Natalie Speaks

Lost Film Footage Found by Italian researcher

I had heard rumors that an audio recording existed of Natalie Barney. Like everyone else, I longed to hear her voice and listen to her speaking. Last week, Natalie’s friend and biographer Jean Chalon very kindly forwarded this link sent to him by Italian researcher Giulia Napoleone. Jean was as surprised as anyone to learn that Natalie had actually been filmed at home, 20 rue Jacob, looking just as he remembered her and wearing clothes he recognized. Jean Chalon met Barney on a damp Wednesday afternoon at 28 in late 1963. He was a journalist surprised to learn that the author of the book he was given to review, Traits and Portraits, was still alive. He walked through wet streets and dead leaves to present himself at teatime for their first interview. She asked his age; he blushed when giving it, not knowing what to call Miss Barney. Charmed, she came to his rescue, and thus began the decade of Wednesday afternoons they spent together before her death in 1972.

Here she is commenting on Mata Hari, in a 37-second film clip used in the British television documentary, “Great Mysteries and Myths of the 20th Century: Mata Hari” (1996 dir. Philip Nugus).

Mata Hari was a Dutch-born army officer’s wife who had fled colonial life in Sumatra to reinvent herself around the turn of the century when she became the toast of le tout Paris. She had frequently entertained Natalie and her garden-party guests in the nude, perhaps offering slightly different pleasures. At any rate, the famous WWI German spy immortalized by Greta Garbo was, apparently, nothing of the sort. Sexually voracious and self-promoting? Yes. A beautiful dancer of questionable judgment who “produced herself too much”? Yes, according to Natalie Barney, who says Mata Hari had no idea what danger she had gotten herself into. Trading sex for secrets? Probably not.

According to facts presented in this documentary, Mata Hari was imprisioned and tried by a military tribunal that was neither required to present evidence nor to admit that the French had, themselves, hired her to spy on Germany by seducing German officers. It appears that Mata Hari’s German targets realized she was a spy and set her up with a false code name, “H-21.”  French listeners on the Eiffel Tower intercepted transmissions they took for evidence of Mata Hari’s guilt, but the intercepts were doctored by the fanatical prosecutor bent on providing the French army with a scapegoat in the darkest days of war, following bitter defeats, heavy losses, low morale and mutiny on the battlefield.

Mata Hari’s own lovers protested her innocence at her trial, but by then she had “confessed” after a month of “harsh questioning” in prison. Her lawyer tried in vain to stay her execution, claiming she was pregnant with his child. Rumors swirled around Paris after her excecution, including a report that she had gone to her death naked beneath an ermine coat. It was Natalie Barney who verified that Mata Hari had been executed wearing a simple white suit (which, by the way, is NOT what the executed “spy” is wearing in this documentary, throwing suspicion over the whole piece.)

What’s more, the narrator identifies Barney incorrectly, which may be why the clip has not been searchable under “Natalie Barney” on YouTube. (Search under Mata Hari.)

I know nothing more about this interview, when and why it was conducted, by whom, or where the raw footage exists. I will do my best to find out. As far as I know, it is the only existing film or audio recording of Natalie.

Many thanks, Giulia and Jean, for passing it on.