Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (29 page)

From
Paris in my Rearview Mirror

BY
LIONEL MAINE

An Essay on Fear

 

IN THOSE DAYS
I had a girlfriend, Jasmine, a widow with two kids. She worked as a receptionist at the Hotel Ritz. She was kindhearted, everyone liked her. She got us free rooms when business was slow, which that winter it was.

No sane human being doesn't love sex in a fancy hotel room. Also there were extras: the barely tasted bottles of wine and the American newspapers guests left behind, papers you could no longer count on finding on the stands. For Christmas I got a
New York Times,
only lightly puckered from having been on some movie star's bathroom floor. Foreign guests were rarer now. Jasmine was lucky to have a job. She might not have one for long. I had no money. We had no plans. The Nazis were in power. Why not enjoy the moment?

Christmas morning, we lay naked in bed. So what if there were fuel shortages and the room was cold? The kids were with Jasmine's mother. We'd had crazy sex and would again. The holiday was ours.

The Sunday
Times
ran a survey that I read aloud to Jasmine: what subjects were the American people most interested in this year? In 1937, the ladies were most interested in the marriage of the Duke of Windsor and Mrs. Simpson. This year men and women alike were interested in the German annexation of Czechoslovakia, and in whether there would be another world war.

Sixty percent of Americans thought appeasing Hitler meant that war was more likely. Forty percent disagreed. Sixty/forty were the chances of war in the estimation of the citizens of Buffalo and Sheboygan. In Paris the numbers were different. One hundred percent in the heart and mind, zero on the face.

I want to get paid to do surveys. I want to take my notebook out to the boulevards and explain that I'm an American reporter writing a story on how many hours a day Parisians spend in terror. Not the old everyday fears—failure, poverty, loneliness, old age, disease—but major historical dread. Will we go to war? Will our cities and homes be bombed? Are we all going to die?

I'd ask, How many of you Frenchies think about war, first thing in the morning?

No reporters have asked the French that. They can have fun debating these questions in Cleveland, but here it's much too close. Life must be business as usual.

A friend of mine sold a painting. We went out to celebrate. We all got fined for having Chateaubriand on a day when meat was rationed. Busted after one bite. Guess who ate the rest of the beef? Not the dogs, I'll tell you that. The cops are having a field day, crown roast every night. If you have any money, you can still live like a king—like Marie Antoinette on the eve of the revolution.

Last week I went to the Chameleon Club for the first time in a while. They have a new revue called “Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise,” after a popular song from a few years back that they are reviving. In the song, a marquise calls home, and her servants tell her that everything is fine, except for one teensy problem, the death of her prize stallion, but everything is fine, except that her château has burned down. Everything is fine except for the suicide of her husband. But everything is fine.

Yvonne's revue consists of the same song performed, in a different way, by actors dressed as horses and stable hands, girls in firemen costumes, pretty boy policemen, all manner of suggestive and comical combinations. It's hard to believe how much entertainment and sexy surprise could come from hearing the same bad news sung fifteen different ways. Beneath it all was the obvious joke. Everything is
not
fine. Our horse is dead, our château in ruins. Our husband has hung himself in the attic.

Things are being sorted out in the most despicable fashion. Where you are born means everything. Either you're French, or you're not. God had better help the Jews, because their French friends won't. Many of my Jewish friends have already left the country, lest they wind up in the same pickle as their German relatives.

So what if I've been here fifteen years? I'm the American writer. The Spanish are all tragic, the Russians all Bolshevik Commies. All the Italians I know call Mussolini the Little Martian. They say he landed from outer space in that wedding cake he built in the Piazza Venezia. The palazzo was a spaceship that touched down and got stuck in Rome, and the Martians thought, What the hell, since we're here, let's invade Abyssinia.

 

Gabor called Jasmine at the Ritz and told her to ask me if we could get together for a drink. We agreed to meet at the Café Voltaire.

We greeted each other warmly. I hadn't seen him in weeks. He looked sleek and well fed. Had the baroness found a genius to cut his hair?

Lately, in my opinion, he'd fallen in with the wrong crowd. He'd been taken up by the race-car set. He'd always been a bit of a social climber, but he'd hidden it before. His photos were shown around the world. I'll admit, that was hard for me, though I'd had some success of my own. Someone told me about a Yakuza who'd had a sex scene from
Make Yourself New
translated into Japanese characters and tattooed, in microscript, on his back.

We drank our first glass of wine in silent, companionable comfort. It was too early to ask about Suzanne. It still hurt to recall how he'd stolen her. Not that Suzanne could be stolen. She'd left me for him. Which was worse. I wanted to hear about his work, but not about his money and fame.

After the second glass I said, “How's the baroness?”

He said that he saw the baroness regularly, though slightly less often than before.

I said, “Can I ask you something? Did you ever fuck her?”

He fell silent. Then he said,
Almost
. Once. If I told Suzanne, he'd deny it. In any case, sex was not the bond between him and the baroness. I don't know why I suddenly hated him. He hadn't said anything wrong. Maybe I felt that his reputation and social connections meant he was
safer
than me. When the war began, the baroness and her family would do more to protect him than anything the American embassy (which was already urging us to go home) would do for me. It was as if we both suffered from the same disease, but he had better doctors.

How
was
Suzanne? Terrified. Depressed. She was sure there would be a war. He blamed her pessimism on the widowed mother. I said the mother was probably right. He said he thought she was right too. And then for some reason we laughed.

I said, “Will you stay in Paris?”

He said, “Maybe it won't happen.”

We ordered another round and drained our glasses in one swallow. Then he told me that he and the baroness had gone to Biarritz. The baroness had promised that it would be relaxing. And maybe it would have if the town hadn't been full of Spanish refugees. Filthy, starving. Sick kids. Hadn't the baroness known that it would spoil their vacation?

I said, “She knew. Didn't you get some good pictures? Refugees are so photogenic.”

“Fuck you, Lionel,” he said. “Actually, I did.”

According to the baroness, it might not be smart to show them until it was clear which way the wind was blowing.

I said, “The baroness always was a slut.”

Gabor said, “First of all, she is not a slut. And secondly, everyone who isn't a whore wants to be one. Even you, Lionel.”

“Actually, not me.” The truth was, I would have been a whore if I could have found a client.

He said, “Everyone has problems.”

Gabor's personal torment was the mail service between Hungary and Paris. What would happen to his parents if war broke out? I said they would be fine. Unless he wanted to move them to Paris, there was nothing he could do. And there was no guarantee that they would be safer in Paris.

He said he might have to stop writing them, sooner rather than later. He was already under suspicion for being foreign born, and now the constant communications with a country about to be under German rule might get him sent to a prison camp. For writing to his parents! It would kill them if they found out. How exactly would they find out? Logic was never Gabor's strong suit when it came to his mother and father.

By now I was drunk enough to say, “I've always believed that relations between a man and his mother are sacred. Off limits even for close friends. Which makes me a better person than Freud, but that is another story. Still I would be lying if I didn't say that, often over the years, when you would tell me something your parents wrote or something you wrote to them, I'd ask myself: How old is this guy?”

“Forty,” Gabor said.

“I rest my case,” I said.

He said that he could tell his parents things he couldn't tell anyone else.

I said, “Really? What, besides boasting about yourself?”

He leaned across the table and hugged me and ordered another round.

We drank until almost dawn, alternately calming each other down and riling each other up. I wish I could remember half the things we said. Only as we were saying good-bye did he realize he hadn't explained why he'd wanted to see me.

He said, “Remember Lou Villars?”

I said, “Of course. She's in my book. Have you read one word I wrote?”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Of course I remember. Last week Lou showed up at my studio. I was nervous because of my photo . . . her trial.”

“That was a while ago,” I said.

Gabor seemed not to hear me. “In fact she couldn't have been friendlier. She wanted to buy a photo. Maybe more than one. I felt it would insult her if I told her how much my prices had risen. Was she sure she could afford them? I asked which photos she wanted. Did I have any pictures of bridges, tunnels, fortifications, armories, that sort of thing? I said I would look. She said don't worry, she had money. What does this sound like to you?”

“Nothing good,” I said.

“That's what I thought,” Gabor said. “And not just because I am a paranoid Hungarian. There's more. She wanted to learn to take pictures. She would pay me to teach her.”

I said, “She was always a creepy broad.”

Gabor said, “I told her no.”

“Bravo. Smart boy,” I said.

After that we said good night. Gabor went back to his studio, where, though neither of us said so, Suzanne was waiting. And I went to the hotel. Maybe Jasmine would still be awake. If not, if I could still see, I would write a letter to my editor in New Jersey.

Did the paper want eight hundred words on “Paris on the Brink”? I could go out on the boulevards and conduct my own survey. I would ask the French if they were as frightened and as willfully blind as my Hungarian friend.

From
A Baroness by Night

BY
LILY DE ROSSIGNOL

AFTER MY BROTHER-IN-LAW
was killed, it put a strain on my marriage.

Armand was shot in September 1938. For weeks his murder went unsolved. All that anyone knew was that he'd gone with Didi and some friends to the Garden of Eden, the club that Clovis Chanac had set up for Arlette.

It was a bachelor party for one of Armand's pals in the Order of the Legion of Joan of Arc. Edith Piaf had been hired to sing “Mon Légionnaire” and a medley of other rousing paramilitary hits.

Chanac must have bribed Arlette to let Piaf have the spotlight for fifteen minutes. I imagine the crowd was relieved when Madame Macbeth returned to the stage. Piaf asked a lot of you, but Arlette asked nothing. All that she and Chanac wanted was to rule the world, starting with Paris.

My brother-in-law went home early, to get a head start on the days of fasting and penance with which he and his wife and children scourged themselves after every time Papa went out. Perhaps he had some errands to run on his way home. At that time my brother-in-law was, like St. Anthony, fending off an army of demons, though in Armand's case the desert was in his veins and his mind.

Armand left without the entourage that accompanied him everywhere. Later, this was looked into, and the men were exonerated; Armand had dismissed them. None of Armand's health problems were in evidence that night, and his minders assumed he was capable of making it home alone. According to his driver, he asked to be let out on a rather unsavory corner in the tenth arrondissement.

Didi was home by two. At five in the morning my sister-in-law called, hysterical because Armand hadn't returned.

It took them several days to find him. Someone had picked his pockets where he lay under the Pont d'Austerlitz.

The crime was immediately classified as a political murder because of Armand's position in the Legion of Joan of Arc. The Legion owned newspapers and lawyers; they had the government's ear. The police said that a Communist was almost certainly behind Armand's death. I was angry at how humbly Didi acted toward the cops, how graciously he thanked them for their brilliant detective work.

I understood: my husband's only brother was dead. But why did he want to be lied to? The Communists weren't after Armand. His circle of acquaintances ranged across many quarters of Paris and included criminals and addicts, any one of whom might have killed him, over money or drugs.

Eventually the police got lucky. Armand's killer was not just a Communist but a Bolshevik Jew! Herschel Grynszpan, 17, the same boy who shot Ernst vom Rath, a junior official in the German embassy in Paris.

That murder, of course, was the crime that set off Kristallnacht, the German people's “spontaneous” response to hearing that one of the Reich's finest young lives had been cut short by a Jew. Goebbels himself came to Munich to say he wouldn't be surprised if the Germans took it upon themselves to revenge this outrage by smashing up Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes.

One last unpleasant detail: my brother-in-law was killed by the same caliber bullet—a 6.35 caliber revolver—that struck vom Rath. So it was decided that Grynszpan had plotted the crime in advance, trailing and killing my right-wing brother-in-law as a trial run for the main event. It was rumored by people “in the know” that Grynszpan had asked my brother-in-law to fund a Jewish sports club like the one he'd belonged to back in Hanover. He'd shot Armand in a fury when Armand refused. But no one who'd ever met Armand would imagine that even a lunatic would approach him to ask such a thing. And Grynszpan wasn't a lunatic, just an unhappy, angry young man.

I never believed that Grynszpan killed Armand, whom he had nothing against, as opposed to the German diplomat, whom the poor boy held responsible for deporting his parents and leaving them, cold and starving, just across the Polish border. And for making him an orphan, a stateless person, and a wanted man.

Everyone was lying, fantasizing, inventing, spouting improbable theories. Later, Grynszpan's lawyers would base their defense on the claim that the killer and his victim were homosexual lovers. Thus it would no longer have been a political assassination, a capital offense, but a crime of passion, which under French law, was perfectly legal or pardonable, I can't remember which.

Armand's memorial service was our homegrown mini-Nuremberg rally. Columns of veterans and policemen marched to solemn dirges played by military bands. The flag-draped casket was hauled forward, one agonizingly slow hoofbeat after another, by a team of white horses with bridles and plumes that matched the flag.

I kept my arm around Didi's shoulders. My poor husband wept without restraint. He cried as the casket rolled by. He sobbed during the “Marseillaise.”

My memories of that day are blurred, but one image I clearly recall is the tear-streaked, swollen face of Lou Villars, bobbing toward me through the sea of mourners. I pretended not to see her. I felt sorry for her, but I was afraid that her soggy sympathy would drown me. I was having enough trouble keeping Didi afloat.

Didi wanted to believe that Grynszpan had murdered Armand. That the killer had been apprehended. And it drove a wedge between us, though it was less like a chasm than like a large oily puddle, too revolting to cross. Everything Didi did and said began to get on my nerves. It was the same for Didi, I'm sure. I could tell how much I annoyed him.

I didn't want to leave Didi, and he didn't want that, either. It seemed simpler if I left Paris.

Anyway, Paris was no longer fun. Did no one see what was coming? No one discussed an invasion. But everyone smelled it on the air, like the first depressing whiff of autumn. Gabor complained that his friend Suzanne did nothing but worry about the war. Maybe it would have made me feel less lonely to talk to her. But she wasn't the sort of girl I spoke to, at that time. Later we would be in constant conversation, ironically at a moment when any words—the wrong words—might have been fatal to us both. History would prove me wrong about her, as it would about so much else.

I decided to leave for the south of France and establish a refuge to which my friends could escape. I suspected that I wouldn't have long to wait. And once again I was right. Even before I had settled in, Parisians were fleeing the city.

It would be a lie of omission not to admit that I purchased a great deal of art and arranged to have it shipped south. I hesitate to mention this because of the nasty gossip one still hears about collectors, especially female patrons of the arts. It's been implied that we took advantage of the crisis and acquired treasures at bargain rates. As if it were a crime to redistribute family wealth, to allow artists to stay or escape: as if we were exploiting our friends instead of saving their lives.