Close Read | Toto Koopman, Model Spy

All but forgotten today, in her time Toto Koopman shocked the world. As the first famous biracial model (she was half-Javanese, half-Dutch), Koopman posed for Chanel in Paris and appeared on the cover of French Vogue in the 1930s. She was fluent in six languages, which served her well when she later became a spy for the Italian resistance during World War II — until she was thrown in a Nazi concentration camp. In his new biography, “The Many Lives of Miss K.,” Jean-Noël Liaut likens the secretive Koopman to “a squid hiding behind its cloud of ink.” Though she was never monogamous — she took lovers into her 70s, including the actress Tallulah Bankhead, Winston Churchill‘s son Randolph and the press baron Lord Beaverbrook — she devoted the second half of her life to Erica Brausen, the visionary art dealer, who, with Koopman’s help, launched Francis Bacon’s career from her Hanover Gallery in London. The couple never concealed their relationship, even though homosexuality was a criminal offense in Britain at the time. “Being around them,” a friend recalled, “I really came to understand the meaning of freedom.”