Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [67]
Cruising into New York on 1 November, Bedaux faced uniform hostility to the Windsor tour from American labour, the press and the State Department. Workers’ unions in Wallis Simpson’s home town, Baltimore, led the national campaign against a couple who had just been entertained by the Nazis. One Baltimore labour leader, Joseph P. McCurdy, accused the Duchess of Windsor of not having shown, as a young woman in Baltimore, ‘the slightest concern nor sympathy for the problems of labor or the poor and needy’.
The prime target of labour venom was the Windsors’ sponsor, Charles Bedaux. Some of Bedaux’s American clients cancelled their contracts to shield themselves from the bad publicity. A few engineers resigned from the Bedaux Company, and his board of directors demanded that he dissociate himself from the firm that bore his name. Stunned by the reaction to what he imagined would be a public relations coup for himself and the Duke of Windsor, he agreed to yield control, but not ownership, of his American companies. His successor was Albert Ramond, another French-born American, whom Bedaux had hired. Bedaux retained non-voting shares and gave his power of attorney to his loyal secretary, Isabella Cameron. At the same time, the State Department announced, at Britain’s request, it would deny royal protocol to the Duchess of Windsor. The battering of Bedaux did not let up. The Internal Revenue Service issued him an income tax demand, and a former mistress lodged a suit against him for breach of promise. The multiple humiliations forced Charles and Fern to slink through a side entrance of the Plaza Hotel to avoid the journalists and the ex-mistress, drive to Canada and sail to France from Montreal. The Windsors, who were waiting in Paris with trunks packed to board the Cherbourg for New York, cancelled.
Bedaux suffered what was undoubtedly a nervous breakdown, diagnosed as arterial thrombosis, and spent months convalescing in a Bavarian hospital. The threat to his health was sufficient to break his heavy smoking habit of the previous thirty years. The treatment led to a dependence on sleeping pills–mainly a German-manufactured barbiturate, Medinal.
Germany, regarding Bedaux as a close friend of an ex-king whom it was cultivating, offered to return his company if he donated $20,000 for reinvestment and $30,000 ‘penetration money’ to Dr Robert Ley’s Labour Front. Payment of this barely masked bribe worked, up to a point. The Nazis restored the company, but they withheld royalties on his consultancies. Six months later, they took the company back, again without compensation.
When France and Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Bedaux announced he would not make profits from the conflict. His promise may have had more publicity than practical effect. The French assigned him to study and improve their inefficient production of arms during the eight-month drôle de guerre, or phoney war, that preceded the German invasion of May 1940. As he had done with American clients like the Ford Motor Company, Bedaux analysed French ordnance production to reduce inefficiency, rationalize the supply of raw materials, increase labour productivity and deliver finished products without delay. The factories under Bedaux’s direction more than doubled their arms output. To the French, his methods were impeccably American and might have helped their army had they