by Susan Ronald
Significantly, the historic agreement of 1860 between Napoleon III and the Grimaldi princes stipulated that no roulette tables were allowed as part of the French casino offer on the entire French Riviera. This automatically gave Monte Carlo its continued preeminence. Nice already had two municipal casinos along the Promenade des Anglais—the Casino de la Jetée, built on stilts jutting into the sea, and the Municipal Casino at Place Masséna. The Casino Ruhl, named after its Swiss-born owner, Henri Ruhl, was the best private casino in the city. Cannes, too, had its casinos in its hotels, the Carlton and the Martinez, and, of course, the Ambassadeurs Casino. There were dozens of private gambling clubs—called cercles—each with its own set of arcane rules that members had to obey. More important to Frank, there were several casino owners—not to mention underworld backroom operations—that would stop at nothing to avoid new competition.10 Frank and Florence believed that they could avoid that murky world—at least for now—since Juan-les-Pins afforded the unique opportunity of a virgin territory.
They spent a lot of time at the splendid Hôtel du Cap at Antibes and were befriended by its owner, Antoine Sella, who was furious when he heard of their betrayal in developing their new hotel on the doorstep of his magnificent oasis. Hadn’t Fitzgerald written the lines about his beach and his hotel in Tender Is the Night: “On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera about half way between Marseille and the Italian border, stands a large, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of some notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April”?11 Hadn’t Sella discovered the secret of keeping his property open on a year-round basis? Frank calmly replied that since Sella refused to sell Hôtel du Cap to him, at any price, he had been compelled to rethink his strategy. It was Sella himself, Frank reasoned, who wanted the competition on his doorstep. What Sella didn’t know then was that the local restaurateur, Edouard Baudoin, who had bought the small casino at Juan the year before, was the Goulds’ business partner in the hotel venture.
Under Baudoin’s management, the Hôtel Provençal became an Art Deco rose-colored palace almost as famous as Hôtel du Cap in the twenties. With its white sugar-sand beaches, luxury suites, jetty suitable for yachts to dock, gourmet restaurants, bars, and casino, it quickly became a favorite for pleasure seekers wanting la dolce vita. Florence and Frank hobnobbed in Cannes at the Ambassadeurs Casino with the Parisian gratin like the Rochefoucaulds and the Melchior de Polignacs, and remained unsullied by the stain of “being in trade.”*
Simultaneously, Florence befriended the wild and wonderful Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald at Juan. Rudolph Valentino, heartthrob of the silent screen, lounged in its bar. She joked with Harpo Marx while he thumbed tunes on the casino bar’s piano. Suzanne Lenglen, the French Ladies’ Tennis champion between 1920 and 1926, taught Florence to play tennis on the hotel’s courts. The Murphys, Fitzgeralds, Picassos, and Hemingways danced in the Provençal’s ballroom and even preferred its casino to the more formal one overlooking the rocky beaches of Monte Carlo. It was the age of the “flapper,” skirts above the knee, eyes rimmed and blackened by kohl, and bobbed hair. The Charleston, the Shimmy, and the Black Bottom dances gave way reluctantly to jazz. Florence embraced jazz quickly and initiated the first “Jazz at Juan Festival” in June to keep everyone entertained.*
Demanding to be the trendsetter in fashions, Florence harangued Chanel to design special beach pajamas for her. By day, Florence wore Chanel’s beach pajamas. By night, these were sequined, or velvet, or satin, lined with extra-deep pockets to hold her spoils from the gambling tables. Florence’s fashion-statement pajamas designed by Chanel caught on, and beach pajamas became the must-have item of clothing for the summer season of 1926. Even Paris’s high-society magazine L’Illustration took an interest and dubbed Juan-les-Pins “Pyjamapolis.” Still, the wealthy, notable, and even the hoi polloi winced as her shrill laughter rang out across the gaming rooms with each of her winning hands. The once quiet and honey-laced singing voice could carry a long way, even in a crowded room. Seemingly, it never once occurred to Florence to be discreet about her winnings at the tables. She was the queen, and they could—in the words of another dead queen—eat cake.
* * *
In the twenties, like so many young women, Florence joined the flapper craze with gusto. A slash of red daubed her lips from then until the day she died. Her eyes, darkened with brown eyeshadow and kohl, made her look exotic, if somewhat forbidding. Furs embraced her face, her slouch hat pulled down over one eye, as she increasingly looked the part of the femme fatale she had become.12 Not satisfied with playing in the casino until closing most evenings, she relished any sporting challenge she could find, daring others in her champagne-infused folly to join in. Freed of her waist-length tresses, Florence helped to popularize waterskiing, by setting up competitions.13 Florence sparred with the French film star Arletty, who had married the shady “financier” Alexandre Stavisky, to race cars along the unofficial “Juan circuit” in her Hispano-Suiza or Frank’s Bugatti. Living fast was the motto of the day. While Florence portrayed life as one great roaring party—never going to bed before three in the morning—Frank preferred a less showy life than his wife. Known as the man in the old-fashioned wing collar and tie, he made fewer and fewer appearances among the glitterati who frequented his hotel and casino, preferring the company of his Pekingese dogs instead. Making the casino and hotel buzz, he believed, was Florence’s job. She was the honey to attract the beau monde into his money-making propositions. She was also the glue that helped them hold it all together. And she was good at it.
* * *
Then, in 1926, to the Goulds’ surprise, the arms dealer turned casino owner Sir Basil Zaharoff suddenly sold his shares in the Monégasque hotel and casino company, SBM, after the death of his wife and longtime mistress, Doña Maria.* Dubbed “the Merchant of Death” in the press, Zaharoff’s name instilled fear, even among the foolhardiest. “The destinies of nations are his sport,” Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, said, “the movements of armies and affairs of Governments his special delight. In the wake of the war, this mysterious figure moves over a tortured Europe.”14 Still, the Goulds coveted SBM.
Frank Gould knew Zaharoff. He also knew that the man was dangerous. Tall and thuggish with his Mephistophelian beard honed to fine points, Zaharoff had made his fortune as an arms dealer for the Allies in World War I. Born to Greek parents living in Odessa, as Zacharias Basileios Zaharoff, he returned with his family to Turkey in the 1840s. There Zaharoff sharpened his racketeering skills by exchanging money on the black market at hugely inflated rates, as well as making a living as a boxer and muscle-for-hire. His uncle Sevastopoulos made him a partner in his textile business, but neglected to pay him a living wage, commissions, or any share in the profits. So Zaharoff, by now calling himself “Basil,” took what he felt was his due from the company and headed to London. Sevastopoulos pursued, and sued; but when Zaharoff produced the partnership agreement to the court, his uncle wept, and the case collapsed.
Leaving London for Athens, Zaharoff was hired by the Swedish armaments firm Nordenfelt, and swiftly worked his way up from clerk to major shareholder. Zaharoff was the arms dealer to the Balkans in the run up to the Great War. After switching his allegiance to the British arms manufacturer Vickers, Zaharoff profited from every conflict worldwide, and was rumored to have prolonged the war by his astute whisperings to politicians of rival nations. The British knighted him for his help to the Allies, but Zaharoff always remained aloof, a mysterious mover behind publicly reported events.
By 1923, The Wall Street Journal named him the fourth richest man in the world—ahead of the Vanderbilts and Mellons. That same year, Zaharoff was an invited guest at the baptism of Prince Rainier Grimaldi, grandson of the reigning Prince Louis II of Monaco. The Washington Post wrote that the French diplomats present were concerned by Zaharo
ff’s presence and gift of a large gray pearl since “no one doubts [Zaharoff] as being the true power behind Monte Carlo,” and a British agent. The article concluded that “the superstitious are suggesting that the Zaharoff pearl may be an omen of ill-luck” for the Grimaldi dynasty.15
Indeed, Prince Louis’s father, Prince Albert of Monaco, had been in financial difficulties since the end of the war in 1918. As a neutral power, the principality had been a hotbed of intrigue, and was even accused of operating a spy ring for the Germans from the casino. Newspaper articles, eyewitness reports of “Monaco as the secret backroom of Europe,” and novelists all preyed on the German connections of François Blanc. “If you only knew the underground workings of the place, the mentality, the way in which everything is run,” a Monte Carlo insider warned a friend in the 1922 novel The Poisoned Paradise by Robert Service, “why you’re not living in the Twentieth Century at all. It’s medieval.”16
Still, Frank and Florence both knew to strip away the hyperbole and concentrate on the important fact that the Grimaldi monarch had depended on his share of the wealth from the casino, and later the SBM hotels, and knew that their takings had declined during the four-year bloodbath that consumed Europe from 1914 to 1918. François Blanc’s son, Camille, headed up SBM now, and despite the Monaco’s monarch asking him for help first, he refused to lend money to the cash-strapped prince. The Goulds had little trouble learning that sometime in 1918, Zaharoff had loaned the prince the sum required, in exchange for his help in taking control of SBM.
As the Goulds were hoping to settle into the Riviera life in 1923, Zaharoff forced the resignation of Camille Blanc. Léon Radziwill, Camille’s nephew, remained a substantial shareholder, and threw his allegiance behind the powerful arms dealer. A figurehead president and former associate of Zaharoff’s working for the French forces in the war, Alfred Delpierre, ostensibly ran things until the high-handed René Léon took over the day-to-day management of SBM. Effectively, Zaharoff had made SBM’s position in the world of gambling on the Riviera unassailable—and Frank knew to stay well away.17
Yet after his wife’s death in 1923, Zaharoff suddenly sold his shares in the company to the Dreyfus Bank of Paris and a consortium of investors. Florence’s playboy friend, Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge became an SBM director, and she sensed it was time to seize their moment, too. By then, the Goulds owned three hotels in Juan-les-Pins and its casino. With Zaharoff out of the picture, they could expand eastward toward Nice, and, who knows, perhaps east again to Monte Carlo. A prime piece of real estate had presented itself on Promenade des Anglais in Nice, and when Zaharoff was known to have retired from his investments in SBM, they grabbed it. Frank’s health had seemingly improved, and the time was ripe to give SBM a good run for its money.
12
TAKING STOCK
Life is a desire, not a meaning.
—CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Despite everything, Florence was unfulfilled—or as the writer Pierre Benoit noted, “bored sitting on her pile of gold.” Business was grand, and making millions fun, but it didn’t quench her desire for fast living. She longed for speed, as all young people did in the Roaring Twenties. For her, the embodiment of that fast life was Zelda Fitzgerald.
Florence adored Zelda. She often told Frank how Zelda and Scott made her laugh. Perhaps Florence recognized something of their unhappiness and desperation in herself, because she saw nothing wrong in their drunken escapades and antics. Crashing cars, kidnapping hoteliers, covering opera singer Grace Moore’s villa walls with obscene graffiti, or gliding a scoop of sorbet down the back of a countess’s ball gown in a stunt akin to those of “the Little Tramp” Charlie Chaplin in the 1917 film The Adventurer were all taken by Florence in good heart.
Yet when Zelda unexpectedly got up from the dinner table at the Juan casino where she had been sitting with Scott and the Murphys, and lifted the skirt of her evening dress above her waist and began to slowly dance like a dervish for no apparent reason, Frank warned his wife that Zelda was not good for business. Casino guests ranged widely from the Rothschilds and Rochefoucaulds to ministers of state and the perhaps more tolerant Hollywood stars. Still, Florence didn’t judge her, and even envied Zelda’s spontaneity. Like the Murphys, she saw Zelda’s “tremendous natural dignity.”
Florence understood, too, what it was like to be overshadowed by a more successful husband. Both women were frustrated artistes—Zelda as a writer and ballet dancer, Florence as a singer. What Florence had perhaps never understood was that for the real artists—writers, painters, musicians, actors, directors, and the like—she would always be a potential patron first; and a beautiful, vibrant woman who loved the arts a poor second. This simple fact blinded her to the shortcomings of Zelda and other artistic “friends,” as they appeared to those outside the social world Florence had entered, and taken by storm, in marrying Frank.
Florence only realized that Zelda was deeply troubled when it came to the incident at La Colombe d’Or restaurant, when the Murphys and their friends were dining there. La Colombe d’Or was magnificently situated high in the hills above Antibes in the medieval village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Apparently, when Gerald Murphy drew attention to the overweight and aging but still magnetic Isadora Duncan, Scott sat at her feet in homage to the once great lady. Duncan was so flattered that she ran her fingers through Scott’s blond wavy hair, calling him her “centurion.” Zelda, unsurprisingly, was furious.
Without any warning, Zelda leaped over the parapet behind Gerald Murphy into the darkness. Everyone thought she was dead. Fortunately, she had landed on a stone staircase and was already on her feet—knees and dress bloodied—but otherwise unharmed by the time they dared, horrified, to lean over the wall to gaze at her corpse.1 The story made the rounds of the Riviera rumor mill, and Frank feared the worst. Zelda was not someone he wanted in his hotel or casino. In their business, so he admonished Florence, there was such a thing as bad publicity. They catered to high-profile guests at the hotel. Even those from Hollywood never behaved as outrageously as Zelda. Certainly, none of them would have enjoyed watching her jump off the terrace at La Colombe d’Or.
Frank believed Zelda was unhinged. Despite his sound, if patriarchal and hypocritical, advice to his thirty-year-old flapper wife—who was too busy enjoying the fruits of Frank’s millions and her inherent defiance of tradition—she remained loyal to Zelda, if somewhat chastened. The final straw came, however, when Scott kidnapped the hotel’s orchestra until they agreed to play the music Zelda wanted. Frank was unamused, and ordered Florence to cut off relations with the ugly Americans—or else.2
* * *
Of course, Florence knew she had gone too far too quickly. Frank began to spend more and more time at the Casino de la Jetée on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. There, he tickled his passion for dancing—and he was a very good ballroom dancer—while also indulging in his infatuation with the comic opera singer Regina Ardenti. Florence knew Frank liked his girlfriends to have some stage presence, but disingenuously, he couldn’t bear for his wife to sing in public. Suddenly, she saw the fate of Edith Kelly Gould looming like some huge wave before her sea-green eyes. Divorce, and even worse, no financial settlement became an unfathomable possibility. True, she held her mansion in Paris in her own name. True, too, she was a director of Frank’s French companies with shares also in her name. Frank had paid for a house for her mother, Berthe, in Cannes, too. Florence had invited her trusted friend Cécile Tellier to live with her mother as a companion. Isabelle, ever envious of Florence, was provided for as well. Frank settled allowances on them, too.
All the women Florence had ever cared for—or, in the case of her sister, felt an obligation to provide for—could finally relax from the nagging financial worries that plagued them. Possibly, Berthe tried to give her daughter some sound advice. Florence had acclimated herself too quickly to the lifestyle of the idle rich. She was bright enough to realize that the fabulous wealth was not her own. As unpalatable as it
might have seemed to her, Berthe was right. There was no doubt that Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald would have to be dropped. As had already become her custom, when Florence turned her back on people, whether lovers or friends, it was an absolute rupture, and this would be the fate of the Fitzgeralds, Murphys, and others in their circle. Only Picasso remained more than a nodding acquaintance.
Still, there is a curious passage in Gerald Murphy’s notebooks that invites some speculation. “What would happen … if a family devoted to an honest, animal expression of sex suddenly came across someone who used sex dishonestly, sophisticatedly, as a tool or a weapon?”3 Surely, Murphy must have been thinking of Ernest Hemingway or Pablo Picasso, both of whom lusted after his lovely Sara. Scott Fitzgerald held nothing of the predator in his sexual attraction to Sara, but made his thoughts known to both the Murphys.
It is tantalizing to ponder for a moment if Gerald Murphy had experienced this predatory nature in a woman for the first time in Florence. Had he observed her cozying up in the casino bar to Charlie Chaplin or Harpo Marx or Rudolph Valentino or Pablo Picasso or Scott Fitzgerald, or any of her other male guests, as she was wont to do? Was Murphy one of her unsuspecting prey? Had Murphy then seen her turn around, as if on a dime, and immediately latch on to the arm of her husband, flashing her radiant, adoring smile at Frank? Murphy would have needed to lose all his senses to avoid observing how Florence approached men with her feline walk, her seductive voice beckoning them to her with its sexy whisper, her face enveloping them, placed an inch—no more—from her prey. Then there were those green eyes, mesmerizing the object of her attack, while her soft breath begged him to kiss her lovely lips, as one of her salon authors, Paul Léautaud, would later write disapprovingly. Murphy, as few others, resisted because he adored his wife, his children, and his life. Florence was simply not his kind of gal.
