chapter nineteen “THAT WAS ANOTHER VIBE”
Opal Jewel had made a mission of barreling forward. After the nightmarish tour with Nev, however, she sometimes longed to go back—to remember the moments in the fledgling days of their partnership that had led her to believe she was living a dream. The magic of arriving a newbie in New York City, or stepping into the studio the very first time… Would she ever experience such wonder again? Off the road and resettled in Harlem, her career stuck on pause while Bob prodded Nev toward rehab, Opal felt besieged by worry and restlessness. By instinct she craved new adventures and horizons, interesting new people with whom to share them. As luck would have it, in the fall of 1973, a trailblazing contemporary from another field floated an opportunity for Opal to savor a taste of the youth she’d been missing.
OPAL JEWEL:
Ever since I’d worn his dress in Vogue, [fashion designer] Stephen Burrows and I had been cool with each other. Both of us were flies swimming in buttermilk, you know, and even though he wasn’t the type to get pinned down on politics, Stephen had made some artistic choices I respected—the color and life in his clothes, and especially the girls he’d pick to wear them. Those choices signaled to me he wasn’t confused about who he was, or what it was he had to contribute.
He’d invited me before to his presentations around the city, or to drop by his boutique at Bendel’s. Things were crazy in those days and I never got the chance. But when he called to invite me as his guest to the show at Versailles, I told him, “You finally caught me at a good time.”
Scheduled for the end of November, just days after the second anniversary of Rivington Showcase, the Grand Divertissement à Versailles—nicknamed the “Battle of Versailles” by Women’s Wear Daily—was a benefit fashion show pitting five French designers against five representing the United States: Anne Klein, Bill Blass, Halston, Oscar de la Renta, and rising star Burrows. Proceeds from the event would fund the restoration of the pre-Revolution royal residence.
OPAL JEWEL:
I gave less than three damns about fixing up a crumbling old palace, but Paris? Now that was worth investing my time. I had always been curious about going—what intelligent Negro wasn’t? James Baldwin was in France, being Black and gay in every sense, and some of the jazz cats had visited and wouldn’t shut up about this sense of freedom they felt just walking the streets. I wanted to see for myself what was up. So I told Stephen I would come sit in his box, as long as he could cough up a second ticket. I had a friend I owed a favor or two. [Laughs]
VIRGIL LAFLEUR:
A favor? Among the biggest miracles I’ve ever worked is preparing us for the Paris debut. Do you understand the shopping required? The fittings and alterations? By the time we boarded the aircraft, I was ready to collapse with my glass of champagne.
OPAL JEWEL:
Pearl beat me to the flying, okay, but me, I sprung for first-class. Different universe. The flight attendants were stunners, honey, with their hair in these spirally updos with the hats pinned on, and they wore chic fitted dresses and white kid gloves. They woke us up for breakfast and before the pilot put the plane nice and pretty at the gate I had a warm croissant with truffle ham and Brie softer than anywhere you’ll find on the ground. And they let us off first! Us, the Negroes! Even took down our bags from the overhead bins so we didn’t have to strain ourselves. That was the moment I understood exactly what my money could buy, exactly how it could be enjoyed. The difference it could make.
The weather on the ground in Paris, though, cast a pall that early morning. Opal remembers trying to sightsee from the back of a taxi, just as she had during her first moments in New York, but this time the experience proved underwhelming. Where was the Eiffel Tower? she wondered, peering into the gloom. Figures scuttled across Pont d’Austerlitz, their heads lowered against the bluster, scarves pulled over their faces.
At their hotel in the Latin Quarter, she and Virgil spent most of the day sleeping off jet lag.
OPAL JEWEL:
It was the light glowing through the slats in the shutters that woke me up. I was so delirious I thought it was still afternoon, that the sun had decided to come on out. I didn’t yet know that Paris vibe, of the streets and squares blooming alive at night. Times Square can feel so tacky and loud, you know, but the light over there has a softness, a warmth. I’d brought my photo of Jimmy, because he used to dream about playing the clubs in Europe, and I remember holding him up to the window and wishing he could really see it.
To attend one of the pre-Battle parties that Monday night, held at Maxim’s, Opal threw a feathered green bolero over an oxblood pantsuit with halter top. In the taxi over, she and Virgil rode in reverent silence as they absorbed the beauty surrounding them. In the narrow alleys of the Latin Quarter, cafés and bars exuded that golden glow Opal had admired from the hotel’s window. At Pont Neuf they crossed the Seine, its surface glassy and prismatic in the wake of the bateaux traversing its length. And at some point, finally, there she rose: the Eiffel Tower, casting out beams of light that pierced the mist.
Arriving at Maxim’s and checking their coats, they joined a cocktail hour stuffed with luminaries of a different sort, both pop-culture figures and aristocracy: In addition to the designer Halston, the party’s honoree, there was Liza Minnelli, who was fresh off her Oscar win for Cabaret and would open the Americans’ presentation at Versailles in two nights; Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor; Pat Cleveland, the ethnically ambiguous model beloved for her whirling moves on the runway…
OPAL JEWEL:
…plus a whole bunch of pinched French birds and their geezers—I couldn’t tell you who or what any of them were, except filthy rich, and they sure as hell didn’t know Opal Jewel. Me in that scene was already surreal, and then Stephen tried to up the ante.
In a quieter corner of the party, Burrows confided in Opal and Virgil that the American team had struggled that day through rehearsals at Versailles. The inclement weather had exacerbated the palace’s quirks—for all its opulence, the interior was dank and freezing—and one of the designers’ favorite models had fallen out sick. They desperately needed a last-minute replacement; would Opal be willing, Burrows asked, to sub in?
OPAL JEWEL:
I guess when Stephen saw my shoulder blades cut through all that old money, he figured I was skinny enough and sufficiently fierce. Or whatever word they use when pretty ain’t it. [Laughs] Anyway, I told him I’d help the team out if he wanted—not so much because the idea excited me, but because I could relax once I knew what the hell I was doing, kicking around with this crowd. Once I knew I had a show to put on.
VIRGIL LAFLEUR:
Perhaps it was past experience as the unlucky understudy that sparked my own skepticism, but when it comes to the things she wants, Mad tends toward unwavering focus. For the rest of the party, I caught her studying Ms. Cleveland. Noting the placement of her feet, the way she raised a cocktail… I told Mad, “Mingle, chère, enjoy this first night à Paris! If it works out, we’ll take tomorrow to hone.” When tomorrow did come, the tune had changed.
Tuesday morning, Burrows called Opal at her hotel, full of awkward apologies: He had been forced to rescind his offer.
OPAL JEWEL:
I said, “Don’t try to tell me the girl got better”—because I understood she had pneumonia, and I don’t care what antibiotics you got, nobody gets up and twirls that quick. So Stephen had to confess that he’d jumped the gun [with his casting proposal]. When he’d passed the idea by the other designers on the team, apparently they hadn’t loved it. I said, Hmmm.
At first I let it roll off my back. We spent the next day and a half traipsing around as tourists. Strolling down the Champs-Élysées, cheesing in front of the Eiffel Tower, eating our weight in macarons. I would have been fine to skip the Versailles show completely, but when the night came I took a deep breath and pulled on the sparkle Virgil laid out. “C’est parfait,” he said when I finished dressing, which made me laugh—when I looked in the mirror, I thought, Yeah, I look just like a Dairy Queen cup. A white Scott Barrie dress with a matching fur muff, and a red fascinator propped like the cherry on top. That was the most formal ensemble I’d ever worn, and I guess I felt a little silly in it.
I remember pulling up to the palace and seeing the powdered wigs [of the footmen] lined up outside. And inside the theater, my little red hat nearly fell off for me looking up at the giant chandeliers and paintings on the walls, the rows of seats rising sky-high, the chichi froufrous cheek-kissing each other… Then the curtain opened, and the French trotted out.
You talk about an effort… whew. They had backdrops that looked like Monet himself had been resurrected to paint them, and a damn Cinderella carriage, and the models walking pigeon-toed in all kinds of formations, and at some point Nureyev himself even came out to try jeté-ing some life back into the thing. The best part was when it was nearly over—the finale number with Josephine Baker. Honey, Madame finally gave us something to see in her nude bodysuit! Sixty-some years old and still oozing sex!I But when the curtain fell on that first presentation? Overall, we were bored. It was over-rehearsed, the whole eternity of it, and during the intermission I sipped my champagne and laughed to Virgil, Thank God I’m not on the bill for this mess.
Then we trudged back to our seats for the Americans’ turn, and they proceeded to light my Black ass on fire.
Following Minnelli’s exuberant “Bonjour, Paris!” the American designers proved, in a simple and head-snapping half hour, that they had come to shake up the fashion establishment. Especially seismic was Burrows’s presentation, during which the models, nearly all of them Black, literally danced in their modern silhouettes and bright colors.
OPAL JEWEL:
The sisters had that je ne sais quoi, darling! Grooving and gliding across the stage, heating up that chilly old cave! They were joyful and bold, relevant, it. Before that night, everybody had looked to the French as the end-all-and-be-all, but here were these Black American girls showing up to say, Nah, baby, it’s us.
And as proud as I felt, as hard as I cheered, I couldn’t help but wonder: Now what was the reason they didn’t want me? I was only twenty-four years old, after all, exact same age and frame as a lot of those girls—hell, if you squinted and cocked your head to the side you might’ve thought I was Bethann [Hardison, Burrows’s house model], because she barely had any hair either, and Stephen had dressed her in that bright shade of yellow that I just love, that tone that pops off dark skin like ours. Better than that, I had a name many artists knew and claimed to respect. But I guess the American team decided the reputation attached to my name was too spiky for their sleek little show. And they edited down their collections last-minute [to make up for the missing model] rather than take the risk of working with me.
Now, I know I came off militant, hard—whatever it is you want to call it. That doesn’t mean I didn’t yearn sometimes to be other things too. That image I carried at such a young age, those labels they’d used to define me back home… They felt like traps dropping down on my head.
VIRGIL LAFLEUR:
I experienced a rush of emotion, watching that show. Seeing what could be possible pour un homme noir. In fact, at a party following the Americans’ coup, I discussed with several of the designers the opportunity to visit their ateliers in New York. My plan was to cobble together a rotating apprenticeship, or, barring that, to enroll in school. As a stylist I had an eye, évidemment, but now was the time to generate my own collection.
The night before we were due to depart—I was already packing, dreaming about the opportunities ahead—Mad came to my room and proposed an extended stay in Paris. “To do what?” I asked, but she had no clear answer, no clear time frame, only a vague anguish about returning home. And yet there was an assumption that I would stay and support such aimless drifting, simply because she wanted me to.
OPAL JEWEL:
“It is not my mission to drag in your shadow”—that’s what my best friend said to me, and when he told me he had things to do back in New York, his own paths to chart, I realized what a burden my unhappiness could be. Actually, let me call it grief, because that’s the thing I was struggling to carry. Not just grief over Jimmy, but for the pieces of myself getting ripped away. My options and pathways closing up, the tighter my public persona took hold. That night I sank very low in Virgil’s hotel room, curled up in tears on top of the bed. He promised that no matter what, I’d be all right. When I saw he wasn’t about to stop packing, I had no choice but to try to believe him.
The American contingent who’d come for the Battle of Versailles soon jetted away, leaving Opal alone in Paris. She didn’t know the language or any other soul.
OPAL JEWEL:
It was still the low season, so I stayed in the Latin Quarter, just moved to a quieter hotel on a side street. When I went out in the daytime I wore plain-Jane clothes and a hat with a brim to shade my eyes. Anonymity was the point—I didn’t want anybody thinking they knew who I was. My only clear goal was to learn Paris the way that Virgil had taught me New York: to sink into it, bit by bit. You gotta get deep in the districts, you gotta try to talk to the people, you gotta eat the food and drink the wine.
I started picking up some words here and there, and venturing further out from the city center. I learned how to say “Where is the metro?” and basic directions, turn right, turn left, straight ahead, follow the river. I went to the eighteenth [arrondissement] and climbed and climbed, up to the outskirts of Sacré-Cœur and back down into the maze of streets around it. And then I turned a corner and I was in Goutte d’Or, where the African people lived and worked. At the Eiffel Tower I’d seen so many of the men pushing trinkets on the tourists, hustling like they had to, and it made me think of the hustlers back home in Harlem… but in Goutte d’Or the women were holding it down too, honey. Beautiful and colorful and dignified, some of them dark as night like me and tending to their business and their babies. I guess I looked like one of them, because in the markets and shops they would start talking to me immediately in French or Arabic and then be surprised when I hit them with the English.
Every evening after I finished walking around like a street urchin I’d come back to a restaurant next door to my hotel, this tiny, tucked-away bistro struggling to attract customers. There was a tall, skinny waiter there who spoke English, reminded me of Nev but with a mustache, and he’d bring me the English-language menu. I’d order something off it and then he’d say my order back in this exaggerated French, very uppity, while he scribbled it down. I wouldn’t normally put up with that kind of bougie, but in a way… This is crazy, but his snobbishness was almost refreshing, because I think he was reacting to me as an American, and not as Black. I’d never gotten talked down to in that particular way before! [Laughs] Oh, I’m not saying the French aren’t racist—the Africans will tell you about that special kind of xenophobia they got over there—but for me, at that time, I did feel different in my skin.
After a while I got brave enough to check out the nightlife. Once my friend at the bistro fed me ratatouille, confit de canard, whatever was warm and delicious that day, I’d go up to my room and change clothes. Put on something a little more interesting and head back out for a nip. Sometimes right in the neighborhood, but usually to the Right Bank, to a club or a bar on the rue Saint-Anne. The men would flock, gay and straight—they liked to dance and practice their English. I liked ordering a Kir Royale and I hardly ever paid. Then one night I’m sitting at a bar and I hear somebody yell out, in this obnoxious, loud American accent, “Jesus Christ, you’re Opal Jewel!” Jig was up then.
Opal was spotted by Michelle Mackey, a white American expat and former Yale drama student who had come to Paris in 1967 as part of a study-abroad program and never left. One of her lovers, a Parisian named Guillaume Dumont, owned a record shop in the fourth arrondissement and collected under-the-radar imports: White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground, High Time by the MC5, Space Is the Place by Sun Ra, Things We’ve Seen by Opal & Nev. But Mackey, attuned to the feminist and Black Power movements back in the States, also recognized Opal as a political figure whose controversial quotes she occasionally read in the European editions of American newspapers.
OPAL JEWEL:
Michelle was a force of life. Six foot four, lean, skinny inches, and bossier than me. She was full of contradictions—she dressed very chic, in these subdued and sophisticated black outfits with her hair pulled back, but in other ways she was so in-your-face she made me look like Miss Manners. I admired that about her, her comfort in herself, and how she was free to switch from this thing to that. Most of the time she was conversing with other folks in French, and I’m not the best judge but to me it seemed like you would never know she hadn’t been born and raised right there, and not in Minnesota. Girl loved her red wine and cigarettes. Everything had her red lipstick print on it.
MICHELLE MACKEY, SPEAKING THROUGH A VOICE PROSTHESIS CONNECTED TO THE STOMA RESULTING FROM A 2001 LARYNGECTOMYII:
I had lots of friends. Many artists. I took Opal to meet them. They loved her.
OPAL JEWEL:
By that time I’d got a little lonely, so I let that crazy white girl grab my arm and drag me all over—to cafés and clubs that had live music, chill house parties that went till four, five o’clock in the morning. Then we’d walk along the Seine and watch the sun come up, watch all the people in love and tearing themselves away from each other. Guillaume was Michelle’s main boyfriend; she lived with him in a flat above the record shop. But everywhere we went there were other men, and sometimes women. They’d be snuggled up with Michelle one minute and crying and screaming at her the next. [Laughs] No matter if they were mad at her, though, they were always cool with me.
GUILLAUME DUMONT:
She was a liberated Black American woman, very fascinating, very beautiful, very not-giving-a-fuck. Pure ebony skin, soul and rock and roll together in her body and her attitude, and she carried herself like a man in regard to confidence. I had the record and I liked it before I knew her, but after knowing her it was strange to hear it and to recognize what she could have been fully capable of doing if she had felt even more free. I told her, I said, “America is shit, so you must stay with us in Paris and let me be your manager. We will put you in the clubs.”
OPAL JEWEL:
Michelle and Guillaume had this idea to give me a small show inside Guillaume’s record shop. They made flyers and everything—the chanteuse one you saw in my hallway.
MICHELLE MACKEY:
I took a stack to every party. Left them in cafés and bookstores. Took them to other places… where I knew expats hung out. I told her, “You’ll see.”
OPAL JEWEL:
I really thought I was humoring Michelle, being nice—I hadn’t thought anybody was gonna come, because not a lot of people knew Opal Jewel in Paris. At the time, that was a good thing; it meant I could do whatever I wanted. I threw something together real quick—I scratched out a setlist with a couple Opal & Nev songs, a couple pop covers, and I rehearsed maybe twice with a jazzy trio Michelle and Guillaume had asked to play behind me. I didn’t even consider being nervous. When the night rolled around I was in their flat above the record shop, and I wrapped my head up big and tall in some fabric I bought in Goutte d’Or, put on a silky jumpsuit with wide legs I had found, loaded up on my regular old jewelry. Then when I went down I saw… Goddamn! The people were taking up all the seats and standing in the aisles between the displays of the records and holding open the front door so the people who couldn’t get in could hear. I found Michelle mingling up near the front, pouring wine, and I looked at her like, What?!?
GUILLAUME DUMONT:
I had pushed some of the displays out of the way to put a small podium with microphones at the front for her and the guys. She went up there and maybe she was thinking what to do, how to adjust, but she began talking in the cabaret style, telling funny things about her mother, her sister, her friend in New York—she had us captivated. Even the few who could barely understand English were smiling. So she did some little songs and finished in twenty minutes, but the people wanted more, and that is when the real improvisation came out.
What she did was from somewhere beyond. Composing on the spot, in front of everyone! She would turn to the drummer and say, “Play ‘Tss-tap-a-boom, tss-tap-a-boom, tss-tap-tap-tappity-tap-a-boom’ ” and he would do it. Then to the bass player she would say: “Now you play, ‘Dah dah dah, dah-la-la, dah dah.’ ” To the guitarist she only nodded, she let him run crazy over that rhythm she made, and when everyone was together and the groove was going she came in. Like scat-singing, this way she would take one silly lyric and stretch it. This one stuck with me: “You got the keys, rev the machine.” And she took one line like that and chewed it, you know, and twisted it around with her voice to sound like the brass instrument or the electric guitar…. The ukulele, you know what I am saying [laughing]—anything that would make it a little offbeat, a little edgy.
Then she began to undo her headwrap, slowly slowly, turning around and twisting her body to the ground. By the time her bald head was exposed at the end of the song, the people were cheering. They were as electrified as if she had stripped totally naked. She was so dangerous, wild… sexy.
OPAL JEWEL:
Before, I was playing to maybe two thousand Mercurials a night, but there in that hot little record shop where I was really an alien? That was another vibe. It was exhilarating, the chance to just play. The question did occur to me: Could I actually make my life in this place?
Mackey and Dumont easily talked their new friend into doing a series of intimate after-hours shows at the record shop, extending Opal’s time in Paris into the summer of ’74. In lieu of payment, she accepted lodging in the guest room of their upstairs flat. No matter how deeply Opal sank into Paris, however, home maintained a decent hold.
OPAL JEWEL:
Besides my sister, Virgil was the only person I’d told how to reach me. It was always nice to read a letter from him. He’d give me the news and gossip I was missing, and he’d stick in sketches of original designs he was working on in his new classes at FIT. I was proud to know he was stretching and growing, and flattered that he missed me—the figures he sketched looked like me, anyway. But the problem was, most of the time his letter would come as part of a bigger package, mixed in with other mail he was forwarding from Harlem. There were a bunch of nasty notices from Howie Kelly, full of underscores and capital letters, warning me what I better not do while under my Rivington contract. And then the letters from Nev… Those I sent back to Virgil unopened. [Long pause] Just looking at the return address overwhelmed me. Most times I was furious, to be reminded of that miserable tour and how he’d nearly wasted our shot. Once in a while, though, I felt guilty for running off on him when maybe he needed me most.
NEV CHARLES, IN A LETTER SENT TO OPAL FROM REHAB (COURTESY OF VIRGIL LAFLEUR):III
Opal my Jewel,
Talk to me. You must, you must. You must come back and see me.
I miss my guitar, I miss working. I miss the times before at our big blue house. In here I can only bang about on things, bluntly. Cot, desk, metal chairs in a circle: Everything is hard and rhythmic, but you just might like it, Opal; you always did prefer the percussion, and I never could tell what you might do with it, and maybe that is what was so exciting about you always: I never could tell. Maybe you’d sound like a warrior, meeting force with force, or like an angel, dribbling honey over top. Do you remember “Black Coffee”? Do you realize I wrote that just for you? Not the lyrics—I know that you hated those—but the heavy sound, the big drums, and the bass. I’d hoped you’d love it. I hate I never told you.
There’s a fellow with me in here, Raymond Jr., and he tells me his life stories—beautiful, detailed stories about his childhood, his sisters in pigtails, Kansas City–style barbecue, a grandmother who sold Popsicles and crisps from her house and watched over them and whose death set him wrong. And how his little sisters won’t come to see him ever, but he still writes to all of them once a week. His stories make me wonder where you are and what you’d say about him, what we might say together about such a delightful and charming person stuck on a bad jag. What we might say about humanity and persistence and mistakes and forgiveness. But is that all a bit too tender for your taste? I’m not sure anymore and I can’t possibly hear you, half a world away.
And that’s just it: You must speak to me, please, or I won’t remember where I am. Where we are, who we’ve been. They’ll let me out, but I’ll fall right back in.
Waiting, and so very sorry…
Once again, I am:
Your Nev
The longer Opal lingered in Paris, though, the more its pleasures wooed her. Moving in with Mackey and Dumont gave her access to an even wider circle of artists and intellectuals, many of them American expats. Late-night rehearsals at the flat would turn into marathon jam sessions/meet-and-greets. Friends and neighbors, attracted by the music floating down to the street, would come and go; every time Opal would wake from a stolen catnap, she’d find another roast chicken, more wine, a new set of people who’d come to say hello. She made many new friends, took several lovers.
OPAL JEWEL:
I stopped worrying and started relaxing. I don’t know how to describe it better than that. Most days my only ambitions were to wake up, make love if I felt like it, dip a croissant in honey. I didn’t wear a stitch of makeup and my clothes calmed down. Michelle and Guillaume’s place was my refuge, a cozy cave full of records and books where you could plop down in the nooks. I read a lot: [Toni Morrison’s] The Bluest Eye, Toni Cade Bambara, Maya Angelou, all the great Black women authors who the expats I’d met were wild about. And I started to think that writing—not improvising, but intentional writing—was a craft that wasn’t off-limits to me. It was something my Black friends especially encouraged me to do, to give myself more options once I got free of Rivington’s grip.
The question was, What was I going to write? My goal at the time was to do anything that felt unexpected. I had a notebook and a purple ink pen, and some days I’d walk to the Jardin du Luxembourg and sit on one of the benches in the shade at the Medici Fountain. I’d take deep breaths through my nose and my mouth, trying to smell the air and taste it and describe it. I was writing these flowery poems—literally flowery!—about the beauty of the roses, and the singing birds, and the marble statues, and the silky ribbons in the hair of the little girls playing nearby. Oh, they were trash. [Laughs] I never had a thought to put them on record. I was just in a phase, experimenting. Pulling far away from the image that had exhausted me back home. And I had put some of this nature poetry to music, acoustic numbers, because these were my peaceful and pretty thoughts, you know, and I wanted to prove, to myself and everyone else, that I could be peaceful and pretty if I wanted to, damn it.
Normally at the shop I performed covers or the Opal & Nev songs or whatever, but one time I decided to debut a couple new things I’d actually written. I made the mistake of announcing it beforehand to a few of my new friends. The show was extra packed that night, everybody waiting to see what Opal Jewel had to say about WatergateIV or Patty HearstV or whatever craziness was going on. You can imagine how my little nature poems went over.
GUILLAUME DUMONT:
Eh, it was maybe not so genius. Who cares? She wants to try something, let her try, let her get it out of her body! But you Americans with your boxes and demands, with your pick pick pick…
MICHELLE MACKEY:
She sang nursery rhymes on a stool. [Shrugs] I loved her, but… it was very confused.
OPAL JEWEL:
After that show I went to a restaurant with Michelle and Guillaume and a few other folks, including this guy I had started seeing, a writer who thought he was my mentor, I guess. The Negro made pouty comments beside me all night. He was devastated, like I’d actively done something to embarrass him in front of the intelligentsia. I got tipsy from the sherry that came with dessert, and he leaned over and asked me the one last time that makes a chick lose her mind: “You didn’t have anything to say tonight, other than that?”
Honey, I stood up and grabbed the first thing I saw…
MICHELLE MACKEY:
A square of tiramisu. Poor guy ate it, all right.
OPAL JEWEL:
…and I threw it in his face, and I screamed at him, without even thinking, “Leave me alone, I’m on vacation!” [Laughs] I was so mad, so resentful of anybody else’s expectations of what kind of artist I needed to be, that I kept on scribbling those terrible songs and subjecting my audience to them. And that’s the irony, right? Even then, singing all that flowery goo-ga, my stubbornness over it was pure Opal Jewel. I finally woke up one night and saw I’d disappointed most of my fans, trying to run away from what I did best. The expats who’d supported me lost patience, lost interest, stopped showing up, and the shit was so wrong that I couldn’t blame them. The only people who did come anymore were a handful of the French folks who barely even knew any English—no matter what I was saying, they stayed glazed and grinning.
Then it actually happened: Nixon was out. Michelle and I were listening to his [August 8, 1974, resignation] speech on the BBC [World News radio], and my heart was thudding. We were screaming and jumping up and down, three o’clock in the morning. The people back home had been protesting, and the protesting put pressure on the representatives [in Congress], and the representatives put pressure on ol’ Tricky Dick to get his butt up out the White House. I know a lot of people say it was a dark day for America, but isn’t that democracy working? Wasn’t that a glimmer of hope that truth could check power, and isn’t hope the entire point? The reason any of us raise our fists and run our mouths? The reason we dare to imagine a “better” exists?
I said to Michelle, sort of dreamy, “Is it crazy to wish I was home right now?” I’d been feeling homesick for a while, but until that moment I’d been too sheepish to say it. Of course, everybody’s high mellowed out before long—what was it, a month [until President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon]? But that was enough hope to convince me it was my time to go back.
By the time I left Paris I was low on funds; on the flight back to New York I was smashed up against a window in coach. But I was feeling good, thinking about where Opal Jewel was supposed to go from here. And what lingered as inspiration for me, funny enough, was Madame Josephine half-naked on that stage at Versailles. The woman had led an empowered and ever-changing life, a life of personal and political resistance, and still, at showtime, she served the people what they loved to eat. That was her box to manage, I guess, and she worked within it the best she could.
I. American-born entertainer and activist Josephine Baker had been living in Europe since the 1920s, when she thrilled and scandalized audiences with her provocative dances and costumes. For her Versailles performance of “Mon Pays et Paris” (“My Country and Paris”), the iconic Black expat, at the time 67, wore a dramatic headdress with feathers and a sheer sequined catsuit that gave the illusion of nudity.
II. Michelle Mackey and Guillaume Dumont married in 1975, guaranteeing Mackey French citizenship. The record shop they owned in Paris is now a café (they sold it in the late 1980s), though Dumont still sells rare vinyl imports on eBay. They travel to New York annually to shop, and stopped by Aural’s offices during one such trip.
III. Nev’s first stint in rehab began in January 1974, after he crashed a brand-new cherry-red Alfa Romeo on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway with Star Acadia in the passenger’s seat. They had been on the way to the airport for a trip to the Galapagos Islands, as he would later recount in an interview with Aural: “We got distracted, took some substances that gave us a sneak preview of the colors and lizards, and ended up with my sports car essentially curved around us.” By some miracle, neither was seriously injured.
IV. The unfolding Watergate crisis dominated the headlines in America through the summer of 1974, with citizens absorbing bombshell revelations about President Nixon’s attempts to cover up his administration’s involvement in a burglary of the Democratic National Convention headquarters.
V. On February 4, 1974, the daughter of media baron William Randolph Hearst was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by the leftist terrorist organization the Symbionese Liberation Army. A little more than two months after her abduction, Patty Hearst, calling herself Tania, was caught on surveillance camera participating in the SLA’s robbery of a bank.