T here were terms for rich young women like Mary Jayne Gold in the United States of the 1930s. Newspapers routinely derided her type as “Lisping Lulus” or “Nice Nellies,” the perfect companions for the “Lounge Lizard” young men who seemed the antithesis of the tough Doughboys of the First World War.
Born in Chicago in 1909, Gold was the granddaughter of the man who invented the first cast-iron radiator, and the family grew wealthy from manufacturing steam heating systems. She came of age in the late 1920s, the decade of jazz and “flappers,” where young women enjoyed social freedom unknown to previous generations. The Great Crash of 1929 didn’t inhibit the carefree lifestyle of women like Gold, who, despite her surname, was not Jewish.
She relocated to Europe in the 1930s, settling in Paris, the city glamorized for Americans in the 1920s by the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Josephine Baker. Gold bought a large apartment in the chicest quarter of the French capital and invested in a Percival Vega Gull aircraft. A contemporary recalled that she would “toot around Europe, she would fly to Switzerland for the skiing and to the Italian Riviera for the sun.”
Life was swell for Mary Jayne Gold, but the idyll ended in September 1939 when France and Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. “You felt it was the end of the world, that everything you believed in and everything that had been built up by humanity or decency for centuries was finished,” she reflected in an interview with the French documentary-maker Pierre Sauvage in the 1990s. “And yet, there was another part of me that said, “We’re going to beat ’em.”
Shortly after the outbreak of war, Gold donated her aircraft to the French air force as a contribution to the war effort. Then, like every other person in France, Gold experienced eight months of what is often described as the “Phoney War,” the period of eerie calm in Western Europe, which was shattered in May 1940 when the Germans invaded the Low Countries. Gold joined the exodus out
