And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (17 page)

During much of the occupation, cabarets and music halls did booming business, with Pigalle-Montmartre, Montparnasse and the Champs-Élysées the busiest neighborhoods: by one count, there were 102 nightclubs in Paris, with forty-nine cabarets in Montmartre alone. So busy were performers that some appeared in at least two shows a night, hurriedly cycling between theaters or clubs. For some cabaret managers, it was as if
la belle époque
were back. Les Folies Bergère and Le Casino de Paris could be counted on to present the splashiest shows and biggest stars. In 1942, Les Folies Bergère boastfully
called its new revue
Trois Millions
because it cost three million francs; this was followed by the still more lavish
Quatre Millions
. It was at Le Casino de Paris that Maurice Chevalier made his occupation debut, in September 1941, in a new revue called
Toujours Paris
. This was hardly an original title, since dozens of other revues also exploited the city’s name, among them:
Paris je t’aime; Amours de Paris; Pour toi, Paris; Tout Paris; Bravo Paris; Paris en fleurs; Paris-Printemps;
and even
Paris, ich liebe dich
. In 1941 and 1942, the ABC went beyond song and dance with two revues called
Chesterfollies
, which added burlesque, clowns and acrobats to the mix. At Le Lido, Jacques Tati, later best known for his
Monsieur Hulot
character, was making his name with mime and parody routines. Other cabarets and theaters popular with German officers were L’Alhambra, Le Palace, Le Bobino, Le Shéhérazade and Les Variétés. The best cabarets, where good food and vintage wine were always available, stayed open all night, enabling revelers to ignore the curfew.

This meant that there was plenty of work for actors, singers and musicians—except, of course, Jews. One cabaret assured its German clients that all its performers were entirely Aryan; another announced that Jews were not welcome. In this atmosphere, then, even before Vichy’s Statute on Jews in October 1940, most Jewish performers chose to stay in the relative safety of the unoccupied zone. “There were lots of Jews in show business,” Francini recalled. “We’d learn that Jewish friends were not coming back. When Jews left, others took their places, directors, producers, they took advantage of their absence.”
⁵
One popular Jewish cabaret singer who hesitated before leaving France was Marie Dubas. She returned to France from a tour of the United States and Portugal to find herself under attack from the collaborationist press.
Paris-Soir
, which accused her of marrying a French air force officer and converting to Catholicism in order to return to the stage, demanded, “Doesn’t she know that the Jewish problem is not religious? It’s racial.” Dubas’s Paris apartment was requisitioned by the Wehrmacht, but she nonetheless resumed her career in Lyon, Nice and other towns in the unoccupied zone. Finally, in October 1942, with the Vichy regime now also deporting Jews from the territory it controlled, she obtained a visa to leave for Switzerland. Her new audiences were refugees like herself. For them, she sang “Ce soir, je pense à mon pays” (This Evening, I’m Thinking of My Country).

Of the top non-Jewish cabaret stars, the only one who did not
resume her career in Paris was Josephine Baker. Now holding dual American and French citizenship, she was performing at Le Casino de Paris in early May 1940, but she stopped when the Germans entered France. Instead, she sang to French soldiers on the Maginot Line before driving south to the Château des Milandes, in Dordogne, which she had rented in 1938 (and would buy in 1947). She was joined there by Captain Jacques Abtey, a French military intelligence officer whom she had met in Paris and who was in touch with de Gaulle’s forces in London. Using La Baker’s fame as a cover, with Abtey posing as her secretary, they traveled to Lisbon carrying information about German military movements written in invisible ink on Josephine’s music scores. Having delivered their secrets to French agents, they were ordered back to Marseille, where Baker reprised her role in Offenbach’s
La Créole
at the city’s Théâtre de l’Opéra. Then, again on orders from London, in January 1941 they flew to North Africa, which, while under Vichy rule, offered greater security. Although Josephine was ill for much of the next twenty months,
^*
when American troops landed in Morocco in November 1942 she quickly offered to entertain them. In the twenty-two months before Paris was liberated, she performed from Casablanca to Beirut, always stressing that she did so as a member of the Free French Forces. She was later awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance with the rosette.

Baker’s prewar colleagues were happy to be back on stage in Paris, none more than the legendary Mistinguett. Born as Jeanne Bourgeois in 1875, she had been a cabaret diva since the turn of the century and had become a silent movie star soon afterward, as famous for her well-insured legs, exuberant ostrich feathers and sultry voice as for her parade of young lovers. Chevalier was her lucky dance partner at Les Folies Bergère in 1911; she promptly seduced him—and made his career. And as she grew older, she held on to her fans—and her lovers—through the sheer force of her personality. During the occupation, by now in her mid-sixties, La Miss performed almost without interruption, succeeding Chevalier at Le Casino de Paris in November 1941. She was also renowned for shamelessly complaining
to her audiences that she was hungry and extracting gifts of butter, wine and foie gras from her undoubtedly hungrier public. Like everyone else, she sang to audiences with German soldiers, although, unlike Chevalier, Tino Rossi, Charles Trenet, Léo Marjane and Édith Piaf, she never traveled to Germany to perform before French prisoners of war. After the liberation of Paris, now sixty-nine years old, she seemed quite pleased by suggestions that she had had some German lovers, responding disdainfully, “
Ça, c’est différent, ça, c’est l’amour
!” (“That’s different, that’s love!”)

With the movie industry in Paris slow to resume production, cabaret managers sought out popular actors and actresses to appear on stage, among them Viviane Romance and Ginette Leclerc. Suzy Solidor, a singer and prewar screen star, opened her own cabaret, Chez Suzy Solidor, where she sang “Lili Marlène” and other German songs nightly to a uniformed public. But the French public responded most to its beloved
chansonniers
. Trenet, already nicknamed affectionately
le fou chantant
(the Singing Madman), returned to the stage in February 1941. He had a velvety baritone voice and a gentle, smiling presence, and he also wrote many of his own songs, including “Boum!,” “Douce France” (“Sweet France”) and, most famously, “La mer” (later recorded by Bobby Darin as “Beyond the Sea”). Trenet’s performances at Les Folies Bergère, the ABC and the Gaieté Parisienne, with German soldiers in the audience, were invariably well received. Yet, strangely, while he seemed incapable of offending anyone,
Paris-Soir
decided to pick on him, first announcing falsely that he had died, then accusing him of being Jewish, claiming that “Trenet” was an anagram for “Netter,” a common Jewish name in France. Trenet hurriedly set about proving he was not Jewish and, feeling all the more vulnerable as a homosexual, he agreed to a request to perform for French prisoners of wars in Germany in September 1943. After the liberation of France, he moved to the United States for several years, until all was forgiven and forgotten.

Piaf, “the Little Sparrow,” was no less active. In May 1940, she appeared in her first play,
Le Bel indifférent
, which Cocteau had written for her. And by late summer, she was allowed to tour the production in occupied France. The following year, she also starred in Georges Lacombe’s movie
Montmartre-sur-Seine
, as a singer whose life was little different from her own. “My real job is to sing, to sing no matter what happens,” she was reported to have said in 1940. Throughout the occupation, she drew large crowds during
tours of the Côte d’Azur and performed almost everywhere in Paris—at the ABC, Le Bobino, Les Folies Bergère, Le One Two Two, Le Moulin Rouge (where in 1944 she fell in love with the young Yves Montand) and even at the elegant Salle Pleyel, one month before the city was liberated.

Naturally, there were Germans in her audience. And she sometimes responded to their presence, according to Simone Berteaut, a childhood friend who was later sporadically part of Piaf’s circle and falsely claimed to be the singer’s half sister. On one occasion, Berteaut said, Piaf performed a popular German melody to rude French slang, which pleased both occupier and occupied. On another, for which Berteaut was not the only witness, she dedicated a song to French prisoners of war—“Où sont-ils mes petits copains?” (Where Are All My Close Pals?)—and then suddenly appeared wrapped in the French colors. There is also evidence that she helped to hide and maintain three Jewish cabaret musicians, Michel Emer, Marcel Blistène and Norbert Glanzberg (who may also have been one of her lovers).
⁶

But it was a different story that shielded her from any charge of collaboration after the liberation of France. Having been chosen as their “godmother” by POWs at Stalag III-D, outside Berlin, she traveled there twice for concerts. Acclaimed even by the Germans on her first visit in 1943, she persuaded the camp commander to allow her to be photographed with him and with “her” soldiers, as she called them; those photographs survive. The plan concocted by her secretary, Andrée Bigard, who was in the resistance, was for the photographs to be enlarged. Each POW’s image was then cut out and attached to a false document identifying him as a French worker in Germany. When Piaf returned to the camp early the following year, the documents were secretly delivered so that, should any POW succeed in escaping, he would have a German identity card to protect him. And, by all accounts, some did escape. “No,” Piaf said after the war, “I was not in the Resistance, but I helped my soldiers.”
⁷

Of all the
chansonniers
, Chevalier’s immense popularity at home and abroad put him most in the spotlight. During the phony war, he had entertained French soldiers on the Maginot Line and, somewhat ostentatiously, he donated his old Packard car as scrap metal for the war effort. Then, after France’s defeat, he withdrew with his companion, Nita Raya, a Romanian Jewish actress, to the comfort of La Bocca, his villa near Cannes, where swimming and playing tennis
seemed more real than war. Feeling safe in the unoccupied zone, he performed regularly in Nice and other nearby towns. And when he was asked his political opinion, his instinct, like that of most of his fans, was to support Pétain. In an interview with
L’Éclaireur de Nice
in December 1940, he said, “Since we are lucky enough to be able to venerate a man and fully understand what he expects of us, I involve him privately in all the decisions I’m compelled to make. I ask myself: what would he say if he were in my shoes? How would he behave if he were beneath my straw hat? That’s why, for the coming year, I can only make the same wish that our Great Man among the Greats would make.”
⁸

In September 1941, Chevalier was persuaded by Henri Varna, the manager of Le Casino de Paris, to appear in the new revue
Paris Toujours
. He was nervous about returning to Paris but, with a crowd of fans, reporters and show-business friends meeting his train at the Gare d’Austerlitz, his arrival was as warm as he could have hoped. He flashed his smile and expressed delight to be home. When offered a car ride, he even took the
métro
so that, he said, he could again connect with Parisians. (He in fact rode five stops, then joined the waiting car.) Predictably, with his jaunty style, charming smile and twirls of his boater, Chevalier was a great success, although the ever-skeptical Galtier-Boissière was less impressed, noting, “At the Casino de Paris, Chevalier takes his turn to sing before an audience of uniforms that has come only to look at the arses.”
⁹
Less wisely, Chevalier not only accepted the sponsorship of
Paris-Soir
for two concerts in a working-class district but also performed at a charity gala attended by German officers and organized by Radio-Paris. Reminded of Chevalier’s popularity, German producers invited him to perform in Berlin, but he refused. Instead, at Vichy’s urging, he agreed to sing to French prisoners of war at Stalag XI-A, Altengrabow, the very same camp where he had spent twenty-seven months during World War I.

In late November, he traveled to Berlin by train with his young accompanist, Henri Betti. They spent the night there and were driven the following day to Altengrabow for a concert before some three thousand POWs. Chevalier’s only payment, he said, was the release of ten Frenchmen from Ménilmontant, the Paris neighborhood where he was born. He also turned down a fresh invitation to perform at La Scala in Berlin, but his trip nonetheless served German propaganda. His Altengrabow concert was rebroadcast in Germany
and by Radio-Paris in France. Further,
Signal
, the German illustrated weekly that circulated in occupied countries and sold some 700,000 copies in France alone, ran photographs of him in Berlin without mentioning that he had performed only for French POWs.

His image abroad suffered accordingly. In August 1942, a Free French broadcast from London included Chevalier’s name on a list of prominent collaborators who deserved death. Despite this, he played Le Casino de Paris again in October. But when he returned to La Bocca, the German army had taken over the unoccupied zone, and he brought Nita Raya’s Jewish parents to his home to protect them. He gave a number of concerts in the south, but stayed away from Paris. In February 1944, the Jewish humorist André Isaac, who was now at Radio-Londres and working under the stage name Pierre Dac, issued a new death threat against Chevalier, which he took seriously. Then in May, he learned that he had been sentenced to death by a special tribunal of de Gaulle’s provisional French government in Algiers. Now fearing both the Gestapo and the resistance, he left La Bocca with Nita and her parents for a hideaway in the Dordogne and stayed there until France was liberated. He narrowly escaped being killed by the maquis before fleeing to Toulouse, where he was briefly arrested. Josephine Baker was not alone in condemning his wartime conduct. In her autobiography,
Josephine
, she wrote, “Maurice was one of those Frenchmen who believed that the Germans had won the war and that it was time things returned to normal—on German terms.”
¹⁰
But Chevalier was lucky. When he came to answer charges of collaboration, he could count on well-placed friends to speak up for him, none more important than Louis Aragon, the Communist poet. And he was exonerated.