Margaret Kelly, nicknamed Bluebell because of her penetrating blue eyes, spent only a few years with the Folies Bergère before creating her own group which she called the Bluebell Girls. She was still only twenty-two. This troupe was sometimes engaged to perform at the Folies Bergère and sometimes at the Paramount Cinema on the classier Boulevard des Capuchines, one of the largest and most ornate of the old-style picture palaces in Paris, still used as a cinema in the mornings, and with a very different atmosphere from the floor shows of Montmartre. Kelly quickly became a successful choreographer, impresario and administrator, taking her girls on tours of Europe and acquiring considerable fame in her own right. She had been close friends for some years with the Romanian-Jewish composer and pianist at the Folies Bergère Marcel Leibovici, and although all backstage romances were officially forbidden, in 1938 Marcel proposed. He was thirty-four and she twenty-six. But getting married was complicated as Bluebell would have lost her British citizenship if she married a Romanian. They resolved the problem eventually by getting the Romanian Embassy to supply documents saying that he was no longer a citizen of their country – in other words that he was stateless, a brave undertaking for him. But then there was the problem of his religion since Bluebell wanted a church wedding and Marcel, although not observant, was Jewish. So determined was she to have the Church’s blessing that she petitioned the Archbishop of Paris, who referred her case to the Vatican. Marcel then had to promise in a formal interview with the Archbishop that he would raise any children of the union as Catholics. Finally, on 1 March 1939 they were married in a civil ceremony and, later, at the huge La Trinité church, they received a religious blessing. They also held a party at the Pavillon Henri IV H?tel in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a popular tourist destination just outside Paris, having chartered a bus to bring as many dancers as it would hold. There was no honeymoon and the next day was business as usual. In July 1939 their first child, Patrick, was born.
With so many couples getting married in 1939, several jewellers now benefited from the flourishing trade in engagement rings. At least if the husband was killed, the war widow would then be able to obtain some financial compensation. But in the chaotic frenzy of changing roles, moving home and worrying about relatives at risk, there were almost as many couples separating or getting divorced. Comtesse Lily Pastré, approaching fifty, was forced to begin a new life in 1939 as, at the end of the year, she finally agreed a divorce settlement with her husband, the enormously wealthy Comte Jean Pastré, whose infidelities had nearly destroyed her.
Lily was born Marie-Louise Double Saint-Lambert in 1891, daughter of a rich family with Russian antecedents on her maternal side, while her great-grandparents on her paternal side were hard-working entrepreneurs and co-founders of the Noilly Prat liqueur business. As heiress to the Noilly Prat Vermouth fortune, Lily was rich in her own right. Nonetheless, her childhood had not been one of luxury, and she had been brought up in an austere Catholic, authoritarian household. As a young girl she was tall, blonde and slim and a talented tennis-player. But the first great sadness in her life came when her elder brother, Maurice, was killed in 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. Two years later, partly to strengthen alliances between families of the haute bourgeoisie in Marseilles, she agreed to an arranged marriage with Comte Pastré. The couple had three children – Nadia, Nicole and Pierre – but as was normal in her circle, Lily was not expected to spend much time with her children, who were brought up by a nanny and an English governess. With few options, Lily made her life in the concert halls and opera houses of Paris and became deeply knowledgeable about avant-garde music, theatre and art. In 1939, aged forty-eight with three adult children, she moved out of Paris as the divorce settlement left her with the family chateau at Montredon near Marseilles. But she was shocked to find herself shunned as a divorcee by French provincial society, even though her husband was the adulterer. She had little idea of what to do with her life and, as the gossip from Paris about her husband’s latest conquests reached her, she lost self-confidence, put on weight and started to drink. For Lily, the war was in some ways to be her salvation.
Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian princess, living with her family in the wealthy suburb of Suresnes in 1939, was also recovering from the break-up of a longstanding affair and recognized that war was going to put an end to her fledgling career as a children’s writer. Noor was born in Moscow in 1914 to an Indian father who was a distinguished Sufi teacher and direct descendant of Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth-century Muslim ruler of Mysore, and an American mother, Ora Baker. The family lived first in London before settling in Paris, in a large house named Fazal Manzil in Suresnes, where Noor studied harp and piano for several years, culminating in a period at the Paris Conservatoire under Nadia Boulanger. This was followed by a course in child psychology at the Sorbonne. Noor was often described by her friends and teachers as quiet and dreamy, but she was also both talented and clever. By her mid-twenties it was clear she was suffering deep emotional turmoil, was often in tears for no discernible reason and seemed close to a complete breakdown, most probably because for the last six years she had been involved in an intense relationship with a Turkish Jewish pianist known as Goldberg (his first name was never used), who lived in Paris with his mother.