Hungarian film star escaped the Nazis and married a New York millionaire.
Valerie Pascal Delacorte (1914–2011)
In the fall of 1944, Hidveghy Valeria found herself racing around her city of Budapest, Hungary, amid the Red Army offensive. Beginning in late October, more than a million soldiers advanced against the city to isolate it from German and Hungarian forces. On November 7, the Russian army was closing in. Valeria, a 30-year-old film star, was rushing from Pest, where she had run an errand, to Buda, the western part of the city. In the streets, she saw families with bundles on their heads, dragging horse carts and trucks to escape.
At the Franz Joseph Bridge, dynamite hung on the railing in looming metal structures resembling bird cages. The Germans were planning to blow up the bridges when the Russians reached the city. Just a few days earlier, the eastern span of the Margit Bridge had been blown up, burying refugees, pedestrians, streetcars, and buses in the Danube.
She crossed the Franz Joseph step by step. At the other end, in Buda, she went to the Hotel Saint Gellert, where a Jewish friend was hiding in a room. They talked about how he was going to escape the Nazis.
After she left him, she went down to have lunch in the hotel. In the first-floor dining room, the headwaiter greeted her. He wanted to seat her near the picture windows, but the tables there were all occupied by German officers. Instead, he sat her near the kitchen, beside a large screen that concealed the entrance.
She heard a plane above. The building shook from a bomb that detonated on nearby Mount Saint Gellert.
Moments later, the hotel was bombed. She did not hear it, only saw the huge chandeliers swinging before they crashed down. The screen folded over her, protecting her from flying glass shards from the windows. All of the German officers at the picture window tables were killed. She had been spared.
Valerie Pascal Delacorte was born Hidveghy Valeria in Budapest to a Dutch father and a Hungarian mother. Her family was poor, her mother domineering and difficult. Her parents wanted her to be well educated and, with tremendous financial effort, sent her to Ursuline Convent. She hated it and felt inferior to the well-to-do girls. Though she neglected her studies, she discovered she loved to write stories and act in school plays.
Against her mother’s wishes, she went to a movie studio with a friend to apply for a job as an extra, but the doorman would not let her in. Her friend gave up and left, but Valerie said, “Look at me and remember me. Some day I shall drive through this very gate, and you will run to open it for me. I shall be a star.”
Eventually, she went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London to study theater, and after returning to Hungary, became a successful stage and film actress. When the war came to Hungary in 1944, her acting career was interrupted.
She married her first husband, a wealthy, older man named Tibor Jakabffy, in 1946. She was not sure of him, but they met under extreme circumstances. As she wrote, “World War II was at its midpoint and food was scarce. I welcomed the pheasants and the capons, fattened with nuts, from his estates.”
In the fall of 1946, she received notice that Gabriel Pascal, the film producer known worldwide for his adaptations of George Bernard Shaw’s plays, wanted to screen-test her in Paris. In Budapest in 1938, she had seen and loved Pascal’s adaptation of Pygmalion.
When she told Tibor she was leaving Budapest to meet Gabriel Pascal in Paris, he said, “Don’t be disillusioned, but you’ll never get out of here.”
She proved him wrong. It took her four weeks to climb bureaucratic hurdles and get out of Communist Hungary. Her journey on the Arlberg Express, the main line between Austria and Switzerland, was treacherous. The conductor had warned her not to leave her room during the night, because Russian soldiers came aboard, and it was not safe.
One night in her compartment, she managed to fall asleep, only to be awakened by the Russian words, “Davai, davai!”, or “Give, give!” The soldiers were pillaging. She heard shouting and banging on the compartment doors. Her heart pounded. Guns clanked. Someone tried to force open the compartment, but then she heard the heavy boots thudding down and away. There was banging on another door and, finally, silence.
When the train reached the clean, whitewashed station at the Swiss frontier, there were no soldiers or machine guns. She and the other passengers got off the train to see long-forgotten objects on the pushcarts: bananas, oranges, grapefruit, chocolate, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. They cried out with joy and relief, buying whatever they could.
Her meeting with Pascal changed her life. She ended her marriage and married him, and their electric but complex relationship lasted from 1947 to 1954.
In October 1946, sitting in a restaurant across from the Fontainebleau, a fire burning in the dining room, Valeria told Pascal, “I was an alien everywhere and always until now … until I met you.”
Pascal’s successful career was artistic inspiration for her, and he introduced her to a storied circle of friends that included Rex Harrison and Vivien Leigh. It was Pascal’s idea to turn Shaw’s play about a professor who bet he could train a Cockney girl to speak perfect English into the musical My Fair Lady, which was adapted into the popular film. In addition, he produced Major Barbara (1941), Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) and Androcles and the Lion (1952).
Valerie and Pascal divorced in 1954, and he died that year of cancer. Their relationship became a vehicle for her writing. She wrote a memoir of Pascal, The Disciple and His Devil: Gabriel Pascal and Bernard Shaw, about the creative and difficult collaboration between the two men. She began work on it shortly after Pascal died, writing first in Hungarian and later in English. In her author biography for the book, she wrote that to write it “was a difficult and emotionally exhausting task, one she put aside several times, only to take it up again.”
Valerie was the primary guardian of Pascal’s legacy, and when, in the late 1960s, correspondence between Pascal and Shaw was discovered, she finished her manuscript. She later donated the Shaw-Pascal correspondence to Boston University.
In 1959 she married George T. Delacorte, Jr., the founder of Dell Publishing. Together and independently, they built up an art collection. Like George, Valerie became active in philanthropy. Among George’s gifts to New York City were the Delacorte Musical Clock, the Alice in Wonderland Statue, and a $150,000 donation to help fund the Delacorte Shakespeare Amphitheatre, all in Central Park.
At Columbia University, George established the Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism, and Valerie served as a trustee. The Delacortes had homes in Manhattan, Connecticut, and Florida.
George Delacorte died in 1988. Three years later, Valerie’s love of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, was broadcast to the world. She made a major donation to the museum: $1 million and five Old Master paintings. In 2008, she stunned museum officials again with a gift of 66 European sculptures and paintings, including works by Rembrandt, Rubens, and Tiepolo. Her favorite was a simple 17th-century Dutch painting called Two Boys Blowing Bubbles. The museum’s reputation expanded nationally, and a gallery was named after the Delacortes.
Valerie died in 2011, soon after her 97th birthday. Her legacy continues with an unrestricted fund in The Trust.
