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By Root 2404 0

journey was too exhausting or too expensive, and every trip was a new honeymoon. On tyres made by his client Goodrich, they drove across the African continent, east to west, then the full length from the Cape to Cairo, pausing in Southern Rhodesia to inspect mines at their owners’ request. They sailed a schooner across the South Pacific, rode ponies into Tibet and made the first long-distance car journey from the mountains of British Columbia through uncharted brush to Alaska. Much of their route provided the basis for the Alcan Highway that later linked Alaska to the state of Washington. Bedaux loved inventing –patenting a crêpe-soled shoe, data-storage on film to replace paper and several children’s games.

Bedaux’s business empire expanded beyond the United States–to Britain in 1926, then to France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Holland. In a speech to American businessmen, he reflected on the expansion of commerce beyond national borders: ‘A man loves his country. He makes laws for the glory of his flag. He traces the outline of a national ideal he would like to live up to, but his stomach, his need for trade are essentially international. He is a patriot, and a sincere one, but when his money is concerned, he blissfully commits treason.’

Within ten years, Bedaux’s nineteen offices around the world were advising 500 companies in the United States, 225 in Britain, 144 in France, forty-nine in Italy and thirty-nine in Germany. The seizure without compensation of his German company in 1934, a year after Adolf Hitler assumed power, led Bedaux to ingratiate himself with the Nazi hierarchy. He used Austrian friends, the brothers Count Friedrich and Count Joseph von Ledebur, to contact the Nazi leadership. The young counts and their four other brothers were well connected, their grandfather having been a finance minister under the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph. Friedrich met Bedaux at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1929, two years after his wedding to Iris Tree, an English actress and daughter of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Later in 1929, he travelled with Bedaux through Spain and France and arranged for his fishing trip in the South Pacific. He also took charge of the native bearers and equipment for Bedaux’s African crossings. His brother Joseph ran a land agency in Vienna and was married to Gladys Olcutt of Boston. Of the six brothers, only Joseph was pro-Nazi. Bedaux made Joseph his Berlin agent to contact the appropriate Nazi officials to reverse the company’s nationalization.

For two frustrating years, Bedaux negotiated with the Germans. He approached a German banker, Dr Emil Georg von Stauss, whom the Nazis had placed in charge of nationalized firms including Lufthansa and Mercedes. Through him, Bedaux became intimate with a sculptress favoured by the Nazi leadership, Annie Hoefken-Hempel. Bedaux commissioned her to make busts of himself and Fern at 5,000 Marks, about $2,000, apiece in June 1935. Next came his sponsorship of an exhibition of her work in Paris where busts of Hitler, Goering and Bedaux were displayed alongside her sculpted nudes. Frau Annie introduced Bedaux to Labour Front director Dr Robert Ley, Hitler adjutant Captain Fritz Wiedemann and Dr Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht, in addition to being her lover, was minister of economic affairs and head of the German central bank, the Reichsbank. Although the acquaintances blossomed, the Germans did not give Bedaux back his company.

In 1937, Bedaux hosted an event at Château de Candé that opened doors in Germany while closing others in America. It began with a letter from Fern’s old friend, Katherine Rogers. Katherine was married to Herman Livingstone Rogers, son of Franklin Roosevelt’s upstate New York neighbour Archibald Rogers. Herman Rogers and his brother Edmund had accompanied Bedaux on his British Columbia expeditions. By 1937, Herman and Katherine were living on the French Riviera that American millionaires like Gerald and Sarah Murphy and Frank and Florence Jay Gould had already made fashionable. Theirs was the privileged world that F. Scott Fitzgerald