With this material Lubitsch could have have made a great comedy in the style of Ninotchka.
Reviewed by Alan Riding
What did you do in the war, Auntie?
Actually, Priscilla Thompson was long dead when her nephew Nicholas Shakespeare was moved to find an answer to that question. He knew she had lived in France during the German occupation, and family lore even had her jailed by the Gestapo for her work in the Resistance. But, like many people who experienced the horrors of this conflict, she chose not to talk about it. Her novelist nephew set out to learn more.
The result makes for gripping reading, not least because his findings on how his blond, blue-eyed relative survived four years of Nazi rule were not what he expected. When Priscilla returned to England in October 1944, two months after the liberation of Paris, she told her best friend, Gillian, “I got out just in time.” In “Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France,” what she meant becomes much clearer.
Priscilla’s life was troubled well before it was disrupted by Hitler. Born in the summer of 1916, she was just 8 when her mother ran off with a lover to Paris, prompting her father, a film and drama critic who later became a popular radio broadcaster, to take up with a younger woman, Nicholas Shakespeare’s maternal grandmother. When domestic warfare followed, Priscilla was shipped off to Paris, where she became fluent in French; formed a lifelong friendship with Gillian, an English girl who grew up in Paris; and saw her hopes of becoming a dancer dashed by illness.
After spending her late teens in England, Priscilla returned to France in 1937, this time for an abortion. (Her mother provided the address.) It was meant to be a quick trip, but on her way to Paris, she met Robert, a Norman aristocrat 17 years her senior, and a new life with a respectable father figure opened up. Only on their honeymoon, in December 1938, did Priscilla discover he was impotent.
Their marriage did not survive the German takeover 18 months later. With Robert’s family in Normandy fearing reprisals for sheltering an enemy alien, Priscilla was bundled off to Paris, where she had to report daily to the French police. She was then interned for three months before winning release by feigning pregnancy. More than ever, she needed new protectors. Her beauty ensured they were not long in coming.
Shakespeare was lucky to locate a trove of love letters and photographs and a draft of his aunt’s unpublished memoir. After Priscilla’s death, in 1982, her friend Gillian also investigated her life, driven by long-buried anger rooted in the suspicion that Priscilla had bedded one of Gillian’s lovers. Shakespeare also read Gillian’s unpublished account, although he still had much gumshoeing to do on his own.
Some of Priscilla’s lovers, like the devoted Daniel Vernier, were innocent enough: married, although not collaborators. But one, Emile Cornet, a Belgian racecar driver, perhaps the first man to satisfy her physically, was involved in the black market and connected to some even darker figures. Not the least of them was Henri Chamberlin, a.k.a. Henri Lafont, whose infamous Bonny-Lafont gang became known as the French Gestapo.
How much was Priscilla aware of? “It is inconceivable that Priscilla and Chamberlin did not know each other,” the author notes. Her own memoir verges on confession: “I was slightly startled as I had never known any shady characters before and there now appeared in my life quite a number of them.” She apparently never left a protector until another came along.
At one point in 1943, Priscilla and Cornet were arrested during a clampdown on the black market. While he spent months in jail, Priscilla was freed within 48 hours. Who had sprung her? Chamberlin, who along with his cronies was tried and executed after the liberation of France, certainly had the power to do so. But some other mysterious figure might have stepped forward.
Could it have been Otto, the lover who wrote a nostalgic letter to Priscilla after the war? But who was Otto? One candidate was Hermann Brandl, Göring’s principal henchman in the looting of Paris, who was known by that name. But Shakespeare discovered another candidate, Otto Graebner, a German businessman with powerful friends, who surely had the clout to order Priscilla’s release. By then, she was also involved with her French lover Daniel Vernier’s brother-in-law, Pierre, although she and Otto spent D-Day together.
After the liberation of Paris, women who had engaged in collaboration horizontale were paraded half-naked through angry crowds, often with their heads shaved bare. Priscilla, who was ill at the time, kept a low profile and survived this too. “All I know is that Priscilla, the little cork, made it through the occupation,” Shakespeare writes. Having done so, though, she was haunted by its trauma for the rest of her life: “Her French years fell suddenly into the category of a shameful subject not to be spoken about, like Vichy.” In the end, after long bouts with alcoholism, only religion brought her solace.
That said, her nephew takes care not to judge her: “At first glance, it was embarrassing to discover what Priscilla got up to. Of course, I wished for my aunt to be heroic. I wanted her to be an exception. But she was not an exception, she was an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances.”
