Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (38 page)

‘I must pack up only what I could carry,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘I thought as winter was coming and we might be taken to a cold German camp, woollies were the best: and flustered, with the soldier with a kind of dinnerplate hanging from his neck watching me as I dressed and hurrying me (schnel mächen), I put into my rucksack the woollies and by mistake two bibles and 2 complete Shakespeares as the most condensed portable reading.’ Adrienne came down to say goodbye. Mme Allier continued crying, and the coal man opposite ‘was for some reason in tears as well’. The commotion in the rue de l’Odéon brought out the neighbours, residents and shopkeepers alike, who ‘gathered as close as possible around the truck that I climbed into’.

The German truck was already carrying other American women. The first Sylvia recognized was her old friend Katherine Dudley, ‘dressed as though for a vernissage, very smart, and in her usual good spirits’. Katherine was one of the four glamorous Dudley sisters, daughters of a well-connected Chicago gynaecologist, who had come to Europe before the First World War. The eldest, Helen, was a poet and had for a time been the mistress of Bertrand Russell. Dorothy Dudley, who had once been engaged to John Dos Passos, was a writer and the mother of painter Anne Harvey. Caroline Dudley had been instrumental in bringing the
Revue Nègre
, featuring a young Josephine Baker and jazz clarinettist Sydney Bechet, to Paris in 1925. With her husband, Joseph Delteil, she wrote some of the pieces for the
Revue
that astounded Paris and added to the allure of black American jazz among fashionable Parisians. Katherine was an accomplished painter, known mainly for her portraits. She was taking care of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Paris apartment in the rue Christine, near her own at 13 rue de Seine. Stein and Toklas were living at their country house in Bilignin in the Vichy Zone, where Americans were not being interned.

The truck trundled through Paris from the house of one American woman to another. Each time the Germans failed to find anyone, the women cheered loudly. ‘After they had rounded up any American women to be found,’ Sylvia wrote, ‘we went on a long truckride but shut in as we were couldn’t see where on earth they were to deliver us.’ The Germans deposited the women at the northern edge of Paris in a place Sylvia ‘knew in better days as the Zoo’, the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne. There, 350 American women were herded into the monkey house in which ‘we were the only monkeys’.

The Swiss Consulate in Paris, acting for the United States, prepared a report on the internments for the American Legation in Berne:

Sylvia received presents from friends who came to the zoo. The Germans allowed the women to take walks ‘in a minute garden where, over the distant hedge we could see any friends who cared to come and have a try at making themselves heard and at hearing our voices in unison calling loudly for that something in the top bureau drawer etc.’.

Drue Tartière, the American former actress and wife of Dr Thierry de Martel’s nephew, Jacques Terrane, had been picked up on 24 September from her house 20 miles south of Paris in Barbizon. Drue had left Radio Mondiale and become active in the Resistance, hiding Allied flyers in her house. She had rented a second house in the countryside as a rendezvous for
résistants
and a hiding place for British weapons and agents. She thought the Germans had arrested her as a
résistante
and feared that she might betray her comrades under torture. During two uncomfortable nights in German police custody with a 64-year-old American neighbour, Marion Greenough, she came to realize that she was being interned merely as an enemy alien. When she and Miss Greenough arrived in the Bois de Boulogne on 26 September, Drue wrote, ‘A crowd was gathered around the large glass-enclosed structure as our bus drew up to the big door of the Jardin d’Acclimatation. People outside the glass windows along the terrace were trying anxiously to catch glimpses of their loved ones within.’ Outside, rain poured on the old men, women and children desperate to know what would happen to their imprisoned mothers and wives. A report by the YMCA noted, ‘On Sunday visitors were not allowed, but friends soon discovered that by paying five francs admission to the Zoo they could reach a place where they could see and talk with the American women through a double row of gratings with German guards in between. Everyone considered it a great joke that they could pay admission to see their friends in the Zoo.’

In a make-shift dormitory on the second floor of the monkey house, Drue enjoyed a reunion with old friends. ‘The first person I ran into was Gladys Delmass, who had worked at the Paris Mondiale radio station after war broke out,’ Drue wrote. ‘She was a very bright girl from Hartford, Connecticut, educated at Vassar and Cambridge, England, where she had become an authority on Elizabethan literature. ’ Gladys was married to a Frenchman, Jean Delmass, who worked for the Vichy government. Drue saw another friend, the sculptress Elsa Blanchard, whose family she had known in Pasadena, California. She was introduced to Sarah Watson, directress of the Paris student hostel, the Foyer International des Etudiantes, ‘short and round, with the pink skin of a baby, snow-white hair, and a kindly, illuminating smile’. Drue thought her ‘soft South Carolina accent added to her charm, and her attractions were enhanced by a lively wit and keen intelligence’. With Miss Watson was another directress of the hostel, Mary Dickson. Sarah Watson introduced Drue to Sylvia Beach, whom she knew by reputation as the ‘proprietor of the famous bookshop in the Rue de l’Odéon, Shakespeare and Company, and publisher and friend of James Joyce’. Sylvia, although she did not mention the fact in her own account of being, as she spelled it, ‘Inturned’, was wearing the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur that she had been awarded in 1938.

Sylvia was pleased to meet ‘our lovely Drue Tartière’ and to see again ‘our genius sculptress’ Mabel Gardner ‘in a long cloak, her golden hair like the angels in the Italian pictures’. Drue called Mabel Gardner the ‘sculptress who had lived in Montparnasse for many years’ and saw her as ‘a middle aged woman who looked somewhat untidy, but was perfectly serene and had a detached, mystic air’. Sylvia introduced Drue to Katherine Dudley, ‘friend of my friend “Baron” Molet and of Picasso’. Through Katherine, Drue met ‘Noel Murphy, a tall, blond, middle-aged woman who looked like a Viking. She had studied lieder in Germany and sang in concerts in Paris. Mrs. Murphy had won the Croix de Guerre in 1940 for her work in evacuating refugees under shellfire.’ After meeting many old and new friends in the monkey house, Drue noticed an incongruous sight.

Sylvia was surprised to see, as more and more women arrived, American nuns from convents all over the Occupied Zone. The community of American women in France, Sylvia wrote, was an extraordinary mélange: ‘There were Americans coming from every kind of milieu–a number of artists as it was Paris, a number of French war-brides of American soldiers from World War I, some teachers, some whores, some dancers, a milliner or two, a poet or two, a lady who lived at the Ritz, the wife of Bedaux the spy and quite a few crazy women whose case was not improved by capture.’

Sarah Watson was, in Sylvia’s words, ‘busy trying to make us all as comfortable as though in her pleasant hostel, which was with only these cots around the walls, close together, and as we discovered soon when it rained, water dripping from a leak in the roof on our faces’. The conditions affected some of the women more than others. ‘Sick women were lying on their cots, moaning,’ Drue wrote. ‘Nervous and anxious wives and mothers were walking up and down restlessly. Everybody was crammed together in this uncomfortable room, where puddles of rain had gathered from leaks in the glass roof.’ Worse, Nazi guards lurking in the bathroom ‘did not seem at all embarrassed at the duty of watching us’. Many of the women, including Sylvia and Drue, had doctors’ letters certifying that internment would damage their health.

After a dinner of ‘soup, meat loaf, and potatoes and German black bread’, the women retired to their dormitories. Some of them cried, until, as Drue noted, ‘this wailing gave way to a cacophony of snores’. In the darkness, leaking rainwater drenched Drue’s feet. German soldiers with flashlights stomped into the room to count the women. A few screamed, and one blurted, ‘Don’t look now. I’ve got a man in my bed.’ Drue wrote, ‘When the Germans had counted methodically up to a number, like forty-four, some of the women would shout, “sixty-four,” and get them so mixed up that they had to start all over again. The soldiers yelled roughly, “Sei still!” but it did no good. The women roared with laughter at them.’ Sylvia remembered, ‘All night long, they would flash the lights in our faces. To count us. They went around counting us, and we were never the same number. And they found this a great bore.’

In the early morning, soldiers woke the women and went to the gallery above the dormitory to watch them get dressed. Not every woman, Drue commented, was embarrassed.

Some of the women were released quickly because of ill-health or age. Miss Greenough, who would be over the 65-year age limit in two weeks, was permitted to return home. Fern Bedaux was freed for other reasons. Drue watched as a ‘group of French collaborationists, obviously personages high in treachery, arrived with an important German in uniform. They were very respectful to Mrs. Bedaux, helped her pack her things, and out she swept while the rest of us were enraged at this exhibition of the power of social and political influence.’ United Press reported from Vichy a few days later, ‘Mrs. Charles Bedaux, who was arrested at the castle she and her husband provided for the honeymoon of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, has been released but her French-born husband is still interned at St.-Denis.’

 

On Monday morning, 28 September, the Germans took 292 of the American women from the monkey house to buses just outside the zoo. They gave each one ‘a sausage, a small piece of cheese and a loaf of bread’. Among this group of Americans were Drue Tartière, Gladys Delmass and sculptresses Elsa Blanchard and Mabel Gardner. While they waited to board their bus, a nurse screamed, ‘My God, Drue, you still in this country!’ It was Ruth Dubonnet, American wife of André Dubonnet, the former First World War aviator and friend of Charles Bedaux and Aldebert de Chambrun. Ruth, who looked ‘very chic in her Red Cross uniform’, shouted again, ‘What are you doing here?’ Then, even louder, she demanded, ‘Is it true what I’ve heard about Jacques being killed?’ Drue shuddered and shouted back, ‘No, I don’t think so, that’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

Drue knew that her husband, Jacques Tartière, was dead. Since the fall of France, when Jacques escaped to London to join Charles de Gaulle, Drue had denied all knowledge of his whereabouts. She told the police in Barbizon that she was waiting for his return, possibly from a prisoner of war camp, and let them believe she had a lover. This gave Drue a reason to remain in France that the police would accept. It also removed suspicion from Jean Fraysse, the putative boyfriend, when he stayed at her house in Barbizon to pass messages to his agents. Fraysse, Drue’s former director at Radio Mondiale, had enlisted Drue in one of the earliest Resistance networks. Taking part in the Resistance was her way to support her husband and his country. Jacques was killed fighting for the Free French in 1941, when the British captured Syria and Lebanon from Vichy. Drue told no one of his death, lest the Germans investigate the widow of a Gaullist officer. To continue working effectively as a
résistante
, the former Hollywood actress posed as a harmless wife abandoned by a roaming French husband.

At the Paris zoo on the morning of 28 September, Drue feared that Ruth Dubonnet’s chance remark, if overheard by the Germans, would endanger Jean Fraysse and the rest of his network. No one else appeared to hear, but Drue was not reassured when Ruth, whom she now saw as a collaborator, said, ‘I’m going to get you out of this, don’t worry.’

Drue asked the French driver of her bus to send a letter to one of her accomplices in Barbizon. The driver, who said he was ashamed to be driving for the Germans, hid her letter and promised to mail it. He recognized Mabel Gardner, his neighbour in Montparnasse, and offered to convey messages for her. Mabel recited a list of greetings for the cobbler, his daughter, the cheese seller and the rest of the neighbourhood. The driver told Drue that Mabel was ‘much loved in our quarter’. As the buses pulled out, the French husband of the other sculptress, Elsa Blanchard, arrived. He was in tears. Elsa smiled at him, but, when he was out of sight, ‘she broke down and wept’. The transfer of the Americans would take place at the small Pantin station, a less conspicuous venue than one of the mainline terminals. Nonetheless, the secret got out. Students from the Foyer International des Etudiantes somehow learned that their directress, Sarah Watson, would be there and were waiting when the buses drove up. The Germans would not allow the girls near, so they screamed goodbye to Sarah over the railway tracks.