It oughta be a movie: A Woman of No Importance, by Sonia Purnell
You know how there has been an idea floated of having a female James Bond? Forget it - there is already a real female spy who blows Bond out of the water! Virginia Hall ran a huge network of informers and resistance fighters in Vichy and Nazi-occupied France. Besides the inherent difficulties being a member of the resistance and a woman in the man's world of intelligence agencies, Virginia was also disabled, having a wooden leg she called Cuthbert. Though she operated behind enemy lines for 3 years and was personally targeted by the Gestapo and Abwehr, she was never caught.
*Warning, spoilers ahead. But it is history, so...*
Virginia was brought up to be a socialite, but was always a bit too eccentric and outdoorsy for that role - for example, one day she came to school wearing live snakes as a bracelet. Instead of pursuing an advantageous marriage, as her mother hoped, she instead set her sights on a diplomatic career. While working in Turkey, she lost her leg in a hunting accident. When war broke out, she worked for a while as an ambulance driver in France, and then was recruited to the British SOE and sent into Vichy France to help build the resistance.
She set up shop in Lyon, and quickly recruited a seemingly unlikely set of helpers, starting with a convent of nuns, a madam and her prostitutes, and the brothel's doctor. Virginia was one of only 4 of the first batch of SOE agents not caught in an early sting operation; More than a year later, she ran an operation that successfully broke 12 of the captured agents out of their detention camp. Meanwhile, Virginia was carefully compartmentalizing her own operations, but was so successful she couldn't help but attract attention. For instance, in one month she worked with 25 resistance organizers, 6 radio operators, and 8 different resistance networks stretching across France. The "butcher of Lyon" Klaus Barbie and the Abwehr agent Alesch were on the lookout for the "limping lady", with the latter managing to infiltrate Virginia's network and even meet with her.
Virginia stayed in Lyon until the very last minute before the full German occupation, in part because she was trying to spring yet more of her colleagues from custody. By the time she left, the only way out was to hike a treacherous 5000 foot climb through the Pyrenees. On the way, she radioed London complaining about Cuthbert. They, not knowing she meant her leg, responded: "If Cuthbert is a problem, have him eliminated."
She returned to German-occupied France heavily disguised as an old woman as an agent of the American OSS, since the British considered her too fully 'burned' to go back in the field. This time she took a more direct role in organizing and getting supplies to resistance paramilitary groups - making use of some very 007-like goodies such as fake horse dung that could be used to blow up vehicles when they drove over it. The maquis fighters she assisted played a vital role in supporting the D-Day operation by disrupting German supply lines and communications and by direct fighting in the interior. The area she took most direct control of, the Haute Loire, was the first to liberate itself, 2 days before Allied forces reached Paris.
It was toward the end of this phase of her life that she met fellow agent Paul Goillot, and they eventually returned to the US together. There she began to work for the fledgling CIA. Virginia stayed with the agency for twenty years, despite many frustrations, before retiring at age 60 to a house in the country with Paul and a pack of poodles, goats, and geese. Though she enjoyed reading spy books, and her family suggested she write her own, she remarked that she had a habit of silence, having seen too many corpses of colleagues who talked.
Adaptation issues: This is a non-fiction book, but it would be a great foundation for a movie or, better yet, a mini-series. There are so many adventures and colorful characters involved that it would take time to flesh them out properly. Some of the people I would focus on include:
- Germaine Guerin, the glamorous madam
- Jean Rousset, the doctor who often aided Virginia's 'tart friends' in sabotaging German soldiers by giving them itching powder to put in their uniforms, or false clearances for syphilis
- Ben Cowburn, a British agent who was one of Virginia's biggest supporters
- Georges Duboudin, her supposed superior officer who was a womanizing mess
- Denis Rake, a plump, bespectacled semi-openly-gay music-hall artist turned radio operator1
- Marcel Leccia and Elisee Allard, originally members of the agency that caught the other SOE agents, but who flipped to Virginia's side and became so close she thought of them as her 'nephews'
- Pierre Fayol, leader of a guerrilla band who initially resented Virginia taking it over, and later became one of her biggest advocates
- Klaus Barbie2 and the false priest Alesch as antagonists
The prison escape bit could be a movie in itself, with great details like having a priest who had lost his legs in WWI smuggle the men a radio under his lap blanket.
It would be important in adapting this not to make Virginia a femme fatale3 or to over-emphasize Paul as a love interest, since he enters the story quite late. In fact, though her classmates called her "Donna Juanita" because her charm brought the boys flocking, "Virginia held such displays of male ardor in contempt...and would assert her independence by wearing tomboy trousers and checked shirts whenever she could." Later, spending time in Paris, it is implied that she admired how fashionable women there "were positively expected to be independent, athletic, androgynous in appearance, and to work and love as they pleased," with reference to Gertrude Stein and Josephine Baker. Virginia had only two significant relationships with men, and in both cases allowed her family veto power that she clearly didn't accept in any other aspect of her life. She would be better described as 'handsome' or 'striking' than 'pretty'4, and participated in 'masculine' activities such as the hunting trip that cost her her leg. As one of my friends pointed out when I was texting her updates about this book and mentioned I was feeling some Sapphic vibes, Virginia's first recruits are from two groups of women - nuns and prostitutes - who don't marry. And though she did eventually marry Paul at age 50, their relationship comes off less as 'passionate romance' and more as 'I need a companion who appreciates the true me and understands what I've been through'5. In addition, two of her agents who were most loyal6, and who never got in trouble due to inappropriate girlfriends as so many of the male agents did, are pointed out to have been a Mayfair hairdresser and a writer for a fashion magazine before the war. And of course the title of the book is also the title of an Oscar Wilde play. If this were fiction, I would call that a lot of of queer coding (at least a 0.8 on the "Good Omens" scale), especially when you add Rake in as part of the staunch inner circle. As this is a true story...well, people's lives are complicated and don't always match up with stereotypes, so I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions. But it might be an angle that would be worth researching more deeply if one were developing a script7. At the very least, it should be clear in the adaptation that neither Virginia nor Paul cared much about traditional gender roles: he was 8 years younger and 6 inches shorter than her, spent most of their relationships as a 'house husband', and seems to have been perfectly content.
I'm not sure how much of the post-war stuff I would include. It would be kind of a downer ending, as working for the CIA seems to have been very frustrating and morally conflicting compared to Virginia's more exciting and clearly justified activities with the resistance. Her superiors at the agency were extremely sexist, not appreciating or rewarding the take-charge attitude and good sense that had served her so well in field operations. The focus of so many of their activities must also have felt a bit strange, given that she had happily worked with socialist and communist resistance fighters in France. Her thoughts on the CIA recruitment of former Nazis, including Klaus Barbie, are not recorded, but she did remark to her niece that she was glad the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba "wasn't one of mine". On the other hand, that stuff could make an interesting tale in itself, or could be blended with stories from other agents to give an insider look of that agency in the early days of the Cold War.
1. I kept picturing Michael Sheen reprising his Aziraphale-as-secret-agent bit from 'Good Omens' when reading about this guy. That blend of fussiness and determination would be perfect.
2. This dude actually had a pet cat he brought to work, like a Bond Villain.
3. After all, Germaine and her girls would be much
better in that role if one wanted to include that seductive element.
4. Emily Deschanel ('Bones') would be great in this role, I think. She has the right jawline and the ability to do both 'charming' and 'authoritative'.
5. That is not to say she couldn't have been attracted to him, or to the Polish officer she was briefly engaged to years earlier. Bisexual people exist, after all, and can lean in one direction or the other - as I can personally attest. Or she could have been demisexual, only being attracted to a few people with whom she formed an emotional connection, and otherwise having a Sherlock Holmes-like focus on her work instead of relationships. Point is...the only thing that definitely doesn't scan is the standard Hollywood romance.
6. One gets tortured for weeks without giving her up, for instance.
7. Or maybe I just REALLY want to see a gay version of 'Inglourious Basterds'! Jewish people seem to have signed up to fight the Nazis in higher-than-proportional numbers, recognizing the personal existential threat. I have a hypothesis that queer people might have done the same, and I do know of a handful of prominent examples, including 'bicons' Josephine Baker (also a spy for the resistance) and Marlene Dietrich (who poured a lot of money and time into supporting the war effort). But a broader pattern would be harder to confirm than for Jewish soldiers/antifascists given that being gay was still illegal and/or highly stigmatized in Allied countries too - and even being a WWII hero wasn't sufficient protection, as Alan Turing sadly discovered. Still, if there were such a pattern, they would probably have found each other, since that seems to happen in everyday life all the time.
