Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (13 page)

It didn't add up. But it was a better plan than letting Fatima be deported. The next morning, I picked Gabor up at his hotel. Suzanne looked down from the window. I waved at her and blew a kiss. Everything is forgiven!

How often does it happen that in a city the size of Paris an ancient Hungarian relict is exactly where your friend thinks he'll be? My heart sank when I saw the guy. If he was minting money, couldn't he have sprung for a shampoo and shave? He looked as if he'd slept in his coat, under a bridge. Closer up I saw that he'd worked on that look, the style of a raffish aristocrat: a greasy shelf of swept back hair, cheekbones you could balance your coffee cup on, the hooded eyes and beak of a hawk, an eye patch for good luck.

“Maestro,” said Gabor. “Good morning. Can we buy you a coffee?”

The old man said, “Please. A café
corretto
.”

Gabor ordered coffee with brandy, then introduced me as his American friend. The counterfeiter grasped my hand in his tattered cashmere glove. The rest was in Hungarian. Gabor had said that a Hungarian couldn't refuse anything if you asked in his native language. But how could that be true? Hungary was a place like any other, full of citizens denying and rejecting each other.

Gargling those garbled consonants, Gabor was a different person: charming as ever but shyer and more quietly respectful. Perhaps he was just deferring to age or social rank, but the tenderness and humility with which he treated the elderly grifter made me think of his parents and the grand opera of their letters back and forth.

When Gabor got to a certain point, the old guy leered at me and said, “Ah,
amour
.” I did my best to leer back.
Amour
was the issue, all right.
Amour,
money, power, and nationalism, to be exact.

Switching to French, Gabor said, “Didn't you mint all that money to paper your mistress's room?”

“I don't recall that,” the old man said.

Could he manufacture a few francs more? The counterfeiter shrugged. He was out of practice. They switched back to Hungarian. Then Gabor produced a roll of bills, which, to paraphrase Karl Marx again, spoke the international language of
yes
.

Apparently, the old guy had a friend who had a studio. . . . How much money would we need? The old man whistled between his last few teeth, a sound like a Japanese flute. He'd see what he could do. He named an absurd fee. Gabor agreed. It was less than Chanac was asking.

A day went by, then another. Gabor was optimistic. On the fourth day we met the old guy at the same café. This time he had a briefcase. He insisted on getting his cut before he handed it over. And he suggested that we might prefer to inspect his work in the men's room. No point alerting the customers of a cheap dive to their sudden proximity to a million francs, fake or not.

Gabor paid him. Don't do it! I thought. But I couldn't interfere. It was a Hungarian business transaction financed with money that the baroness thought was being spent on photographic supplies.

Gabor and I took the suitcase and hurried off to the toilet. God knows what the barman thought. By the flickering light of a urine yellow bulb, we examined the ragged bills. This was surely the only time in the history of France that the fifty-franc note carried the portrait of an elderly Hungarian with long white hair and an eye patch. Gabor and I ran back out, but the old man was gone.

Gabor tracked him down and got back most of the baroness's money. Having run out of options, I took Fatima to the police station. We were crying our eyes out, but she stopped crying before I did. At least she would see her dear mama.

That was when she told me that she wasn't going to see Mama. In fact, to be honest, she wasn't leaving France. She pointed toward the handsome young guard assigned to escort her to the border.

For all I know, they're popping out half-Moroccan babies in some prefecture in the provinces. So I would like to ask Mr. Karl Marx about this part of the story. Could it be that there are more important things than money?

Gabor saved a few counterfeit bills. One night, at the Chameleon, he gave two of them to Yvonne. Apparently the old shyster was a Hungarian national hero. She was delighted to find out that he was still alive, though sorry that his efforts had led to Fatima running off with a cop. She loved it that the old man had put his face on the bills. She took the phony Hungarian francs. A lucky charm, she said.

That night she sent to our table a bottle of champagne, which I drank to get over Fatima and to imagine a heaven in which Karl Marx was wrong, and money didn't matter.

From
The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

BY
NATHALIE DUNOIS

Chapter Five: First Love

 

DURING THE WRITING
of this book I have repeatedly tried to build a bridge I could cross to reach Lou Villars. What could make someone sympathize with a torturer and a traitor? If empathy and pity are unavailable, then which of the higher emotions is left? Kindness? Compassion? If one is looking for explanations or exculpation, one could cite Lou's troubled brother (heredity?), her gothic childhood, her lonely adolescence, culminating in the near rape by her mentor and trainer.

Then why do I feel most strongly for Lou when I think about her doomed passion for the little blond viper Arlette? Everyone knows what it is like to fall madly in love with an ice cube. Many women (including myself) imagine that only men are naturally incapable of showing warmth or affection. But this book has been an education for me—and, I hope, for the reader. As we learn from the story of Lou and Arlette, a woman can be as calculating and cold as the most chilly, self-centered man.

Arlette was a hustler of a type that has always existed. She parlayed a pretty body, a mediocre talent, intense ambition, and opportunism into modest fame and brief success. Did Arlette use Lou Villars? Arlette used everyone. She traded up from her handsome cheesemonger boyfriend to notoriety with Lou, whom she traded in for the Paris police prefect, Clovis Chanac. Arlette hooked her star to a comet that would shine its sickly light on the dimmed-down Occupied City.

The notorious Clovis Chanac clawed his way to power. He took Arlette along with him and set her up in her own club. After the war, Arlette would be tried for treason, but she was never convicted. Her lawyers, who specialized in defending entertainers, proved that it wasn't, strictly speaking, a crime to have been popular with the Germans. Chanac vanished into the ether and wasn't considered worth tracking to Buenos Aires or Detroit.

Arlette saw Lou as a way to get noticed. Not only noticed but talked about, not only talked about but immortalized in Gabor Tsenyi's photograph “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.” Which is not to say that great art meant much to Arlette. Immortality was for the weak. Arlette lived for the present: pretty clothes, fresh oysters, champagne, a nice apartment in which to sleep late, an audience that loved her whether she sang on key or not. Walking into a stylish nightspot, she wanted people to know who she was. What good would it do to get the best table after she was dead?

Inexperienced innocent Lou had no way of knowing what Arlette wanted or who she really was. I feel I can say with certainty: Lou believed they were in love. Together they moved into a cramped flat in the unstylish nineteenth arrondissement. On the nights when Eddie stayed over, Lou slept on the couch.

To Lou it was her first real home, and a happy home it was, though there wasn't much in it but overflowing ashtrays and empty bottles. Arlette's suitcase spilled onto the floor on her side of the bed, which should have told Lou something, if she'd let herself see an unpacked valise as evidence of anything but Arlette's adorable free spirit. Later, Lou would tell another lover—who has asked that her name not appear in this book—that she'd been moved and surprised by how intimately and fully Arlette was
present
for her, and only her, when they made love. She'd never seen a mouth as huge and soft as Arlette's when Arlette leaned in to kiss her.

All of us have observed how often our erotic attractions reflect a mysterious but consistent taste, almost as if we were ordering a favorite dish from a menu. The chicken, please, not the fish. The difference is that the menu of Eros is secret, even from us. Sometimes only in retrospect do we realize that we have wasted our best years looking for a lost, inappropriate first love, that our life-changing passion for a particular person was no more than the desire to finally kiss the crooked lower lip of an elementary school principal or the boy on whom we had an unrequited childhood crush.

In her lovers, Lou invariably chose surface over soul. She was drawn to beauty of a certain vulgar sort: skinny blondes with heart-shaped faces. Or perhaps she would search forever for whatever she'd seen in Arlette—a quest that would eventually lead to the most disastrous of her affairs, her romance with the (also blond) German auto racer Inge Wallser.

But love is strange, as they used to say at the Chameleon Club. Even those of us who value intelligence over appearance have discovered, to our chagrin, that a high IQ doesn't necessarily translate into kindness or even conscience.

My readers may find me guilty of special pleading, of making a case for my subject, of laying the groundwork for Lou's (inconceivable!) pardon, of spreading it on too thickly when I mention a tragedy that occurred at this time and that left Lou even more vulnerable to Arlette's evil influence.

One afternoon a gentleman came looking for Lou at the club. He was her family lawyer; she dimly recalled him from childhood. Abruptly, and despite the fact that other people were present, he said he was sorry to tell her that both parents had been killed in a car wreck. Her father was driving. The accident had occurred near their home. That was all the lawyer was authorized to disclose.

Lou said, “Poor Papa always was a bad driver.” By then she had learned to drive. Arlette's boyfriend Eddie had taught Lou on the tiny Citroën he co-owned with a pal. One of their favorite pastimes was to motor out to the country, where Lou drove as fast as she could while Arlette sat on Eddie's lap and kissed him. Then they'd go back to their apartment, where Lou and Arlette made love all night.

The lawyer was also sorry to tell Lou that her parents had left the bulk of their estate to support her brother, who was still in a residential home. The lawyer was not authorized to disclose where Robert was. Lou thought that if he said
authorized
or
disclose
one more time, she would have to punch him. But if she did, Yvonne would have her thrown out of the club, and they would find another sailor to save the little mermaid. So she thanked the lawyer and bowed her head, as if he had come to award her a gold medal of condolence.

 

Now that they are out of the picture, we can more fully assess what sort of parents Henri and Clothilde Villars were. Neither the best nor the worst. Neglectful, cold, and self-involved, like so many mothers and fathers. But to their credit they found Lou a school where they hoped she might thrive. They didn't stand in the way of her sports career, nor did they protest when that career ended and she wrote home to say that she was working as a dancer.

But what about their decision to keep her brother's whereabouts secret? Did they think they were sparing their daughter the burden of caring for him? Or were they simply hypercivilized, garden-variety sadists, denying Lou the one piece of information she craved, keeping her apart from the one person she longed to see? Perhaps there were other reasons which, lacking access to Robert Villars's medical history, we will never know.

Lou vowed that she would find her brother or hire someone to track him down. For now it seemed wiser not to bully the lawyer into
disclosing
where Robert was.

I can imagine my readers—those with psychotherapeutic turns of mind—making vaulting Freudian leaps from Lou's inability to find her brother to the brutality with which she would later extract information from her innocent victims. And perhaps these same readers will draw another “direct” line between the manner of Lou's parents' demise and her decision to become an auto racer. Or between her betrayal by Arlette and her subsequent betrayal of her country.

But however tempting it may be to make these neat connections, these “logical” explanations seem overly facile. Not everyone who is denied some vital personal information will wind up burning innocent people with cigarette lighters until they disclose the identities of their comrades in the Resistance. Not every girl orphaned in a vehicular accident will wind up racing cars. And not every spurned lover punishes the world by telling the Germans where the Maginot Line ended.

Hours after Lou received the bad news about her parents, she insisted on going onstage as she did every night, though Yvonne—who knew everything that happened in her club—told her she could take time off. But it would have felt like another loss, a loss on top of a loss, to forgo the moment Lou waited for all day, the moment when Arlette flipped around in her arms so they were face-to-face, and Arlette slid down her body like a serpent slithering down a tree.

As they kissed, Arlette thrust her slim hips forward and pressed her groin into Lou's. The audience could read Lou's mind. This beautiful woman is mine! She has chosen me, only me, and together we have traveled to an undiscovered planet of pleasure and happiness, a private universe where the two of us dwell alone, needing no one but each other. There is nothing we are ashamed of. This dance we perform, six nights a week, is a testament to our love.

How ashamed most of us would be, if we were reminded of some past behavior, some attitude that we maintained while under the delusion that we were in love—and were loved in return.

From
A Baroness by Night

BY
LILY DE ROSSIGNOL

THROUGH MUCH OF
the 1930s, the Chameleon Club was my favorite nightspot. I adored the clientele, the dancing, the costumes, and for a while, the floor show. It provided a soothing antidote to the more stressful aspects of my life, among them my hopeless love for the photographer Gabor Tsenyi and a (possibly related) rough patch in my marriage to Denis (“Didi”) de Rossignol. It also offered a brief distraction from politics, history, and from the terrifying uncertainties of the moment in which we lived. Whenever I managed to rise above my personal problems, it was hard not to notice that half of France was unemployed, that Hitler had seized power next door, that murderous gangs of extremist thugs were rampaging through our city.

Because I counted so many talented artists—and foreigners—among my friends, I was alarmed, even repelled, by the rhetoric of the right. On the other hand, I feared that if the Communists won and the upper class went under, so would my husband's auto business—and all our employees. Though later, the news out of Soviet Russia made me realize that Rossignol Motors would have done fine, selling cars to party officials.

In an atmosphere so unsettled, one might think that something more was required to lighten our mood than a lively drag show, a noisy crowd, a room full of dancing same-sex couples. But one can never predict what will enable a person to get through the night.

The Chameleon Club has had a long afterlife—most importantly, in Gabor's photos. It also appears in the cult classics written by our American friend, Lionel Maine. I've seen it mentioned in books about the history of the period and popular culture in Paris. But unless you were there, you cannot understand why it was so beloved, why one felt so happy to stand in front of its door and whisper its well-known “secret” password:
Police! Open up!

In part what made the club such a haven was its power to make each person feel temporarily less alone. As someone who has always abhorred crowds, a horror I shared with Gabor, it wasn't the crush of dancers I enjoyed, or the smoky air. Nor the illusion of community, the shallow unreliable reassurance of being together with strangers whom we want to believe are like us. What moved and gladdened me was that the club's popularity, its longevity, and its very existence seemed to prove that each of us leads a double life.

When we say
a double life,
what do we think of first? The mousy government bureaucrat selling secrets to the enemy? The hired assassin masquerading as a country housewife? No, when we say
double life
, we generally mean sex. Bigamy, infidelity, an infinite continuum of so-called kinks and perversions. The self who touches and is touched in the dark, between the sheets, is not the same self who gets up in the morning and goes out to buy coffee and croissants.

Or anyway, so I was told.

By the time I joined the Resistance, I'd had considerable practice in secrecy and stealth. As with most people, my secret involved sex. But in my case, it was the lack of it that could never be mentioned. All through those years, in fact until the early days of the Occupation, I remained a virgin, even as I projected the world-weary, jaded sophistication of a woman who has tried everything and experimented so freely that, with no new frontiers to cross, she has retired from her strenuous erotic explorations.

I suppose the reason that I was assumed to be a degenerate libertine were the four years I'd spent in Hollywood. In Paris, at least in the circles in which my brother-in-law Armand moved, that was the equivalent of fifty years in a brothel. California was where I'd met Didi, but no one ever suggested that it had corrupted
him
.

Possibly you have seen me in the films of that era. I was the blonde in the scanty toga shyly draping a wreath around the neck of the sweaty muscular Christian climbing out of a gladiator pit. I was the prostitute cradling her baby in the doorway when the mad scientist dashes by en route to his demented experiments. I was the handmaid who catches the third of Salome's tossed-off veils.

Then little by little, role by role, I faded back into the crowd. I was one of the cannibals fleeing the volcano that saves the explorer from being cooked and eaten. I was one of the Israelites fanning my arms in front of the Golden Calf, though not one of the dancing girls exuding guilt, in close-up, after Moses's sermon. I was pretty enough, but not
something
enough to fight the riptide pulling me out to the sea in which the pretty extras drowned.

Hollywood years are like dog years. And age is a funny thing. When I first met Gabor he and I were the same age. But I was always older. Didi also was my age, but we
were
the same age. Perhaps because we both liked men, to whom age is so important.

People used to ask Didi and me how we met. A question meant to remind us that we were an unlikely couple. But how little that mattered, at first. We had so much in common. We were French and far from home. We were young and attractive.

“At a party,” I'd reply. “Across a crowded room.”

Actually, it was a party at the home of Douglas Fairbanks. He had a private auto racetrack and invited movie stars to watch their famous friends drive. Didi knew someone who knew someone, I knew someone who knew someone else. We were the only French guests except for a costume designer who ignored us, afraid we might know that she had been a seamstress at home. It was lovely to meet Didi and chat, in French, about the Americans' disgusting food and infantile social customs.

It was Hollywood. Crazy things went on. But knowing that the actor who plays the charioteer can only perform sexually in the presence of a chattering ring-tailed monkey is not the same thing as going to bed with the actor and his ape. Despite the skimpy toga, despite the doll-baby I clutched as the madman rushed by, despite what all Hollywood assumed about a pretty blond French extra, I had never been kissed offscreen.

I knew that men loved other men, that women fell in love with women. But no one ever had told me that there were men like Didi, who only made love with other men but who liked kissing women. As he drove me home from the party in his gorgeous Bugatti, he pulled off the road and embraced me so forcefully that when I got back to my apartment, the seams of the upholstered front seat were imprinted on my back. Nothing about Didi's kisses suggested his heart wasn't in it.

Didn't it mean anything that he asked me to marry him on our first date? It was obvious he loved me, though he never said so. Sometimes we necked for hours, then he stopped and pulled away. He was controlling his animal instincts. Saving me for marriage.

We were married by a judge in the Los Angeles County courthouse. Then the auto business called Didi back to Europe. Chaste as two cherubs, we traveled by train to New York, and by ocean liner to Rome, where we were married again in St. Peter's. Then we went to Venice for our honeymoon.

Venice was wet and cold. I blamed everything on the weather. Didi wouldn't get out from under the blankets and wouldn't touch me beneath them. Would our lives have been different if we'd gotten married in June? Then—a little late, don't you think?—he decided to tell me the truth. So it wasn't the weather or the Venetian climate. He'd assumed I'd known all along. Apparently, everyone did.

Venice is a beautiful city. But I have never liked it.

Sometimes I minded that everyone knew about me and Didi. No matter how modern you think you are, how many conventions you flout, it's a trial of the spirit to have the whole world know that your husband cannot forgive you for not being a Swedish boy. Had I turned him against women? Back then, people still believed that the right woman could convince a man to change his sexual preferences—even though it's been proven how hard it is to modify a man's taste in cuff links.

Unless I drank enough champagne, and sometimes even then, I often suspected that people were making veiled comments about my marriage. I still remember Lionel Maine talking about a nightclub act he liked: two Norwegian brothers who dressed and sang exactly like two popular American sisters performing across the street. I remember feeling a shiver of irrational fear that Didi might somehow meet one of the Rocky Twins.

It was ironic, wanting people to think I'd married Didi for money, rather than the embarrassing truth: I'd been in love. Didi loved me. Also he liked the social cachet of having a stylish wife with famous and gifted friends. He respected and followed my advice about Rossignol Motors. Someone else might think that we had the perfect marriage. I could pick up the tab for everyone, and dear Didi would pay. We enjoyed our time together. We were like brother and sister, but happier and closer.

Later in life, I met other women whose husbands shared Didi's predilections. Though we never discussed it, such wives understand one another. We knew what attracted us to men of that sort: they were nice to us, they were gentle, they liked the things we liked. And most important, they listened to us the way women listen to other women.

Before I married, I used to imagine the amusing, intelligent children I would have. But how would I have done that without another Virgin Birth? Eventually I convinced myself that I was better off childless, without the slack belly and sagging breasts. I could stay out till dawn with my friends without worrying about nannies or diapers or those childhood illnesses that age mothers prematurely before turning out to be nothing. I always thought I would have made one of those glamorous, indulgent aunts. But Armand's wife protected her children from their godless Aunt Lily.

One night, after one of the rare evenings when we'd gone out together, Didi informed me that, after several glasses of wine, I'd turned to each of the gentlemen in the room and announced, in a plaintive voice, that I didn't have any children. Did I think they didn't know? Was I asking them to give me a child? Didi said that the men were appalled.

Humiliated, I apologized. He told me not to worry. Men had short memories, especially for what women said. But though he trusted me at home, where I never failed to rise to my responsibilities as a hostess, we would never again attend, as a couple, a social event at which alcohol was served.

Didi married me for the third time in a church in France, to please or to spite his pious brother who, when we met at one of those hellish French Sunday family lunches, asked Didi, right in front of me, “Are you sure it's even legal?” At that same lunch, Armand asked if he might have seen any of the films in which I'd appeared. I said no, most likely they had never been shown in France. Later I learned that Armand never went to the movies.

Apparently, the Church had no problem with opium. Or if it did, Armand ignored it. He only smoked at night. During the day, he was a sharp businessman, working beside my husband. He was also an excellent driver, having practiced his skills in the ambulance corps during World War I. He'd insisted on driving himself, even though he'd been a colonel, a rank that came with the family name. He'd been wounded in battle, which, he claimed, was how his drug use started.

Armand was one of the founders of the Order of the Legion of Joan of Arc, the right-wing veterans organization with a small private army and close ties to the military and the pope. Why direct your prayers to a loving God when you can have the crown of thorns and the martyred French soldiers flying up to Jesus?

Because of Armand's nationalism and his prejudice against foreigners, I was literally trembling the first time I invited Gabor to dinner. I meant to seat my friend and my brother-in-law at opposite ends of the table, but circumstances intervened. Armand was high, but not high enough to miss the fact that Gabor spoke with an accent. There was an incident involving a grape that mortified Gabor. Somehow he'd gotten the idea that polite society sliced grapes in half with knives, and his flew across the table and practically hit Armand. Luckily I was able to help Gabor see the humor in it.

It took me years to appreciate my brother-in-law's good qualities, but I will say that by the time of his death I loved him like a brother. We learned not to talk about politics or religion, and to put the past behind us. It was Armand who, in a sober moment, taught me how to drive and gave me, as a belated wedding gift, the beautiful Rossignol sedan that I still treasure and occasionally take for a spin, though usually now with a driver. Even then, when I went out with friends, I preferred to have a chauffeur. I felt obliged to keep up with some world-class drinkers. And the cocktails at the Chameleon Club were notoriously strong.

By then I had learned to have things my way—an accomplishment, for a woman.
My way
meant never being bored. Boredom frightened me as much as, or possibly worse than, death. Only later, looking back on that time, did I understand that boredom was a luxury and a blessing.

Didi and I were married for almost twenty years. Like every marriage, ours had its ups and downs. My husband was kind and gentle when we were alone, but with his friends he sometimes turned mean. They gathered in his library, and when I heard them laughing, I often felt they were laughing at me.

I knew they were wounded creatures. Many, including Didi, had been tormented by cruel schoolmates and intolerant fathers. But my sympathy for them decreased with every minute I spent at the Chameleon, where men and women with odder quirks and more troubled pasts could relax and have fun and laugh at jokes that were not about the hostess. When I heard my husband and his friends laugh that way, I felt as if I were back in Hollywood, in the crowd of extras, watching the other girls get picked to prostrate themselves in front of the Golden Calf.

The first years I knew Gabor Tsenyi were not the happiest in my marriage, but later I turned back to Didi, for reasons I will explain. I can't recall who introduced me to Gabor. I think we met in a café. He seemed like a charming man with an adorable accent and unusually lively dark eyes. Then he showed me his photos. After that all I wanted was to see what he saw.