A black and white photo of Toto Koopman, a Dutch-Javanese woman wearing a fashionable high-neck black and white polka dot wrap top. Her black hair is pulled back into a low updo. She has '20s style makeup, with dark lips, thin arched eyebrows, and smoky eyeshadow.
“One dressed up not to please men, but to astound the other women.” – Toto Koopman
If one were to pause and look at any single inflection point in Toto Koopman’s roller coaster of a life, there would always be one adjective apt to describe her and her actions, and that would be “brazen.” Whether it was in her pursuit of a modeling career despite the objection of her parents, her unabashedly publicized affairs with both sexes, or her dogged and defiant role as a spy and resistance fighter during WWII, Toto lived her life with both audacity and conviction every step of the way.
Catharina Koopman was born October 28th, 1908 in Java, an island in present-day Indonesia that at the time was part of the Dutch-ruled colony called the Dutch East Indies. Her father, Jan George Koopman, was a Dutch cavalry officer, while her mother, Catharina Johanna Westrik, was mixed-race; part Javanese and part Dutch. Though she was named after her mother, Catharina preferred to be called “Toto,” a childhood nickname taken from her father’s favorite horse. Toto had one older brother named Ody, who became a successful tennis player in the 1930s, but the siblings, along with their mother, often faced racial prejudice as biracial individuals and were derisively called “Green Dutchmen” due to the color of their skin.
Toto left Java in 1920 to attend a prestigious boarding school in the Netherlands, where she was a star pupil. There she became fluent in English, French, German and Italian, and started to learn Turkish, all on top of her native Dutch tongue. As was customary for educated women at the time, Toto then advanced to an English finishing school, but left after just one year and moved to Paris to pursue a modeling career. Her family was upset with this choice, regarding modeling as just one step above prostitution. At just nineteen, however, Toto was already defiant, independent and self-driven, as well as confident that she did not want to go down the expected path of getting married, having children, and spending the rest of her life as a housewife.
Once in Paris, Toto began booking gigs, modeling haute couture and working for numerous designers including Marcel Rochas, Main Bocher and Madeleine Vionnet. She even worked as a house model for Coco Chanel, only to quit after a mere six months. Still beloved by most of the designers she worked for, Toto consequently became a “jockey” for them, meaning they would give her clothes to wear out to balls, operas and other venues of Parisian high society in order to be seen donning them. She was also photographed by many esteemed fashion photographers, including Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene, and appeared regularly in Vogue Paris throughout the 1930s, including on the cover of the August 1933 edition. In doing so, she became the earliest known photographed cover model for the magazine, which had previously only featured illustrations of models. Koopman’s rise to prominence as a model was also significant in that she was one of the first famous biracial models at a time when racist views persisted, and while many celebrities at the time felt the need to conceal their ethnic backgrounds, Koopman spoke openly about her Asian ancestry.
In 1934, Toto was cast for a small role in the film, The Private Life of Don Juan, and though her part was ultimately cut from the final production, she still attended the premiere with renowned actress Tallulah Bankhead, who was one of her lovers at the time. The premiere was also notable for Koopman as it was there that she met William Maxwell Aitken, known as Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian-British newspaper empresario thirty years her senior. The pair began an affair that would last for a couple years, during which Beaverbrook had no problem funding Koopman’s lavish lifestyle, paying for her to attend operas, travel across Europe, and more. This relationship was severed, however, once Beaverbrook discovered that Toto was also seeing his son, Max. In response, Beaverbrook ran a series of slanderous stories in the multiple newspapers he owned, including the Daily Express and the London Evening Standard.
The talk of London high society, Toto, as if unbothered, continued to see Max, living with him for four years. But when Max asked her to marry him, she refused, so he ended the relationship. In fact, Toto had a good reason to refuse marriage, as she had signed an agreement with Beaverbrook that granted her a pension for life from him provided that she would never marry Max. This contract suited Toto well, as she enjoyed a life of luxury but also knew that she was not and never would be the marrying kind.
Tired of London, Toto moved to Italy in 1939, where she began a relationship with a leader of the anti-Mussolini resistance. She soon found herself involved in the movement, engineering her society connections and selling her furs and jewelry to help back his anti-fascist endeavors. Shortly thereafter, WWII broke out, and Toto, with her vast list of contacts and connections, along with her multilingual skillset, agreed to become a spy for the Italian Resistance. She began to infiltrate meetings of the Blackshirts, Mussolini's all-volunteer militia, but was ultimately caught and apprehended by the Italian Police. She was then sent around to various remote prisons, spending time detained in Milan and Lazio before being sent to the Massa Martina detention camp. Toto managed to escape the camp and fled, hiding in the mountains around Perugia. Not one to sit around and do nothing, she began working with a local resistance group, helping other camp escapees find asylum.
While working with these resistance forces, Toto was recaptured, but managed to escape again, this time fleeing to Venice and laying low for a brief interim. But Toto would once again pick up the fight, and in October of 1944 was caught spying in plain sight on high ranked German officers inside Venice’s Danieli Hotel. This time, she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, which was predominantly for women and located in northern Germany. A smaller scale camp, approximately 132,000 female prisoners passed through its gates, with over 90,000 of them failing to make it out alive.
Once at the camp, Koopman again used her wits and wiles to her advantage, and in perfect German convinced camp officials that she was a nurse who had trained at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. As a result, Toto was assigned to work with the medical team at the camp, a role that likely helped her to survive. Working in the camp’s infirmary, Toto continued to resist the opposition in any way she could, often sneaking food to the hospitalized patients assigned to her care. Right before it was liberated in April 1945, Ravensbrück released several hundred prisoners, including Koopman, to the care of the Red Cross in Sweden. This came about thanks to Count Folk Bernadotte, the Swedish Red Cross’ Vice President who managed to convince Heinrich Himmler to release 7,500 women to their care.
Upon hearing of her release, Randolph Churchill, a former lover of Toto’s (and the son of Sir Winston), went to the aid of the emaciated Koopman, helping her obtain new clothing, a new passport, and even a wig to cover her shaved scalp. Lord Beaverbrook himself also came to her assistance, and in 1945 Koopman traveled to Switzerland to start recovering in Ascona, on the coast of Lake Maggiore. Little did Koopman know that while there she would meet an art dealer named Erica Brausen, who would become her lover and with whom she would spend the rest of her life.
At the time of meeting Toto, Brausen was working for London’s Redfern Gallery, but was simultaneously pursuing her long term goal of opening her own commercial art gallery in the city. In her endeavors, Brausen successfully persuaded a rich and eccentric American named Arthur Jeffress to help back the enterprise, and shortly thereafter established the Hanover Gallery. In addition to being her romantic partner, Toto also became Brausen’s business partner, and the pair ran the Hanover together, with Erica dealing with and managing the artists, while Toto worked on the back end, organizing their lives and schedules, handling the mail and the catalogs, and using her extensive connections to help ensure that the gallery flourish. In short time, the Hanover Gallery rose to prominence and became one of the most influential galleries in Europe, particularly noted for being the first to represent the gay artist Francis Bacon and help nurture his career. Brausen, Koopman and the Hanover Gallery would continue to represent and jumpstart the careers of numerous acclaimed artists over the next 25 years, including the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Man Ray and William Scott. While still involved with the Hanover Gallery, Koopman also began to pursue another interest of hers and started studying archaeology at the University of London in the 1950s. She would go on to take part in numerous archaeological excavations throughout the rest of her life, and make a large donation of books to the Institute of Archaeology in London.
Though homosexual relationships were not legalized in England until 1967, Koopman and Brausen lived together openly, and those who knew them were fully aware of the extent of their relationship. Additionally, though they remained partners for the rest of their lives, their relationship was an open one, and Koopman continued to take lovers of multiple genders throughout their time together. In 1959, Koopman and Brausen bought a property together on the Italian island of Panarea, where they built six villas with extensive gardens. They would go on to reside there together and would frequently and quite lavishly entertain many prominent guests, including Giacometti, Miro and even Pierre Boulez. It is there that the pair would remain until Koopman’s death at the age of 82, on August 27th, 1991. Perhaps from loneliness and heartbreak, Brausen would pass away only eighteen months later.
As a woman of beauty, style, intelligence and guile, Toto Koopman approached every watershed moment in her life with an unflappable amount of tenacity. Ever the iconoclast, Toto was spurred on by her fiercely independent spirit, without care for the repercussions or opinions of others. She was a risk taker from the very beginning, when she dared to sever ties with her family in order to pursue a life and career that she chose for herself. Toto’s daredevilry would remain a constant in her many exploits, whether it came to her bold personal relationships or relentless bravery as a spy and resistance fighter. In its entirety, Koopman’s story reads as an astonishing tale–what with its racy romances, kooky characters, and action-packed war-time adventure–that it's a wonder her life has yet to be memorialized in a cinematic setting. Like Toto herself, it would certainly be sensational.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Baker, Katie. “Toto Koopman, the Bisexual Model and Spy Who Fought The Nazis.” Daily Beast, 2017, August 11. https://www.thedailybeast.com/tinker-tailor-model-spy-the-remarkable-life-of-toto-koopman
Frame, Alan. Toto Koopman & Coco Chanel. Delaware, Kelvin House, 2020.
Goodman, Elyssa. “The Story of Toto Koopman, the Free-Spirited Model Turned World War II Spy”. THEM, 2019, March 5, https://www.them.us/story/toto-koopman
Koski, Lorna. “Model Turned Spy Toto Koopman’s Story Rediscovered in New Tome.” WWD, 2013, August 27. https://wwd.com/eye/lifestyle/model-toto-koopmans-story-rediscovered-in-new-tome-7100765/
Liaut, Jean-Noel. The Many Lives of Miss K. New York, Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2013.
Lineri, Raquel. “This Vogue Cover Model Spied On, Seduced, and Fought Nazis During WWII”. New York Post, 2020, October 24. https://nypost.com/article/catharina-too-koopman-vogue-cover-girl-wwii-spy/
Ring, Trudy. “Women Who Paved the Way: Model, Spy, Arts Patron Toto Koopman”. The Advocate, 2017, March 13, https://www.advocate.com/women/2017/3/13/women-who-paved-way-model-spy-arts-patron-toto-koopman