And sometimes the results were profound. Take the case of Fernando Gerassi, a Turkish-born Spaniard who came to Paris in the 1920s and, as an abstract painter in the mode of Kandinsky and Klee, chummed around with such Left Bank icons as Picasso, Sartre, and Alexander Calder. By the late 1930s, Gerassi had fought for the losing side in the Spanish Civil War and found himself living back in Paris under the uncomfortable threat of German ascendancy. And then he had a chance meeting with somebody who could help. According to Gerassi’s son, historian John Gerassi, the painter and Rubi met playing poker and hit it off and Rubi was able to help his new friend by hiring him as a secretary at the Dominican embassy. Then, when the Nazi threat grew more intense, he gave Gerassi a more prestigious title that resulted in safe passage out of Europe not only for him and his family but, as it turned out, for many others.
“My family was leaving Paris because the Germans were coming,” the younger Gerassi recalled. “Rubirosa gave Fernando the position of ambassador from the Dominican Republic, gave him the official stamp. Fernando, in turn, gave eight thousand passports to Spanish Republicans, Jews, whoever he could help, before the Germans caught up. My parents came to America as Dominican diplomats.” Not only did Fernando Gerassi save the lives of his family and the thousands for whom he obtained visas and passports throughout 1940 and 1941, he was, when the United States entered the war, enlisted in the OSS as an operative in Latin America and then Spain. In the latter operation, Gerassi engaged in disruptions of German military traffic, abetting the Allied landing in Africa and receiving commendation and a medal from the U.S. government. “Without your actions in Spain in 1942,” OSS founder William Donovan wrote to Gerassi, “the deployment of Allied troops in North Africa could not have taken place.” Thousands saved, Nazis frustrated, a painter become a humanitarian hero, and all because Rubi found lucrative use in the black market for his Dominican diplomatic privileges. It’s a Wonderful Life with an ironic coating of avarice.
It wasn’t long, though, before larger events scuttled Rubi’s get-rich-live-rich scheme. Starting in June 1940 when the Nazis finally did enter Paris, the status and even the location of the Dominican embassy shifted with disconcerting regularity. The Dominican Republic was still technically neutral in the European war, and it maintained diplomatic relations with the Nazis’ puppet government in Vichy, a liaison that was difficult to maintain as the Germans continually forced the Dominicans to relocate their base of operations: Twice before midsummer the embassy moved, first to Tours and then to Bordeaux, where Rubi was ordered to present himself. “A lady friend accompanied me,” he remembered in his memoirs, failing to mention that it was his partner in greed, lust, and social climbing, La Môme Moineau. “Officially, the Dominican legation was put up in a castle near St. Emilion. I presented myself there. It was filled with refugees—some crying old ladies, children with dirty noses, caged birds, kittens in baskets, and old men who had saved France in Les Esparges or Verdun.” This wasn’t exactly the duty he’d signed up for, and he immediately took advantage of the vacuum of authority—communication with Ciudad Trujillo had slowed to almost nil—and changed his and his companion’s situation: “I stayed in a pension for a few days and then returned to Biarritz.”
Eventually, a Dominican embassy was established in Vichy. Even though it enjoyed a prime location—it was situated in the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs directly across from the Grand Casino—the new embassy wasn’t to Rubi’s liking. “In Paris,” he explained, “life had recommenced. I was neutral. I returned to Paris and then went to Vichy. Paris—Vichy, Vichy—Paris: This was my itinerary during the fall of 1940.”
And so it was that when the French diplomat Count André Chanu de Limur invited him to a cocktail party in Paris that autumn he was available to attend. Truth be told, he might have made the effort to be there no matter where he’d been when he got the invitation: The guest of honor was just the sort of woman he would want to meet: the highest-paid movie star in France, “the most beautiful woman in the world,” as she was billed, twenty-three-year-old Danielle Darrieux.
At fourteen, there was a knowing depth to her eyes, and their audacity drew you to her soft, gamin face. By seventeen, she could play ten years older than she was and had learned how to steal scenes with such mature tricks as slowly unfurling her eyelids when asked a question. She was a bona fide natural, able to channel emotions—joy, sorrow, worry, hope—in such a way that the audience felt them instinctively through her. But she was at her best as a comedienne, with a delicious ability to squinch her features into a smile so that her eyes seemed two merry commas on either side of the aquiline exclamation mark of her nose.
She was a war baby, born in Bordeaux on May 1, 1917, to Dr. Jean Darrieux, a French ophthalmologist and war hero, and his wife, an Algerian concert singer. (Polish and American roots were hinted at in publicity biographies.) After the Armistice, her family relocated to Paris. By the age of four she was playing piano; later, she would take up the cello seriously. But her path toward the conservatory was hindered by two fateful events: In 1924, her father died, leaving her mother to raise three children with whatever income she could earn as a vocal instructor; and in 1930, Danielle was recommended for a screen test. “My mother was distrustful,” she recalled later. “At that time, the cinema was reputed to be a completely depraved world.” But she nevertheless relented and allowed the girl to go.
Danielle auditioned for director Wilhelm Thiele, one of those Viennese maestros so stereotypical of the silent film era: autocratic, high-minded, and lecherous (a few years later, he would pick Dorothy Lamour out of a chorus line). The film he was casting was based on Irene Nemirovsky’s novella “Der Ball” about a teenager whose social-climbing parents plan a grand ball but don’t include her; jealous, she tosses all the invitations into the river. To deal with the vagaries of the new technology of sound film, which still lacked the capability for dubbing dialogue, Thiele employed the then-common practice of shooting two versions at once—a German and a French, with distinct casts made up of actors from each country. Danielle got the part of the headstrong daughter in the French version.
The impression she made was strong enough to guarantee her a full five-year contract. In the next three years she made nine films, mostly comedies in which she appeared as a sparkling ingénue. (She made one crime film, Mauvaise Graine [“Bad Seed”], which was cowritten and codirected by Billy Wilder.) And she appeared on the stage in several productions throughout Europe: in Paris, Brussels, Prague, Sofia, Munich, and, fatefully, Berlin, where, in 1934, she signed a contract to make six films.
The first film covered by that agreement was L’Or dans la Rue (“Gold in the Street”), the French-language version of a German thriller coauthored by a German named Hermann Kosterlitz and a Frenchman named Henri Decoin. It was a fateful meeting of star and writers. Kosterlitz was a Jew who had engaged in a few unwise run-ins with German authorities and would soon be leaving for America, where, as Henry Koster, he would hit paydirt as the man who made Deanna Durbin a star and put Abbott and Costello in the movies; he would keep a savvy eye on Danielle as her star rose. Decoin was a former Olympic swimmer, World War I pilot, and knockabout journalist who had been working as a director and screenwriter for almost a decade; he would become, in 1935, Danielle’s first husband.
The age difference may have raised eyebrows—he was thirty-nine, she just eighteen—but it made sense when Danielle’s fatherless adolescence was taken into account. As she remembered tellingly, “I was always absolutely confident in him, and I obeyed him in all things.” More striking was the way in which they wed their careers, turning them into one of those classic director-actress couples who do their best work together. In a span of seven years starting in 1935 with Le Domino Vert (“The Green Domino”), Decoin directed his wife in six features, establishing himself as a capable hand in a variety of genres and cementing a directorial career that would last into the 1960s.
But Danielle became an international star largely on the work that she made between Decoin’s films; while he worked exclusively with her during this period, she