Career
In the 1930s, her money allowed her to enjoy the vibrant social scene in London and Paris. Piloting her own airplane, she traveled around Europe, spending her time at luxury hotels, skiing at the best resorts in the Alps, and socializing with the elite of the day. Gold was living in a Paris apartment when France fell to the onslaught of the German army in 1940.
She fled to the Mediterranean seaport of Marseille in southern France which, although not Nazi occupied, was under the control of the collaborationist Vichy regime.
In Marseille she met Miriam Davenport, an American art student, and Varian Fry, an American journalist and intellect. In the armistice agreement between Germany and defeated France, France had agreed to "surrender on demand" refugees to the Nazis.
Instead of returning to the United States, Mary Jayne Gold chose to remain and joined Davenport and Fry along with other volunteers in sheltering refugees and organizing their escape through the mountains to Spain or by smuggling them aboard freighters sailing to either North Africa or ports in North or South America. She was helped in part by returning French Foreign Legionnaire turned local gangster Raymond Couraud, who became her lover.
In fall 1941, Mary Jayne Gold returned to the United States, while Couraud traveled to Spain and onwards to England, where he became a war hero in the Special Air Service.
, she divided her time between her apartment in New York City and a house she had built in the village of Gassin, Var, not far from Saint Tropez, on the French Riviera. In 1980, she wrote about her wartime experiences in the memoir Crossroads Marseilles 1940, published by Doubleday in 1980, and republished in France in 2001 by Mary Jayne Gold"s literary heir Pierre Sauvage. Mary Jayne Gold never married and had no children.
She died of pancreatic cancer in 1997 at her villa in Gassin.
Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century, Confessions of an Art Addict, (Foreword by Gore Vidal, (Introduction by Alfred H Barr Junior), ANCHOR BOOKS, Doubleday & Company, Incorporated. Universe Books 1979.
