The Bugatti Queen
by Miranda Seymour
Random House
Imagine if a Vegas "exotic dancer" (who performed the occasional pas de deux with the New York Ballet) became a NASCAR driver of distinction then drove in Formula 1 and on the international rally circuit. Her career destroyed after allegations of collaborating with Al Qaeda — never proved, but never quite disproved either — she retreats into obscurity, ending her days supported by a charity for ex-strippers based in Vegas.
That, in contemporary terms, is the story of Hellé Nice, born Marie Solange in 1900, and one of the fast women of the 20th century. She was literally the fastest, in 1929, and again in 1937 when with an all-female team she established various records — some still standing — for driving at speed over a great distance. She was also fast in the more debased sense of the word. With a succession of lovers and admirers, Nice unashamedly used her considerable physical charms, as seen in the photos author Miranda Seymour reproduces in this biography, to get ahead. One photo shows a naked, exultant Nice releasing a dove into flight, and evokes a palpable insouciance and joie de vivre, that Seymour can't help admiring.
Seymour, who has previously written lives of Mary Shelley, Robert Graves and Henry James, took a serendipitous route to become Nice's biographer. A friend, "one of the few true eccentrics I have ever known," discovered one of Nice's scrapbook in a rummage sale, found a short profile of Nice in a motor-racing magazine, and forwarded the article to her. Beside the piece's concluding words, "If only Hellé Nice had written her autobiography," he scrawled "Yes! But fear not! Miranda is on the case!" Thus commissioned, Seymour immersed herself in the worlds of interwar Parisian cabaret, Depression-era speedways in the United States, Paris under the Nazis and Nice's final, drawn-out years in the South of France.
This serendipity mirrors Nice's own path to motor racing. Leaving the small village where she was the daughter of the postmaster for Paris around 1920, she entered the world of modeling and nude dancing. There was a much closer relationship between this demi-monde and "respectable" show business at the time — indeed Nice was highly regarded as a serious dancer. There was also a close relationship between the worlds of stage and of nascent motorsport, with a special race each year for performers. Always sporty, Nice won this race in 1927; after a skiing accident ended her dancing career, motorsport became her new passion, taking her not only across Europe, but the United States. In the 1930s, she was the only woman to brave the notoriously dangerous American speedways. She seems to have been highly popular, but for some reason lost to the ages (possibly her failure to land a Hollywood contract), never returned to America.
Seymour is also a novelist, and her biography is as much an act of imaginative reconstruction as of straightforward record. We read, for example, of the child Nice's reactions to the deadly Paris-Madrid race of May 1903. Seymour puts her in the arms of lovers the night before races, waking up the next morning hungover from morphine and sex.
Some — particularly the more sober-minded racing fan who has bought this hoping for a history of Bugatti — may object to this, but in general it works as a device to draw the reader into a life that often seems stripped from the archives. It is sobering to read how a woman who once advertised Lucky Strike in France and Esso in the USA, and was in 1929 "the most famous woman in France," fell into such obscurity. Where Seymour overreaches is in ascribing Nice's reckless promiscuity to possible sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather on the basis of very little apparent evidence aside from the behavior itself and Nice's distant attitude to her family after she made the move to Paris.
Seymour is more circumspect in examining Nice's ties to Nazi Germany. Whether Nice collaborated with the Nazis is impossible to ascertain. But there is no record of her being a Gestapo agent, the specific allegation made to her face at a Monaco pre-Grand Prix party in 1949 that effectively ended her career. She certainly had contacts with members of the Nazi party prior to the war, but this was more due to mutual interests in racing than any sympathies with Nazism. The European motor racing world was small, and, impelled by Hitler's ambition, the German motor industry began to dominate the sport in 1930s. Nice spent the war years with her lover, living quietly. As Seymour writes, for some postwar accusers, living reasonably well was evidence enough of collaboration. Seymour seems to feel the overall verdict is not guilty, but there is no definitive evidence either way.
Thus the long years of life that remained to Nice — she died in 1984 — were spent looking over her scrapbooks, thinking about the past. She died almost forgotten, with only a brief mention in the obituaries of Le Figaro, and was buried in the family grave. Her name was never inscribed on the gravestone. It was a sad, lonely end to a life of excitement and passion, a life to which Seymour does justice. Ironically, it is a story that has apparently attracted the interest of the Hollywood studios who rejected Nice during her lifetime.
— Seamus Sweeney (seamus.sweeney@campus.ie)
