by Susan Ronald
The Paris to which Florence returned in October 1916 was a distinctly different place. “Madame Lacaze,” as Florence became known as a divorced woman, gazed upon large billboards dotted throughout the city. These outlined where “the front” was located, with its infinitesimal advances and retreats from the trenches regularly updated. The front had stalled only forty-five miles from the capital. From Montmartre, frequent fireworks of mortar shells lit the night sky, entertaining the often blasé onlookers. Although the Germans had captured the industrial heartland of the northeast, creating shortages of all manner of supplies, including ammunition,* many Parisians seemed distinctly unconcerned with the horrific, and at times senseless, bloodshed reported daily. Two years of war had hardened souls.
Florence’s beloved Paris was overrun with older men and young women, soldiers on leave and thinly disguised deserters. Many simply did not believe the war would last, or that the injuries to France’s youth could be so devastating. Still, when their men did not come home for the first Christmas of 1914 or the one after that or the following one, everyone asked when and how it would finally end.
Florence, like so many others, was more concerned with how she could keep her mind off the air raids and nearby bombardments. The museums were closed. The Paris Opéra was dark, as were the theaters in the early years of the war. Only the music halls like the Folies Bergère and Moulin Rouge remained open.
Meanwhile, writers of a rainbow of nationalities volunteered for the various international ambulance corps. Natalie Barney’s “Temple of Friendship” was where one went to hear the readings of works by poets killed in the war, accompanied by “sweet and sad music.” Charity dinners were held by salonnières for the war effort, and it was at these that Florence had her chance to sing, and be discovered, at long last. Years later, in reminiscing about this time in her life, she said—in contradiction of all her other memories—that she hadn’t settled on singing bel canto opera as her career.1 There was, of course, no mention of her attending the Conservatoire de Paris, as it was a lie that could easily be revealed to all and sundry. Undoubtedly, her reception at these dinners fell far short of the adulation she felt was her due.
Patriotism was the order of the day. The reclusive, hypochondriac writer Marcel Proust skulked about the city in the early evenings to check on his investment in the gay brothel at the squalid Hôtel Marigny on rue de l’Arcade. He observed that the only form of patriotism on show was the transformation in fashion. Designers Jean Patou and Paul Poiret were working for the army, not only in creating chic uniforms, but also in the relentless search for an “invisible” blue. Their myriad outfits not only failed in their mission—after all, how much blood and guts and mud does it take to render “unchic” and “unblue” even the most carefully tailored garment—but their dozens of shades of blue created confusion as to which one was the correct one for the uniforms of the French army. Still, their preoccupation with their fruitless commissions made way for younger, inventive designers like Coco Chanel. Unable to source exotic feathers or silks that proliferated before the war, Chanel, though still only a milliner, successfully adapted locally available fabrics to her simpler designs of straw hats and felt berets redolent of the French countryside of her youth. Wearing Chanel’s hats caught on as a symbol of patriotism.
The military look became high fashion, and Florence was among the bevy of women clamoring for a Chanel hat and her own handmade pair of military high-heeled boots. Cosmetics, too, became a boon industry, and Florence, like so many young women, began wearing rice powder to remove the shine from her nose. Fashion, always a way of life for French women, had become a recreational pastime in war.
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Not all women, however, were occupied with selfish enterprises in the first two years of this nightmare war. As deaths and casualties mounted to the hundreds of thousands, the American upper crust of Paris stepped to the fore. Winnaretta Singer de Polignac returned to a stunned city in October 1914, just as Florence was sailing to America. Winnaretta saw the long queues of people lining the streets hoping to empty their increasingly worthless cash from their bank accounts. The Métro was no longer running, and many newspapers had to cease printing for lack of newsprint. With each month that passed, some young man Winnaretta knew and loved had died. Nephews Henri de Polignac and Jacques Descazes, the youngest of her sister Belle-Blanche’s three children, were killed. It was time she put her fortune to work to stop the madness.
In March 1915, Winnaretta met with the first female Nobel Prize winner, Marie Curie. The scientist was attempting to buy automobiles that hadn’t been requisitioned by the government to convert them into mobile X-ray units. Curie believed that by enabling field surgeons to more readily locate bullets, X-rays would facilitate battlefield surgery, and thousands of lives could be saved. It was a view not necessarily shared by the generals or government, due to lack of funds and shortsightedness toward innovation. Curie’s mission would need, therefore, to be privately funded. Of course, Winnaretta donated one of her own automobiles and covered all the costs to purchase and install the radiological equipment. As Curie personally trained 150 female attendants to operate the vehicles and apparatus, Winnaretta shamed her other aristocratic friends into donating in equal measure to herself.2
She also joined the French branch of the pianist-turned-politician Ignace Paderewski’s General Committee for Polish Relief, which distributed much-needed supplies to Poland. Working with Consuelo Vanderbilt, the estranged wife of the Duke of Marlborough, to fund the 350-bed hospital in Suresnes on the outskirts of Paris,* Winnaretta went on to become the driving force on the Franco-American Committee for the War Blind. She organized the purchase of a large old hotel in Sceaux, another suburb of Paris, as their lodgings. She tirelessly raised funds from friends, newspaper columnists, and press barons alike, while also securing the personal patronage of French President Raymond Poincaré.3
In the late spring of 1917, Florence, too, did what she could for the war effort. Like many society women, she volunteered as a nurse, and after her training, worked in a hospital in Limoges, in the southwest of France.4 While Florence could hardly be called a “society lady” as a twenty-one-year-old divorcée of modest means, her infallible belief in herself allowed her to pretend that she was. Perhaps the only way she could convince others that she was a “society lady” was to go where no one knew her, far away from her Paris home. Naturally, it is also possible that, once she had volunteered for service, Florence was posted, like any soldier, where the nursing administration felt she was most needed. In the second war with Germany twenty-two years on, she boasted to her German writer friend Ernst Jünger that “I could stomach the amputation of a leg far better than a hand,” without giving Jünger further insight.5
Whatever the reason for the Limoges posting, her patients there had been stabilized in field hospitals or in other centers near Paris before being shipped out, so the injuries treated were, generally, complications from surgery, the spread of infection, secondary amputations as a result of gangrene, shellshock—known today as post-traumatic stress disorder—or simply long-term convalescence.6
While Florence may have harbored daydreams of tending to the wounds of a major or colonel, who more than likely would be the son of a wealthy landowner, she was too shrewd to fall for the trap commonly set by doctors at the hospital who asked if she would like to tend to the wounded officers only. Yet it is here in Limoges that the first remarks about her loud laugh rang out. Her raucous sense of humor was tickled by the conscripts’ salutes to those nurses who preferred ministering to officers. Often resentful of what seemed like shoddy treatment, the French poilus organized coordinated rear-gun cannonades, let loose to the chagrin of many an embarrassed nurse, who would scurry to the windows to let in the fresh air.7 Florence was not one to blush, rush, or hide from insults.
Similarly, she regaled in the mockery made of some aspects of the war in the weeklies like the glossy magazine La Vie Parisienne, aimed at officers.
L’Illustration, meanwhile, targeted amusing the general reading public. La Baïonnette pandered to the working classes, with fewer articles and more cartoons, pinups, and caricatures. A veritable humorous war of postcards broke out where “Tommies”—the British rank-and-file—joined a French poilu in spanking the Kaiser, or the poilus on leave bequeathed souvenirs of lice to the places they visited. In all the printed media, the Germans were reduced to the third-century barbaric Hun archetype, and their helmets, called pickelhaubes, intended to inspire fear on sight, became objects of ridicule. The naughty postcard of a lady’s bent-over nude bottom with a likeness of the Kaiser painted on it and a pickelhaube perched atop was a bestseller.
Since the front was so close to the capital, it was unusually easy for writers who weren’t serving in the ambulance corps or the army to visit and write about what was going on. Other writers were in the thick of it. Jean-Paul Sartre became a prisoner of war. Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hamett, and even Walt Disney all drove ambulances and ammunitions trucks at the front. Edith Wharton was one of many who made a tour of the trenches.* Gertrude Stein wrote, “The 1914–1918 war made everyone drunk … there was never so much drunkenness in France as there was then, soldiers all learned to drink, everybody drank.” French soldiers were often ordered to drink tafia—100 proof alcohol straight from a frontline still—just before going “over the top” of their trenches. Good, properly brewed tafia was tested in a spoonful mixed with gunpowder. If it exploded, it was the genuine stuff. The African-American former boxer turned Foreign Legionnaire Eugene Bullard said, “It made us more like madmen than soldiers.”8
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Although the United States remained neutral until the spring of 1917, there were thousands of American Francophiles who volunteered much earlier for the American Volunteer Corps and the Foreign Legion. The advantage for Americans stranded or working freelance in France was obvious: Not only could they help the war effort, but they could be fed at the French government’s expense. The Presbyterian pastor at Princeton University, Sylvester Beach, a former chaplain to the American Cathedral in Paris, encouraged the university’s 181 volunteers prior to America’s entry into the war to join up. “In Princeton, we are all for war,” he declared. His daughter, Sylvia, who was living in Paris at the time, had left the city to be an agricultural volunteer in the countryside so a farmer’s son would be able to join the good fight at the front.9
With the arrival of the American forces, Florence took stock. Even though Russia pulled out of the war after the victory of the Bolsheviks in their October 1917 Revolution, it was a racing certainty that the entry of the United States would swing the balance of power in favor of the Allies. American men, fresh and able, as well as American war materiel, would make all the difference, Florence reasoned. Still, as these doughboys† appeared over the horizon like the legendary Fifth Cavalry, Florence had to admit to herself that she was neither fully French nor fully American. To boot, the war had put her life and aspirations on hold. Her brief stint as a singer at charity galas in the homes of the Parisian salonnières in the 1916–1917 season was an eye-opener. She had kidded herself long enough that she was going to succeed as an opera singer. She was twenty-one, a divorcée, with few prospects. Still, she could sing popular songs, and she danced wonderfully. Besides, her shapely legs and ankles, along with her other undoubted attractions, made men remark that she was, quite simply, drop-dead gorgeous.
When, where, or how she had the idea to lower her sights to become a chorus girl remains Florence’s secret. She never divulged her innermost thoughts to her friends except Cécile Tellier—and the devoted Cécile never spoke out. In fact, the only proof that Florence performed onstage at all resides in a series of newspaper articles dating from December 14, 1918, to September 14, 1919, in which Florence is named by the former dance hall performer Mrs. Edith Kelly Gould as the co-respondent in her divorce from American millionaire Frank Jay Gould. In one article, Florence is described as “a former Parisian beauty” who had “returned to the stage in Paris and at the time she is said to be acquainted with Gould while playing at the Folies-Bergère.”10 No wonder Florence’s memory lapsed years on, when she claimed that she had met Gould in 1921, introduced to him at a salon by the French Brazilian pianist Magda Tagliaferro and newspaper caricaturist Sem.11 If it were widely known among the gossips in the salonnière community that Florence had also become embroiled in a divorce suit with an American millionaire, all doors to le gratin of Paris would have slammed shut.
Still, there was more to it than that. Florence had always been an unmitigated snob. In 1918, the Folies Bergère was much more than the nude chorus girls its name conjures up today. While topless women appeared on its stage as early as 1907 in a pantomime entitled La Chair (The Flesh), where the cuckolded husband tore the clothes from his wife’s body, the resulting lack of outrage was unexpected. The breasts revealed in La Chair belonged to the actress, and later writer, Colette, the second woman in France to achieve the rank of Grand Officier de la Légion d’honneur. The Folies star performer, Maurice Chevalier, who became her lover shortly after, wrote, “Colette was a superb example of the 1908 beauty. Plump, broad shouldered, a trifle stocky … with a high, full, shapely bosom, a bosom which is—oh, here goes—the most exciting, appetizing bosom in the world!”12 Nonetheless, Colette was unhappy with her pioneering bare breasts at the Folies, but had little choice when directed to allow her violent disrobement. She was flat broke, kicked out of the marital home by her bounder of a husband, Willy, and living on the goodwill of her lesbian lover, the Marquise de Belbeuf. While Florence was not plump, broad shouldered, or a trifle stocky, her slender shape, bosom, and legs were often admired by Chevalier when they danced the rhumba together.
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The Folies was not alone in pioneering scantily clad women. This was also the heyday of Florenz Ziegfeld and his Ziegfeld Follies in New York. From 1907 through to his final show in 1931, Ziegfeld launched the careers—and breasts—of some three thousand beauties. Some grabbed noble titles while rifling through their husbands’ wealth, while the less fortunate were used and discarded into poverty, or eventual suicide. For Florence, the Folies was her means to grab the best future she could for herself with both hands and never let go.
When Ziegfeld was criticized for his wanton disregard for his performers’ welfare, he replied that his nudes were never allowed to budge so much as a little finger. They were tastefully arranged in tableaus among the bucolic scenery, wearing strategically placed laces, rosebuds, or spangles. To Ziegfeld, he was re-creating artistic tableaux vivants reminiscent of fine paintings.13 While Ziegfeld shocked Broadway, the chauffeurs of the “Four Hundred” still drove up to the theater to collect their patrons: Guggenheim, Rhinelander Stewart, Vanderbilt, Biddle, and Hutton. The Folies Bergère wove its own brand of magic in Paris, attracting its clientele from among le Tout-Paris and le gratin. Surely, there, Florence would be noticed?
After all, Anna Pavlova, the daughter of a laundress and unknown father like Berthe Lacaze, performed opposite Nijinsky there. Charlie Chaplin, aged only fourteen—forever “Charlot,” the little vagabond to the French—enchanted audiences from the outset. Mistinguett sang and danced, sprinkling her Marseilles accent with the fairy dust of the new snobbery—an English accent. Along with her lover, the debonair singer Maurice Chevalier, the pair thrilled the audiences while fully clothed. Arletty, originally a fashion model for Paul Poiret and discovered, as many girls dreamed, while walking along the street, took to the stage with French matinee idol Jean Gabin in 1912. Clown acts, jugglers, magicians, circus riders, and female impersonators from the four corners of the globe were just some of the acts adorning the stage of the Folies Bergère.14
Still, with the war, even the Folies had to change its approach to entertainment. At the outset, young actors either volunteered to fight or to entertain at the front. Its current owner, Paul Derval, who had abolished the ladies of the promenoir, that s
cantily clad backdrop to the main revue, reintroduced his “small nudes.” Gemma la Bellissima, a dancing girl in see-through green gauze, became the resident “Dancer in the Nude” and the crowds of soldiers on leave, newshounds, and deserters flocked in alongside the men who were too old to fight. “During the Great War,” Maurice Chevalier wrote, “the breasts of the girls at the Folies became a sort of symbol of what a great number of troops briefly on leave from the agony of the front line thought they were fighting for.” Indeed, when Italy entered the war, the Folies marked the occasion with a parade of “twenty magnificent girls” decked out in Italian uniform with one breast exposed.15 Most of the chorus girls were English, having learned their craft at dance schools back home. They lived in a hostel nearby, jealously guarded by their English nannies to make sure nothing untoward happened to them.
When Florence appeared sometime in the summer of 1918, she was an exception in more ways than one. She was, of course, not English. She also lived at home with her mother and sister. Most significantly, she was no ingénue, and entered the life of the dance hall with her wits about her. She knew about the Guggenheims and Vanderbilts at the Ziegfeld Follies as much as she knew about le gratin of Paris and visiting royalty, who frequented the Folies. Perhaps she was one of the many gowned mannequins habillés (scantily dressed models) rather than a nude sporting her cache-sexe, or strategically positioned fig leaf. Perhaps not. Maybe she was a backup singer for Mistinguett or—more likely—Arletty, who became Florence’s friend around this time. Sadly, again, Florence never said.
Instead, Florence recounted the fantasy to her friends that she first met Frank J. Gould when he heard her sing at a charity gala in 1921. He was so smitten with her beauty that he came up to her and proposed marriage on the spot. Her story was that she took two years to give in to his unswerving pursuit. The history, however, widely publicized at the time in France and in the United States, reflects a different truth.
