Finding the Dragon Lady (11 page)

The Nhus stayed in a borrowed house at 10 rue des Roses. It belonged to a doctor friend of Madame Nhu's father, and although it wasn't a large villa, Madame Nhu's parents came to stay, as did Nhu's older brother, Ngo Dinh Diem.
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French writer on the Far East Lucien Bodard said the place was “tawdry”; Madame Nhu would only say that “you wouldn't want to cross the garden to get to the kitchen after dark because you wouldn't want to run into a tiger.”
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But sacrifices were only to be expected—a war was on.

The new war would become
known as the First Indochina War, but back before anyone knew there would be a second one, it had other names. To the Vietnamese, it was the War of Resistance; to the French it was the Guerre d'Indochine; either way, it began just as soon as World
War II was officially over. The war in Europe had left France badly battered—the economy was broken, as was basic infrastructure—and Vietnam's vast natural resources glittered. They had been France's for the taking once; why not again? Recolonizing Vietnam would reconfirm the old colonial notions about French superiority. It was a cause the whole country could rally around—never mind what the Vietnamese themselves wanted.

The French ran headlong into the Viet Minh. France had a modern army and state-of-the-art weapons, as well as ever-increasing American funding. The Viet Minh relied instead on the ingenuity of recruits, surprise guerrilla tactics, and the sheer determination of people brought in from the villages, fields, and cities who had had enough of foreign domination. The war would rage for eight years. Estimates vary, but historians put the casualty count for the Viet Minh side somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 dead. French casualties would exceed 75,000—more dead than the United States would incur in the next war fought on Vietnamese soil.

The war's decisive battle took place on May 7, 1954, in a far northwestern valley of Vietnam called Dien Bien Phu. The French were out-smarted. The Viet Minh had managed to surround them with heavy artillery and men. The French lost their will to fight. After a hundred years, they finally packed up and went home. It was an early lesson in how futile any attempt to exert long-term foreign control over Vietnam would be. If only the Americans had been paying better attention.

The war's front lines were very
far away from the Nhus' mountain retreat. Madame Nhu called it
une guerre bizardouille,
a weird little war. She described her life in Dalat as safe and simple and left politics out completely. Madame Nhu tended to her growing family, had babies, took care of chores around the house, and cooked family meals. The same woman who had grown up with twenty servants rode her bike to do the daily shopping in the market and accompanied her daughter to school. All the while, her husband Nhu was indulging in his orchid-raising hobby.
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But nothing in Dalat was ever quite what it seemed. The very premise of the place as a white island of healthy rest and repose was
one big deception. For one thing, it was never isolated from the Vietnamese. The place was built on the sweat and blood of forced labor. Despite the endless supply of human capital and the emphasis on luxury, the colonial builders had run out of money. Ironically, the resort built as a getaway where people could go to get healthy was a breeding ground for malarial mosquitoes because of the man-made lakes. Dalat was not a sleepy hideaway from the war either. It became the de facto headquarters for French political and military ambitions in Indochina. Moreover, Nhu was not nearly as interested in orchids as he appeared. He was cultivating something much more dangerous.

During the Dalat years, from 1947 to 1954, Ngo Dinh Nhu was planting the seeds of a political party, one he called the Can Lao—the Personalist Labor Party. It recruited members into a shadowy network of cells in which no one knew more than a handful of fellow members. All that intrigue would eventually bear fruit, generating a political apparatus with tens of thousands of enlistees. It would support and sustain the presidency of Ngo Dinh Diem for nine years, but the organization would never shake off the secrecy of its founding years. It would earn itself and its creator, Nhu, a nefarious reputation.

“Personalism's” most basic tenet was that a “person” was the antidote to an individual. It was a totally bewildering notion. Nhu had picked up on the obscure Catholic philosophy as a student in the 1930s in France. His attempts to explain how a French Catholic philosophy could apply to building an independent Vietnam would always be long-winded and confusing. His belief, however, was fervent. Nhu was building a real alternative to both the French and the Viet Minh. He was building a network of supporters for his brother Diem.

“I was alone most of the time,”
Madame Nhu wrote about her marriage during that time. While Nhu was building his political base, his wife didn't know where he was. “My husband would simply disappear without a word.” Madame Nhu may not have known exactly where her husband was, but she had a rough idea of what he was working on. The honeymoon location could not disguise the fact that theirs had become a marriage of pragmatism and plotting with little time left for romance.

Madame Nhu wasn't altogether isolated when her husband took off on his secret missions. She had her cousin in Dalat, His Majesty the Emperor Bao Dai, who was good company. Technically he was her mother's cousin, and technically he was no longer the emperor. Bao Dai had never really ruled anyway. Under the French colonial system, his power had always been mostly symbolic. Bao Dai had been crowned emperor in 1925, when he was twelve years old. He had rushed home from school in France to see his father, Emperor Khai Dinh, buried, but then returned to France. The throne sat empty for the next seven years, during which the French resident superior was in total command. By the time Bao Dai returned to Vietnam in 1932, he had been groomed as a perfect little Frenchman, perfectly happy to do whatever the colonial powers told him to.

Bao Dai's life was one of pampered ease. He was married, but that didn't stop him from living like a playboy. Chasing wildlife and young women were his two passions. His actions during World War II and its aftermath demolished any reputation Bao Dai may have clung to as a leader through the colonial years. First he had capitulated to the Japanese; then he turned his crown over to the Communists before going right back to working with the French in their mission to reestablish control in Indochina by the late 1940s. Bao Dai should have ruled from Saigon, but he frankly preferred life in Dalat. He was wise enough to know that he wasn't doing anything anyway. Bao Dai was fully aware of, and resigned to, his pathetic fate. When he overheard one of his lady companions being teased for being a prostitute, the emperor protested. “She is only plying her trade,” Bao Dai said. “I am the real whore.”
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Bao Dai was presumably just as confounded as Madame Nhu by the
guerre bizardouille,
the strange conflict they were not a part of. The cousins, estranged from the rest of the country at war, could barely conceive the extent to which the world had tilted. At least in Dalat, the royal cousins were in a familiar Europeanized milieu. Madame Nhu accompanied her cousin on fishing trips and partnered with him for bridge. When her husband wasn't home, they went on picnics and swam in waterfalls. From behind the ochre walls of the emperor's art
deco palace on the hill, Madame Nhu and her cousin could look down on the valley while remaining ensconced in their world.

She said her husband knew
all about “those nighttime soirees and the daytime excursions.” He probably encouraged them. As discredited as Bao Dai was, the monarch's stamp still meant something politically. If Nhu wanted to build a movement to oppose the French and oppose the Communists, he needed any help he could get. A nod from the emperor would give at least a facade of legitimacy.

If his wife's palling around with her cousin the emperor was convenient, it would also prove temporary. Bao Dai was one of the first political casualties of the Ngo regime. He spent the rest of his life in a run-down chateau in the South of France near Cannes. In Madame Nhu's memoirs, she refers to her cousin bitterly. There is no lingering family warmth: Bao Dai is “that French puppet.”

The former emperor's palace
is now a major tourist attraction in Dalat for the honeymooners. The state has preserved it, not out of any nostalgia for Bao Dai but rather to showcase the indulgent luxuries of a playboy. It had been built for the Vietnamese emperor in 1933 in the exact same style as the French governor-general's house—even using the same granite. Both houses had geometric angles, roof terraces, and circular bay windows. Maybe the twin homes were intended to show some kind of equality, but they really demonstrated that the emperor was as foreign as the Frenchman.
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Even when Madame Nhu
became First Lady, she and her family continued to use the mountain retreat of Dalat as a special place to come together. It was where the children attended boarding school, and the family gathered there for holidays and breaks from palace life. By then, the Nhus used the French governor's home as their weekend home.

In 1962, Madame Nhu invited Time-Life photographer Larry Burrows for a weekend trip to Dalat. She wanted him to see and capture what a very special place it was to the Nhu family. Madame Nhu insisted that the family show their guest how normal they were. She traded her usual palace attire, the fitted silk
ao dai
and tightly coiled
updo, for weekend wear. She sported a sweater loosely belted over capri pants and let her long hair tumble out of a half ponytail. The style made the thirty-eight-year-old First Lady look more like her younger self, the twenty-three-year-old she had been when she had first lived in Dalat. Madame Nhu clasped her hands inside the crook of her husband's elbow and drew herself close to him. With the children scampering around on the lawn, they could have been in a New Jersey suburb—until Madame Nhu got down on one knee and showed her two-year-old daughter how to properly aim a pistol and fire at a target.

The Nhus often said that when they retired, they would move back to Dalat full-time.
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But Madame Nhu didn't intend to stay in the French governor's house forever. She commissioned construction of a cluster of houses at 2 Yet Kieu Street overlooking a beautiful mountain valley. She was building one for herself, one for her father, and one for guests. The houses would gather around a courtyard with a heated swimming pool, a Japanese garden, and a lotus lake. When the lake was filled with water, an image of a map of Vietnam was supposed to appear. Her villa was to be named Lam Ngoc, Forest Jewel, and guarded appropriately. A huge grey guard tower for a private security force loomed at the entrance. Even while the home was under construction, people said that if a stray bird flew into the garden, it would be shot immediately. The house would have five fireplaces and be decorated with the hides and heads of the wild animals felled by her husband. It would have a stainless steel kitchen with modern amenities and even an infrared broiler. All the main rooms were to be equipped with secret trap doors, which would lead to escape tunnels that ran under the swimming pool and emptied into a nearby safe house. A secret ladder under her bed would take Madame Nhu down to an underground room and a huge vault lined with enough reinforced iron to withstand firepower.
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Madame Nhu didn't think of the “little villa” she was building in Dalat as lavish, but traditional Vietnamese homes in the countryside still functioned with an outhouse on stilts, the hole positioned above a pond teeming with hungry carp. The amount Madame Nhu was spending just to build herself a porcelain-tiled and hygienically plumbed bathroom was beyond what most people earned in an entire lifetime.

The house took five years
to complete. She had the front door rebuilt eight times. The corner window had to be remade ten times before it pleased her. One of her fifty gardeners, Pham Van My, said Madame Nhu was “a difficult lady” to work for. He said she shouted her orders and threatened the workmen but was scared of worms. The woman he described had expensive and fickle tastes. The construction was initiated by a woman just coming into her own, but Madame Nhu told me she never set foot in the place once it was done. By the time Madame Nhu's dream house was finally finished, so was she.

“We should meet,”
Madame Nhu said on the phone shortly after Tommy's birth. It was the first time she had expressed any willingness to meet me face to face. She must have reasoned that I couldn't possibly be conspiring to hurt her if I was with a baby, so she insisted that I bring Tommy. Would Paris be alright?

“Of course, Madame. I would be honored.”

I really was. I was planning a September trip to introduce the baby to my French relatives. A stop in Paris would be on the way. I didn't tell Madame Nhu that I was also planning to visit the French colonial archives in the South of France to see what other history I could pull up. By this time, I knew how firmly Madame Nhu believed that her version of the truth should be adequate and reported unchallenged—even when it had obvious cracks.

She planned the time and place. Our meeting was to take place in the Église Saint-Leon, a Catholic church not far from her apartment in the fifteenth arrondissement. We would meet in the nave, in front of Saint Joseph's statue at 10:00 a.m. “Then we can go to the park across the street,” she said. “To talk. It will be very discreet.”

When I got inside the church, the vault-like doors closed behind me, shutting out the bright autumn sun. I thought, belatedly, that perhaps I should be worried. I reminded myself that I was just introducing Tommy to a little old lady. What could happen? Sure, she had been the Dragon Lady. She had run a militia of armed women and had her husband's henchmen at her disposal, but she had also been a mother four times over. I forced myself to focus on that aspect, but I was ill at ease. I told myself I was just nervous about making a good impression.