“I am a freelance activist. I like to do things when there is nothing there,” says Toby Gemperle Gilbert who, along with French artist Vicky Colombet, was behind 967 48 37, France’s first helpline for female victims of domestic violence.
It opened in 1975 and received around 300 calls in eight months.
Born in 1941 in San Francisco, she travelled to New York at 17 where she signed her first contract as a model, ultimately posing for Chanel No 5 campaigns.
She is, however, more French than American, having made this country her home since 1960, first in Paris, then Toulon. Her activism came later, from the 1970s onwards.
“I have been privileged to give a voice to others because my voice is loud and clear,” she says, when we met at her apartment to look back and ask questions on her colourful life and assess the state of society today.
How did your modelling career take off?
Things were so easy those days. I was a student at the New York City Ballet School and someone asked me to have a go at modelling. I was sent to Eileen Ford, who ran the Ford Models agency, where I had some pictures taken. Here is what I was told when they were taken: “Listen, we’ll change your nose, your teeth, you’ll lose 20 pounds and we will make a million dollars by Christmas”. I didn't and it worked.
I became a junior model and was chosen by Coco Chanel for six ads. That was 1958. I was free, independent financially and married to my first husband, Dan Budnik. We took a boat to Europe and got off in Antwerp, before going to Stockholm where Dan had to take pictures of Ingmar Bergman for Time magazine. Then we came to Paris, around January 1960. I was 18.
What was so appealing about France, back then?
I have always been interested in the Middle Ages. Of course, there is not much of that sort of history in San Francisco. I wanted to learn about castles and old stones, literature from the period – all of that. There was the arts and fashion as well – Paris was the heart of the roaring 60s.
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Why didn’t you pick Italy? There’s plenty of that there too…
Because Dan was close to the photography agency Magnum, which has an office in Paris, and I had [US model] Dorian Leigh for an agent. It is through her that I met Coco Chanel. For my first booking in Paris for Elle magazine, I was asked to be there at around 10:00. I came in at around 9:45. No one was there. Still nobody had arrived by 10:00 but I was told by secretaries to go to the dressing-room and do my make-up. A stylist came at around 11:00. We tried on some dresses and went to lunch until 14:00. We did the shoot in the afternoon [laughs].
It was the French way…
It was very similar to the experience of Emily Cooper in Emily in Paris! I thought “This is really cool”. More opportunities came as soon as I landed a cover on Elle. I was making enough money to have my own house and share it with my dearest people – half-poets, half-artists or whatever. I loved it immediately. How could you not? You lived the essence of French soft power, this sort of légèreté and chic…Yes, but at the same time there was the war in Algeria, and Europe was cut in two blocs. I never felt that comfortable. I was not engaged publicly but it was a violent world. Of course, there was the Vietnam War too.
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How much easier was it back then in terms of visas and citizenship?
I only needed a smallpox vaccine and my US passport. There has never been a problem when I stayed in France.
I ended up falling in love with Yves Gilbert, a Frenchman, whom I stayed with for 37 years and married in 1967. It was one of those windows when you get nationality from the get-go. I have been a dual citizen ever since.
I asked for a French passport the day Donald Trump got elected in 2016 because I felt the carte d’identité would no longer be enough.
I had no idea if I could go back to the US and do not think I am going to be welcomed right now. I know a lot of people in Europe are not going to the US any more, and a lot of people in the US are not leaving, afraid they will not be able to return.
‘Freelance activist’…Does it pay well?
[Laughs] It is pretty much out of your own pocket.
How do you pick up a fight?
The fight picks me, necessarily. My most recent has been around the right to die, walking in the footsteps of my mother who picked it up in the US in the 1970s. I was able to help her at the end of her life in Oregon. I did the same for my husband in France.
Helping someone to die is the last form of care. France is 40 years late compared to our neighbours Belgium or Luxembourg. I hope things will get better because those who are privileged will always find their way out. The poor people are those who die badly in France and continue to die without dignity.
The “fight picks me” line is certainly true when looking at the helpline you set up…The helpline was in the context of changing the law on divorce, equal jobs and equal pay. But laws only change if the mentality changes.
We were besieged. Over eight months, we received more than 300 calls. It's incredible to say, but we became a sort of cultural phenomenon. We were on every radio and television station.
Do you think the progressiveness of San Francisco moulded you for life?
I was brought up on Russian Hill and went to Presidio Hill School, a very progressive school. In 1954, a Senate Republican passed a law that required students to pledge allegiance “to the American flag. Under God.”
I thought it would be a double lie. I would be pledging under a God I did not believe in. We talked about it with the school and figured out that I would not pronounce the “Under God” part. That was my first lesson in direct democracy.
America is known as the land of the brave and the free. Bravery only exists if you know you can be yourself when there is a problem. Why? Because you are free. Of course, if we were in somewhere like Iran, for example, I would not be talking in this way. In a democratic country, freedom is inside you. Part of you seeks dignity. This part is what I have found in the battered wives and the oppressed and people looking for the right to die.
What was San Francisco like in the 1950s?
It has always been a city of freedom and experimentation. One of my friends says it is the “Extreme Occident”. You cannot go further, so you might as well get along with each other or jump off the bridge. My education, both at Presidio Hill and within my family, was simple: ‘listen to each other, open your eyes and heart and the world will come to you’. It was a very important psychological environment. As a kid, it was fantastic.
My family was very much in love with the arts, as well. We were exposed to a lot of things very early. I went to the opera, saw Egyptian arts, I lived among jazz players at home. My mum would take us to [Indian sitarist and composer] Ravi Shankar, to Buddhist temples, Catholic churches etc.
It has certainly changed since then, with many social issues including homelessness. Does this make you sad?
It is tragic. That’s the correct word. The big mistake is that the US refused universal healthcare. The US is one of the cruellest countries in the world. It’s marche ou crève as French people say. It makes you or breaks you. In France, people get help and everybody pitches in. That is why the salaries are lower, because a lot goes to the healthcare system, a redistributive system.
When I talk to Britons and Americans in France or in their home countries, I’m struck by how many are looking to “escape”...
It’s sad that the American dream became the American nightmare and that the US has become the enemy of its oldest friends and itself. In some ways the Civil War has never ended in the US and will likely continue for decades to come.
Can you imagine? The Civil War officially ended in 1865 but it took until 1965 for the Civil Rights act to be passed. We are only 60 years away from the Civil Rights movement. It is really short in the period of humanity. And all of the rights we have gained with Roe v. Wade [which established a woman's constitutional right to an abortion] are getting stripped away from us.
There are around 40 years between your domestic violence helpline and the start of the #MeToo movement…
When we started working on these problems in France with the helpline, the US was right into the problems of rape, setting up rape crisis centres around the country. The US approach with men beating their wives was more policed, more legal. They were considered criminals. The French started protecting women but punishing the men less. The US system, which is harsher against the men was quicker. France has passed 20 laws to protect women over these 40 years. I keep all of them in a dossier and often bring it to use as an example of how slow things sometimes move.
Ligue des Droits des Femmes
In 1974, Toby Gemperle Gilbert joined the Ligue des Droits des Femmes, an organisation founded by philosopher and activist Simone de Beauvoir, where she met Vicky Colombet, a Franco-American visual artist who had launched the newspaper Les Nouvelles Feministes.
The pair came up with the idea for their 967 48 37 helpline after an interview they conducted in 1975 with Erin Pizzey, a British activist who was promoting her book, Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear.
Ms Pizzey told them that Françoise Giroud, then Secretary of State for Women's Rights, had refused to preface the book, arguing that violence against women did not exist.
Ms Gemperle Gilbert scribbled down notes for every woman who called the helpline and kept all notebooks in her apartment in Toulon.
“Eight months in I had a burnout and could not keep on going,” she said.
“I was listening to stories that equated to horror, atrocities, torture and murder.”
But she continued championing the cause in various other ways. She provided voiceovers for Delphine Seyrig’s documentary Sois belle et tais-toi, a compilation of 23 interviews with actresses about their professional relationships on sets. In 1976, Ms Gemberle Gilbert went to Brussels and took part in the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women, a people’s tribunal uniting 2,000 women from 40 countries to denounce violence against women.
The 967 48 37 helpline is now largely overlooked in the story of the French feminist movement, something that has “faded away in the annals of history,” said Ms Gemperle Gilbert. But it has not disappeared.
