Early years
Koopman left Java in 1920 to attend a boarding school in the Netherlands where she developed a talent for languages and became fluent in English, French, German and Italian. After a year at an English finishing school, she moved to Paris to work as a haute couture model.
In Paris, Koopman worked as a house model for non other than Coco Chanel. She also worked for the designers Rochas, Mainbocher and Madeleine Vionnet. She appeared regularly in Vogue Paris and was photographed by Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene.
Koopman had a minor movie role in the film The Private Life of Don Juan and attended the film's premiere with her lover Tallulah Bankhead, who introduced her to Lord Beaverbrook. The Canadian press-baron and Koopman eventually began an affair (1934) that lasted several years. She traveled throughout Europe in the 1930s and often attended opera performances in both Germany and Italy. When Beaverbrook discovered that Koopman was also in a relationship with his son, Max Aitken, he ran a series of stories in the newspapers he owned, (including the Daily Express and the London Evening Standard), that tried to make Koopman an outcast in London high-society. Still Koopman ignored his efforts and she and the younger Aitken lived together for four more years.
Throughout her life Toto Koopman exhibited a free spririt, unapologetically scandalous and riveting, she was openly bi-tracial and bi-sexual, in a time when other celebrities like movie star Merle Oberon felt the need to conceal a multi-ethnic background by pretending that her dark-skinned, Anglo-Indian mother, who was living with her, was her maid.
World War II and later life
She infiltrated meetings of the Black Shirts, but was captured. After spells in prisons in Milan and Lazio she was sent to the Massa Martina detention camp but escaped and hid in the mountains around Perugia, where she worked with a local resistance group.
She was recaptured, promptly escaped again and made her way to Venice. There, in October 1944, Koopman was caught spying on high-ranking German officers in the Danieli Hotel and quickly deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
While there, she decided to tell camp officials that she was a nurse who had trained at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. The fact that she delivered this tale in impeccable German is one reason it was believed. She was assigned to a medical team there, which may have saved her life.
Very shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945, the Nazi authorities released several hundred prisoners, including Koopman, to the care of the Red Cross in Sweden. A former boyfriend, Randolph Churchill (a relative of British warleader Winston Churchill) went to Gothenburg and helped the emaciated Koopman obtain new clothes, a new passport and a wig for her shaved head.
During the 1950s Koopman studied at the University of London and became an archeologist. She took part in several archaeological excavations and made a considerable donation of books to the Institute of Archaeology in London.
In 1959 Koopman and Brausen bought a property on the island of Panarea where they built six villas amongst extensive gardens and entertained very lavishly. They continued to live together until Koopman's death in August 1991, eighteen months before Brausen's death.