Susan Ronald - A Dangerous Woman: American Beauty, Noted Philanthropist, Nazi Collaborator – The Life of Florence Gould

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For Jonas, August, Isabeau, and Freya, may you be alert to danger in its many guises.

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after Ive left the opera house.

Maria Callas

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

M ARK T WAIN

I ran for my life, Florence often recalled with a shudder, through two great walls of flames toward the bay. She was only ten years old at the time.

Years later, as she recoiled from the memory, her trembling voice seemed to relive her absolute terror. Still, the actress in her had learned over many decades that her oft-repeated tale required a meaningful pause at this point. She had learned, too, that timing was essential to the telling of any good story. So, here, Florence would stop and touch her elegant jeweled fingers to the perfect, outsized, three-tiered pearl necklace caressing her throat. She held her audience, one by one, spellbound with her fabulous green eyes. Florence understood instinctively that beauty, as well as money, was power; and she had both in abundance.

The date she remembered was Wednesday, April 18, 1906. The place, San Francisco. The time, 5:12 a.m. For those friends who hadnt heard her story before, Florence willingly retold how she had survived the great and terrifying San Francisco earthquake, embellishing the many death-defying details they expected to hear. Her friends in Franceand particularly in Parishad never lived through such a seismic cataclysm. Oh, there had been warscannonades heard across Frances northern plains, death beyond imagining in the Great Warand of course the Nazi occupation. Florence had lived through these man-made upheavals in France, too, but the horror she described was the death of an entire city within minutes. Even the survivors of the Paris floods of 1910 could not comprehend such an instantaneous tear in the fabric of tens of thousands of lives. Only with the onset of the nuclear age could those who hadnt lived through a large earthquake begin to understand its swift devastation.

Florences first great badge of courage was the San Francisco earthquake, not that she needed any medal in her long and wildly lived life. Perhaps it made her feel more American to tell tall tales no one else could imagine. It certainly set her apart, like her American-tinged accent that she cultivated, despite a lifetime lived in France speaking French. Being an American somehow made her grander, more significantand Florence craved significance. That and her lust for phenomenal wealth and her need to be loved were the driving forces behind who she was, and what she did. During her eighty-seven years of life, she would achieve all three ambitions. So what if the truth was often bent to her will? At the end of the day, she had the means to bend it, and her entourage came to expect and desire whatever enchantment she devised for their pleasure.

So, who was Florence? Born Florence Juliette Antoinette Lacaze in San Francisco on July 1, 1895, she would die in Cannes, France, in 1983 as Florence Gould. In the intervening period, she was on the guest lists of Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco, French and American politicians, millionaires, and movie stars. She rubbed shoulders with the famous, artists, and seedy underworld characters who haunted every casino in Europe. Her life would become a rags-to-riches dream, if not a fairy tale, and she would host the glitterati, the literati, and those who preferred to live their lives in the shadows. Her story fires the imagination in a life writ large. From the time of the San Francisco earthquake, she seemed to be at the heart of some of the most chilling events of the twentieth century, and proved time and again that she was a born survivor. She wielded power in a way only the super-rich and beautiful can do: unrepentant for and unaware of the damage done to others. Nonetheless, once you were adopted as her friend, she became your generous benefactor. Her enemies soon discovered that she could be a formidable foe.

Florence lived her life through many mirrors of varying hues, with an unshakable belief in her beauty, wit, and charm. The truth, as for so many people with power, existed only as she chose to tell it; and the great San Francisco earthquake is a wonderful example of the artistry with which she crafted her tall tales. Her catlike green eyes flashed as she retold the horror of those three days of fire and brimstone to her French audiences. The beauty mark on her upper-left cheek was the only flaw on her alabaster skin, as if proof were needed that she was human, and not some goddess descended to earth. Her beautiful slender, long fingers grabbed at the pearls caressing her throat, while her mellifluous voice speaking in French, tinged with her ever-present American accent, rose and fell with each rise and fall of the quake.

Yet Florence never made any allusions to the roaring of the earthquake or its immediate destructive effects. Nor did she describe the nauseating sulphur smells after the first two shocks, nor the horrid aftertaste in her mouth. How could someone who was so observant be so oblivious? Hadnt she heard the family horses neighing and stomping in the stables, fearful of the seismic impending doom, as all the animals of the city were that morning? She omitted these details because, truthfully, Florence was in her bed, at home, presumably fast asleep when the terror struck.

How else could she omit recalling the quakes thundering northward into the city, lifting and rolling everything in its path, leaving utter destruction in its wake? She hadnt seen any buildings as they crumbled in an unstoppable, destructive domino wave of bricks and stones crashing back down to earth skewed, as if they were toys tossed carelessly from an infants crib. The great commercial palaces of the American Wests premier city were reduced to billowing clouds of rubble in seconds. Born in the Pacific beyond the Golden Gate, the earthquake sucked the waters from the bay, then rolled them back in with phenomenal force, spilling the ocean onto the streets of San Francisco. Enormous breakers far beyond a surfers craziest conjuring pounded the citys thoroughfares.

Florence hadnt seen this, nor the total devastation of Chinatown, where she later claimed she was a constant visitor. From her home, north of San Francisco in Belvedere, in Marin County, she could not observe the frantic search and rescue of Chinese immigrants onto Angel Island in the bay. Only later would she hear about the metal

There were, nonetheless, many eyewitnesses. Police constable Michael Grady had seen the Phelan Building lurch over Market Street, then be set back slanting onto its foundations, screeching and twisted. Constable Cook recalled the deep and terrible rumbling where

The great walls of flames Florence described occurred in the aftermath: the fire that engulfed San Francisco and raged for three days following the earthquake. The entire metropolitan area from Embarcadero North Streets Ferry Building west and south to Mission and Dolores streets was destroyed. Chinatown was burned to the ground, save one solid brick

Landmarks like the Golden Gate Park were in flames for days. Libraries and brothels, art galleries and jails, homes and churches were reduced to pulverized masonry and smoldering, twisted iron. Everywhere was choked with unfathomable clouds of smoke and dust that made breathing the air outdoors a feat of heroism. As her parents and their friends described the carnage, the fire-ravaged, shoddily built, brick and wooden structures of the city became as real to Florence as the safety of her family home in Belvedere across the bay.