The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

  Officially, the opposition to Bugatti’s claim was made by the communist-run trades unions which wanted the Molsheim factory to be run as a cooperative, liberated from the Bugatti family’s authorative control; unofficially, resentment was fuelled by the belief that Bugatti had taken a fat bribe to support a comfortable life in Paris and had therefore forfeited his right to ownership. Such feelings would not have been surprising; Alsace had suffered considerable humiliation during the Occupation, when French had become a forbidden language and the franc was replaced by the Reichsmark, returning it, in all but name, to the status of a German province. In May 1947 Ettore was driven back to Alsace in his Bugatti Royale, to the war-battered town of Colmar; here, once more, he appealed for the restoration of his estate. A savage attack on his character was made by the lawyer representing the trades unions. The appeal seemed certain to be rejected. Driven away by his chauffeur Toussaint, a despondent Ettore asked to be taken to the factory, but the gates were barred against his entry. Paying his respects at the stretch of road where his son Jean had died, Ettore collapsed. The stroke and a subsequent coma robbed him of the news that the Colmar court had finally decided to grant his claim. Ettore Bugatti died on 21 August and was buried beside his son in the family vault at Dorlisheim.4

  A photograph of Hélène dining out in Cannes with an unknown companion in 1946 reminds us how frequently the word ‘agitated’ was now being used to describe her.5 She has lost her look of gleeful insouciance. The radiant smile has gone; in its place, there is a look of strain. She is dressed with smart severity. It is a photograph which makes the viewer want to know what it was that these two were talking about. She was still living at the Villa des Pins. Arnaldo Binelli, a poor businessman, had been allowed to take control of her financial affairs. It is possible that, as Hélène saw youth disappearing from her features, she tried to hold him with bribes. ‘Pour Naldo, tout ce que je possédais était à lui,’ she told a woman friend, Janalla Jarnach, in the 1970s. The expression is ambivalent. I gave him all I had, or, so far as Naldo was concerned, everything I owned was his. Both may have been true of the circumstances.

  Hélène and an unknown companion in Cannes, 1946.

  In January 1946 the former racing driver Marchese Antonio Brivio Sforza sat down in Milan to write an answer to a letter he had received from a former girlfriend in the South of France. He had, while alarmed by its contents, prudently waited to talk to the managing director of Alfa Romeo before making a reply.

  In 1938 Alfa Romeo had come up with a remarkable new model, the 158. It caused a sensation at its Livorno debut that year; between 1950 and 1951 it would establish itself as one of the most successful racing cars of all time, winning 47 times out of its 54 appearances. In 1946, however, the model was still safely under wraps in the Italian cheese factory where it had spent a restful war. Its glory lay ahead. The startling gist of the letter Hélène had posted off to Tony Brivio late in 1945 was that a 158 had been stolen. The theft could only be of value to another firm who were intending to examine and adapt it for their own use.

  Brivio Sforza was closely connected to Alfa and he was President of Milan’s Automobile Club. His hair must have stood on end when he read Hélène’s news. But the story was without foundation. No model 158 had been stolen from the cheese factory; neither had any of the other Alfas which were still under guard. ‘And so,’ Brivio wrote back with a bluntness which only just kept on the right side of mockery:

  I really can’t think what kind of car you might be talking about. Anyway, thank you so for such a charming reminder of times past and I do hope we get the chance to meet again at a race course in France, or in Italy, one of these days. Best wishes, Antonio Brivio.6

  There had, it seems, been a mistake and Brivio’s letter, so coldly casual in tone, was a blow to any hope that Hélène may have had of attracting his interest and re-establishing herself as an Alfa driver.

  She had lost none of her eagerness to resume competitive driving although, in her mid-forties, it had become hard to convince the organizers of races that she was not past her best.

  It was her red-haired rally-driving friend Anne Itier who reached out once again to bring her back to the wheel. In the autumn of 1948, remembering Hélène’s magnificent performance in a Renault at Comminges in the summer of 1939, Itier wrote to suggest that they should partner each other for the Monte Carlo Rally of 1949. Hélène was overjoyed. On 17 January she went into Nice and bought a new Renault for just under 320,000 francs from the local showroom. She had six days left in which to refresh her driving skills on the approach road which twisted up to the lonely Villa des Pins.

  The first Rally to take place since the war was an ideal event at which to stage the return which Hélène was planning (she had already opened negotiations with the Automobile Club of Reims). Renault were eager for publicity and few people in the racing world had shown a more spectacular ability to attract it than the former dancer. For the car firm, as for her, Monte Carlo provided the perfect showcase.

  Glamour had returned to the Riviera, once again a favourite winter playground of the fashionable world. Orson Welles had just acquired a villa at Mougins; Aly Khan was staying at his opulent Château d’Horizon with Rita Hayworth. The Bal d’Or, held at the Sports Club of Monte Carlo, was a dazzling occasion, the walls of the club’s dining-room newly brightened by gold leaf to match the Maharanee of Baroda’s splendid evening dress and the elegantly wrapped presents which were handed out by a gleaming bevy of gold-frocked ladies. At Cannes, the widow of the great aviation pioneer Louis Blériot put in an appearance to welcome John Derry, who set a new record when he flew down from Paris in 44 minutes. Crowds assembled to watch the British pilot give a sea-skimming demonstration of air stunts in his Vampire the following day.7 And crowds gathered in the steep little town of Monte Carlo on the morning of 23 January to watch the drivers, masked by their goggles and well-muffled in the heavy protective clothes they would need, as they checked their cars and provisions for the gruelling journey out across a Europe which had, for the past ten years, been made inaccessible. This was not simply a rally; it was a symbol. The roads of Europe were open again, and freedom tasted sweet at the wheel of a speeding car.

  One would like to know what conversations took place as the Renault drove out of Monte Carlo that morning. The night before, in the shocked presence of Anne Itier, Hélène had undergone the most humiliating experience of her life. Dressed for a splendid night out, she attended the reception which was being given for the pick of the rally drivers, in their honour. She had been deep in conversation with Itier and their friends, Yvonne Simon and Germaine Rouault, when a tall figure detached himself from a male group on the far side of the room and made his way towards them. Jabbing a finger at Hélène and raising his voice so that nobody could fail to hear his words, he denounced her as a Gestapo agent. It was, he boomed, a disgrace to Monaco and to the rally that this woman had been allowed to participate. Why was she here?

  Silence fell as the drivers turned to stare at Hélène, white-faced, mute with shock. Politely, they waited for her to defend herself. ‘I was,’ she said afterwards, ‘so staggered to hear myself being called an agent that I simply didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even react.’8

  It might have been better if she had; and yet what, in such circumstances, could she possibly say, and who would believe her, when the man who had accused her was Louis Chiron, the adored king of motorsport in Monte Carlo? Monegasque by birth, Chiron had put the principality firmly on the tourist map when he founded its own Grand Prix in 1929; he had been one of the most spectacular winners of the national Grand Prix in 1931; a superb driver, he had the charisma of a film star – and the vanity.

  Immaculately dressed in his light blue overalls and with a polka-dot scarf knotted at his neck, Chiron was a man who enjoyed the company of beautiful women and relished the flattery of the press. Photographs of him show a man who loved the camera and responded to it like a showman. It is conceivable th
at he resented a woman who excelled at diverting press attention to herself; it seems incredible that he would have sought to defame her for such a petty reason. It may be that Hélène had rejected his advances, or that she had angered him by gossiping about his long relationship with Alice Hoffman, the wife of his first influential sponsor. Yet none of these reasons could justify such a vicious and calculated act of revenge.

  Chiron had chosen the place and time at which to make the denunciation with cruel skill. Hélène was French; if she chose to challenge Chiron, she would have to make her claim in a Monaco court, outside French jurisdiction. Antony Noghes, with whom Chiron had founded the Monaco Grand Prix, was President of the Automobile Club of Monaco. He also headed the committee in charge of the Monte Carlo Rally. Noghes was the man to whom any complaint would have to be addressed. He was one of Chiron’s closest friends.

  Itier and Hellé Nice completed the Rally without distinguishing themselves.* Shortly after their return, Hélène wrote a long and dramatic appeal to Antony Noghes whose name, it is worth noticing, was so unfamiliar to her that she misspelt it as Nogues. The letter, of which she preserved a copy, described the nature of the accusation, the horror and shame Chiron had caused, and the damage to her reputation. ‘I can promise you that what he said was bad enough to have influenced everybody who heard him – and they all did,’ she told Noghes, naming her women friends as principal witnesses. She protested her innocence, pointing out that this was the first time such an accusation had been made. She asked Noghes to take note that gossip was already spreading. At Reims, a hasty decision had been taken to ban her from further contact with their course; she had learnt this on her return from the Rally.

  From indignation, she turned to threats. In the first place, she told Noghes, she expected a full written apology from Chiron. If this was not produced, she would take the case to Monaco’s tribunal, where her own name would be cleared and Louis Chiron’s blackened as a teller of untruths. Unchivalrous untruths, she added for good measure.

  On 25 February Noghes dictated a short and carefully noncommittal response. Louis Chiron was unfortunately visiting England for an undetermined period. He would be shown the letter on his return. No assurances were offered; the nature of the accusation was not even mentioned.9

  And then? Applications to the city archives of Nice and Monaco have yielded nothing concerning a trial. The Automobile Club of Monaco, which has a splendid bust of Louis Chiron on show to greet visitors, lacks any evidence of the dispute. The Court of Appeal in Monaco, a magnificently ecclesiastical building, has no files on a case brought against Louis Chiron in the period between 1949 and 1955. Hélène herself kept only the copy of her letter, together with Noghes’s response. It is hard to believe that she would not have kept an apology from Chiron, or proof that she brought a case against him, with a successful outcome. But there is nothing.

  Is it possible that Chiron had grounds for his terrible attack on a fellow racer? An article which was published about Hélène in 1997 has suggested that suspicions were aroused by her friendship with Huschke von Hanstein; why then, did he spare Itier, who knew the German driver, had a brief affair with him and was standing beside Hélène when he made his accusation?10 Even if Hélène did have a brief fling in 1938 with the man later known as ‘the racing baron’, would he have encouraged her to become a Gestapo agent? The idea is frankly absurd: Hanstein was himself arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and given six months in prison for the pitiful crime of going to a Brazilian embassy party in Budapest. Sent to the Russian front, Hanstein finally succeeded in making his way home and kept a low profile for the rest of the war. Nobody who ever met him regarded Huschke von Hanstein as anything other than an ebullient racing and rally driver who later became a brilliant public relations manager for Porsche.11

  There is another possibility. One of Hélène’s carefully preserved photographs shows a handsome airman in his plane, while another shows the same man in his German officer’s uniform. This was General der Flieger Freiherr Friedrich Leopold von Richthofen, who wrote to wish her well after the São Paulo crash. It may be that these photographs hold a secret and that this was a friend who could have lured Hélène into working for the enemy. Even if this was the case, it seems unlikely that she would have been careless enough to keep a photograph of him in full uniform, when friendship with a German officer was all that was required for a charge of collaboration to be launched.

  The photo of Friedrich Leopold von Richthofen, which he sent to Hélène, and which she kept until her death.

  The French records of the war years show nothing relating to Hélène Delangle and there are no extant details of a court case, although the author of the 1997 article was confident that she took steps to clear her name after Chiron’s denunciation. Neither are there any details obtainable in France of native spies who were employed by the Gestapo; the question is, indeed, such a delicate one that a response is extremely hard to obtain.

  The Germans are more forthcoming and, on this issue, more thorough. A detailed list has been created at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin; it gives what is thought to be a comprehensive account of all agents working with the Gestapo in France during the Occupation. Application was made to the Bundesarchiv during the course of researching this book; Hellé Nice is known to the archive keepers neither by her pseudonym nor by her true name. They concluded that she was not, as Chiron had alleged, a Gestapo agent.

  But would she have been prepared to go to court in an unsympathetic principality to prove her innocence? It is possible that the writer who claimed in 1997 that she did so was misinterpreting the evidence. Several of the photographs in the American archive12 to which he was given brief access show Hélène sitting in what appears to be a court-room; they were in fact taken at an official meeting before the Biella Grand Prix of 1935.

  I am, despite that misleading photographic evidence, inclined to share his view. Had a woman as well-known as Hellé Nice proved to be a former Gestapo agent, only four years after the war, the newspapers would have been full of the news and she would have been severely and publicly punished for it. Her crime would be remembered. Since no reference appears anywhere to such a charge, other than in her own copy letter to Noghes, it seems safe to conclude that Chiron backed down. The fact that she never again referred to this humiliating experience need not cause surprise; all that mattered was the clearing of her name. Silence, even after a victory, would have been prudent.

  Let us assume, then, that the case was due to come before the Tribunal of Monaco and that Chiron withdrew his allegation at the last moment. Hélène was vindicated, but her public career was over. She made a last gallant effort to return in 1951. Entered for the local Nice Grand Prix, she was replaced at the last minute by a fierily brilliant young driver, Jean Behra, whose reputation was made the following year when he won the Reims Grand Prix. The decision was not surprising; she was over fifty and she had not competed against men in a Grand Prix since her accident in Brazil. She still had her Renault and the will to drive it, but rallying partners fell away after Chiron’s revelations. Nobody wanted to be seen keeping company with a woman who had been accused of working for Germany; however thorough the vindication had been, the taint of an unsavoury history lingered.

  Arnaldo, while sympathetic and affectionate in the early stages of Hélène’s indignation and unhappiness, grew tired of offering reassurance, especially when it seemed to produce so little effect. She was no longer the strong, attractive woman he had been enchanted by at their first meeting in 1935. Volatile in her moods ever since the São Paulo crash and impossible as a sleeping companion – she would wake after two or three hours, often drenched with sweat after a nightmare in which the moments leading up to the crash were replayed – her hatred of Louis Chiron, her destroyer, was beginning to mark itself on her face. Lines pulled down her laughing mouth and emerged like gullies in the anxious frown which had become her most recognizable expression.

  Arnaldo began to look elsewhere f
or pleasure. The unoriginal cover story of playing cards with a few friends in the afternoons was soon blown. Caught and forgiven, on the first occasion, he was trapped between the desire to leave a woman to whom he was no longer attracted and the fact that he remained financially dependent on her. Awkwardly, he tried to change the nature of the relationship, making light of his infidelities, seeking her advice about how to escape the advances of some unusually predatory lady. It seemed to him that Hélène was content in this role; years later, she was still wondering that any man could have been so obtuse. She had, she remembered, once asked him why he chose to tell her so much more than she wanted to hear. She never forgot his answer: ‘Why, who else could I tell?’13

  15

  SANS EVERYTHING

  ‘Je crois que la chance a perdu mon adresse.’*

  HELLÉ NICE TO JANALLA JARNACH, 18 APRIL 1967

  Arnaldo Binelli, according to Hélène’s own account, was responsible for her financial ruin. In 1950 he met a Parisian businessman who persuaded him to borrow her savings for investment in a Liechtenstein-based company. The compensation she received after her crash at São Paulo had been changed from Brazilian milreis into gold in the Canaries; its value in 1950 was, by her own calculation, approximately three million francs (approx £42,000 in modern currency). Arnaldo, as a Swiss citizen, was legally entitled to take the money abroad; his business partner was not. The two men were arrested by the customs and imprisoned. They were eventually released but the money disappeared – along with the Parisian financier.

  This was the bizarre explanation which Hélène produced for her vertiginous plunge from riches to poverty; telling the story in 1974, she was even ready to suggest that Arnaldo had fabricated the businessman in order to gain possession of her money and lock it up in a Swiss bank account.1 She may have been fantasizing; she certainly exaggerated the sum involved.* There is, however, no doubt about the fact that the money had disappeared.