Wild Lavender (26 page)

‘Great,’ I muttered. ‘Another polka dot song and dance number.’

I was called into the Casino de Paris a few days later and was immediately ashamed of my cynicism. Monsieur Volterra had engaged, at considerable expense, a writer to compose songs for me. ‘We need something impressive to replace the tango as the subplot,’ Monsieur Volterra explained, showing me into his office.

My jaw dropped when I saw the man with the dark suit and pencil moustache who was waiting for us. Vincent Scotto rose from his chair and stepped forward. ‘It will be a pleasure to work with you, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ he said, gazing into my face with his melancholic eyes. ‘I have some ideas that will suit your beautiful voice.’

I was surprised by his tone of deference. This was the man who had written songs for some of the greatest stars in
Paris: Polin, Chevalier and Mistinguett. And Monsieur Volterra had commissioned him to write specifically for me!

There was an even greater surprise in store when I visited the wardrobe department to be fitted for my costume. Erté, the Russian costume designer, had created a dress for me. Even though he had a contract with the Folies Bergère and had recently been working with MGM studios in Hollywood, somehow Monsieur Volterra had persuaded him to create a one-off costume for the show. When the wardrobe mistress swept the organza cover aside I was delighted by the whimsy of the dress. It was made from shimmering lamé with key holes cut away around the ribs and the rise of the hips. The seams were trimmed in pearls. The costume draped the dress dummy like a waterfall, there was no flounce in it. It simply glistened. I was to wear a pair of feathered wings with it that stood half a metre above my head and a pearled headdress topped by plumes.

‘It has taken two seamstresses and a beader five days and nights to complete it this quickly,’ the wardrobe mistress explained.

‘I can believe it,’ I told her, handing my coat to one of the assistants and kicking off my shoes. I couldn’t wait to try everything on.

It required two assistants to help me into the costume, and as soon as I felt the weight of it I understood why Casino de Paris chorus girls were statuesque. It took strength and a firm posture to wear a towering headdress and move with any sort of grace. I tried a few turns to the left and right and nearly toppled over. But I was determined to master the costume, even if it meant a stiff neck and headaches. One look at it and I knew it was the costume of a star.

If I had worked until my feet bled for Rivarola, then I worked until my lungs burned for Scotto. I sensed that I was walking down a magical corridor where all the doors were flung open. I could take any path I chose. To sing popular songs of the day was one thing; to sing material composed for you was quite another. And an impresario,
especially Monsieur Volterra, was not going to spend money on a composer and five thousand francs on a costume if he didn’t see me as an investment.

‘This is your big chance, Simone,’ I told myself each day when I arrived at the Casino. ‘If you can’t launch yourself with all of this, you never will.’

The thought chilled me, but it spurred me on to work hard too.

Scotto wrote and perfected the songs with lightning speed. As each number was completed and choreographed, I rehearsed it until it met the approval of Monsieur Volterra. Then it was immediately inserted into the show, because Rivarola’s exit had left gaps in the program that needed to be filled.

From my first night on stage the critics were ecstatic. Jacques Patin, the reviewer for
Le Figaro
wrote:

A few months ago she was launched by the Casino de Paris as a key dancer. Now she is one of the principal singers. Simone Fleurier delivers. She puts more emotion into one line of a song than most performers put into a lifetime of work. She has a remarkable voice which, because of her age, I expect will develop further. This is a girl with a formidable future.

I bought several copies of the paper and sent the article to my family and to Madame Tarasova and Vera in Marseilles. I kept a copy under my pillow and read it first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
A formidable future.
Jacques Patin did not say such things about anyone. He had hammered Jacques Noir; although that didn’t seem to have made any dint in the comedian’s popularity—the show was still sold out every night. I was no longer seen as a sweet girl singing ditties in a ruffled dress, or Rivarola’s stage skivvy. A sublime energy inflated me from my toes to the top of my head. I became more self-possessed, and when I walked or danced I was like a caterpillar that had emerged from the cocoon and surprised everyone with her transformation.

By Christmas, all my songs were included in the program. One afternoon in the New Year, I arrived at the Casino de Paris for my rehearsal and was heading towards the stage door when Jacques Noir came out, his wife scuttling a few paces behind him.

‘
Bonjour
, Monsieur Noir,’ I said. In the heady blur of my success I was filled with goodwill for everybody and I had forgotten that Noir had ever performed a parody of me. I wasn’t greeting him because he was the show’s star; I would have been delighted to meet anyone in my joyous state.

I didn’t try to engage him in conversation or pester him in any way. I even stepped aside so he and his wife could go past me first. Noir gave me a frosty stare while his wife scowled. They ran down the steps to where the chauffeur held open the door of Noir’s Rolls-Royce. I shrugged and stepped inside the theatre, barely registering the couple’s surliness. I was too excited about practising my songs for the evening performance.

But the following afternoon when I arrived at the Casino for rehearsals, there was tension in the air. I felt it in the doorman’s churlish greeting and the irritable way the stage manager handed me changes to the program. Outside the dressing rooms, I found the chorus girls and two of the clowns gathered around the notice board. From the indignant way they were standing with their arms folded and their feet apart, I assumed somebody had been unfairly penalised for something. Minor acts were often given fines for tearing a costume, turning up late to rehearsals or performing with scruffy shoes or a missing button.

‘He’s got a hide,’ one of the clowns muttered.

Sophie, the lead chorus girl, shook her head. ‘Whoever it was should have known better. Now we’ll all have to walk around on tiptoes.’

I couldn’t resist the temptation to find out what the issue was. The normal reprimands always caused grumbling, but
this sounded like something interesting. I waited in my dressing room until I heard the chorus girls go down the stairs for their rehearsal, then I stuck my head into the corridor to check that it was clear. There wasn’t much on the notice board: a couple of changes to schedules and some advertisements for rooms for rent. Then my eye fell to the memorandum, which I could tell was new because of the whiteness of the paper. The message had been typed in capitals. The words shouted off the page at me:

MEMO TO ALL PERFORMERS IT IS NOT NECESSARY FOR SUPPORTING ACTS OR EXTRAS TO GREET MONSIEUR NOIR. REFRAIN FROM DOING IT. HE FINDS IT ANNOYING AND RUDE. IT IS ALSO AGAINST C.D.P. PROTOCOL FOR MINOR ACTS TO APPROACH THE STAR.

THE MANAGEMENT

I stood in the hallway with my mouth open. It took a while to register the words. It was the preposterous request of a megalomaniac, but the way the memo was worded, the way the print seemed to be stamped on the page rather than typed, and the fact that the culprit—me—had not been directly approached, made it seem as if a heinous crime had been committed. I burned with shame. I felt as humiliated as the stagehand who had been reprimanded for defecating on the toilet seat.

I did my best to put the memo out of my mind and concentrate on rehearsing, but that became more difficult as the afternoon wore on. I soon discovered that the memo had not only been posted on the notice board. There were copies all over the theatre: in the rehearsal rooms; near the stairs; in each of the wings; even on the back of the toilet stall doors. To make things worse, I kept overhearing the other performers talking in hushed whispers about it. The memo was the news of the day and was discussed with as
much passion as a scandal.
Who do you think it was? I bet it was that sly ballerina…No, it was Mathilde. She’s always trying to get a step up in the show by crawling to the stars.

At one point when we were rehearsing the grand finale, I was tempted to call the cast to silence and confess that I was the offender. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. My bubble had been burst. Jacques Noir would have told Monsieur Volterra exactly who the culprit was, but instead of coming to see me himself Monsieur Volterra had dictated a memo to his secretary. Why? Because Monsieur Volterra was a busy man and the memo was expedient. It meant he could reprimand me and warn the other performers at the same time. If I had been the star that I thought I was, Monsieur Volterra would have come to my dressing room and explained the situation. ‘I don’t want you to worry about this, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ he would have said, putting a fatherly arm around me and acting as if the incident were a joke between us. ‘I know it’s petty, but Monsieur Noir is the leading star and we have to accommodate his idiosyncrasies. You understand, don’t you?’

And what did the wording ‘minor acts’ mean? Despite all the money that had been spent on me, and the favourable reviews, was that all I was in the end?

When the rehearsal was over, I consoled myself by inviting Odette to join me on a shopping trip. I wanted to furnish my new hotel room. One of the first things I had done after
Le Figaro
praised me was to move from the Latin Quarter to a hotel in the étoile area where I had two rooms and my own bathroom. The hotel itself wasn’t much fancier, but the area was more suitable for a rising star. The streets of the eighth
arrondissement
were lined with prestigious hotels, grand limestone buildings and cafés that served champagne in crystal glasses. Camille was on the Right Bank too, in an apartment in the luxurious Hôtel de Crillon, paid for by her new lover, the playboy Yves de Dominici.

When Monsieur Etienne heard about my change of address, he didn’t openly chide me about not saving money. He commented that I was following in the footsteps of Picasso, who had moved to the area with his Russian wife, Olga Khoklova.

‘What are you suggesting?’ I asked.

He smiled wryly. ‘Well, he started off in Montmartre, moved to Montparnasse and now lives in the étoile Quarter. It seems to suit his wife’s social-climbing aspirations.’

‘No, Monsieur Etienne, you are mistaken,’ I answered, flashing him a cheeky smile. ‘I have never lived in Montmartre.’

He handed me a letter of introduction to his banker. ‘Monsieur Lemke will be happy to help you invest some of your money, should you ever decide to do so.’

I didn’t tell Monsieur Etienne that I had met Picasso. When the gnarly Spaniard appeared at my dressing room door, his wife hovering nervously in the background, I was too ignorant to grasp how important a person he was. His intense eyes and the sloppy way he spoke French reminded me of Rivarola, though of course Rivarola spoke no French at all. The artist was wearing a dinner suit with a red cummerbund, but he seemed as out of place in it as my mother was in the silver fox stole. He said that he would like to paint me and gave me his card. I thanked him but forgot about him as soon as I closed the door. Monsieur Etienne would have been delighted to hear that an artist who never painted portraits wanted to do mine.
Think of the publicity!
he would say. All I knew was that on the same day
Le Figaro
had reviewed me, they had also announced that Picasso had discovered Surrealism, and I couldn’t see the appeal of appearing on a gallery wall with a distorted nose and my insides in my lap.

After buying some silk sheets at the Galeries Lafayette, Odette and I went to the furniture store on the Boulevard Haussmann where Joseph had just been made manager. Joseph wasn’t as handsome as I had expected but there was something appealing about him. His boyish face lit up
when Odette and I entered the store, and he greeted me with a warm handshake and three kisses. The look that passed between him and Odette was full of love and it made me smile.

‘I am pleased to meet you at last, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ he said, pushing his steel-rimmed glasses further up on his nose and guiding us past bronze sculptures and Empire mahogany games tables. ‘Odette speaks so highly of you that I am going to see you perform at the Casino on my first day off.’

Joseph took us to a back room and pulled aside a packing crate. ‘I have been keeping these for you,’ he said, pointing to two Louis XV chairs upholstered in leopard skin. ‘As soon as I showed these to Odette, she said they would be perfect for you.’

I ran my hand over the sleek fur. The chairs were the most beautiful objects I had ever seen. I glanced at the price tag. They were outrageously expensive, even with Joseph’s best discount, but I had to have them. After we had agreed on the price, Joseph dragged out an oriental screen.

‘It will cover the battleship grey walls of your room,’ said Odette, stepping closer to examine the gold leaf and abalone shell etchings.

‘I’ll take it,’ I said, my head light with the excitement of spending so much money on luxuries.

After the purchase, which the three of us toasted with a glass of champagne, Odette and I returned to my hotel room. Odette directed the delivery men where to place the chairs and screen—a decision that was changed several times before she was satisfied that they had been positioned exactly where they should be in the room.

‘You would be in a lot of trouble with your uncle if he saw you doing this,’ I told her. ‘He thinks I shouldn’t be spending so much money.’

Odette shook her head. ‘If you want to be a star you have to live like one.’

‘I don’t know if your advice is any wiser than your uncle’s, but it is more appealing,’ I said.

‘I am coming to the show tonight,’ Odette said. ‘I haven’t seen it since all your songs were included.’