Just over a week after The Evening of the Bearded Heart, Kiki and Man Ray watched the Bastille Day fireworks bursting above the Sacré-Coeur basilica. They were at a party in the studio of the Bulgarian painter Jules Pascin (born Julius Mordecai Pincas, the letters in his last name rearranged to create his adopted one), a giant top-floor space from which they could smell fresh waffles and cotton candy wafting up from boulevard Clichy below, mixed with the smoky perfume of firecrackers. Pascin’s parties were always packed with a socially and racially diverse crowd that usually included most of the regulars from the Dôme and the Rotonde, as well as a few high-society figures, a couple of beggars from the boulevard invited up to share in the food and wine, and always a strong contingent of Pascin’s favorite models. Though far from wealthy, Pascin always managed to put out a delicious spread accompanied by a full bar. Kiki described the typical Pascin gathering as “one long battle between bottles and bottle-openers.” He wanted everyone to feel free and at ease. He hated seeing people arriving in formal evening dress.
Kiki felt a kinship with Pascin, who was deeply insecure and introverted by nature, usually coming across as melancholy and antisocial when with one or two friends, yet needing badly to let loose now and then in front of a big and noisy crowd. Many times she’d seen him go, in seconds, from laughing and clapping his hands with joy to picking fistfights for no reason. Once when Pascin insulted Treize in front of a nightclub, Kisling had to pull Treize off of him. Kisling himself, Pascin’s closest friend, thought that “he carried with him a secret wound which life aggravated every day—a taste for suffering, a morbid desire for obliteration amidst fog and ashes.” Still, Kiki adored him. As she wrote, “I can see a simple soft heart behind all his cruelty and mockery. He’s good like a loaf of bread is good.” Pascin at some point bought one of Kiki’s watercolors, Guesthouse (undated), a cozy scene of a man, a baby, and several women eating, drinking, and talking around a large table.
From Pascin’s party, Kiki and Man Ray rolled along with friends on three days and nights of drinking and feasting, barely pausing to sleep.
A few nights later, over dinner, Kiki told Man Ray she loved him. She was seeking reassurance about their relationship, whose terms they’d never clearly defined although they’d been living together for more than two years.
His answer was “Love? What’s that? Huh, idiot? We don’t love, we screw.”
By late July, Kiki was sailing to New York, accompanied by a young American journalist, Mike (last name unknown), who’d been passing through Paris. Treize, in an interview, explained Kiki’s reasons for going with him to America: Man Ray would “brush her off when she said she loved him. She suffered when he wouldn’t say he loved her in words. He loved her also but he didn’t have a good character. He didn’t understand.” Mike, on the other hand, was “handsome and a good lover . . . and it was a marvelous, sensual encounter.” There is no record of how Mike and Kiki first met.
Kiki left Man Ray a note: “I leave because you don’t love me.”
During the crossing, Kiki discovered she fared terribly on open water. Looking out over a stretch of ocean with nothing to see but the horizon made her uneasy, as did the boat’s incessant creaking, unease that turned to panic when the seas got rough. Drinking champagne to try to calm herself—on a perpetually empty stomach since she felt too seasick to eat much—only made things worse. She missed Montparnasse. She worried that New York wouldn’t live up to her expectations. She’d already seen it in so many pictures.
They arrived at night, staying at the Hotel Lafayette off of Washington Square Park, popular among French expats as it was run by a Frenchman who also ran the nearby Hotel Brevoort, Man Ray and Duchamp’s former haunt.
Kiki and Mike spent a lot of time drinking. There was “good wine that reminded me of my beloved Paris,” wrote Kiki, although she was annoyed to find that they served it in teacups owing to Prohibition. Mike took to calling Kiki “Butterbean.” They apparently enjoyed themselves, but after a few weeks the fling petered out. Mike went back to his life in St. Louis, leaving her some money.
Kiki ended up spending three months in the city, walking or riding the bus with no destination in mind. She liked how New Yorkers left you alone to do what you liked. She wrote that she went to the cinema every afternoon of her stay, which could be true since she was crazy for American movies.
Kiki seems to have written her memoir’s New York chapter mainly to frame a yarn about her own brush with the American movie business. She explains how a friend arranged a screen test at the Famous Players studios in Queens. When she reached the studio gate, she’d wanted to touch up her hair, which made her realize she’d forgotten her comb, which made her lose her temper, which made her so red in the face she knew she would look terrible on film, so she turned around and went home. A French reporter later gave this screen-test story another spin by suggesting that Kiki, feeling out of depth among so many English speakers, was too nervous to go through with the test. One of Kiki’s cousins offered another take: Kiki did secure a small part in a picture, but her scene required her to jump into water, which she hated (she couldn’t swim), so she walked off the set.
Whatever the truth, Kiki’s tale reads like a wishful assertion of independence, describing her foray into an entirely new artistic milieu, one she attempted, or nearly attempted, without help from Man Ray or anyone else from Montparnasse. Telling this screen-test misadventure as a farce, with herself the butt of the joke, also let her poke fun at the grandiose notions of anyone who took seriously their own ambitions of “making it” as a star of the American screen and who might judge her harshly for failing to do the same. Kiki rejected America before America could reject Kiki.
By the fall of 1923, Kiki wanted to go back to Paris. She wired Man Ray asking for money to come home. He told her to go to Brooklyn to see his married sister Dorothy Goodbread. Kiki called her “Mme. Bon Pain.” The two women got on well; Goodbread later described Kiki as “a friendly, happy, bubbly person, a blithe spirit.” Man Ray had written to his other sister, Elsie, at the end of September 1923, asking her to visit Kiki and see how she was doing, “as near as you can find out discreetly,” since he “was much worried.”
Man Ray in his memoir makes no mention of rejecting Kiki’s declaration of love. He writes nothing about a Mike from St. Louis. He blames her trip on an unnamed American couple who had come to Europe, were enamored with Kiki, and promised her fame and fortune in the theater or cinema. They said they would cover all her expenses, but then split up when the man showed his interest in Kiki, and everything fell apart from there.
Man Ray, too, wrote about Kiki going for a screen test. This time the problem was Kiki getting lost trying to find the right building in the studio complex. Disturbed by the informal arrangements, she went back into Manhattan. And he gives his version of the incident a self-serving ending: “After that, her one thought was to return to Paris. She was happy now, was not interested in a career; would stay with me forever.”
It is possible that Mike from St. Louis had come into Kiki’s life as part of a couple. More likely the mysterious American twosome who led Kiki astray in Man Ray’s telling were his own invention, a fiction told to obscure his pain and embarrassment at Kiki’s choosing to spend time with someone else.
Man Ray and Treize met occasionally at cafés while Kiki was away. Treize recalled that during this time he never once mentioned Kiki’s name.
Treize and Man Ray’s accounts concur on what happened after Kiki’s return. Kiki and Man Ray picked up as though nothing had happened.
A few days later, though, Kiki found Man Ray sitting on the terrace with friends, waiting for her so they could go for dinner. She slapped him across the face, screaming that she knew he’d slept with “one of her acquaintances,” as Man Ray worded it, while she was away. (In Man Ray’s version, he was the only one with the potential to stray, not the one who got left. He never says if he did have an affair.)
Kiki took a room in a hotel. Man Ray followed her there, and they quarreled. She threw a bottle of ink at his head but missed. In Man Ray’s telling, he “asked her quietly where she had gathered her information. There was no doubt about her sources, she said, and continued to call me names. I hit her so hard that she fell on the bed.” Kiki, his story continues, put her fist through the window, screamed, and threatened to jump, until a maid came to check on the commotion, followed by the proprietor. After these two left, he and Kiki “fell into each other’s arms, Kiki weeping and I laughing,” while the bruise-colored ink dripped down the wall.