And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (18 page)

For the French public, whether listening to their favorite singers on stage or on Radio-Paris, the emotional connection often came through the words of their songs. Two broad themes emerged, one around love, the other around France. Léo Marjane, Mistinguett’s prewar rival, ended the war having to explain why she performed for German troops and broadcast on Radio-Paris,
^*
but many of her songs—like “J’attendrai” (I Will Wait) and “Attends-moi, mon amour” (Wait for Me, My Love)—spoke for the hundreds of thousands
of women whose husbands, boyfriends or sons were prisoners of war or, later, forced to work in Germany. Her biggest hit, “Je suis seule ce soir,” would be played almost nightly on Radio-Paris. It begins:

I am alone tonight
With my dreams
I am alone tonight
Without your love
.

It continues:

I am alone tonight
With my sorrows
I have lost hope
That you will return
.

And it ends:

In the fireplace, the wind cries out
In silence, the roses lose their petals
The clock chimes every quarter-hour
Measuring the gloom with its gentle sound
.

Trenet’s no less melancholic hit, “Que reste-t-il de nos amours?” (What Is Left of Our Loves?), also looked back nostalgically to a happier time:

What is left of our loves?
What remains of those sweet days?
A photo, an old photo of my youth
.

In their songs about France, the
chansonniers
spoke of the country’s eternal charms, none more than Lina Margy’s “Ah le petit vin blanc” (Ah, the Little Glass of White Wine) and Pierre Dudan’s “Café au lait au lit” (Morning Coffee in Bed). Trenet’s instant hit “Douce France” evoked childhood memories, then proclaimed:

Yes, I love you
And I give you this poem
Yes, I love you
In joy and in grief
Sweet France
.

For those French citizens trapped in the provinces, he wrote “Si tu revois Paris, dis bonjour aux amis”—If you get to Paris, say hello to my friends. And Mistinguett offered the consolation that the Eiffel Tower was still in place: “La Tour Eiffel est toujours là!” But it was Chevalier who assumed the role of chief cheerleader, with songs that echoed Pétain’s message of “let’s love and rebuild France.” “Ça sent si bon la France” (France Feels So Good) presents a long list of French people and places worthy of affection, from “this old bell tower in the setting sun” to “this brunette with eyes of paradise.” Even more
pétainiste
is “La chanson du maçon” (The Builder’s Song), which imagined all the French singing as one as they built their new house—that is, France. And it ended: “We would be millions of builders / Singing away on the rooftops of our houses.” In “Notre Espoir” (Our Hope), Chevalier recalled that he once sang of love and of joy, but now he lacks words so he improvises with sounds, like “Tra la la la la-la” and “Dzim pa poum pa la.” Then he added: “My hope is that the sky will become blue again / And that we’ll sing in peace in our old France.”

A more surprising favorite of the Paris nightlife was Django Reinhardt; as a Gypsy, the gifted Belgian-born jazz guitarist could easily have joined hundreds of thousands of other Gypsies in Nazi death camps. Yet despite official Nazi disapproval of jazz as a product of “degenerate” black American culture, its popularity in the 1930s continued throughout the occupation. Reinhardt was in London with his Quintette du Hot Club de France when war was declared in 1939, but he turned down the option of exile and immediately returned to Paris. Then, after the German occupation, he continued to play at the Hot Club de France and other nightspots, drawing French as well as German jazz fans. (One Luftwaffe officer, Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, even published his own secret jazz newsletter.)

The Hot Club, run by Charles Delaunay, who was also active in the resistance, sponsored jazz concerts and festivals at such mainstream locations at the Salle Gaveau and the Salle Pleyel. Even Radio-Paris, in its eagerness to win over French listeners, broadcast jazz in its many variety programs. Perhaps this was made easier by the absurd claim in André Coeuroy’s
Histoire générale du jazz
in
1942 that jazz had its origins in Europe. Reinhardt himself, though, evidently did not feel too secure in occupied Paris. Sometime in late 1943, he decided to flee to Switzerland, but he was caught at the border by German guards. By luck, the officer in charge was a fan, and he returned Reinhardt to Paris, where, in 1944, he opened his own club, Chez Django Reinhardt.

While Django was the city’s most famous jazz musician, he was only one of hundreds working in music halls and cabarets. Among these, Johnny Hess stood out for the bizarre sociopolitical movement he indirectly sponsored. Hess and Ray Ventura were responsible for introducing the catchy big band rhythms of swing to France in the late 1930s. And although Ventura, who was Jewish, left with his popular band for South America soon after the occupation, it was swing that ruled the Paris night scene during the early 1940s. (After the war, Trenet said that “La Mer” was not a hit in France when he first sang it in 1943 because it “lacked swing.”)

But there was more. As early as 1938, Hess threw into his lyrics for “Je suis swing” the meaningless word
zazou
. It soon caught on as a nickname for swing fans and, during the occupation, it came to represent a broader form of cultural protest, in which Zazou men wore long hair and long jackets, women wore short skirts and heavy shoes and everyone wore dark glasses and carried an unfurled umbrella. Their desire to stand out was seen as a provocation, which pleased them all the more. After Jews were obliged to wear yellow stars after May 1942, some Zazous made their own and scribbled
Swing
or
Zazou
across them. Having already annoyed the authorities, the movement was then blessed in 1942 by Hess with a song, “Ils sont zazous,” in which he described their attire in detail, adding with apparent approval, “And above all / They look disgusted.”

Still, if the Zazous dressed with attitude, many Parisians were more concerned with remaining stylish—and staying warm—at a time that crucial ingredients likes wool, silk and leather were in short supply or, rather, being sent to Germany. They knew that by looking good, they not only felt better but also showed the Germans that the French spirit was intact. The result was a triumph of improvisation and imagination as both designers and
parisiennes
circumvented the multiple new obstacles to elegance. Already during the phony war, fashion houses and magazines like
Marie-Claire
were quick to adjust, endorsing the grays and blues of military uniforms and suggesting the right clothes to wear in air-raid shelters or how best to
carry a gas mask. During the exodus of May and June 1940, the women’s pages of some newspapers also recommended what to pack: notably, comfortable clothes and flat shoes. After Paris fell, however, the Germans elbowed their way to the front of shops’ lines and set about emptying the city’s inventory. And with the deutschmark artificially overvalued by the occupier, they could afford to do so. Soldiers crowded into Les Galeries Lafayette, Printemps and other department stores to buy lingerie and perfume, the ultimate proof to wives and fiancées back home that they had conquered Paris. More senior officers headed for haute couture shops, often carrying photographs of their
Frauen
to determine what size clothes to buy.

What the Third Reich really wanted, though, was to inherit Paris’s place as the creative heart of haute couture. And, as early as late August 1940, Goebbels ordered leading French designers to prepare to move their operations to Berlin and Vienna. There they would be assured of the materials needed for their work and be guided toward a style more pleasing to German women. “Parisian fashion must pass through Berlin before women of taste can wear it,” proclaimed the German weekly
Signal
. In his memoir, Ambassador Abetz claimed that he challenged Berlin in a report: “It will not be through the temporary, mechanical and forced suppression of French fashion that it will be possible to arrive at the creation of a truly German fashion, but only through the development of the creative spirit and artistic taste of German fashion itself.”
¹¹
Subsequently, Lucien Lelong, the designer who headed the the industry’s guild, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, managed to block the German move to “deport” haute couture. “It stays in Paris or it is not at all,” he claimed to have said before traveling to Berlin to make his case. Once there, he explained that, while the Paris fashion industry was renowned for its famous designers, it comprised thousands of independent dressmakers and tens of thousands of artisans skilled in working with an array of fabrics, leathers, perfumes, jewelry and other accessories. Finally, preferring not to provoke unnecessary French discontent so early in the occupation, the Germans abandoned the plan. But they never gave up their dream of promoting Berlin as a fashion capital.

As it happens, Paris’s two leading interwar designers chose not to work under the Germans. But while Elsa Schiaparelli moved to New York, Coco Chanel remained in Paris and emerged from the occupation with her image badly bruised. Between trips south, Chanel, who was fifty-six when Paris fell, shared her suite at the Ritz Hotel with
Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a Wehrmacht officer thirteen years her junior who was also said to be a Nazi spy. During the course of the war, she also tried to recover control of her company from an exiled Jewish family, the Wertheimers, who had acquired a majority share in 1924. Finally, in 1943, Chanel became party to an absurd plot, supposedly involving Hitler’s foreign intelligence chief, Walther Friedrich Schellenberg, in which she would convey a secret message to Churchill. Nothing came of it, but Chanel still had much to answer for at the moment of liberation. She was briefly arrested and, after some well-placed connections obtained her release, she moved to Switzerland, where she lived until 1954. A third—Jewish—fashion designer had no such option. Fanny Berger (as Odette Bernstein was known professionally) had her
salon de mode
at the upmarket address of 4 rue Balzac, beside the Arc de Triomphe, but in July 1941 she was forced to sell it to an Aryan former employee. She managed to evade the large roundups of Jews in the summer of 1942, but in September that year she was arrested while trying to cross the demarcation line to the south. She spent nine months in an internment camp at Beaune-la-Rolande, in the Loire Valley, before being sent to the transit camp of Drancy, outside Paris. In late July 1943, she was deported to Auschwitz and immediately killed. She was forty-two.

A number of other Jewish designers fled Paris, once again leaving more space for others. Those who stayed kept working, among them Jeanne Lanvin, Nina Ricci, Robert Piguet, Jacques Fath, Maggy Rouff, Marcel Rochas and Lelong, who from 1942 had Christian Dior and Pierre Balmain as his principal designers. In haute couture’s first postoccupation shows in October 1940, the industry aimed to hold on to its wealthier and show business clients, imagining what clothes would be suitable for taking the last
métro
after attending the opera. Some designers helped Vichy’s propaganda effort by printing scarves portraying Marshal Pétain in uniform and others showing him being acclaimed by cheering crowds.
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Nazi officers with money in their pockets were also important clients. But the designers did not ignore working
parisiennes
. The bicycle, for instance, was now the most practical and best way of moving around town and, while some younger women were happy
to wear short skirts, the more modest could soon choose from a range of different
jupes-culottes
, or divided skirts. The importance of turning heads while riding along the Champs-Élysées was underlined by a fashion show in October 1941 in which designers nominated bicycle outfits for three titles,
Élégance pratique, Élégance sportive
and
Élégance parisienne
. Dressing for all weathers was still more important for those riding bicycles or tandems known as
vélotaxis
, which pulled one- and two-seat carriages, usually no more than baskets precariously attached to two wheels. Since this rustic form of transportation offered no protection, passengers, too, had to dress for the elements.

Other changes were imposed by shortages. Wood replaced leather for the soles of shoes, adding close to one inch to women’s heights and spawning inventive designs for heels and colorful strips of cloth for appearance. The loud clack that shoes made on sidewalks even inspired Chevalier to serenade the wooden soles in “La Symphonie des semelles de bois.” Similarly, since silk stockings were almost impossible to find, women feigned wearing stockings by staining their calves with a special lotion, marketed by Elizabeth Arden; some even painted a vertical line down the backs of their legs for verisimilitude. Furriers could no longer obtain mink and half of France’s sheepskins were being shipped to Germany, but they did their best with the skins of seals, rabbits and even cats. For some of the many Paris furriers who were Jews, their profession even became a lifesaver: the Wehrmacht so badly needed fur for winter combat uniforms that it released some 350 Jewish furriers from the Drancy concentration camp in Paris and exempted others from arrest so they could continue working “without contact with the public.”