The man who kept re-inventing himself

When Romain Gary, a courageous and much decorated pilot in the RAF’s Free French squadron, was presented to the Queen Mother shortly after the second world war and asked about his background he apparently chose to remain silent. ‘Pour ne pas compliquer les choses,’ was his own version of the one-sided exchange.

Gary, born Roman Kacew to Jewish parents probably in Vilna in 1914 and educated in Nice where he was taken as a teenager by his ambitious actress mother, was constantly re-inventing himself. In 1945, any explanation of how he had ended up in London, a captain, after his 1939 application to become a commissioned officer in the French army had been turned down, and how he had helped land a plane when the pilot had become temporarily blinded, would have seemed unbelievable. Yet Gary’s decision not to even try to explain was far from unusual, even for those without his fame or glamour. How people managed to survive in France during the four long years of Nazi occupation was complicated and painful for almost everyone. Many French chose to move on with their lives without giving further details of how they spent the war years.

The occupation and its aftermath is fertile territory for a novelist and Gary, who had initially trained as a lawyer and after the war became a diplomat with posts in Bulgaria, Switzerland and the United Nations, used it for many of his bestselling books. In 1956 he was appointed French Consul General in Los Angeles, (aka the French ambassador to Hollywood), until he asked the Foreign Ministry to place him on the ‘inactive list’ so that he could pursue other interests.