Wild Lavender (25 page)

When the audience and gossip columnists saw us perform together on stage, they assumed that Rivarola and I were lovers in real life too. Those who saw us backstage knew better. For the minutes we danced together, Rivarola and I smouldered with desire in each other’s arms. But as soon as the curtain came down and we ran to the wings, he discarded me like the sweaty shirt he tossed to the wardrobe assistant. In between acts he hid himself away in his dressing room, drinking whisky and smoking cigars. He was not interested in me beyond what I became for him on stage. I don’t think he knew my name until several weeks into the performance. And yet, from the first night, our dancing moved the audience to standing ovations and reviews that were full of admiration. The critic for
Paris Soir
wrote: ‘
The sublime teaming of Rivarola with newcomer Simone Fleurier is one of the highlights of the show. The distinctive performance by Rivarola is enough to send anyone’s pulse racing and his partner matches him in every way with her grace and precision
.’

Monsieur Etienne was pleased with my success and, as a treat, took Odette and me to dinner at La Tour d’Argent.

‘It is one thing to be a great singer,’ he said. ‘And another to be able to dance the way you do.’

‘I don’t think there is anybody else in Paris who is a genius at both,’ gushed Odette.

Monsieur Etienne raised his champagne glass. ‘Paris is your tango partner, Simone. She is within an inch of your grasp.’

Until then, Monsieur Etienne’s assessments of me had been positive but reserved. The fact that he was handing out such high praise gave me the boost in confidence I needed. From him, I could be sure it wasn’t flattery. But while I might have been on the verge of conquering Paris, not everyone was enamoured of me.

T
he best thing about being lifted from the status of minor act to principal player was that I was included in the grand finale. The set was a Spanish villa, complete with pots of cascading geraniums, and a Moorish courtyard with a fountain as the backdrop. The audience sighed with admiration when Camille made her entrance, lowered from the flies on a chandelier like a deity descending from the heavens. She landed in the arms of the principal male dancer, who wore a matador’s suit with pants tight enough to raise every woman’s temperature. Camille’s costume was daring too: a Spanish dress cut away at the front to reveal a corset and knickers and a lace mantilla sprouting from a comb on her head and spilling around her shoulders. The chorus girls, in little more than sombreros and sequins in strategic places, swirled around the couple, waving feathered fans. The clowns, playing the part of the matador’s
banderilleros
, chased and were chased in turn by two clowns dressed as a bull. Just before Camille made her appearance I danced a kind of Frenchified flamenco, which Rivarola refused to perform because it had nothing to do with Argentina, but which the whole chorus line mirrored behind me. My exit came when I was swept away by a
picador
on horseback—a real horse’s back. The animal was named Roi and was the offspring of one of Monsieur Volterra’s racing thoroughbreds. After Camille and her lover danced and sang their triumphant number, the chorus girls broke out into a cancan. The dance had nothing to do with Spain, but the audience loved it.

Although she was a star, Camille did not have the top billing for the season. That place went to Jacques Noir, ‘the most adored comedian in the whole of Paris’. ‘Adored’ was the right word: whenever he appeared on stage, my dressing room trembled with the earthquake force of the audience’s applause. Once my photograph of Fernandel—which he had autographed for me after I had seen him perform at the Folies Bergère—fell off its hook from the violent vibrations and smashed on the floor. The glass cracked straight across the comedian’s dopey smile. Poor Fernandel, I thought. Although he was one of Paris’s most talented singing comedians, I doubted that with the dark circles under his eyes and his equine face he would ever be described as ‘adored’.

Once Rivarola and I had settled into our act, I asked the stage manager if I could watch Noir’s first set from the wings. Because of the schedule I had never seen him perform. Noir appeared in the grand finale after me, when the stagehands were too busy trying to manoeuvre me, the
picador
and Roi outside before the horse splattered droppings where the other performers would step in them. Despite not being fed for six hours before a performance, a bowel movement was Roi’s usual reaction to his post-performance euphoria.

‘Only Noir’s wife sits in the wings during his performance,’ the stage manager informed me. ‘He doesn’t like distractions.’

‘I’ll be discreet,’ I promised. ‘I can’t see him at rehearsals. They are always closed.’

‘That’s so people don’t steal his material before he performs it.’

‘I’m hardly likely to do that,’ I said. ‘Unless you think Rivarola and I have potential as a comedy act?’

The stage manager relented and led me to a section of the left wing where there was a wooden stool. It was splintery and prickled my legs, but I smiled as if nothing were wrong.

The stage manager put his fingers to his lips. ‘I don’t want you to even breathe,’ he said.

I peered through the darkness and saw a woman sitting in the opposite wing, a circle of light falling in her lap from a table lamp perched on a shelf above her. That must be Jacques Noir’s wife, I thought, taken aback by the woman’s appearance. For the wife of one of the richest entertainers in Paris, she was dressed dowdily in a grey dress. Apart from the wedding ring on her finger there was not a glimmer of jewellery anywhere on her person. And if the stage manager was so worried about me breathing, I wondered what he made of Madame Noir’s knitting. The click of her needles was audible even from where I was sitting. Her birdlike neck and the wrinkles on her forehead made her look more like Noir’s mother than his wife. I had heard that Noir was only thirty-two years old.

The chorus girls opened the act with a jazz dance performed on a chessboard floor with extra dancers dressed as kings, queens, bishops and knights. As the dancers were fleeing the stage via the staircase, one of them flipped up the crown of a giant rook. The chess piece opened and out stepped a man in tails and a top hat. He was as obese as a hippopotamus with three chins and beady eyes peering over his snout of a nose. Despite his expensive English suit I thought he was the most unattractive man I had ever seen. I was sure he was one of the clowns in extra padding and make-up until the crowd went wild and the women started calling out, ‘Jacques! Jacques!’

My breath caught in my throat. If I had been surprised by his wife’s appearance, I was shocked by Noir’s. This was the most adored comedian in the whole of Paris? Maurice Chevalier was more handsome and bursting with Gallic charm. Even Fernandel didn’t seem so unattractive next to Noir. I thought about the poster in the foyer: the artist had taken some liberties in improving Noir’s appearance there. But from the reaction of the audience, he had a much more positive effect on them than he did on me.

‘Ladies! Ladies!’ Noir called out. ‘Please! What will your menfolk think?’

The restless women giggled and settled down.

‘At least you have the good taste to be at the Casino de Paris tonight,’ he grinned, swaggering across the stage, ‘and you haven’t gone to see Mistinguett at the Moulin Rouge.’ He stopped, eyed the crowd and rolled his tongue in his cheek. ‘You know the difference between Mistinguett and a piranha, don’t you?’

The audience tensed, waiting for the punch line.

‘The lipstick.’

The crowd roared with laughter and clapped. Noir quickly followed up with, ‘What is the first thing Mistinguett does when she gets up in the morning?’ and, after a staged pause, answered his own question, ‘She puts on her clothes and goes home.’

This joke brought more hoots of laughter and applause. I wondered if I was hallucinating. Could that obese man really be Jacques Noir?
He
was being paid over two thousand francs a performance? He was appalling.

I glanced across the stage to his wife. She didn’t appear to be paying attention to her husband’s performance; she looped and stitched at her knitting as if she were waiting for a train instead of sitting in the wing of a music hall. Meanwhile, Noir moved on from savaging Mistinguett to humiliating Chevalier who had featured in the gossip columns that week with the rumour that he had tried to kill himself. ‘You know what happened there, don’t you?’ laughed Noir, eyeing the audience. ‘They say it was because of his bad war memories. Hah! It was because of his bad New York memories. He was trying to sell himself as a big star on Broadway when a kid and his mother approached him and the kid asked, “Mister Chevalier, would you sign my autograph book?” “Sure, kid,” said Chevalier, loud enough for everyone within a mile radius to know that
someone
had recognised him. Well, the kid pulled out this tiny notepad, no more than two inches by two inches, that he’d bought at a five and dime store somewhere. “Gee, kid,” Chevalier said, “there’s not much room here. What would you like me to write?” The kid thought about it a
moment and then his eyes lit up. “You know, Mister Chevalier, perhaps you could write out your repertoire.”’

The joke brought the house down. Noir’s rapport with the audience baffled me. Was I missing something? Had working with Rivarola cost me my sense of humour? I wondered what Monsieur Volterra made of Noir’s digs at Mistinguett and Chevalier; after all, they were two of his biggest stars at the Casino de Paris. I wondered if after tonight they would ever perform there again. But Noir had something in store for Monsieur Volterra too.

‘How do you tell if an impresario is dead or not?’ he quizzed the audience. ‘You wave a thousand franc note past his face.’

With that the orchestra started up and Noir burst into song. The whole mood of the act changed and I understood what was so appealing about him. Noir hummed, half-sang and half-talked his way through the song in a voice that was the best I’d heard from a male singer in Paris. It was more resonant than Chevalier’s argot, and more agile in its jumps and skips than Fernandel’s. If you closed your eyes, you could forget the song was being sung by so hideous a man. The voice belonged to someone dashing. But even with my eyes open, Noir’s appearance improved when he sang. There was something magnetic about him. I tried to pinpoint what it was, because I feared it might be that elusive ‘star quality’ I was desperately seeking myself. Perhaps it was the confidence that radiated from every pore of his generous body. He was good and he knew it.

I was so swept away by his song about a dandy who loves his mistress’s maid that I forgot about the splintery stool and the cruelty of his earlier jokes. Noir’s voice smoothed his rough edges the way the sea blunts sharp stones. But the next instant, I was jolted out of my pleasure. Noir picked up a cane and skipped around the stage, bouncing the stick in time to music I recognised.

La! La! Boom! Here comes Jeanne

Checking out my new Voisin.

La! La! Boom! She asks, ‘What are you doing?’

What am I going to tell her?

La! La! Boom! I’m warming up my little machine…

Noir was parodying the song I had sung in last season’s show, only his version was full of double-entendres. But worse than just parodying the song, he was lampooning me, bouncing and skipping and wiggling his behind as I had been made to do by Madame Piège. I looked from Noir to the audience; they were laughing, their mouths open like hundreds of dark caverns. I had hated that number myself but that didn’t lessen my humiliation. Noir turned my previous trivial act into a truly embarrassing memory.

If Noir had left his parody there, it would have been humiliating enough. But to add insult to injury he finished his act in a tango pose, blew a kiss to the audience and cooed in a mock-sexy voice with the extended vowels of a southern accent, ‘I’ve come a long way, haven’t I, darlings? Just look at me now.’

The curtain fell and the audience went wild. Horror overwhelmed me and I couldn’t move. After three encores Noir exited and the stage manager shooed me off the stool to make room for the stagehands to change the set. I stared at the manager but he didn’t pay me any attention. Was he so insensitive that he hadn’t connected me to Noir’s act before he let me watch? I rushed to my dressing room, so blind with fury that the other performers hurrying along the corridors appeared as blurs in my vision. I slammed the door. Bouton and Rubis, the poodles, jumped from surprise. Rubis yelped. Madame Ossard, their trainer, swung around.

I threw myself down at my dressing table and tore a comb through my hair. I didn’t want to have to go through with the finale. I wanted to go home.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Madame Ossard, adjusting the lace on her jumping hoop.

I avoided her gaze and exchanged the comb for a powder puff, dabbing furiously at my forehead.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen Noir’s act?’

I threw the puff down and shrugged. It occurred to me that the other performers had known of the parody all along. Why hadn’t anybody said anything?

Madame Ossard clucked her tongue. ‘He’s a bastard for doing that to someone who is just starting out. Especially a fellow performer at the Casino.’

‘How could they let him?’ I asked, my voice quivering. ‘It’s not fair.’

Madame Ossard slipped a handkerchief from her neckline and passed it to me. The cloth smelt like the tar soap she used to wash her dogs. ‘Take it as a compliment,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t put the audience off your act, has it? If anything, it is good publicity for you.’

‘But he makes me look silly,’ I protested. I realised then what had upset me so much. By making fun of me, Noir had reduced me to a singing comedian again. In that moment I realised how difficult it was to ‘grow up’ on the stage. There would always be someone to remind me of the things I had done to get ahead.

Madame Ossard clasped my chin between her fingers and lifted my face so that I looked into her eyes. ‘Simone, I think there are a few people at the Casino who are jealous of the attention you are getting. Being satirised by the most famous entertainer in Paris is not necessarily a bad thing.’

One evening, a few weeks before the Christmas season, Rivarola’s wife returned. I caught sight of her on my way to the wardrobe mistress to fix a tear in the hem of my skirt. She was standing near the stage door with her hands clasped in front of her, staring straight ahead. Despite the heating, a chill stung the air and the skin on my scalp prickled. It was like catching a glimpse of a lurking theatre ghost. I had secretly feared this would happen, but the last I had heard, Maria was in Lisbon with a German playboy. The way her scarlet-lipped smile curled and she narrowed
her glance to the dress in my hand spelt doom for me and Rivarola.

When the time came for our first set, despite three calls and stagehands searching everywhere, Rivarola was nowhere to be found. The stage manager and one of his assistants broke open his dressing room door, but all that remained was a trace of tobacco scent in the dusty air and a record snapped into pieces and scattered on the floor.

‘I don’t want to let you go, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ said Monsieur Volterra. ‘The audience and the reviewers adore you—even more than they liked Rivarola.’ He leant back in his chair, which creaked from his weight, and tapped his pen against his chin. ‘Give me a week,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Of course, with Monsieur Volterra that was going to be an unpaid week, but I didn’t have much choice. All the big shows were already in production and wouldn’t be holding auditions any time soon.

‘He is speaking with Madame Piège about the choreography for a new piece,’ Monsieur Etienne told me when I hadn’t heard from Monsieur Volterra for ten days.