by Susan Ronald
No matter what the outcome of George’s and Edith’s counterclaims to his own, Frank proved to Florence that he was a man of his word. He had been sober for three years. He had bought Florence cars, jewels, and her own hôtel particulier on the Right Bank. He had arranged for her introduction into Parisian high society. Finally, he had made it quite clear that he was, separate from the Gould family trust, willing and able to keep Florence in the style to which she wanted to become accustomed. He owned several transit system traction companies including the Virginia Railway, and combined them into the Virginia Railway and Power Company that was capitalized at $42 million.18 Most significant of all, hadn’t they had oodles of fun? Frank asked. Florence had to admit that even without access to half of Frank’s riches, he was an exceedingly wealthy multimillionaire.
Another year passed. Frank, now age forty-five, and Florence, already twenty-seven, were wed at last on February 10, 1923, at the Mairie in the bride’s parish of the sixteenth arrondissement in Paris. Frank was Protestant, but this time, there would be no asking of forgiveness of the Catholic Church. Florence’s witness was her accompanist, Geo Dequenne. Frank’s was Charles G. Loeb. Neither Florence’s mother, Berthe, nor her sister, Isabelle, were present. Berthe’s pleadings for Frank to make Florence an “honest woman” and her remarks about his womanizing and ungovernable drinking were the most likely causes. As for Isabelle, she could not be trusted by Florence to keep her mouth shut about Henry Heynemann. Florence would not allow anyone to hurt her chances of bagging her millionaire.
The San Francisco Chronicle, naturally, made the wedding their page-one banner headline: FRANK J. GOULD MARRIES S.F. GIRL WHO WAS NAMED BY EX-WIFE AS CORESPONDENT. Unlike complimentary articles that describe the bride’s gown, or the groom looking handsome, no newspaper in the United States waxed lyrical about either Frank or Florence. Their eloquence was, surprisingly, present in the unwritten word.
If Frank and George had agreed to private nonbinding discussions on how to end the deadlock, they were cut short by George’s untimely death of pneumonia on the French Riviera in May 1923. That autumn, Frank kept the litigation alive by refiling charges against George’s heirs to the estate. If successful, Frank’s lawsuit would sweep away the $4 million left to Guinevere in a trust fund George had set up to protect his widow.19 By the time an eventual agreement between family members was reached “in the interests of harmony” on Christmas Eve 1926—and at an estimated cost of $10,000 each day in legal fees—the Gould family estate had shrunk to a mere $50 million.
* * *
Unsurprisingly, there was a vengeful wedding present from Edith to the happy couple, too. Edith—still calling herself Edith Kelly Gould—announced her intention to open on the Paris stage in a musical revue at the Alhambra Theatre in the autumn season. Frank and his bride were livid, and issued proceedings to forestall Edith. When that failed, Frank sued to make Edith drop the Gould name, which to his mind, she was bringing into disrepute.20 She appeared on stage before the courts could hear the case, warning the press that Frank and his bride might wish to “crab” her performance. There was, and is, nothing like a whiff of scandal to make a box office smash. Still, justice prevailed in Florence’s eyes. The scorned Edith lost both the Gould name and any right to Frank’s fortune. Apparently, the French courts—rightly—took umbrage at Edith’s long battle to prove the French divorce invalid, while later arguing that under French law she was entitled to half of all Frank owned in France.
An interesting statement made by Frank’s lawyer in the dying embers of Edith’s litigation indicated that “Frank never wished to abandon America, citing the fact that the millionaire evaded paying French taxes on the grounds that he paid U.S. income tax, and was therefore, exempt elsewhere.… Mr. Gould lives in France solely because he needs special treatment for an illness by French specialists and because he desires to train his race horses.”21
Illness? What illness? Surely Frank’s lawyer was not referring to his alcoholism, since it was not seen as an illness or disease until long after. Another recognized, and terrifying, illness springs to mind. Did Frank have syphilis, contracted during his days amused by the demimondaine Leone Ritz? Had he passed it on to Florence? If so, was her treatment for syphilis—the cocktail of the organic arsenic compound marketed under the trademark Neosalvarsan* as the preferred therapy to inorganic mercury—the reason she never had children? Or was it some other disease caused by his alcoholism? Whatever the “illness,” Florence knew the best way to protect herself and survive well was to accept Frank’s financial generosity for her many kindnesses. Self-preservation rather than love was her main preoccupation in the years immediately following the Great War, while she was still Frank’s mistress. Of course, nothing more was said about his health at the time, though Frank’s symptoms and actions would soon speak volumes.
And what about those taxes? There is no available record of Frank Jay Gould paying his U.S. federal income taxes to the Internal Revenue Service once he became an expatriate. There is, however, plenty of information available over many years that he neglected to file, much less pay, his American federal taxes on his substantial declared French income.
Just maybe Florence had met her match at last.
9
LEAVING THE PERFUMED AIR OF BOHEMIA
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.
—MARCEL PROUST
Florence knew her husband was in fragile health due to his alcohol abuse. If he suffered from syphilis, too, the “cure” would have been as unpleasant as the disease. Given his history of violence toward Edith and his memory lapses once he sobered up, along with other disagreeable symptoms, Frank probably also suffered from a chronic condition dubbed “Wet Brain,” or Korsakoff psychosis, after its Russian discoverer.* Florence was old to be a bride at twenty-seven, but believed she was too young and pretty to be Frank’s compliant nurse. Above all, she needed to ensure Frank’s return to health—or they would end up leading separate lives.
Besides, the roaring life of the twenties beckoned. Out of the madness, a new Paris was born. The salonnières were still “at home” to one another, but the old rituals of le gratin seemed anachronistic to the new beau monde (beautiful people) like the artist and writer Jean Cocteau, and Colette, who at last became a writer, too. At the outset, Florence had barely noticed the fresh wave of foreigners frequenting newer “bohemian” salons, save her old bêtes noires, the Russians. A host of homegrown and foreign artists like Marc Chagall, José Maria Sert,* Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, Juan Gris, Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, and Henri Matisse were integral to the new beau monde. Exiled Russian royalty and artists abounded. Paris was a wilder, rejuvenated beating heart of the art, fashion, and cultural worlds of the West.
Gertrude Stein held court at 27 rue de Fleurus with a host of young American writers, from John Dos Passos to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Irish writer James Joyce, championed by Sylvia Beach and soon to be published by her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, proved eventually a bridge too far for Stein and her life partner, Alice B. Toklas. Despite the continued friendship with Sylvia and her lover Adrienne Monnier, Joyce was persona non grata at 27 rue de Fleurus. The “new normal” of the Parisian beau monde included aristocrats of the Right Bank—like Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, Élisabeth Greffulhe, and Count Étienne and Countess Edith de Beaumont, famous for their spectacular themed costume parties in the twenties—mingling freely with the Left Bank artists, like Picasso and Braque. All, that is, except Proust. In the year of Proust’s death, 1922, Picasso mocked Proust at one of de Beaumont’s fabulous parties for speaking only to dukes.1
Paris became “a world somewhere between Guermantes Way and Sodom,” Florence’s new friend, the playboy Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, claimed in his book Un gentilhomme cosmopolite.2 The secret world of the lesbos of the Left Bank was no longer discreet, or indeed, shocking. It was a tantalizing time to
be young and a woman. The war had left women in charge on the home front, making them liberated and useful running businesses and the economy while the nation’s working men were at war. More significantly, it marked them. Many like Adrienne Monnier, the owner of the bookshop La Maison des Amis des Livres, recognized that they might never have been alive had they been born boys. Others simply rejoiced that they had survived.
Paris afforded vistas that were unimaginable anywhere else—as the poor black girl born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, discovered when she became the exotic singing and dancing sensation known as Josephine Baker. When she opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, The New Yorker reported that Josephine discovered “Paris has never drawn a color line.”3
The British cruise ship heiress, Nancy Cunard, fell into the arms of Henry Crowder, the African-American jazz pianist, crashing through another color barrier. Nancy moved to Paris in 1920 to escape her drunkenness, dizzying array of lovers, and life-changing mistakes. In Paris, she became a poet, writer, political activist, and publisher of the Hours Press. Janet Flanner, Cunard’s good friend and The New Yorker’s columnist of “A Letter from Paris” for half a century, became the wittiest and most accurate portrayer of life in Paris for Americans back home. “For the most part we had recently shipped third class to France across the Atlantic, at that date still not yet flown over except by migratory sea birds.”4 Florence should have been in her element.
Paris had become an American home-away-from-home. Demobilized American doughboys stayed on, enamored with the French and especially just how far the American dollar could go. Searching for the Parisian legends, they could often be heard to drawl in English of any passing man, “Say, mister, now where is this here Maxim’s?”5 African-American musicians introduced the city to American jazz, and the international love affair was sealed. Harlem poet, Langston Hughes, waited tables, while Ada “Bricktop” Smith, the West Virginian daughter of an Irish immigrant father and black mother, sang at Le Grand Duc, until she opened her own nightclub Chez Bricktop in 1924. Other Americans, like the wealthy couple Gerald and Sara Murphy, famous for their wonderful parties and literary friends like Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, composer Cole Porter and his wife, Linda, were all attracted to France by its artistic flair and the cheapness of living well.
There was another, extremely compelling reason for the mass American migration of the 1920s: the Volstead Act and the ensuing nightmare of Prohibition. Americans didn’t like the restrictions on their freedom one jot, and felt that cold breath of the Puritan fathers huffing and puffing down their necks. Even the apple-pie-and-Dolly-Madison-ice-cream Saturday Evening Post carried an article by Kathleen Howard in 1922 extolling life outside the United States. “Of course we were all expected to start drinking as soon as the ship pulls out of New York harbor, and keep one happy mood of booze until we face the stern customs official on our return trip,” Howard wrote. The article also told of her thrilling trip to the Maisons-Laffitte racecourse and even the sex-mad music halls of the Moulin Rouge, Folies Bergère, and the Rat Mort, a famed Montmartre dive. “Then, of course, there’s no experience,” Howard effused, “like heading off at three in the morning to the restaurants near Les Halles, for the obligatory onion soup and beer.”6
There was a darker side to the excesses of Americans—especially American women—traveling to Paris for “the atmosphere.” The English-language newspapers warned daily of “counts” and “barons” sweeping fresh American divorcées off their feet and out of their fortunes, while the American ladies were on the hunt for a title to match their wealth. The days of chaperones and the “acceptable for the respectable” were over, and any woman of means might find herself dancing with a total stranger at the Château de Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne, only to discover that the stranger was really interested in the contents of her hotel room. Florence scoffed at the amateurs’ ignorance, while applying a slash of red to her lips after luncheon.
American artists, writers, and even tourists drank in Parisian cafés and struck up conversations with perfect—or at times imperfect—strangers. Many lived among the bouquinistes (booksellers) lining the Left Bank. Later, they would discuss their finds with French intellectuals at Les Deux Magots, which had been serving alcohol to French literary giants like Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé since 1884. Alternatively, there was always La Rotonde in Montparnasse, where the increasingly broke impresario Serge Diaghilev, his schizophrenic ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, the yet-to-be-discovered American writer Henry Miller, and composer Igor Stravinsky chose to unwind.
Another big attraction for Americans looking to escape the provincialism and puritanism of home was, frankly, described by Mark Twain: “A Frenchman’s home is where another man’s wife is,” he lamented late in his life when he had turned from Francophile to Francophobe. “It is a country which has been governed by concubines for 1,000 years.” No wonder the notion that France was the land of loose morals at the end of the nineteenth century was nurtured in America. Writings by Émile Zola, one of the first to extol the virtues of prostitutes and bohemians of the Latin Quarter, made for much secretive bedtime reading.
Lesbianism and homosexuality were more than tolerated—they were celebrated. Lovers kissed in the streets. For heaven’s sake, everyone kissed, everywhere. No one hesitated to make eye contact, and men palpitated at the sought-after invitation from a strange woman with a wee bit of leg revealed from her ever-so-slightly-lifted skirt, silently inviting him to “Suivez-moi, jeune homme” (“Follow me, young man”). One of the period’s best guidebooks, Paris with the Lid Lifted by Bruce Reynolds, gave practical advice on how to react to such overtures: “… you zee little French Goddess tripping towards you, and she spies you at ze same moment and you look ecstatically at her and show your pearly teeth (if you still have them) and she gives you right back zat ‘come-and-get-me-love-me-carry-me-away wiz you’ invitation. You have to make good.”7
Still, the greatest reason for foreigners to move to the French capital was that Paris was a cheap place to live. While most European economies suffered devastation during the war, the 1920s saw rampant inflation, particularly in Germany, and a heavily devalued franc. The United States had done well for itself, emerging as the world’s economic powerhouse in the twenties. Boat passage to France from New York could be bought for eighty dollars. Hemingway wrote an article for the Toronto Star Weekly in February 1922 entitled “Living on $1,000 a Year in Paris.” “The dollar,” he boasted, “either Canadian or American, is the key to Paris.”8 The U.S. dollar was worth some twelve and a half francs, and the Canadian dollar, something over eleven francs.* The ever politically divided French Third Republic—torn between royalists, republicans, and now communists—was united in its distaste of the carpetbagging American businesses. As for American millionaires, well, they were simply ill-bred men who only respected wealth.9 Still, the American migration of rich and poor, literary and artistic, continued unabated. Paris became a new American Dream.
* * *
That is, for most Americans other than Florence and Frank. Florence, who always sought to rise like cream to the pinnacle of society, was lost, searching for a new identity. She was just one American, who was also French, among fifty thousand Americans wanting to be French. Hers would be a different voyage of discovery. While she would return frequently to Paris, what to do with Frank had become her abiding concern. She concluded that to protect him and their futures meant they would need to abandon Paris soon. She portrayed her devotion to Frank as being his personal “Geisha,” who had learned her métier with aplomb.10 In fact, she was looking after Number One.
Florence later said that they went to Cannes for their honeymoon, but their first trip south together was in the summer of 1923, not in the winter season, as one might expect for a man in ill health immediately after his wedding. No one, except Americans Cole and Linda Porter and Gerald and Sara Murphy, had ever gone in the “off” summer season until t
hat very year. Her claim was vintage Florence, trying to steal a march on others who had become the more famous and well-loved couples. In truth, it was the dreaded Edith’s revue premiering at that precise time at the Alhambra that was behind it all. Given their combined anger at Edith’s antics, and Florence’s compelling need to remain center stage throughout her life, her true motives and what she later claimed seem to have become muddled. Besides, it was hardly an exaggeration to say “summer,” which included August and September, even if one’s arrival on the French Riviera was the last day of September.
Still, unlike the Porters, Murphys, and other Americans discovering the Riviera, Florence and Frank would make it their permanent home and attempt, rather successfully at the outset, to re-create the Riviera in their own image.
10
CARELESS PEOPLE
My life has got to be like this, it’s got to keep going up.
—JAY GATSBY, The Great Gatsby
Boundless opportunities lay before Florence and Frank as they gazed at the dazzling blue Mediterranean. They drank in Cannes’s raw beauty, its wild air, and fell in love. Frank felt that he had come home. Florence must have been reminded of the California coast of her childhood. Yet, for Cannes to become home, they needed to buy one. They immediately settled on a house called Semiramis, aptly named after the mythical Queen of Babylon, but apparently they slept there only three nights, despite owning it for some thirty years. Villa Semiramis, built in 1884 by the Cannois architect Vianay Laurent and originally called Château Saint-Roche, was not a suitable residence for the increasingly spoiled Florence. While surrounded by nearly four acres of parkland, with magnificent views of the sea, it was isolated from the town by a ten-minute car journey and had no private beach. Florence was unprepared to settle for any home without a private beach. Now that she had bagged her millionaire, she could afford to be demanding. Surely, the French Riviera must have something more to her liking, she urged. So they kept looking.
