, a wonderful way for audiences to meet their favourite stars and give them support. Any actor or dancer or singer who enjoyed driving, and most of them did, wanted to enter the championship. A few of the performers took it seriously; others, like the comedian and film star Georges Biscot, who helped start a craze among the rich fathers when he tore around the course in a miniature Bugatti which Ettore had designed for his younger son Roland, treated the occasion as the high comedy which, in part, it was.
Hélène had always herself treated these occasions lightly until the disaster of her accident. Now, plotting a career change, she took note of the fact that the Actors’ Championship of 1929 was due to take place in the same month as the only serious sporting event for female drivers, the Journée Féminine de L’Automobile. Marcel Mongin, from whom she took advice, thought she stood a chance of winning both, provided that she had a decent car and good coaching. Speaking to him in April, when she was first able to take a few steps without pain, she had neither. All she did have, other than a well-known name, was a ferocious competitive urge, the quality which had startled and impressed Mongin from the first time he had seen her on a ski-slope.
The conversations with Mongin and the mentor’s role ascribed to him here are based on inference, not documentation. It is, however, striking that Hélène chose to drive an unusual car, the Omega Six, which Mongin himself had used successfully at Le Mans in 1924. It is likely to have been Mongin who approached the manufacturer, Jules Daubecq, and put it to him that his falling sales might receive a boost if a beautiful young woman drove one of the most ravishing sports cars of the time to victory. By 1929, Daubecq was worried enough to agree. A car was produced and prepared for her; possibly, Mongin supplied an experienced mechanic from his own garage.
Preparations were intensive and exhausting. She needed exercises to strengthen her torso, waist and shoulders for full control of the wheel, to harden her thighs and calves for braking, and to toughen her palms. Strenuous though the training was, she relished the sensation of a body growing daily more powerful. She knew Mongin was a superb driver; she had absolute confidence in him as a teacher. Memorize every corner, every uneven patch, he told her; know the course well enough to drive it blindfold. Keep your left foot down. Use it as a brace. Make sure you have spare goggles where you can reach them without looking down. Use two pairs of cotton gloves, thin enough to give you a feeling for the road, never mind the burnt palms. You won’t notice the blisters until it’s over.
Simple details, practically delivered, dutifully followed. Every day, twice a day, she drove ten laps of the circuit at Montlhéry, the first course in France to have been built specifically for cars. The most Mongin ever said was that she was picking up.
Publicly, her confidence was unassailable; alone, she was scared. What if she failed? Late at night, in the quiet hours, she sat on a kitchen chair, cold cream smeared on her cheeks and neck, a cigarette clenched between her teeth. She narrowed her eyes until she could see the circuit, brace her body against each jolt of broken surface under the tyres, tighten her fists and wrench the wheel until her shoulders ached, hold it there, hard, until she was safely round the bend, moving along the straight. Take a rest, her friends told her; it’s not doing you good. And then she’d weaken and go drinking and come back with a handsome boy and she’d forget the irritation of his snuffles and snores as she lay wide-eyed in the darkness before dawn, listening for the rising whine of an engine, waiting for the wind to thump a fist against her face.
Once, circling the Montlhéry concrete bowl at a higher speed than Mongin or the manufacturer had licensed her to attempt – the bowl was excluded from the circuit for which she was rehearsing her skills – she nearly hit the barrier as a falling scrap of scarlet cloth flattened itself against the scrap of glass in her windshield. Blinded, she snatched it away. A pilot, flying low enough to have dropped a thoughtless souvenir, waved a jaunty hand before he pointed the little plane’s nose skywards.
Couc had once told her that he always wore a red scarf around his neck when he went up in a plane. She wanted to believe that his ghost had come back to wish her luck. Mongin thought the idea ludicrous, but she kept the scarf tied around her neck. When she came home first in the preliminary elimination trial, the day before the main race, she was joyfully convinced that her amulet had played a part.
The Grand Prix of the third Journée Féminine was due to begin just after midday on Sunday, 2 June 1929. She reached the track with half an hour to go, wishing she hadn’t spent the night before dancing at Les Acacias. A green-eyed boy, a friend of one of the costume-makers at the casino, had stayed the night. A mixture of morphine, champagne and sex had left her wanting to crawl into a coalhole when she woke up and now, with ten minutes to go, Mongin was worrying about the Omega’s brakes. Dully, she watched the mechanic go to work again. She pulled her white beret down over her ears, lit a cigarette, stubbed it out. Her hands, she noticed, were shaking.
Given her state of nerves, she thought fifteenth place in the first race wasn’t too much of a disgrace, from last starting position. Mongin, however, looked grim. Embracing her for the benefit of one of the camera teams sent by Le Journal, the sponsors of the day, he gave her a hard pinch. ‘You’ll have to do better than that if you’re serious, ma grosse,’ he murmured. ‘And how many men was it, last night?’
She told him, which was true, that her knee was hurting. He gave her a thoughtful look and walked away without responding to speak to Charles, the mechanic.
Half an hour now until the big race. Acid bubbled in her stomach. Her eyes flickered from the busy row of mechanics to the fluttering banners and up to the clock, hanging like a full moon beside the start post. She watched the competition, Lucy Schell with one hand in a bandage; Dominique Ferrand, knowing she was the favourite, stroking the bonnet of her scarlet Amilcar as though she’d been given a new pony; Baronne d’Elern sulking at the news that her Rosengart wasn’t up to the required safety levels; Violette Morris, marching around her vast Donnet like a policeman on duty, cigarette glued to the corner of her mouth as she barked out orders at a kneeling mechanic . . . Turning as if she could sense the watchful stare, Morris took the cigarette, dropped it and slowly ground it out, her eyes on the rosy-cheeked girl in the white beret. Even as an old woman, Hélène Delangle remembered that look.
A voice had called the warning for departure time. Mongin put a hand on her shoulder, smiled. She wondered if he, too, was thinking of Henri de Courcelles and wishing that their friend could be here to see her. She smiled back, grateful for all the time he’d given her. ‘Charles?’ She nodded at the young olive-skinned mechanic to accompany her as she s
trolled away from the pitstop and crossed to face the grandstand, giving the crowds just the hint of a shimmy. She heard a volley of hammering hands, laughter, a man’s voice shouting her stage name. Let Morris or little Ferrand match that. She milked the moment, bit into a sandwich with strong white teeth, turned for the cameras to admire her as she tipped her head back to swallow from a water bottle before she thrust it into the front of her overalls with a straw jutting out high enough to be caught later by dust-parched lips. She flexed her feet in the narrow rubber-soled gymshoes, pulled a second pair of gloves over the thin cotton ones which would absorb some of the sweat. Bouncing on her toes as she walked towards the row of cars, she felt the familiar stab of pain shoot up from her knee. She bent quickly to hide the grimace.
The Omega was being given a last check by Charles and Mongin’s nephew, Albert, named for their friend Albert Guyot. Head down so as not to meet the eyes of her competitors as the first machines began to rattle and belch smoke, she swung open the heavy blue door, settled herself into place, goggles on, right toes stretching out for the brake pedal, right heel ready for the centre-placed throttle, left foot just short of the clutch pedal. Far away, a band was thumping out the Marseillaise; nearer, the voice of the marshal came over the loud-hailer, giving the warnings. Blue flag, waved: give way to the driver behind you. Yellow flag, still: danger ahead. Yellow and red, the one to dread: oil on the track. Black flag with your number on it: back to the pit. And on. And on. She breathed deep and slow, stretched her fingers wide, reached for the gear stick as the mechanic spun the crank. Ahead of her, crouched on its appointed line, she heard the roar of a lion from Morris’s Donnet.
The Bugatti Queen Page 7
