Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (53 page)

Kizette, who was now boarding at a Catholic girls school, had been yearning for a festive holiday with her grandmother and Cherie. When Malvina saw Kizette struggling to overcome her disappointment, she was enraged by her daughter’s callousness. There was a cupboard in the new apartment in which Tamara kept her by now enormous collection of hats – a collection that ranged from the large theatrical models she had favoured in the early 1920s to the close-fitting cloches she now preferred, dozens of them in different colours and styles. Malvina emptied the cupboard and took all the hats downstairs where, one by one, she tore them to pieces and threw them onto the fire.

There’s no record of how Tamara reacted to the destruction of her hats when she returned home. It was a busy time for her. Paris was already suffering from the fallout of the market crash, especially in the steady exodus of its American population. As Janet Flanner reported in the
New Yorker,
orders for expensive jewellery were being summarily cancelled, art collectors had stopped buying and in the bars of expensive hotels, the ‘pretty ladies’ were suddenly having ‘to pay for their cocktails themselves’.
²⁰
Yet Tamara’s client list continued to expand. In Paris, as in New York, those who still had money seemed determined to continue spending. Among the numerous social events she attended that year was the ‘silver’ party given by Jean Patou, held in a roofed garden where every surface, including the trees, was covered with foil. Giant stuffed parrots hung in silver cages and three lion cubs were led on leashes through the crowd of conspicuously fashionable guests.

None looked more fashionable than Tamara. To be in possession of her beautiful apartment, her extensive wardrobe and her lovely social life was all balm to her. To see herself not only survive but triumph during the economic crisis, while others failed, was proof of her talent and spirit. In 1934, when she married Kuffner and his enormous fortune, she could safely consider herself immune from danger for the rest of her life. And yet for Tamara, too, something significant had ended with the turn of the decade.

From 1930 onwards she started to suffer prolonged bouts of anxiety and depression. Her robust health faltered and she developed severe stomach pains. She missed Kizette, whom she had sent to boarding school in England, believing it offered a better education and better care than her convent in France. She missed Ira Perrot, with whom she had quarrelled irrevocably, and she was distraught over the death of Jules Pascin in June 1930, which seemed to be a grim exemplar of the passing decade: drunk and unhappy he had slit his wrists and hanged himself in his Montmartre studio.

But it wasn’t just her personal life that seemed to be slipping out of control. When Tamara visited friends in Berlin in 1934 she was seriously alarmed by her first vision of Hitler’s Germany. She claimed she could smell the fear on the streets, and when Nazi uniformed officials had demanded to see her travel papers she felt a shuddering reminder of her past encounters with the St Petersburg Cheka. It seemed that the world was heading towards another catastrophe, and as it did so Tamara was far less confident now that her talent would allow her to transcend it. She was feeling her age, and also her vulnerability to changing trends.

The 1920s had created Tamara; they had provided her with her style, her subject matter and her marketplace. Even if her painting had never, objectively, attained the greatness she had hoped for, it had been exceptional as a register of its time. It had captured the tempo and colours of jazz, deco, of Coco Chanel and
la garçonne;
it had evoked the café culture of the Left Bank and the monied luxury of the Right. But in a rapidly changing world she began to sense that she was adrift. Over the decades that followed she tried to experiment with different techniques and subject matter, yet again and again the results turned out to be kitsch, sentimental or coarse. With the passing of the 1920s, it was as though she had lost some instinctive accord with her material, and when she and Kuffner moved to Hollywood, Tamara became known merely as the eccentric baroness who did ‘these amusing paintings’.
²¹
While she lived long enough to see her early work making a return to fashion in the 1970s, it was also long enough to know that as a painter her golden age had been disappointingly brief, ending shortly after the decade that had formed her.

Chapter Twelve

JOSEPHINE

When Josephine Baker arrived in Paris on 22 September 1925, the city was still inventing itself as the capital of the
années folles,
and all the elements that had limited her career were about to be repackaged as something Dionysiac and new. She was to be presented as a Harlem jazz babe, a black modern flapper, but also as the most primitive of sexual fantasies, an African goddess. As the Paris historian Jean Prasteau would write, the timing was perfect: ‘She arrived exactly at the moment we needed her. With her short hair, her free body, her coloured skin and her American accent, she untied the tendencies, tastes and aspirations of that epoch.’
¹

Josephine herself was alight with expectation when, along with the rest of the troupe, she stepped off the train at the Gare Sainte-Lazare. Her terror of the Atlantic crossing had been distracted by an on-board romance with the band leader Claude Hopkins, and by Caroline Dudley’s promises of what awaited her. Even though the city was misted in a grey autumnal drizzle as the troupe were taken by bus to their lodgings, Josephine stood on the observation platform to catch every passing view: the jaunty taxis honking through the streets, the pavement cafés under bright awnings, the massive stone boulevards as grand as Manhattan museums. Approaching Montmartre and its steep, cobbled streets, she witnessed her first astonishing sight of white people and people of colour talking easily on the pavements and drinking together in bars. Paris looked like a kind of paradise, and when she fell asleep that night her mind was filled ‘with the idea of conquering [it]’.
²

Conquest was not, however, what an unhappy Rolf de Maré predicted when he watched the troupe’s first rehearsal. The assortment of jazz, tap and Charleston numbers that had been assembled for
La Revue Nègre
seemed to offer little that would excite his sophisticated home audience. The troupe didn’t even look very ‘nègre’ with their hair straightened, their cheeks powdered and rouged and their performance style honed to suit white American audiences. De Maré looked in vain for the blue-black skin, the tight African curls, the exotic ‘dynamite’ he had imagined selling to Paris.

With little more than a week to go before opening night, he tried to imagine a more original way of restyling the show. His producer, André Daven, had been impressed by the troupe’s gregariousness when he’d first met them at the Gare Sainte-Lazare, spilling off the train in a ‘rocking, boisterous, multi-coloured [crowd] all talking loudly, some roaring with laughter. Red, green, yellow shirts, strawberry denims, dresses in polka dots and checks. Incredible hats – derbies – cream coloured orange and poppy.’
³
This Harlem energy was new to Paris, and with the help of Jacques Charles, a famously canny veteran of the music hall, de Maré decided to make it key to the revue. New costumes were ordered in an exaggerated, motley design – Louis XIV hats were combined with overalls and straw hats paired with furs; scenic backdrops of New York and Mississippi steamboats were to be lit with carnival-bright colours. Charles also trawled Paris for darker-skinned performers to augment the cast, including the Antillean dancer Joe Alex. Finally, Charles identified the crucial missing ingredient. Erotic images of black women were widely peddled in France, ranging from the tropical fantasies of Gauguin’s paintings to the postcards of half-naked Algerian women on sale in the street. Charles was clear: ‘We need tits. These French people, with their fantasies of black girls, we must give them
des nichons.
’
⁴

Naked breasts were already key to the marketing of the famous, and white, Folies Bergère, as well as productions that were less obviously burlesque. Parisians were accustomed to discreet views of flesh: ever since a 1908 court ruling had drawn a legal distinction between the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘obscene’ nude, audiences had become used to the flash of a naked breast or buttock slipping from artful drapery. But Charles was right to assume that de Maré’s audience would hope for more from this black American troupe. He planned strategic moments at which the chorus line would appear topless, and suggested a duet for Josephine and Joe Alex to be titled La Danse Sauvage, in which she would be virtually naked, except for a decorative belt of feathers and minuscule briefs.
*

If Charles hoped that these improvements would create the necessary oomph of sexual bravura, the dancers were tearfully resistant. Onstage nudity was a rarity in legitimate American theatre, and for them to show their breasts in Paris, in what they had assumed was an upmarket show, seemed like a professional insult. Josephine, too, was angry and confused. She had come to Paris in the expectation of a sophisticated new platform for her career – Caroline Dudley had half promised her the chance of developing her singing – and to perform a ‘savage’ dance in nothing but a few feathers sounded like a step backwards into the theatrical ghetto.

But Charles was good at his job. In the face of Josephine’s reluctance, he promised her that the duet with Joe Alex would be purely artistic, that it would be the climax and talking point of the entire show. And in truth, Josephine had little choice but to comply. She was in a strange city whose language she couldn’t speak, and she had no money with which to buy a ticket home.

As the remaining days blurred into a frenetic schedule of rehearsals and costume fittings, she continued to feel very unsettled though. André Daven’s publicity had made an attempt to trumpet the revue’s novelty: ‘You will see these twenty-five Negros, in typical scenes and in their crude state. We haven’t changed or altered anything. It might not appeal to everybody, but all the same, Negro art is really something. The greatest artists in the world have praised its … force.’
⁵
But despite this fanfare negative rumours were circulating: people were already suggesting that the dancing girls were not up to Parisian standards, and that the music was too wild for Parisian ears. The singer Mistinguett insisted that her own adoring public would never accept these American mongrels.

By opening night everyone’s nerves were ragged. Although there were sold-out notices plastered outside the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and flowers were heaping up at the stage door, many of the venue’s two thousand seats were unoccupied when the curtain rose on the first half of the show. This was not the revue itself, but a music-hall programme of singers, dancers and Japanese acrobats, yet even so, as Josephine warmed up backstage, she was convinced she’d come to Paris only to fail.

During the interval, however, crowds began to fill the theatre, and by the time Josephine came onstage to dance her first number, a comic Charleston, she could sense their warm, excitable presence. Clatters of applause greeted her high kicks, and laughter rumbled round the theatre as she rolled her eyes, yodelled, puffed out her cheeks and exited the stage on all fours, her bottom arched high in the air. The excitement in the auditorium pitched even higher when Sidney Bechet started to play the music for ‘Big City Blues’, a number set in the streets of New York. Afterwards, Caroline Dudley swore that with the first searing notes of his clarinet, she could feel the public’s reaction vibrating through the building: ‘It was like the trumpets of Jericho, the house came tumbling down.’

All this was familiar territory for Josephine. But when she was back in the wings, waiting for the music of her Danse Sauvage, she felt drawn towards a very different place. She and Joe began their duel of seduction: their bodies coiling and retreating, their feet thrumming a fierce rhythm, and as she later recalled, a kind of ecstasy possessed her: ‘Driven by dark forces I didn’t recognize, I improvised, crazed by the music, the overheated theatre filled to bursting point, the scorching eye of the spotlights … Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone. I felt … intoxicated.’
⁶
Josephine was still imprisoned within a stereotyped sexualized fantasy, yet naked and exposed as she was onstage, she nevertheless sensed a new creative freedom.

*   *   *

Josephine couldn’t understand exactly the terms in which Paris acclaimed her. To the eminent dance critic André Levinson she was the quintessence of ‘African Eros’, the ‘black Venus who haunted Baudelaire’;
⁷
to Picasso she was ‘the Nefertiti of now’;
⁸
to the novelist Paul Morand she was a pure physical force, ‘
une machine à danser
’.
⁹
These references meant nothing to her, and it was much easier for her to gauge her success by the number of journalists who were waiting outside her hotel the following morning, clamouring for a photograph and a quote from the city’s new star. Also by the solid evidence of the box office, where there was such a run on tickets that the revue was rapidly extended beyond its initial two-week season. Out of superstition Josephine kept the first thousand-franc note that she received from her weekly wage tucked under her garter, where it eventually became too creased and faded for use. The rest she began to spend. She upgraded herself to a suite in the Hôtel Fournet, with two bedrooms and a private bathroom, which until recently would have been an unimaginable luxury. And she began to surround herself with the kind of treats she had longed for as a child: a flowered cretonne bed cover from Galeries Lafayette; a collection of baby dolls, which she named and laid out on her pillows, and a small menagerie of pets, including two baby rabbits, a snake, a parakeet and a pig named Albert.