Fortunately, while several journalists had probed for her thoughts about young Jean Bugatti, none made the connection between herself and Bruno d’Harcourt. Which was lucky, considering Bruno’s Bugatti had been parked outside the autodrome on the afternoon of the speed trial, as he waited to take her out to a celebration dinner. She warned him at the time that he shouldn’t take such risks, not in his situation. It wasn’t as though the relationship was serious. The serious thing about Comte Bruno d’Harcourt, father of four, was that he was married to one of the grandest women in France, Princesse Isabelle d’Orléans. Her mother was a Guise and Hélène knew her history books well enough to fear what a member of that ruthless family might do, if she were crossed.
So this had remained a discreet affair. Occasionally, when the princess was visiting her mother in the country, they managed a day together; for the most part, however, the relationship was an afternoon arrangement between friends. The date, like everything else in Bruno’s life, was fixed: Hélène, while no snob, was fascinated by the elaborate rules of behaviour which still defined the life of a man who went, every Saturday, to visit his old nanny and eat a plate of almond biscuits. His mother and he had been having tea together at the Ritz every Wednesday since he was twenty.
Theirs was a relation of opposites. Buying a racing Bugatti was the boldest thing Bruno d’Harcourt had ever done; Hélène thrived in an atmosphere of audacity. She climbed mountains; Bruno preferred strolling over lawns. She could stay up all night; Bruno had been to every club in Paris once, and stayed in none for more than an hour. Tall, moustached and with a nose which would become eagle-like when the boyish roundness of his cheeks was gone, he resembled both a cavalry officer and a surprised choirboy. Hélène found his looks immensely attractive and could make him blush by saying so.
At thirty-one, Bruno d’Harcourt was still easy to shock; that, for her, was half the fun. It gave her a thrill to know that her elegant, bashful lover was watching when she performed in the Actors’ Gala that March of 1930, stripped down to the smallest pair of gold shorts that she could slide over her hips. Lowering herself into the splits, she looked for Bruno’s startled face in the crowd who, whether they liked it or not, were seeing more than they had paid for. They clapped her for being brave – it was her first try on the bar and the high wire – and for showing what she shouldn’t. It was all for you, she promised him afterwards; only for you. And he had reddened with pleasure. He was, as she remembered him, a strangely innocent man.
She wondered, sometimes, if Ettore Bugatti might have treated her more respectfully if he had known with whom she was spending time that spring. The count was just the kind of client Ettore liked best, a rich amateur enthusiast whose victories, if he had any, would be credited to the marque, while his costs – and Bugattis were notoriously expensive cars to maintain – would be his own affair. Perhaps, if she had dropped Bruno’s name into the conversation when she went back to Molsheim to collect her car that March, not long after the gala, things might have been different.
It never ceased to amaze her that, after all the initial courtesy, the effort she had put into her training, the publicity her success had won for his firm, Ettore had still expected her to put up three-quarters of the full price for a second-hand car.4 The price was high – 40,000 francs was a lot of money. She had made a second journey to Molsheim not expecting to pay a cent. It was a shock. She remembered staring at Ettore’s face, wondering what he had heard, what she was being punished for. No answer came, only a tranquil repetition of the arrangement. He looked not at her, but slightly to the side, over her shoulder. Correctly, she sensed an insult.
The car, it was true, had been shaped to her needs like a tailormade, ready for her first rally drive in Morocco the following month. But any expectation that she would be welcomed back to Molsheim as a friend, part of the team, was dashed on the first evening. She was shown into a tiny, stifling attic at the Pur Sang, and told that her meals would be paid for by the company. No invitation came to join the family, as she had fondly anticipated, no morning stroll around the estate was suggested. The only bright moment came at the end, after she had paid over the money and taken possession of the car. Jean, Ettore said, laying heavy emphasis on his son’s name to indicate that he did not represent his own view, had suggested she might take part in the Bugatti Grand Prix at Le Mans that summer. She always had plenty to say to the press about her wish to compete against men in Grand Prix: well, here was her chance.
The April rally in Morocco was a plan which had been hatched with Bruno. He was, he said, tired of only seeing her for an hour a week; travelling separately from Marseille, they could meet up at Casablanca, enjoy a few days of sun and pleasure, drive down south to the Atlas Mountains, if she wanted a bit of climbing. The choice was hers; the princess had taken the children off to see their grandmother; he was free and at her disposal.
Hélène often went back to participate in races in France’s North African colonies during the 1930s. Her albums thickened with photographs of mosques, gardens, palm trees, groups of waving children, carpet sellers and souks. The welcome was always hospitable; to a young woman who loved hot climates, the dry air and wide blue skies added to the pleasure of discovering a country which, while its language was familiar, was unimaginably remote from anything she had yet known. Looking at her pages of tiny snapshots, it is tempting to imbue them with romantic significance. All that exists other than these is a dried yellow flower, a map of the route and a list of the drivers.
The list of entrants for the Casablanca rally was impressive. Marcel Lehoux, the oldest at forty-one, was an Algerian garage owner, French-born, who began racing in 1924, and was among the best of the Bugatti drivers, especially on the North African courses. Philippe Etancelin (Phi-Phi) from Rouen had built his career on a fortune made selling wool and goosedown for bedding and upholstery and turned to racing in 1926. Fast and fearless, he had a wife as intrepid as himself who, when regulations permitted, raced beside him. Anne Itier, a newcomer to the Grand Prix circuits after years of rally driving and hill-climb competitions, was a small, redhaired woman whose ability to swear in Gaelic was a legacy from her unhappy marriage to a Scot named Rose. Any one of these more seasoned drivers might have shown a relative novice how to map the course, which stretched from Casablanca down to Mogador, east to Marrakech and back to the north by Settat; the result was preserved by Hélène, together with a note that she had covered 233 kilometres in just over seven hours on a trial run. For a first prize of 70,000 francs, careful preparation was a good investment.
Her endurance skills, the ones most needed for a drive notorious for its dust storms, were never tested. Two days before the race, Bruno took his Bugatti out for a fast practice run back to Casablanca from Medronna. Coming into a fast bend, he misjudged and overshot the road. He was still fully conscious when they found him some hours later, trapped under the car with a fractured spine. He died in hospital two days later.
Bruno d’Harcourt in Morocco, 1930.
Hélène never discussed this relationship; her fellow racers had no idea of a connection between the doomed driver and the jaunty, tough little blonde. Some surprise was felt when she announced that she would be withdrawing and returning to Marseille. By the middle of April, she was back in Paris. In her scrapbooks, years later, she pasted her photographs of Bruno at the wheel of his car on to the same page which recorded the death of Henri de Courcelles, together with her preserved yellow flower. Below, and next to his obituary, she wrote simply that the photographs showed him on the day of the accident.
The weather was terrible in France in the summer of 1930. The Seine surged through doorways in the streets of Montparnasse; the main train from Paris to Brussels was stranded for a week in a metre of water; floods prevented Hélène taking off from Le Bourget on her first and well-publicized flying lesson. Bad weather has never defeated the French in their love of a day at the races and, despite the rain, the crowds turned out on 1 June for Ettore Bugat
ti’s Third Grand Prix at Le Mans. The race was for amateurs, but perhaps with Jean’s coercion, Hélène was allowed to have the use of Joseph Cecci, the Molsheim employee who had supervised her car for the Montlhéry trial. Cecci was a dour character, but he should have had no complaints to make that day. This was her first Grand Prix, and she brought the car home in 3rd place, after doing 32 laps, 566 kilometres, of the celebrated 24-hour course. Typically, Hélène only minded that the victor, Juan Zanelli, the elegant Vice-Consul of Chile in Nice, had beaten her by 28 kilometres. ‘I’ll do better next time,’ she said afterwards. ‘It’s all I ever ask for, just to show what I can do, without a handicap, against men.’ She took care to make the point that she would have been going in for the Swedish Grand Prix next, had they deigned to allow women to compete.5
Ettore and his son were both there to award Zanelli his prize of a T43. Both men were in poor shape, Ettore after a fall from one of his horses, Jean on crutches after crashing on a practice run at Molsheim. (The official story was that he had slipped on a staircase.) It was Jean who presented a filthy-faced, exhausted Hélène with her third prize and Jean, perhaps, who sent her the souvenir picture of the two of them which she liked enough to keep. One can see why. Confident, well-dressed, a little arrogant, the young car designer leans forward, crutches forgotten as he stares into the eyes which look up into his with beaming and undisguised joy. Ettore, although not visible, must have been comforting himself with the thought that she would be out of the country by the end of the summer, never, with any luck, to return. This was not the kind of match he had in mind for his brilliant heir.
To have come third in her first Grand Prix was a magnificent achievement, and not diminished by the fact that the five other entrants had failed to complete the course. To many of the actors and cabaret performers who braved atrocious weather for the Seventh Actors’ Championships a few days later, it seemed grossly unfair that they should be expected to compete against a semiprofessional. Blanche Montel, still smarting at having been robbed of both victory and publicity the previous year, announced that she would not be taking part in the same events as Miss Hellé Nice.
Torrential rain and shabby grandstands were blamed for the fact that spectator crowds were disappointingly small at Paris’s Parc des Princes sports park for its last function before being revamped; the actors, nevertheless, put on a magnificent show. Sidney Chaplin, Charlie’s older half-brother and a devastatingly funny performer in drag, turned up in a loud suit to help out his friend Georges Biscot when his baby Bugatti needed a push. Diana, calm and beautiful as always, drew applause as she drove sedately down the course in a green Delage which took first prize for elegant looks in the car show. Nadine Picard, a rising star in the Gaumont short films which many of Paris’s music-hall stars made in their lunch-breaks, was there; so was her sister Gisèle, dressed as her twin in beautifully cut beige silk. André Roanne, Hélène’s co-performer at the Actors’ Gala of 1928 as the the third of ‘Les Harrys’, rolled up his shirt-sleeves and flexed his muscles at the crowd, miming his determination to win; the handsome young actor Raymond Maurel disqualified himself by jumping out of his car during the obstacle race to wave at the fans.
There were only two real stars that day. The first was a talented young female acrobat called Line Jack. Dressed in a white bodysuit which emphasized the grace of her movements, she presented herself as the bonnet-top mascot of a scarlet Mathis driven by Farwell, her actor-lover. Bending like a croquet hoop as the car slowly circled the track, she brought her head between her ankles, smiled to the cameras with her chin on the tall radiator, and raised her slender legs like twin arrows, toes pointing skywards.*
Line Jack contributed the grace that day and Hellé Nice the drama. Privately, she must have cursed the massive sports touring car, a Bugatti T43A, which she was driving and which a new mechanic had failed to conquer. Oh! What a fearsome machine! the sports writers exclaimed as smoke belched from the exhaust pipe and the gearbox clanked like a box of chains; oh! how terrified the other competitors must have been! An ill-prepared car didn’t stop Hélène winning the gymkhana and the ladies’ speed trial. She did so with a nonchalance which must have had Blanche Montel’s nails bitten to the quick. The cartoonists, summing up the day’s events in playful images for the sports pages of Le Journal and L’Intransigeant, showed their favourite heroine riding to victory – in very high heels – on a rocking-horse with a Bugatti pennant flying above her; the photographers paid tribute to her professionalism by photographing the champion in an uncharacteristically demure pose, knees out of sight, white blouse buttoned to the throat, sitting between the gigantic Grebon headlamps of her troublesome car.
The following month, Paris’s theatre world reconvened at the Buffalo vélodrome at Montrouge for the last of the summer car shows. Hélène’s T43 was still causing trouble, but it hardly seemed to matter in a day which became a one-woman promotional event, a hijacking of publicity which ended any remaining vestiges of friendship with her fellow stars. Her first coup was to jump on a motorbike for a duel against Arthur Honegger, the young Swiss composer who was, at the time, the most commercially successful and celebrated of the group later known as Les Six. His music, Honegger said, was intended to reflect the mechanical age, the sounds of speeding trains and wailing taxis, the whine of highspeed cars. He was a fearless driver but his bike, on this occasion, was soundly beaten. Taking to the circuit again before rain brought an end to the day, Hélène demonstrated her biking skills on the dirt track normally reserved for cycling competitions and then, to cheers from under the dripping umbrellas, perched side-saddle on the back of a motorbike with the British sportsman Angus Dallimore and roared around again. The crowd gasped when the heavy bike skidded, sending her sprawling in the dust; they were delighted when she jumped up, dusted herself down, laughed, and gave them a bow.
A stylish way to perform a lap on the bonnet of a Mathis at the Actors’ Championships of 1930.
This sudden love affair with dirt tracks was explained the following day when a newspaper article disclosed that France’s most intrepid woman racer was off to America to compete against men on speedways and dirt tracks in a supercharged Miller, one of the world’s fastest cars. ‘Congratulations to the manager of the Miller company on his shrewd choice,’ the journalist finished with a flourish, ‘and congratulations to him on being so well-represented! Good luck to you, our charming ambassador!’6
The man who had prepared Hélène’s programme at Buffalo with such skill was her new agent, a cheerful bespectacled man called Henri Lartigue, whose wife, Madeleine, shared Hélène’s passion for shih-tzus and pugs. The name which appeared most prominently on Lartigue’s business paper was that of the American William Morris, who had by 1930 become Hollywood’s best-known film agent. This may have been what first drew Hélène to Lartigue; what she could not have known was that her new agent had never met Morris. His own American connections were to a much less glamorous outfit, Ralph Hankinson’s Hot News Agency.
Hankinson, a tough veteran promoter of several of the East Coast fairgrounds on which some of the most dangerous dirt-track driving in America took place, was seeking ways to bring crowds to the tracks. A good-looking French girl, a Parisian, no less, who had now beaten the women’s world record for speed, struck him as a splendid promotional asset. Her background as a dancer and acrobat added to her marketability; Esso expressed an interest in an advertising campaign.
The bait held out to Hélène was a good regular salary of $200 for each appearance, the promise – it was not fulfilled – of all transport and hotel expenses being covered, the chance to drive one of the world’s best-known cars, Ralph DePalma’s supercharged Miller, and considerable publicity.
Hélène signed the contract with the Hot News Agency on 23 May, agreeing to arrive in New York by 3 August. The promised Miller had, by the time she put her name on the contract, been converted into an assurance that she would always be allowed to handle ‘a first-class racing automo
bile’: not quite the same. The disappointment was sweetened, however, by the news that she would, if successful, be given a renewal of her two-month contract, with a chance to renegotiate her payments.
It is possible that her ambitions reached beyond the dangerous thrills of dirt-track racing. She had, during her successful run in Les Ailes de Paris, been in daily contact with Maurice Chevalier, the show’s star, and Chevalier had already left Paris to try his luck as a screen-star in Hollywood. It isn’t even necessary to conjecture an affair with the shamelessly promiscuous Chevalier to see why Hélène might have wanted to try her luck in films. She had, throughout her dancing years, lived among people who had a second career as screen performers: André Roanne, Blanche Montel, Georges Biscot, Nadine Picard, Sidney Chaplin, Harry Pilcer, the Rocky Twins, the Dollys. It is hard, in fact, to find a music-hall star of that period who had not, at some point, gone to work at the Gaumont studios based so conveniently close to Pigalle’s theatres. Marie Bell, in 1930, appeared as a racing-car driver in the popular film The Night is Ours: Hélène must have thought that she could play the same part with more authority.
An interview which appeared in Pathé Journal on 1 August 1930, shortly after Hélène’s departure for the United States from Le Havre, reported that the racing driver had just been taking voice and screen tests and that the result had been highly successful; a glorious film career was predicted. The article may have been a puff placed by Lartigue, but he could not have fabricated the taking of tests. She must, at the least, have been considering a film career and yet, despite Lartigue’s urgent reminders, she never contacted William Morris.
Hélène doing acrobatics on the beach at Le Touquet with an unknown friend, June 1930.
The Bugatti Queen Page 10
