The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

  AFTERWORD

  When I first knew Warner Dailey, he was selling antiquities from his house in London. Outside, the street by a greasy canal set the scene for a 1950s gangster movie; Warner, narrow-faced as a fox under a black fedora, matched his row of sleek Packards and black Citroëns to perfection. Inside, the house was crammed with oddities which had taken his fancy: Winston Churchill’s telephone, an eighteenth-century bed shaped like a Russian troika, dress-shop dummies, box cameras, a cardinal’s chair, photographs of pale girls framed in plaits of their own hair.

  Articles were written about Warner and his house; the guests who braved evenings in the dark and strangely menacing kitchen smiled in disbelief when told that their dinner rolls came courtesy of the dustbins at the Savoy or Claridges. (Their provenance, although they had arrived via the back door, was always of the best.) Warner, one of the few true eccentrics I have known, saw nothing strange in his collection or his catering arrangements.

  Fifteen years later, Warner and his wife moved to the South of France. He was still in business. Every Sunday morning, he visited a car-boot sale in an olive grove at Cogolin, a few kilometres inland from Saint-Tropez. And there, one morning in 1994, he spotted a thick, slightly battered album of yellowing sports cuttings, for which the dealer was asking 700 francs. One of the newspaper items showed a girl with short blonde hair and an earsplitting grin, sitting at the wheel of a racing car. The caption read: ‘Hellé-Nice, Champion racer.’ Somebody had written a date beside it: ‘1929’.

  700 francs (£70) was a considerable outlay for a collection of cuttings about an unknown woman, but Warner bought the book. A dealer mentioned another, very similar, which had been sold a few weeks earlier at a Nice flea-market. There was a good chance it might turn up again. Four months later, he had the chance to buy the companion book for a thousand francs. Whoever the unknown lady might be, her value was rising.

  Peter Hawkins, the man in charge of Christie’s car auctions in Monaco, helped him take the next step. The car which appeared most consistently in the albums was a Bugatti; the deed of sale, also with the cuttings, provided a registration number. If the car survived, its owner would be listed with that number at the Bugatti Trust. Six months later, Warner had managed to track the Bugatti to Ben Rose, an American with a passion for vintage cars. Rose, happy to reunite the scrapbooks with the Hellé Nice Bugatti, bought them for $7,000. Two years later, the books and car were sold, for a considerably larger sum, to another collector.

  In August 2000 I met up with Warner and his wife after a long gap in our friendship. Over dinner, Warner announced that he knew a wonderful story which needed to be written. He told me about the albums; a few days later, he sent me a three-year-old article from a car magazine. Titled ‘One Hellé of a Girl’, it sketched the extraordinary life of a Frenchwoman who went from working as a striptease dancer to become the most successful female racing driver of the thirties before a liaison with a German driver led to accusations of Nazi sympathies, forcing her to clear her name in court. ‘If only Hellé Nice had written her autobiography,’ the article concluded; beside it, Warner had scrawled: ‘Yes! But fear not! Miranda is on the case!’

  He was right. I had fallen for that bold laughing girl in the car the moment I saw her face. The problem was that the scrapbooks had disappeared, along with the car; Warner had no clue who had bought them or how to reach Ben Rose and I was worried about researching a life of which so little was known, and for which all research was likely to be in a foreign language. Bugatti fans soon introduced me to a good point from which to start. Souvenirs d’un bugattiste, published in 1997, showed a photograph of Hellé Nice on its jacket; a picture of her draped in a scarf and nothing else was credited to the collection of the author, Antoine Raffaelli. It was rumoured that Raffaelli had acquired a huge collection of her papers in the south of France at about the same time that Warner Dailey picked up the first scrapbook. Diligently tracked to Marseille, M. Raffaelli kept his head down and answered nothing. Eventually, he said that he was unwell.

  The new owner of the Hellé Nice Bugatti rang me on Christmas Eve 2001, apologizing for his delay. A month later, Oscar Davis drove me to his New Jersey office to inspect the scrapbooks and, for the first time in my life, to sit in a racing car. Her car, no less, the very one in which she beat the world record at Montlhéry in 1929. I didn’t expect the Bugatti to be so pretty; I hadn’t, until I drove one, fast, understood the exquisite adrenalin-filled rush it would bring, a feeling of exhilaration, of excited, dangerous joy. Few experiences could match the intense happiness of racing in a car like this.

  The cuttings in the albums loosely confirmed the article I had read. I still had no idea of her beginnings, her family, her love life – with the exception of a reference to von Hanstein – or her end. I didn’t even know where she had died, and I needed that information most of all. In France, unlike Britain, beginnings are found in ends; the details of birth are recorded alongside the entry of death. Common sense suggested that if the scrapbooks surfaced near Saint-Tropez, she must have been living somewhere nearby. Somewhere with a racing history: that narrowed it down to Monte Carlo and Nice.

  Nice it was, and my elation faded as I walked up rue Edouard Scoffier. I knew from the interviews in the scrapbooks that this was a woman who loved light, mountains, sunshine: it seemed terrible that she should have spent her last years in the cold shadow of the cliffs behind Nice, in this grey and desolate house. A friendly basement squatter let me in and left me to wander at liberty through the neglected rooms. Knocking at the house next door, I spoke to a woman who looked baffled by my questions. Hellé Nice? No, the name meant nothing. Nevertheless, I scribbled down her own name: Madame Louis Lavagna.

  Hélène had been born, as I now knew, at Aunay-sous-Auneau, near Chartres. Here, and at Sainte-Mesme, it became possible to shape her early years. I saw the tiny house which had once been inhabited by the postmaster, the school she had attended, the Delangle home at Sainte-Mesme and the drab little building at the far end of the village where, I was given to understand, Solange Delangle had kept to herself, never speaking of her private affairs. An old neighbour remembered that he had, as a child, seen Solange’s sister arrive in a big smart car; the local historian, Roger Delayre, established that Alexandrine Delangle, the mother, had passed as the wife of a M. Bernard during her life in the village. The gravestone was perplexing; I could not understand why, if Hellé Nice was recorded as having been buried here, there was no mention of her name.

  Back in England, I decided to send a photograph of Hellé Nice to Madame Lavagna and see if it might jog her memory. It did. She had forgotten the name, she wrote back apologetically. Yes, she remembered her now, a shabby, lively little woman with a blue Simca who had been taken in by M. Agostinucci as a charity case. If it was any help, she could give me the name and address of the landlord’s daughter; she might have kept something.

  She had. In April 2002, when I was in despair of ever finding the material I needed, Andrée Agostinucci let me into her house on avenue Mendeguren in Nice, high on one of the hill roads which twist up from the back of the town. Hellé Nice had, as I now knew, once been her neighbour, although they had never met. Andrée, a small, graceful girl, explained that she had found a trunk of papers, letters and photographs in a garage on one of her father’s properties. He was dead; nobody was interested in the trunk; she decided that it was worth rescuing. And she, like Warner and myself, had fallen under the spell of the woman whose story it disclosed.

  Later that day, Andrée introduced me to the contents of the trunk. Here, at last, was the stuff of which biographer’s dreams are made, letters, pictures, cuttings, piles of them, none of which had ever been seen before. One of the letters was from a Madame Jarnach at an organization called La Roue Tourne; Andrée urged me to get in touch with her.

  Before then, however, I had another stroke of good luck. Antoine Raffaelli, having failed to respond for two years, sent me the address of Wolfgang Stamm, to
whom he had sold his collection. He enclosed a photograph of Hellé Nice which I had never seen before. A present, he said kindly, to make up for having kept me waiting. It was one of the best pictures of her I had yet seen.

  A fortnight later, Wolfgang Stamm and I met up in the foyer of a Heathrow hotel. After dinner, he opened his briefcase and spread a second feast on the second table. Here, wonderfully, was a naked Hellé Nice, arms upstretched to capture a fluttering white dove, Hellé Nice driving a Miller on an American speedway in 1930, Hellé Nice and her raffish American manager, Ralph Hankinson, Hellé Nice’s boyfriend Billy Winn, scribbling a message ‘to the sweetest little girl in the world’ on a handsome picture of himself – and, of course, the picture we had all seen in Raffaelli’s book, Hellé Nice scantily draped in a gauze scarf for a studio shot. Wolfgang Stamm said that I could use whatever I liked from the collection for my book. Such generosity is, in my own experience, rare; in my search for Hellé Nice, it was what I had come to expect.

  The last great find came almost by chance. I had no expectations of finding anything in Paris, but it seemed courteous to pay a call on Madame Jarnach, since La Roue Tourne had evidently played an important role in Hellé Nice’s life. Visiting a gracious chair-bound lady with a magnificent coiffure in November 2002, I was told that she had arranged for me be taken to lunch on the premises of the charity. Seeing my long face – I had planned to enjoy an off-duty afternoon – she added that I might find it quite helpful for my researches.

  Lunch at La Roue Tourne was a cheerful experience, well laced with wine in honour of a dancer whose father had been a film stuntman, and whose birthday it was. My neighbour at the long table was a tiny ninety-year-old tightrope walker who showed off some of his skills after the meal. Later, Jeannine Chaponnay, the charity’s secretary and general organizer, took me up to Hélène’s little bedroom, grey and cold enough to make it clear why she fled back to the warmth of the south. They had, Jeannine added tentatively, kept some of her photographs and letters, if I was interested. Also, her address book. Everything, of course, was at my disposal, if I cared to borrow or make copies.

  The last part of the story came together that afternoon as Jeannine, the retired dancer, and I sorted through the piles of close-written letters from Hélène – always Hellé in this correspondence – to her last and most faithful friend. Here was the pathetic story of the final years after the defection of Arnaldo Binelli, years in which, without the support of La Roue Tourne, she could not have survived. ‘You will always be our Hellé, and we will always look after you,’ Madame Jarnach had promised in one of her letters. It was evident that she had kept her word.

  Gaps remain. I have used imagination to recreate the story of Hellé Nice’s earliest years; it is still not clear when or why she left Sainte-Mesme for an independent life in Paris, or how she became such an accomplished dancer. (Novelists will sympathize with my longing to have made something of the summer school for missionaries which existed at Sainte-Mesme while Hélène was a teenager; unfortunately, not a scrap of evidence could be found on which to build a link.) Her relationship with Henri de Courcelles (‘Couc’ in all the personal annotations) is conjectured from photographs and from the many pages of cuttings which she preserved about him, together with his obituaries. Marcel Mongin remains something of a mystery figure, as does Henri Thouvenet. The nature of her friendship with Ettore and Jean Bugatti is open to speculation; so is the mysterious loss of her wealth in the period following Louis Chiron’s claim that she worked for the Gestapo.

  Caution is required when relying on the evidence of a woman whose memory is defective and it is clear that Hélène’s memory became unreliable after her crash in 1936. In one undated interview, given in 1938, she joked that she could no longer recognize her own mother’s face or even her own apartment block. Research shows that many of the dates and circumstances noted in her albums were inaccurate. She remembered, to take a single example, having participated with Anne Itier in the 1950 Monte Carlo Rally; Itier did enter it, but with another partner. Hellé Nice was not a 1950 entrant. I have restored the true events wherever it has been possible to verify them.

  The story I have told will not, I am afraid, satisfy the experts who would like to know precisely which cars she owned and which were loaned to her, the degree to which they were customized for her needs, the links between her and Itier, the way that she was perceived by her mechanics, the reasons that she chose to continue driving an outdated Alfa Romeo when she could, as it seems, have easily afforded to buy a more competitive machine. My aim has been to tell her story rather than to provide a technical history of her career. My hope is that I may have established the ground from which more detailed researches can be undertaken.

  My wish, above all, is that her extraordinary life should not be forgotten. A heroine who rose from obscurity, and who now lies in an unmarked grave, deserves to be honoured and recalled as she was once described, as a champion of the world.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Without Warner Dailey, ably backed by his wife, Fiona, this book would never have been written. Andrée Agostinucci and Patrick Trapani, Brian Brunkhorst, Oscar Davis, Janalla Jarnach, Simon Moore, Antoine Raffaelli and Wolfgang Stamm have been immensely generous in allowing me to make use of their collections, and their time. Jean-Pierre Potier has been steadily kind and helpful in providing introductions and information; Dick Ploeg and Patricia Lee Yongue have been the best of email friends to me, supplying answers to my interminable questions with a patience and good humour far beyond the call of duty.

  My thanks are also due, with apologies to anybody whose help has been neglected here, to:

  Pierre Abeillon, at La Revue des automobiles; Joan Acoccella, Jean-Louis Arbey at The Bugatti Club of France; the Bugatti Trust at Prescott, with particular thanks to Richard Day and Sue Ward; the Brooklands Museum, where I gratefully remember John Tarring and the late John Granger; the Motor Museum at Beaulieu, where Malcolm Thorne helped me to find some wonderful material. At Beaulieu sur Mer in France, I was kindly assisted by André Cané; at Aunay-sous-Auneau, Raymond Barenton and the mayor, Monsieur Picault, were patient, helpful and informative. Thanks also to Philippe Aubert, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, for book loans and valuable advice; The Military Archives of Berlin, the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale; Alan Black, William Boddy, Malcolm and Ian Brackenbury, the staff of the British Library, William Cash, the Casino de Paris, M. Cavalier, Giles Chapman, Jeannine Chaponnay at La Roue Tourne, Tom Clifford, Ian Connell, Gerard Crombach, Gordon Cruickshank, Charles Dean, Roger Delayre at Sainte-Mesme, Elsie Burch Donald, Trevor Dunmore at the RAC library, everybody at Ivan Dutton Ltd, Irene Testot Ferry, Gregor Fisken, M.R.D. Foot, Simone des Forest and her family, Lynn Garafola, Andrew Graham, Robert Greskovic, Malcolm Harris, Malcolm Jeal at the Veterans Car Club, Louis Klementowski, Danielle Lallart at the archives of Aunay-sous-Auneau, Madame Louis Lavagna, Mike Lawrence, Katherine Legge, the late Joan Littlewood, the staff of the London Library, David Long, Maurice Louch, Mike Lynch, Alastair Macaulay, Stanley Mann, John Marks, Mike Marshal, Lester Matthews, the Midlands Motor Museum, the automobile club of Monaco, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, the appeal court of Monaco, the Archives Municipales of Nice, with especial thanks to Mireille Massot, Louis-Gilles Pairault, Agnes Rougier and Auguste Verola; Patrick O’Connor, the staff of the Archives de Paris; Jimmy Piget, Sam Posey, Don Radbruch, Peter Rickley, Lord Rothschild, Roland Saunier, Joe Saward, David Sewell, Alessandro Silva, Leif Snellman, Evelyn Stoddard, Ken Summers at CHH Motorcars, Simon Taylor, David Thirlby, Antonia Till, Gillian Tindall, David Venables, Nick Walker at the Vintage Car Club, Mick Walsh, author of the first – and, at present, the only – British article on Hellé Nice to be published after her death.

  Thanks are also due to two splendid agents, Anthony Goff and Henry Dunow, and to my wonderful editors, Andrew Gordon, Martin Bryant and Ileene Smith. Thanks also to Pen Campbell and Alan Hollinghurst.

  Especial thanks to my son and daug
hter-in-law, Merlin and Shula Sinclair, for support and company when it was most needed; and to Thomas, Sallie, and the matchless trio.

  APPENDIX 1

  Translation of a letter sent from São Paulo by Arnaldo Binelli to Charles Faroux, editor of L’Auto, Paris, July 1936 (Agostinucci Collection).

  Dear Sir

  I have just received the article about Miss Hellé Nice’s accident which was published on 15 July. L’Auto seems not to know what took place as much of the detail is inaccurate. I am enclosing, to let you judge for yourself, a photo which was taken at the precise moment of the accident. You will be able to see that there was no barrier, no form of organization and people standing all over the circuit. You can see that the race was still going on and you will appreciate that there were fifteen more cars coming up behind at high speed.

  You seem not to have have understood that the accident took place just 25 metres before the end of the 60th – and final – lap. Look at the photograph and you will see that the car on the left is de Teffe’s and that Miss Hellé Nice is on the right, in the process of passing him. You can see that de Teffe is not making room for her, but the main cause of the accident is the crowd of spectators who ran out on to the circuit to cheer on the Brazilian who seemed about to lose third place so near to the end. The cars were doing about 140 kph. The inquiry has reached the view that the spectators were to blame and that Miss Hellé Nice was their first victim.

  I am Miss Hellé Nice’s mechanic and I was standing by the finishing line, 25 metres from the accident, so I saw everything. All the French people out here are unhappy about L’Auto’s account. Miss Hellé Nice is doing reasonably well now and she should be able to explain everything to you herself on her return. She will also be able to produce photographs and a film which offer clear evidence of the events.