by Susan Ronald
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Hoover’s determined work would take second or even third place to the investigations into Florence’s two main German contacts, or persons of interest, in the parlance of today. Colonel Helmut Knochen and General Carl Albrecht Oberg (nicknamed “the Butcher of Paris”) were both sentenced to death. Knochen was sentenced in a British trial for the murder of British parachutists landing in France in August 1944, a year after the fact. Oberg, too, was found guilty of mass murder by the British. Yet it was only in 1954 that both men were tried in a French court together, and again, sentenced to death.
Notwithstanding the two death sentences, both men were released together at the insistence of the German postwar chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Apparently, on January 18, 1955, Adenauer protested in the strongest terms to Pierre Mendes-France, a Jew and member of the French Resistance who was president of the Council of the National Assembly,* that both men were merely “Waffen-SS soldiers” performing their duty as any other soldier must do. Knochen, Oberg, and others had already been convicted and served their time in the intervening period. The pair, despite being responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, were the beneficiaries of the new realpolitik of the Cold War and were set free in October 1958, it is suggested, as part of a global reparations deal for 250 million Deutschmarks to the French “victims of German National Socialism.”17
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The new decade—the 1950s—was half over and the shadows of World War II receded, making room for new conflicts between nations, and new personal friends for Florence. Florence’s crimes and misdemeanors would go unpunished, as would hundreds of thousands of similar crimes across Europe. Operation Safehaven would die an unnatural death, just as the work of the Monuments Men in restoring looted assets would do. Both had the vastness of their tasks—including the impossible denazification program in Germany—to thank in part, but it was the Cold War and shameful McCarthyism that truly killed off their well-intended efforts. Florence, like so many others, would never come to trial or be deported from France. Whether she ever saw Vogel again before he married a pattern designer for Vogue, we shall never know. Vogel was by then part of her rich and varied past. She did, however, meet up with Ernst Jünger while traveling in Switzerland in the late 1940s, and agreed to finance a translation of his Parisian diaries.
She hired the writer Henri Thomas to translate these in 1950—that is, until he asked for more money than Florence believed he was worth. “Florence believes that he [Thomas] wants to diddle her,” Dominique Aury wrote to Paulhan. “I suppose,” she continued, “that he has it in for her because she refuses to give him what he demands [as payment].… There was a terrible moment when I was seated next to him on the patio, and he looked up at her with hatred in his eyes … she rounded on him and said ‘he pisses us off. Yes, you. You piss us all off.’” What Florence really held against Thomas was that she had already paid him 200,000 francs, and he hadn’t produced anything. To boot, he refused to bathe. He literally stank.18 Thomas was, of course, fired. Frédéric de Towarnicki and Henri Plard became the translators.
* * *
In the 1960s, Maurice Chevalier decided to write his memoirs. He, too, became a regular at Florence’s Meurice lunches, championed by her to meet and greet all the great and good in publishing worth knowing. It was a new endeavor for the singer, and he was grateful to his hostess, a “Great Lady of the Arts.” Chevalier added to Florence, “Why do you wish to hide it?” He later admitted that “I courted her in a shameless but sincere way at the time. In my new life, in a new world where I was treading water to survive, her friendship and advice were of paramount importance. I said to her, half-seriously, “In truth, Madame, you are the godmother of an amateur writer of eighty-one years of age.”19
It was time to party on.
29
QUEEN OF THE RIVIERA
The more one ages, the more one surrounds oneself with things that are pleasurable.
—FLORENCE GOULD
When Frank died, Florence was just shy of her sixty-first birthday. One of her first acts was to announce to her menagerie of friends that she was giving up sex. While hardly a genuinely uttered remark, it put down a marker that whatever any man might claim, she had no intention of remarrying. Nor would she allow any man to dig his clammy claws into her hard-won fame and fortune. Roger Peyrefitte, author of the scandalous book The Jews, detractor of literary prizes, and one of Florence’s writer friends, wrote in his autobiography, Propos Secrets, that she wished to marry him. He would be one of many, including Pierre Benoit, who misinterpreted her continued flirtatiousness for serious overtures. “A gigolo,” she famously said, “would cost me more than a painting.”1 Florence ceased to care who were her friends, her court jesters, or her parasites. All comers were accepted equally at her parties, so long as they knew how to play her game.
Florence’s main preoccupation was to begin the rest of her life in the way she intended it to continue. While the gaiety rolled on seemingly forever on the Riviera, avenue Malakoff was consigned to the past. Instead, Florence’s Thursdays took place at her new Parisian abode, the Hôtel Le Meurice, where Frank had entertained his personal madame, Leone Ritz, some forty years earlier. At Le Meurice, Jouhandeau ceded his preeminence to Florence’s new master of ceremonies Jean De Noël, a sensitive editor at Gallimard. The hotel luxuriated in her gatherings of the famous and notable, hosting the political, cultural, and social leaders of the day. André Gide, now a Nobel Laureate, backed her in the dogged and successful quest to make Jean Paulhan one of the “Immortals” of the Académie Française in 1963.
For all her generosity to French culture, including millions given for the museums at Versailles, Nice, and Angers, as well as contributions to the arts, Florence was awarded at long last the great honor of becoming an officer of the Legion of Honor. Ten years later, she became an elected correspondent member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Today, she is listed as one of the major benefactors of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
After the brouhaha with Frank’s daughters was settled, Florence embarked on a project to mark Frank’s passing in some way that would show the world that, despite their differences, she held a deep respect for him and all he gave her. Thus, the Frank Jay Gould Foundation and Museum was born. Or was it? The file for this venture in the French National Archives is still extant, but beguilingly empty. The local archive files in Cannes, too, are silent on the fledgling foundation.2 After 1956, a serious project for the conversion of the Gould tennis courts into a primary school was undertaken by the town of Cannes; but, it, too, was beached on the rocks of political wrangling in 1960.3 Instead, a fitting memorial to Frank was found in the form of a building named after him at New York University.
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While Florence still received friends at La Vigie, shortly after Frank died she acquired the former home of Lady Orr Lewis, a Canadian railroad heiress, called Le Patio. Built in 1933 by the American architect Barry Dierks, on avenue Gazagnaire in Cannes, it had commanding views out onto the Mediterranean and the Lérins Islands—as well as that all-important private beach. Redubbed Palais Gould by its new owner, it combined all the elements of a high-security house in a city with the creature comforts of a lovely home with an immense patio at its heart. As the invited guest of Prince Rainier and his bride, Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace,* and other royal families (such as the Aga Kahn, King Farouk), Florence wanted Le Patio to be perfectly fabulous.
Old friends, too, were invited. In the spring of 1976, Ernst Jünger appeared on the terrace of Le Patio, dressed in white, tanned, with his piercing blue-eyed gaze that defied the Mediterranean with its brilliance. Aged seventy-six, with a full head of white hair, he stood erect like the soldier of old, still oozing every ounce of charm he exuded more than thirty years earlier. Florence was feasting her eyes on him when he recoiled slightly at her Pekingese dogs encircling him. Jünger never liked dogs, preferring cats. Yet he stooped to point out the cutest of her litter and said with a
brilliant smile, “We will make an exception of this one because he is so beautiful.” Then, without batting an eye, he added, “How do they satisfy their sexual urges?” Quick as a flash, Florence lifted her chin at him and replied, “They have none.” Like the click of her compact signaling the end of her lunches, the conversation was brought to a close.4
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It was at Le Patio that Florence’s large collection of Impressionist art was displayed at its best. Philippe Huisman, the antiquary and right-hand man of Daniel Wildenstein, advised her on future purchases when Wildenstein himself was unavailable. Often, Wildenstein would fly down to Cannes in his private plane, filled with Impressionist masterpieces that he felt would tickle Florence’s fancy. These would be left “on approval” until the next visit—or the one after that—so that she could contemplate her new friends in their home environment, seeing how the light played on the canvases at different times of day. Florence, always with an eye to fashion, determined that Renoir’s La Bohémienne, while initially seductive, had “too much of a bad hairdo” to please her. When Florence asked for a Van Gogh, Wildenstein produced one. She turned it down because of its black background. On the death of Daniel’s father, Georges, Florence was delighted to buy the Three Dancers by Degas that had hung in Georges’s office.
Her tastes also ran to older artworks. She bought an El Greco and art from the English School of the eighteenth century. Courbet and Corot as precursors of the Impressionist movement were important additions to her collection, too. Bonnard’s seascapes and beach scenes stole her heart. In fact, she would acquire eleven Bonnards through Wildenstein. Some of these artworks had been the property of Jewish art dealers, like Gaston Bernheim’s Vue de l’atélier by Bonnard.5 It is significant to note that the painting was bought through Daniel Wildenstein.
Some of the Wildenstein art, however, may hide dubious provenances. An Alfred Sisley, La Machine de Marly et le Barrage, sold to Florence by Wildenstein in 1969, was exhibited at Galerie Charpentier in 1945. Galerie Charpentier had been one of the hotbeds of Nazi looted art during the occupation. Another, a Manet still life entitled Pêches, was allegedly sold by Marcel Bernstein of Berlin in 1932 to Madame Kurt Hermann of Prettsfeld in Bavaria, and then miraculously reappears in 1976 in London. The 1945 date at Galerie Charpentier could easily mask a painting that was looted during the occupation. The alleged Bernstein sale of 1932 could have actually taken place in 1933. Other paintings with a Daniel Wildenstein provenance have since been shown to have a manipulated past.
The 1960s, however, remained a time of carefree buying, without the same research into art provenance regarding Nazi looted art as there is today. Back then, provenance was intended to assure the buyer that the painting was not a fake, first and foremost. Given that Daniel Wildenstein’s name on a provenance has become a reason to exercise caution today in restitution departments of auction houses around the world, it also casts a dark shadow on the entire Florence Gould collection of art. Toward the end of her life Florence thanked Daniel’s wife, Sylvia, for their years of friendship and service by giving her a thirty-five-carat emerald ring—one of only five of such a size. It was sold at auction in 2009 for € 500,000 along with its matching earrings and brooch.6
The hostess of Le Patio also excelled in collecting first edition books, perhaps with a little less fervor than she had collected their writers in her younger days. Art books by her favorite artists, such as Bonnard, Braque, Derain, Jean Dubuffet, and her particular friend, Salvador Dali, took pride of place. Matisse wrote a dedication in her copy of the 1948 Les Lettres portugaises de Marianna Alcoforado, which he illustrated: “Dear Florence Gould, how your dress is beautiful. The white and blue and all its lines and florets that come to a point around you…” accompanied by a pretty little picture that he had sketched for her.7
Her crystal and porcelain collection was also worthy of a prince. Not only did she own a service for twelve that had been given by Count Orloff to Catherine the Great of Russia, but she also possessed an eighteenth-century dinner service from the French East India Company of 279 pieces engraved in gold with the letters “N” and “J” in commemoration of the marriage of Napoleon Bonaparte to his Josephine.8 Florence had surrounded herself, indeed, with objects of great beauty—and value.
* * *
Still, hobnobbing with royalty, politicians, and social hostesses would have taken its toll if it were not for her most intimate friends Cécile Tellier, Magdeleine Homo, and Madeleine Manigler. Family and close friends had become ever more important with age. Perhaps it was for this reason that Hélène-Violette, Princess de Sagan, and her lover and later husband, Gaston Palewski, became frequent guests. Whenever Palewski traveled to New York for business (as de Gaulle had become the eighteenth president of France in 1959, and founder of the French Fifth Republic), the threesome often visited Anna Gould at the ancestral home of Lyndhurst, until Anna’s death in 1961. In a move that must have made Florence think about her own mortality, Anna gave Lyndhurst to the nation, and set up a charitable foundation to preserve it in perpetuity.9
More recent friends, like the cosmetics multimillionairess Estée Lauder, provided Florence with a fresh entrée into New York society. Until the launch of her perfume Youth Dew in 1953, Lauder had been the ingénue in the cosmetics business, always trailing behind Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden—and “the nail man,” Charles Revson of Revlon. “It was the success of Youth Dew that rankled with Miss Arden,” biographer Lindy Woodhouse wrote, “whereas it was the reinvention of Mrs. Lauder’s persona as not being Jewish which infuriated Charles Revson.” Also Jewish, “Revson once famously yelled, ‘Her name’s not Estée, it’s Esther! Esther from Brooklyn.’”10 Actually, it was Esther from Queens. If Estée wanted to pretend she wasn’t Jewish, that was fine by Florence, too. Besides, like most of Florence’s friends, theirs was a truly symbiotic relationship. Florence was the Queen of le Tout-Riviera, and Estée wanted to join the club. Estée was the reigning queen of cosmetics, with tremendous connections in New York, and Florence wanted in.
Through Estée, Florence was honored at the first-ever private party at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, given by its museum director, Tom Hoving. During the week of Thanksgiving 1967, unusually dressed in white—yet sporting her dark sunglasses and usual array of nugget-like jewels—Florence was hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lauder at the Met. Hoving was delighted. “We are both medievalists,” he told The New York Times. “Whenever I saw her in the south of France, I’d invite her to visit the museum and she couldn’t manage it, so this was one way of getting her here.”11
Her thank-you note to Hoving was very warm, addressed to “Dearest Tom.” She apologized for its tardiness, and yet rolled into one a thank-you for the Met party, a private tour of the Cloisters with Hoving as her tour guide, and Christmas wishes. After a lifetime vamping men, it is hardly surprising that her note should also be suggestive: “I have never had such a visit nor such a man of knowledge to go around with in my life—with my heartfelt thanks and gratitude for all that you are.”12 That March, Florence became an official benefactor. Their April correspondence was signed “love” by both, showing the deep—yet undoubtedly platonic—affection they each held for the other.13 Or did it?
Hoving’s no-holds-barred book, Making the Mummies Dance, about his ten years at the helm of the Met portrays him as a man on a mission to turn the Upper East Side museum from a dusty repository of art and artifacts into a dynamic, world-class, thrusting art world leader. He described himself as “part gunslinger, ward heeler, legal fixer, accomplice smuggler, anarchist, and toady.” His approach for many was akin to a dictatorship of good taste, while for others it represented nothing more than a “vulgar circus.” As for Florence, she is described by Hoving as “short, plump, with enormous lips slathered with ruby-red lipstick … and loaded down with what must have been, nestling in rock crystals of diamonds, a kilo of the darkest emeralds I have ever seen.… She looked like a mafia mistress.”14
Hoving’s words were kind compared to former Monuments Man and Met director James Rorimer’s description of her. “She is disgusting, a spoiled, dissolute woman covered in emeralds who at all times of the day or night wears sunglasses with purple lenses and is so damned boring!” Rorimer exclaimed to Hoving, who was his special assistant at the time. “Oh those parties! One is expected to drink and drink and drink. Makes me sick!”15 Perhaps Rorimer forgot that he, too, curried favor with Florence after the war to get his hands on the Gould medieval tapestries for the Met.
Hoving’s book was published in 1993. After the Met benefited from its main gifts from Florence in her lifetime, Hoving shows himself up to be the ungentlemanly sort of parasite who frequently fed on Florence’s overwhelming generosity. According to Hoving, like Rorimer before him and other museum directors elsewhere, he was merely acting out the part of “toady” described in his book, looking to improve the Met’s offer.
Utterly unaware of what Hoving’s feelings toward her were, Florence donated a Pierre Bonnard painting entitled La Terrasse de Vernon to the Met. As is frequently the case in valuable gifts, to maximize tax allowances the painting was deeded to the Met in various fractions of ownership until the museum owned the entire painting in September 1972.16
Still the relationship with the Met went back much further. In the same momentous year as the San Francisco earthquake, Frank Jay Gould wrote to then director Sir Casper Purdon Clarke that he would like to present to the Met photographs of his collection of “antique Roman and Greek glass, as well as some Egyptian antiques” with his compliments.17 If Purdon Clarke had voiced an interest in the collection itself, Gould would most likely have given it to the Met.
