The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

  Madame Delangle and Solange at Sainte-Mesme, c. 1931, photographed by Hélène.

  The photograph is strange enough to justify a little speculative deconstruction. It is puzzling, with such an attractive and successful daughter paying a visit, that Alexandrine Delangle refused to look at the camera. It is, perhaps, significant that only one terse note survived to the daughter she alone always addressed as Mariette. Had she – it would be understandable – disapproved of her daughter for flaunting her naked body on stage? Did she know, from Solange, if not from Hélène herself, about her carefree sexual life? Did she resent the fact that, while her older daughter was a postal clerk and her son a part-time upholsterer, Hélène had a cupboard full of furs, a flat near the centre of Paris and a circle of friends which included members of the richest families in France?

  Even if the answer to all these questions is a cautious affirmative, another explanation for Madame Delangle’s strange coolness should be considered. It is not clear at which point Jean Bernard entered the widow’s life and made himself part of the family, but the pattern of Hélène’s relationships, involving sometimes as many as three affairs at a time during the 1930s and many betrayals, is most easily interpreted as a reaction against early emotional damage. Playing the field, she escaped the risk of involvement and rejection; using her considerable sexual charisma as a weapon, she found it easy to draw lovers to her, to work from a position of power. Concentration on physical perfection and performance, when combined with a fear of sexual commitment, lest the flaws are discovered, is a primary behaviour pattern for cases of women who have suffered sexual abuse in childhood.

  Supposing that this was the case, it becomes easier to understand why Hélène’s voluminous collection of photographs and letters contains only one businesslike note and this uneasy photograph to connect her to her mother in adult life. It is tragically common for wives in such situations to allocate blame to the victimized child rather than the predator. If abuse did take place and if Alexandrine held her younger daughter responsible for seducing Jean Bernard, she would not have forgiven her.

  ‘Poor little Didi was my only real friend in the family,’ Hélène wrote later. ‘Maman and Solange always sided together, and Solange was always jealous.’7 Confirmation of this seems apparent in the fact that when Madame Delangle bought her second, considerably larger house in Sainte-Mesme in 1926, she used Solange as her witness and named Solange as her sole heir. French laws of inheritance favour equal division of property between the direct descendants. Hélène, living half-an-hour’s drive away in Paris, was not hard to reach. This was not the act of a loving mother.

  Visits home may have been lacking in joy, but two glorious photographs of a festival day at Nantes in 1931 show that Hélène was in good spirits after her return to France three months earlier. The high spot of the Nantes Mi-Carême carnival, held traditionally on Holy Thursday in the third week of Lent, was a pageant celebrating Joan of Arc’s victory over the English at Orléans. Joan, crop-haired and radiant in her triumphal chariot drawn by a sturdy pair of dappled greys, was represented by Hélène, arms outstretched as she beamed at the camera over the helmeted heads of a genial gang of costumed medieval footsoldiers. Perhaps, happily boasting of her role as France’s leading woman racer and ambassadress, she was seeing herself as Joan’s descendant, championing her country against all foreign competition.

  Hélène as Joan of Arc at Nantes, 1931.

  In June 1931 Hellé Nice carried off two prizes at the Women’s Championship at Montlhéry; the following month, she met Marcel Lehoux at her first Grand Prix of the year.* Reims, with its long straight runs and only three sharp corners, was becoming popular as one of the fastest courses in Europe; she looked forward to a challenge. Beaten to first place in the day’s Coupe des Dames by Anne Itier (they were the only two participants), she came 4th in the 2-litre class, against drivers who included Louis Chiron, René Dreyfus, Philippe Etancelin and the Parisian-based Polish aristocrat, Count Czaikowski. The champion of the day was Lehoux and Hélène found an opportunity to congratulate him when the local newspaper sponsored a champagne party in the pits. Lehoux was probably more impressed by her performance at Dieppe three weeks later when, despite torrential rain and a number of serious accidents† involving other drivers, she managed to come 7th, and 1st in the 2-litre class.

  Lehoux, at forty-five, now began to share Marcel Mongin’s role as a reliable father-figure in Hélène’s life. Immensely popular and respected, he was a short, stocky man, known for his lack of ostentation, his generosity to rising young drivers and his professionalism. Born in France in the Loire valley, he lived in Algeria from the age of three and built up a successful garage business there which helped to subsidize a successful racing career. Hélène kept none of his letters, but their relationship was well-known in the racing community, especially since they often travelled to events together. Publicly taken photographs of them reveal their mutual affection; the usually reserved Lehoux often looks as though he has only just managed to stop laughing for the camera while Hélène, uncharacteristically, appears to be more interested in what her friend is telling her than in giving a good shot to the cameraman.

  As a professional, Lehoux must have admired Hélène when he watched her driving her own Bugatti in August of 1931 on the spectacular and difficult mountain-encircled course at Comminges in the south of France, near Pau. This was one of the most popular French circuits and special trains had been laid on to bring some of the 15,000 grandstand spectators who were unwilling to face the crowded roads. It was Philippe Etancelin’s day, in an Alfa Monza; Czaikowski took second place in a T51 Bugatti. Anne Itier crashed on her sixth lap; Hélène did well to come 9th. As always, she won the publicity race hands down, laughing at the cameramen as she perched on the blue torpedo-tail of the Bugatti, head thrown back, legs jauntily crossed. Three weeks later, she was the only woman entrant for the Monza Grand Prix near Milan where, after a disaster when Philippe Etancelin’s car hit and killed three spectators, injuring ten others, the big race of the day began and was won by the fiery Italian driver Luigi Fagioli. A week later, she was back in France, speeding along the hard, flat sands of one of Europe’s most beautiful beaches, La Baule, and racing against, among others, Marcel Lehoux. Here, she only lost 4th place when she was obliged to change spark plugs on the final lap. She was, the leading sports daily L’Auto declared in the following day’s report on the race, ‘une conductrice de valeur’, a remarkably fine racing driver – for a woman.

  The first event of 1932 was the Paris–Saint-Raphaël Féminine rally which had begun in 1929 and which later acquired the glamorous title of the ‘Rally of Princesses’ as it attracted an increasing number of aristocratic female competitors. It was a demanding race of over a thousand kilometres, undertaken in freezing weather and on icy roads which were often little better than bumpy farm tracks. A victim that year was one of Hélène’s few close women friends, Renée Friderich, the pretty twenty-year-old daughter of Ettore Bugatti’s first engineer (he now ran the Bugatti agency in Nice from which many first-class racers had acquired their cars). Lively, dark-haired Renée had only been driving competitively for a short time, but she was good enough for Louis Delage to have tempted her away from what she must have regarded as the family firm. She drove a Delage for the first and last time in the Paris–Saint-Raphael rally; fatally, she tried to handle it like the lighter, more flexible Bugatti, and crashed on the steep and twisting ascent of Pougues. ‘Pauvre petite Renée, toujours gaie, toujours souriante,’ lamented L’Auto, before condoling with the father who had been summoned to identify her crushed remains. Hélène, tightly swaddled in waterproof clothing, made the record time of the day, and of the entire event, on the same treacherous stretch of road.

  Hélène on her unsupercharged Bugatti 35 at Comminges, 1931, steals the show.

  Renée Friderich

  The prospect of sunshine lured French drivers south in the spring of 1932 when their cars were winched up
on to the steamers travelling from Marseille to Tunis for the two North African Grand Prix events. Lehoux was at the docks to meet Hélène and drive with her along the coast to Oran to prepare for her first Algerian Grand Prix.

  ‘Oh, mornings in Oran!’ Albert Camus wrote twenty years later in Summer. ‘From high on the plateaux the swallows swoop down into the immense cauldron of simmering air. The whole coast is ready for departure, a thrill of adventure runs along it.’ Almost Spanish in its hardness and in the brilliance of its light, the ugliness and poverty of Oran in the thirties made less impression on visitors than the beaches of fluttering asphodels and the towering, predatory crags of the Santa Cruz mountain which loomed above the city’s yellow defence walls and dusty streets. Sheaves of photographs have survived to show that Hélène fell under the spell of Algeria’s exotic combination of French and Arab ways, the silent crowds who lined the town beaches just before dusk, to watch a dark sea swallow the last fiery spikes of the sun, the graceful couples who lounged along the boulevards after dusk, the naked village children who, unused to cars, ran innocently towards the strange machines which emerged from the dust clouds like djinns from the desert sands.

  Practising for a race is hard work. Notes have to be taken of all the places which might endanger the car; every corner must be memorized, every change of road surface recorded. The driving has to be fast for the notes to be of value; a bend taken safely at a slowish speed can prove lethal when the throttle is pressed down. Hélène was lucky in having Marcel Lehoux to monitor her; few drivers knew the North African circuits so well.

  Familiarizing herself with the demanding Oran circuit in timed practice runs – it was said to be more difficult than any in France – Hélène met up with Lehoux’s new protégé. Spanish by birth, like many Algerians, the tall and open-faced Guy Moll had recently started racing as a wealthy boy’s hobby; he showed such uncommon aptitude that Lehoux loaned him a Bugatti to compete at Oran. Moll only missed victory after a mechanical failure while Hélène’s hard work was rewarded when she came 2nd in the 2-litre class. Neither driver was so lucky at Casablanca a month later: a mechanical problem forced Moll to retire and Hélène’s car failed to qualify; Lehoux, the middle-aged professional, took 1st place. Told by Lehoux that he had the ability to become one of the world’s great drivers, Moll decided to accept the older man as his mentor. The three of them, Hélène, Lehoux and Moll, often shared the expense of transport trailers on the arduous slogs from one European Grand Prix to another; it seems probable that Guy Moll was the Spaniard of whom Hélène sent rapturous accounts to Teddie Caldwell in the summer of 1933. Teddie was unacquainted with any Spaniards herself and had a mild prejudice against the nation; she confined herself to the cautious comment ‘but if you say that he is nice . . .’8

  Nobody ever described Philippe de Rothschild as nice and nobody supposed that he was regularly lending Hellé Nice the supercharged Bugatti T35 she called ‘Yoyo’ – it was the new craze in Paris for ladies to dangle these little weighted wheels from gloved fingers while walking along the street – out of altruism. Hélène first drove her sporty ‘Yoyo’ on the sands of La Baule in the autumn of 1931; she was in it again the following summer on the hill climb of Pougues which formed part of the Paris–Saint-Raphaël rally and at Mont Ventoux in Provence, where she set a new Ladies’ record before driving west to the dreary oval plateau of Miramas where the first Grand Prix of Marseille was taking place in September. She had long since parted with the Bugatti in which she had made her record-breaking drive at Montlhéry in 1929; and later, in 1932, she sold a second one.9 Rothschild’s car became, during the year of their affair, a welcome substitute, freeing her from the expense of maintenance.

  The theatre director Joan Littlewood, who compiled Philippe de Rothschild’s lively autobiography from her many conversations with him during the 1980s, made no reference to a racing driver among his multitudinous sexual partners. When interviewed, however, she remembered that Philippe had mentioned a sporty and gamine blonde ex-dancer among the impressive file of film stars, society women and models who visited his bachelor flat on rue Cortambert for brisk sexual tussles after a light meal served by an obligingly discreet valet.10

  Two years younger than Hellé Nice and not much taller – he was five foot eight in his socks – Philippe de Rothschild could have first met her either at Molsheim or in Paris, when he was running the Théâtre Pigalle designed by Charles Siclis for his father. An exceptionally shrewd and competitive young man, he took over the reorganization of his family’s superb but dilapidated wine estate at Mouton when he was only twenty. By 1929, while his father frolicked around the Mediterranean on a yacht called Eros, Philippe was combining management of the vineyards with racing his own Bugattis, running a Paris night club, importing banned Soviet films and having an affair with Yvonne Printemps, the actress who was appearing with her husband, Sacha Guitry, at the Théâtre Pigalle. In 1931, by which time Baron de Rothschild had decamped to Hollywood with an attractive French actress, Philippe squeezed an enjoyable affair with Hélène Delangle into the months left over from a tour of the East and a spot of tiger-shooting.

  Philippe de Rothschild at the wheel of a Bugatti.

  Philippe was, according to his friends, clever, compulsively energetic and excellent company, ‘radiating a supreme selfconfidence in his ability to solve almost any problem’.11 Brought up in considerable luxury by a father who financed a car factory (Unic*), a mustard factory (Maille) and a soapworks (Monsavon) in between writing plays, practising medicine and inventing a successful treatment for burns, Philippe was equally remarkable in the breadth of his interests, from designing the first form of windscreen wiper to translating Elizabethan poetry. The fact that Hélène began to read French and English poetry, plays and novels at this time owed much to his influence; so, perhaps, did her choice of a new, flamboyantly modern Paris home.

  Late in 1932, she left her old apartment on rue Saint-Senoch for more spacious accommodation in an exuberantly curvaceous building newly designed by Bassompierre de Rutte Sirvin. The building, still standing at Rondpoint Mirabeau beside the Seine, is a splendid relic of thirties style; beside it, the Métro stop André Citroën marks the former site of France’s largest car factory, spread at the foot of the Eiffel Tower around the top of which Citroën used to flash his name in lights, proclaiming his reign over Paris. Looking through her vast convex windows on the sixth floor, Hellé Nice had one of the finest views in Paris, stretching out, almost, to Vincennes; inside, five handsome rooms were rapidly filled with the unexpectedly ornate furniture and delicate water-colour landscape sketches which she collected with acquisitive pleasure. Here, and in the overdressed porcelain dolls which, with her little dogs, assumed the place of the children she would never have, she expressed her own taste, not Philippe’s. An unkind visitor might have seen the apartment’s interior as more suited to a music-hall star’s dressing-room than to France’s most dashing female racing-driver. Hélène, indifferent to criticism, adored it.

  It seems unlikely that Hélène cared much for the elegant social world which Philippe de Rothschild entered and left at will; of rumba dancing in the white room at Ciro’s, of attending, in full fancy dress, the fabulously expensive, and absurd, balls presided over by Elsa Maxwell and Count Etienne de Beaumont. There is no doubt, however, that she liked a title. She had a short affair with the dashing Prince Nicolas of Romania, a racing friend of Philippe’s, and it wasn’t admiration for the ruthless way in which the young Spaniard Count José de Villapadierna had stolen his grandmother’s jewels to buy his first race car that attracted her when they had an affair the following year, in 1935.

  The list of lovers, aristocratic and otherwise, who became involved with Hellé Nice during the 1930s is almost as long as the list of races in which she took part; fortunately for us, she had the helpful habit of marking their names with an ‘X’ in her new black address book. Racing at Nîmes, where her car broke down, in May 1932, she was comforted not only b
y two charming married friends from Marseille, Jean and Andrée Marquand, who had come to cheer her on, but by a dashing fellow competitor who posed for her in his car, a cigarette clenched Spanish-style, like a rose-stem, in his teeth. He signed himself ‘Georges’ and assured her that his fierce smile owed everything to the presence of his ‘chérie’. Georges d’Arnoux was in evidence again at the Grand Prix of Marseille of that autumn, for which he shared lodgings with Hélène at Aix. The lodging may have been a family home; her photograph shows him on the steps leading up to a chateau, white handkerchief perfectly folded in his breast pocket, hand lifted to point out some interesting feature in the distance to an unrecognizably elegant Hélène, hair upswept and feet fashionably shod.* Within a few months, she had added another lover, Henri Thouvenet, to her list. Thouvenet, visible only as a muscular torso in an extraordinary beefcake beach photograph taken by Hélène in 1933, was a wealthy and hot-tempered young Parisian. His letters show that he doted on ‘M’amie’, pining in her absences, reminding her that his love, however frequently they quarrelled, was deeper than she could ever imagine.

  Beach boys, Ste. Maxime, Riviera, 1933, photographed by Hélène. Left to right: standing, ‘x’ and Henri Thouvenet; centre right, Dr Pierre Chambret; foreground, Fred Arra, Antoine Molinvaud.