With a title like Toto and Coco, you might expect a children’s book or a book about dogs. Think again! Alan Frame’s book is utterly extraordinary and un-put-downable. The former Fleet Street executive has unearthed a true-life-and-death wartime spy saga laced with almost every human emotion imaginable – from unashamed debauchery and “pleasure without guilt” to the unbelievable hell of Ravensbrück, the wartime German concentration camp exclusively for women.
Before the war, Toto and Coco had been friends.
Coco is Coco Chanel, the Paris based, unimaginably rich and famous couturier and parfumier, who although close to Winston Churchill, took a Gestapo lover and became a Nazi agent.
Toto is actually Catherina Koopman, a glamorous, mixed-race, bisexual Vogue cover girl in pre-war Paris who had affairs with, among others, the celebrated press baron and wartime Cabinet minister Lord Beaverbrook before moving on (much more passionately) to a genuine love affair with his eldest son, Max Aitken.
She remained promiscuous, but to her credit, bravely passed on “pillow-talk” information to MI6 in London. “While she slept with the enemy” writes Frame, “she did so as a spy and not as a pleasure seeker.”
As war broke out she continued her espionage activities with the Italian Resistance, survived some narrow escapes, was imprisoned three in Italy, but was finally arrested and locked up in Ravensbrück, where she endured unspeakable horrors, including enforced sterilisation (with no anaesthetic), till finally she and other camp detainees were rescued towards the end of the war by the Swedish Red Cross. She weighed less than five stone.
After the war she partnered a new lesbian lover, Erica Brausen in a relationship which lasted 45 years till Toto died aged 82.