Kiki auditioned for the French silent film star Jaque Catelain early in 1924. He was making his second movie as an actor-writer-director. The Gallery of Monsters would tell the story of star-crossed Spanish lovers who join a traveling circus. The cherubic Catelain and a fifteen-year-old American actress, Lois Moran, future model for the starlet Rosemary Hoyt in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, played the couple.
Catelain wanted to showcase some of Montparnasse’s most visually striking personalities alongside his parade of mermaids, wild monkeys, dancing bears, lions, tigers, strongmen, and sword swallowers. They would feature in cameos posing as members of the circus troupe. There was Flossie Martin, the former Ziegfeld showgirl; Bronia and Tylia Perlmutter, Polish-Jewish granddaughters of a famous rabbi, who’d moved to Paris from Holland and broken into the modeling world after Kiki invited them to sit with her at one of the cafés; Le Tarare, an actor with dwarfism who appeared in several films that decade; and Kiki.
It was Kiki’s first role in a feature-length film, one with a plot you could follow and genuine production values. After location shooting in Spain, Catelain finished the movie at Studio Éclair in a suburb north of Paris. The shoot, for Kiki, was a comedy of errors. The monkeys were mean-spirited, the arc lights blinding, and the bear kept trying to “make it” with her. The film’s producer, Marcel L’Herbier, recounting the same shoot, added in his telling the caged lion who refused to act wild until tempted by the reward of a live bunny.
Kiki’s is the first of the film’s cameos. The star-crossed lovers join a crowd to watch the circus troupe piling onto the stage. The players vie for attention, bouncing off one another like whirligigs. They stand on their hands, swing Le Tarare circles, lift impossible weights, tickle monkeys. The barker introduces Kiki. Wearing a gossamer-thin dress printed with horseshoes, and a flower tucked behind her ear, she does a slinky belly dance and bangs a tambourine, backed by a white band in blackface, marking the film as a product of its time and place. Shots of Kiki’s undulating hips alternate with reactions from the mostly male crowd, followed by a close-up of her face in the three-point lighting. She smiles widely and turns to her profile, the light glinting off the tip of her nose. For two seconds, she looks as if she belongs in that counterfeit world. She shines. The lovers grin up at Kiki, delighting in receiving her downward gaze. We, like the lovers, are meant to feel the magic in the act of watching her, to interpret her brief appearance as an attraction in and of itself. The camera gets up close to anoint her: a star. Her cameo ends with a shot of her gyrating her pelvis at the crowd before dashing off stage right. She returns a while later and dances away in the background for much of the film.
The Gallery of Monsters debuted that spring in the sumptuous, five-hundred-seat Artistic-Cinéma-Pathé on the Right Bank in the Saint-Georges neighborhood, home to many of the city’s most popular theaters. It went on to screen to receptive audiences across France and Spain, with a print eventually traveling as far as Japan, a minor hit that turned a profit.
Kiki experienced what must have felt like a kind of apotheosis, seeing herself on screen—in full form, dancing and having fun, rather than as a headless and nameless torso—and again in the film’s credits, her name listed as she’d requested: Kiki Ray.
She popped up on screen again that year in the prolific French filmmaker and film theorist Jean Epstein’s The Lion of the Moguls. Epitomizing the Montparnasse fast life for a few moments in a crowd scene, she dances in a shiny backless dress, her features accentuated by a dramatic scarf and big hoop earrings. She is mostly lost among the wild club crowd being entertained by a mockup jazz band led by a one-eyed piano player. During the filming she met and had a brief affair with the male lead, the Russian-born actor and occasional director Ivan Mosjoukine, a major star of French silent film, known for his gray eyes, bright yellow Chrysler, and prodigious spending, mostly on women and wine. Recalled Treize: “He drove fast in his sports car, was a charmer, a seducer, and also a simple person. He spoke French fairly well. Kiki went to see Mosjoukine at his place in a bachelor hotel.” Kiki admired his acting, telling Mosjoukine he could make her laugh and cry as easily as Chaplin could. She wrote to him of waiting anxiously to spot his yellow car in the street, that she was both delighted and frightened by his physical beauty and the desire it provoked. They “were like beautiful cats together,” said Treize. “His wife [Natalya Lysenko] was jealous, but she wasn’t there.”
Mosjoukine broke it off with Kiki after a few weeks. She gently asked that he return a ring she gave him, explaining that she was highly superstitious and thought it would be bad luck for both of them if he kept it.
For her next acting job, a few weeks later, she appeared topless, back to the camera, as an artist’s model posing for a painter with a lushly sheeted daybed beckoning behind him, in L’Inhumaine by Marcel L’Herbier, who after meeting Kiki during the production of Gallery of Monsters saw her as ideally suited to the role. She reported to Mosjoukine that she thought her scene somewhat ridiculous and found L’Herbier an uninspiring director.
Also in 1924 Kiki appeared among a procession of mourners running and leaping in slow motion behind a camel-pulled coffin in the comic phantasmagoria Entr’acte, a twenty-two-minute Surrealist masterpiece. Picabia and Satie, who were making the ballet Relâche together, asked the French filmmaker and writer René Clair to produce a short film as an interlude. Clair had a sardonic view of the world, sharpened by suffering an injury as an ambulance driver during the war, and his subsequent wrestling with the absurdity of his surviving when so many others died. The film featured a sequence of Man Ray and Duchamp playing chess on a rooftop until a cloudburst ruins their game. Man Ray likely recommended Kiki to Clair. As with the previous projects, the role called for her to do little more than serve as attractive scenery, a glorified extra.
Four movies made in quick succession. Four bit parts. For those few months in 1924, her life must have felt like a nonstop sequence of guest appearances in other people’s stories. But then finally, before the year was up, Kiki made a prominent appearance in a film. “Prominent appearance” rather than “starring role” because her performance was not quite film acting in the usual sense but something closer to posing expertly before a moving picture camera.
That summer Fernand Léger was developing a long simmering idea for a movie with “no scenario,” as he wrote, but only “reactions of rhythmic images, that’s all.” Léger had moved from painting portraits and still lifes infused with his silvery Machine Age aesthetic to doing studies of various objects, seen from such proximity they looked almost abstract. He wanted to experiment with a filmed version of this investigation into fragmentary, close-up views. He dreamed of turning machines and objects into the “leading actors” of a movie, as he wrote, imbuing them with a sense life and giving them dramatic trajectories by shooting them at various angles and distances and speeds, then assembling the footage as a series of linked montages. He called the project Ballet mécanique.
The visual anchor holding Léger’s plot-free parade of images together was not in the end a machine but a human face: Kiki’s. Man Ray may have suggested her to Léger, as he collaborated informally on the project, contributing ideas and shooting some of the footage. Three other Americans living in Europe contributed creatively as well: director Dudley Murphy, poet Ezra Pound, and George Antheil. Accounts differ as to who did exactly what.
Kiki didn’t write about her experience but was surely thrilled to be the movie’s focus. Her natural charm lights up the otherwise ponderous film whenever she appears. Léger (or one of his collaborators) filmed her through a specially designed kaleidoscopic lens, atomizing and reconstituting her flour-white face piece by piece.
Ballet mécanique opens with a mock introduction from a Cubist marionette meant to look like Charlie Chaplin. (Léger became a huge fan of Charlot, as the French called his Tramp character, after Apollinaire introduced him to Chaplin’s films during leave from the war.) After the marionette jerkily dances, the film shifts into a series of montages of various objects—Christmas ornaments, frying pan lids, corrugated sheet metal, a pearl necklace—as well as cutouts of shapes and footage of machines at work. There is also a looping sequence of Murphy’s wife, Katherine, on a swing. As the object-machine montages continue, Kiki appears at increasing intervals, which come more quickly as the film reaches its end.
Her face is displayed in full, in profile, in segmented close-up: there are Kiki’s cupid’s bow lips opening into a wolfish toothy smile; this is Kiki’s plastered hair, slick and shimmering as her head slowly twists from one side of the frame to the other; those are Kiki’s laughing eyes, opening, closing, opening again to look off at an angle as though summoning some lost memory back into the light for reinspection, now returned to center to meet the viewer head-on, now gazing out somewhere far beyond the theater’s back row. Against the oppressive coldness of Léger’s machinery, Kiki radiates human heat.
The film debuted at a festival in Vienna in September 1924 and later in Paris, the reception modest. When explaining the film’s genesis, Léger said that his war experience had thrust him into “a mechanical atmosphere,” leading him to discover “the beauty of the fragment. I sensed a new reality in the detail of a machine, in the common object. I tried to find the plastic value of these fragments of our modern life. I rediscovered them on the screen in the close-ups of objects which impressed and influenced me.” He made no reference to Kiki.
Among the small number of people who watched Ballet mécanique were some who recognized the importance of her contribution. Henri-Pierre Roché wrote to compliment Kiki on her acting work that year. (He was exploring moviemaking himself at that time, working with Abel Gance on a script for what would become Gance’s epic Napoléon.) Thanking him in her letter back, Kiki wrote, “I have to wait and see what’ll happen with films. There’s nothing I’d like better than to continue with it, but I’m waiting for someone to ask me. If you hear of anything for me, don’t forget.” In his diary entries from this time, Roché refers to Kiki as “Kiki Man Ray.”
Roché bought another of Kiki’s watercolors around this time. After advising John Quinn on the purchase of Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy—Quinn’s last acquisition before dying that year of cancer—Roché spent part of his commission on work by Kiki. “Dinner with Man Ray, Kiki, and Tzara,” he wrote in his diary on April 15, 1924. “Bought a beautiful watercolor, a ‘super-Matisse’ by Kiki.”
Among the possible watercolors he might have been referring to was one from that year that she titled Family Posing for the Camera. It shows a couple in formal dress seated between a skinny standing girl with short black hair and a striped dress. A dog sits to the right of the frame. All face forward, staring blankly ahead, turning the viewer into the camera for which they’re posing. It’s a picture at once full of longing for the rituals of family life that Kiki missed out on having and, with the hollow stares of its subjects, an indictment of such rituals, a suggestion that the traditional family unit was itself a kind of pose. Roché paid Kiki as well as he would have paid any other up-and-coming artist. He would eventually own ten of Kiki’s paintings. His late, lucrative client would have disapproved of his taste. “Most woman artists seem to want to paint like men,” Quinn once wrote to Roché, “and they only succeed in painting like hell.”
Kiki wrote to Roché again that summer, answering a letter, now lost, in which he praised her art making. “Your letter . . . gave me great pleasure. Only I really hope that I have all the qualities and talent that you find in me. I’ve been working and I already have two paintings in oil with eight figures. You must come see.”
On the back page of the July 1924 issue of Picabia’s arts and literature magazine 391, Roché announced an upcoming showing of Kiki’s paintings at his apartment, without specifying a date. There’s no evidence to confirm it took place.
For all the excitement of her first film appearances, her posing, her making and selling her watercolors, and her being the subject of Djuna Barnes’s magazine piece, 1924 was a painful year for Kiki. Her grandmother, the one blood relation who’d truly cared for her, died on October 29 at seventy-six.
“You cannot know the sadness that invades the heart of a child who has no father, whose mother is far away, and whose only tenderness comes from a grandmother,” Kiki wrote roughly a quarter-century later. “The kisses from her shriveled lips and the touch of her rough hands were the only sweet things I knew in my childhood.”
In her memoir, she praised her grandmother as a plainspoken woman, accepting of whatever friends or lovers she brought to visit. She “never said there are things that are done or not done: she found everything natural.” She enjoyed seeing her granddaughter in full makeup and liked nothing more than having Kiki comb and style her hair for her, the more outlandish the style the better, then to scrub her face for her with eau de cologne. Among her grandmother’s most cherished stories, possibly embellished for patriotic effect, was of slapping a Prussian soldier who’d pinched her backside during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
“Death, among poor folks, isn’t the catastrophe it is among the rich,” wrote Kiki. “And when you’ve been fighting your whole life just to get enough to eat, the big send-off can be seen as a kind of deliverance.”
Man Ray was meanwhile circling the glittering, careless world of the American collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim and her husband, the British writer and painter Laurence Vail, informal heads of the small and self-contained colony of American and British expats of exceeding wealth. Guggenheim admired Man Ray’s photography and hired him for a portrait, posing in a dashing Poiret evening dress of patterned gold cloth worn over a blue and white top of embroidered crepe de chine, matched by a golden headband.
Guggenheim enjoyed Kiki’s company, too, while regarding her chiefly as Man Ray’s accessory. Echoing other Montparnasse memoirists, she claimed that Man Ray carefully applied Kiki’s makeup for her each day. Guggenheim interpreted this supposed ritual as an act of artistic creation, describing the couple as “Man Ray and his remarkable hand-painted Kiki.” She’d hosted them the previous June at the villa she’d rented in the seaside village of Villerville in Normandy. Guests were encouraged to paint al fresco in the garden, where Guggenheim herself picked up a brush for the first and last time of her life.
There Man Ray took informal shots of Kiki in a neoclassical dress of flowing white tied over one shoulder, lazing in the property’s giant field of long grass alongside a smiling Guggenheim, who wears a dress in a simple floral pattern; Louis Aragon, stretching his long trim frame in a light suit; Guggenheim’s sister-in-law, the painter Clotilde Vail, to whom Aragon would dedicate a play, in a loose-fitting white cotton dress; and in shirtsleeves and slacks, Robert McAlmon, the American writer and publisher, openly gay and in a marriage of convenience to the novelist and patron Bryher (pseudonym of Annie Winifred Ellerman, of the shipping Ellermans), earning McAlmon the nickname “McAlimony” among the expat crowd, even as he privately helped to support some of its artists and writers, using his wife’s money. The peaceful scenes Man Ray documented in the villa’s garden belie the frenetic pace at which Guggenheim and her husband were then living with their son and a baby nurse in tow.
More recently Guggenheim had invited Kiki and Man Ray to a gathering at her apartment on Faubourg Saint-Germain. They got into a vicious fight for reasons unknown, which ended with Kiki hitting Man Ray in the face and calling him a “dirty Jew.” She chose her words perhaps not out of a general anti-Semitism but specifically to wound Man Ray, preying on his difficult relationship with his Jewish identity and his family origins. The scene unfolded in front of Peggy Guggenheim and her shocked mother, Florette, who were Jewish. Florette let Kiki know her anger at what she’d said. The epithet outraged Florette far more than it did her daughter and son-in-law, busy writing their own torrid history of connubial violence and humiliation. Peggy found these kinds of theatrics merely boring, one of the annoyances that came with throwing her many parties. Man Ray, for his part, always chose to interpret Kiki’s public outbursts as misguided displays of affection.
He worked feverishly through that summer of 1924, when Parisians felt they stood at the center of the world even more than usual, as the city played host to the Olympics. Cocteau’s friend the French socialite and patron Count Étienne de Beaumont hired Man Ray to document what would be remembered as the most decadent of his costume balls, this one to cap a series of ballets and plays he’d funded. He stipulated that Man Ray wear a dinner jacket so he wouldn’t look like the help.
That night Man Ray photographed Sara and Gerald Murphy for the first time. They were widely envied in Paris for their easy American elegance, as close to a golden couple as the era produced. With their three young children, they’d sailed for France in the same summer of 1921 as had Man Ray, though in a considerably more comfortable cabin. They wanted to escape what they saw as stifling lives in New York, where it felt as if people spoke endlessly about business, property, and possessions and cared nothing at all about what Sara called “the simplest, bottomest things—the earth and all the elements and our friends.” Gerald had begged off a career in the family’s leather goods business that had been waiting for him after his graduation from Yale. He wanted to paint and in France would develop into an exceptional artist. For all their complaints about the trappings of wealth, however, they lived off of family trusts.
In Man Ray’s photo, Sara Murphy looks like unwrapped candy in a dress of crinkly foil, the shining spirit of the Machine Age, her neck roped by three loops of pearls, her eyes framed by the oversize goggles of a Grand Prix driver or a fighter pilot. Gerald, also goggled, stands like a walking skyscraper, inhabiting a stainless steel contraption that he’d been welded into earlier in the evening, with a loudspeaker mounted to his shoulder and a giant tin-man headpiece adorned by circular lights. Posing stiffly in their silvery sarcophagi, they look like two misplaced pharaohs from some future civilization.
Man Ray also photographed friends who, unlike him, had come to the ball as invited guests. He shot Picasso dressed as a toreador standing between his Ballets Russes–dancer wife Olga Khokhlova and his patron, the Chilean-born Eugenia Errázuriz. Man Ray also caught Tzara kneeling to kiss the hand of a silver-suited and top-hatted Nancy Cunard, the British-American shipping heir, poet, and renegade, who later introduced Man Ray to some banker friends looking to have their own portraits photographed.
The lines between friendship and patronage were blurred when it came to Man Ray and high society. His desires were split in two, as he yearned for a solitary creative life but also for the lucrative work and sparkling chatter that he imagined would relieve him from the banal demands such a life presented. He understood that for all the era’s changes, the aristocracy would persist, and its members would continue to wield great social power, so deeply entrenched in their positions that they would survive any upheavals. He befriended aristocratic salonnières such as the stately Élisabeth, Countess Greffulhe, one of the models for Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes (though it sometimes feels as if every titled French man or woman who ever shared a ballroom with Proust claimed some link to one of his characters), and heirs to industrial fortunes such as Bryher. But only because they’d hired him to give them lessons in photography.
But while he might have thought himself smarter than his wealthy clients and their equally fortunate friends—certainly he was more ambitious—Man Ray knew no one wanted party shots from a photographer who felt superior to his subjects. He tried to put some distance and irony between himself and the people whose revels he was paid to capture. He wore cufflinks made of flashing red lights, undercutting the suit and tie required of him, declaring himself just an artist, visiting, observing, harmless. But he might also have wanted those blinking cufflinks to transmit a second message: kings and queens come and go, but a clever jester keeps laughing through many regimes.
It must have been hard, though, to resist trying to form an affinity with these people, so close at hand. Hard to act aloof as he navigated their ballrooms and gardens. Many of them defined themselves through the artists they patronized, and many would have known his name, especially once his work started to gain recognition, and even admired his photographs. And he had excellent bait with which to lure them into familiarity, because how many people can really resist the invitation to be granted the camera’s undivided attention? “As a photographer, I was in demand,” he would recall. “I was like a doctor. Everybody needed me. It was like selling bread and meat.”
Without his camera, he was less of a draw. The most sought-after invitations eluded him. He was not yet benefiting from the loosening of social barriers resulting from the class-transcending trauma of the war that had people questioning traditional hierarchies, or from the endurance, beyond the Armistice, of wartime connections that had been forged across class lines. It was a time when, as the British writer Patrick Balfour would remark a few years after the decade’s close, diagnosing changes in London that echoed those in Paris,
peers became Socialists, and Socialists became peers, actors and actresses tried to be ladies and gentlemen and ladies and gentlemen behaved like actors and actresses, novelists were men-about-town and men-about-town wrote novels, persons of all ranks became shopkeepers and shopkeepers drew persons of rank to their houses.
For all those rearrangements and realignments, Man Ray—unlike Tzara, Picasso, Léger, and other artists in his circle—was not invited to the city’s key social events, perhaps because he was seen as less refined than they were.
Kiki couldn’t have cared less about that kind of thing. She loved a good party and good wine as much as the next person but was happy to celebrate alongside anyone at all, so long as they could keep up with her.
Duchamp had by then returned to Paris after four months of competitive chess in Brussels. He was a stylish player, possessing all the skill but only some of the ambition worthy of a professional. He liked playing a beautiful game more than winning a brutal one. Many of Duchamp’s peers, notably Breton, were critical of what they regarded as his abandonment of art in favor of a board game. He moved into the Hôtel Istria, next door to Kiki and Man Ray. It was usually well stocked with artists and writers, a place favored variously by Picabia, Satie, and the poet Mayakovsky. Duchamp spent much of the time holed up in his room solving complex chess problems, venturing out occasionally, according to Treize, to carry on an affair with Léger’s wife Jeanne. Treize was then also living at the Hôtel Istria, a few doors down from Duchamp.
For a time, Kiki and Man Ray took a small second apartment in the Hôtel Istria, too, on Duchamp’s floor, so that Kiki could have a space that felt like more of her own. Germaine Everling, sometime lover of Francis Picabia and an influential champion of Dada as art critic and salonnière, would remember how Kiki “like a miracle . . . changed her makeup every day and looked like a different person. She would stand on the stairs and shout to her friends on other floors. . . . Man Ray often came to see her, climbing the steps with a sad air and descending with an even sadder one.”
Kiki, Man Ray, Treize, and Duchamp went out often for midnight meals at the Dôme, which had replaced the Rotonde, standing directly south, as their most regular haunt. Its kitchen specialized in “foreign” delicacies such as chili con carne, baked beans, puffed wheat, sweet corn, and a Montparnasse favorite, gras double (the fattest), an inexpensive but filling tripe dish from Lyon. Duchamp always ordered the same lackluster soft-scrambled eggs.
The atmosphere at the Rotonde had changed since Papa Libion was forced to sell in 1920, undone by too much bad spending and too many bad friends, which invited unwanted attention from the tax authorities. Kiki and Man Ray found the Dôme the best alternative, good for keeping up with the latest gossip and the comings and goings of friends—the neighborhood’s “living newspaper,” as Cowley put it. They appreciated the small counter in the corner where you could buy tobacco and stamps. Hemingway liked the place too, writing in A Moveable Feast of how he would cross to the Dôme, where “there were people there who had worked. There were models who had worked and there were painters who had worked until the light was gone and there were writers who had finished a day’s work for better or for worse, and there were drinkers and characters.” Kiki felt so at ease on the Dôme’s wide terrace that she would sometimes hike up her skirts and piss from the edge of her chair into bushes on the patio, saving her the long wait for the washroom.
But the crowd at the Dôme often got too “American” for Kiki and Man Ray’s liking. And they found it too brightly lit, loud as well, filled with voices like fifty phonographs pitched to different speeds and volumes, each playing a different tune. Sometimes, headed for the Dôme, they detoured instead into the quiet tabac a couple of doors down, with its horseshoe steel-countered bar lined with laborers in their blue jumpsuits. Sometimes they dined at the nearby Select, whose specialty was a terrible Welsh rarebit.
Down the way at the corner of rue Campagne-Première and boulevard du Montparnasse, Kiki and Man Ray had watched a little bar, the Café Caméleon, being reinvented as the Jockey. This would soon become their new favorite spot.
The Jockey was the brainchild of a young Wharton dropout and budding impresario named Hilaire Hiler, who’d partnered with another American with tenuous claims to a horse-racing past, which gave the bar its name. Under the club’s gaudy neon sign, Hiler painted the outside entrance with cartoonish scenes of what they would have called a cowboys and Indians theme. Inside, he plastered the walls with jokey slogans: we’ve only lost one customer—he died; if you can’t take a joke—take a walk. The regulars followed his lead and soon filled in the blank spaces with dirty limericks and quizzical haikus in several languages.
A photograph showing a small crowd out front of the Jockey marks one of the few instances of Kiki and Man Ray appearing in the same frame. Man Ray looks boyish, crouching and clutching his Kodak. Kiki stands behind him, icy and regal. Tzara crouches nearby, looking like the kind of aristocratic villain who would have been played in the movies by Erich von Stroheim. Cocteau in knitted gloves is there, as is Ezra Pound with his Van Dyke beard and floppy beret.
The Jockey in its first months was no more or less of a hot spot than anywhere else in Paris. At that time, all a club had to do was open its doors. Nearly all the city’s four thousand cinemas, close to six hundred theaters, and hundred or so dance halls were already running close to capacity every night as people rushed out to embrace any kind of entertainment after years of depravation. But Kiki and Treize were instrumental in turning the Jockey into the Montparnasse crowd’s chosen headquarters. They brought everyone they knew to it, like ambassadors for some fledgling nation. They felt as if they’d discovered the place and then made it their own just by going there so much.
“I don’t know anywhere else in the world . . . where you could have so much fun and be so completely yourself,” Kiki said of the Jockey. Desnos, escaping his studio crammed with piles of old records, a waxwork mermaid, and handmade ceramics, among other flea market finds, spent hours in a corner writing poems on napkins and peeled-off wine bottle labels, or releasing drops of water onto crumpled up paper straws so they’d crawl like inchworms. Pascin, bowler hat pulled down so low it covered his ears, came nearly every night to pick up women, talking softly so they had to lean in to hear him. “Almost anybody of the writing, painting, musical, gigoloing, whoring, pimping or drinking world was apt to turn up,” according to the hard-drinking Robert McAlmon, another fixture at the club.
Lone occupant of a crumbling single-story building, the Jockey stood like a massive boxcar stuck on the tracks, the stowaways crammed together at its lone wooden bar and at tables pressed against the back wall. It was one big open room, so that you always felt at the center of the unfolding action. The floor was sticky, the ceiling low, lighting and airflow almost nonexistent. Such luxuries could be found across the Seine in the fizzy nightclubs of the Champs-Élysées, with drinks quadruple the price. But those were the places whose regular clients were now coming to slum at the Jockey. Expensive cars lined the boulevard du Montparnasse. Nearly as many liveried men stood on the sidewalk smoking and waiting as there were people inside dancing. One memoirist reported hearing a chauffeur telling another, “The dirtier the place the more they love it.” People came to drink Martinique rum, or beer shandies, or one of the many transatlantic inventions on offer at this bar américain: Manhattans (two ounces whisky, one sweet vermouth, a couple of dashes of Angostura bitters, stirred with ice, strained into a coupe garnished with a maraschino cherry); Alaskas (three parts dry gin to one part chartreuse, shaken well and strained into a coupe); and gin rickeys (a wineglass’s worth of gin poured into a highball glass over a lump of ice and the juice of a quarter of lemon and a half of lime, and seltzer filled to the top).
The door was always opening and closing, especially after the nearby theaters let out and two hundred bodies squeezed into a space meant for fifty. Theatrical fisticuffs were frequent. It got so hot that people let their unbuttoned shirts hang to their waists, or threw items of clothing into the corners, or stripped down altogether. The crowd was constantly changing and racially and economically mixed. On a dance floor no bigger than a picnic blanket, a London banker’s wife in fine taffeta and a suburban shop assistant in austere cotton might find themselves shimmying between a shaggy Russian painter in a fisherman’s jersey and a veteran of the Harlem Hellfighters in a smoking.
Someone could walk a few hundred yards from her door and encounter notes and rhythms in combinations still unheard in all but a few tiny patches of the globe, and which seemed to speak to the present moment like no other music could. Le Jazz, as the French called it, was first introduced to Paris by African American troops arriving in 1917 and 1918, and by the touring bands of James Reese Europe of the 369th Infantry (the Harlem Hellfighters) and Louis Mitchell’s Jazz Kings. Many of the Black American expats in Paris during the twenties were veterans from among the two million American soldiers and support staff who’d been mobilized to France for the Great War, and who’d remained or had come back after brief, often disappointing returns to America. They frequented the bars and nightclubs of Montparnasse as customers, as performers, and soon as owners. While Paris in that era was far from a frictionless racial utopia, many Black expats remarked on feeling that they were treated with more dignity in France than in the United States. Meanwhile artists and writers among the Parisian avant-garde quickly co-opted African American music as both the soundtrack to their lives and fodder for their work. “Jazz,” the French writer and politician Paul Morand recalled of his time in Parisian nightclubs in the first years after the war, “produced such sublime and heartbreaking accents we all understood that we must have a new form of expressing our own feelings.”
Les Copeland, a Wichita-born vaudevillian, manned the Jockey’s rattling piano. He played choppy jazz and ragtime, slow blues, old cowboy ballads, whatever came to mind, accompanied some nights by a couple of banjoists. He wrote his own stuff, too. With his Kansas drawl, people mistook him for a retired cowboy, and he was in no hurry to correct them. A bigger draw than Copeland because he appeared more rarely was Hilaire Hiler himself. Customers clanged silverware on the tables to get him to play. When he felt agreeable, he took over for Copeland. Hunching his tall frame over the piano, Hiler showed himself to be a gifted if less refined player, banging away, his mouth stretched into a grin that seemed to span to the lobes of his big jug ears. He recited poetry in nonsense Yiddish and sang old songs from the Caribbean or French folk tunes. Sometimes he picked up a saxophone and blew fairly well. The American novelist Kay Boyle remembered Hiler’s “loose red mouth that was like a gaping wound. His enormous eyes were strangely glazed, either from drink or from some excruciating mental pain.” She recalled how whenever she and Hiler walked into any of the neighborhood’s clubs, he went straight for the piano, replacing the regular player to “bang out current jazz and blues with such brilliant melancholy that girls would leave their escorts to come sit at Hiler’s feet,” and that the crowd kept asking him for more.
From those original calls for Hiler at the Jockey came the custom that whenever people wanted to hear a particular performer, they would clang their dishes and chant the desired musician’s name, carrying on until they got their wish. Not every performer at the Jockey needed an invitation. In the club’s first years, anyone could get up and sing or dance or play an instrument so long as they could stand being ignored by the chattering crowd, or at worst hissed out of the spotlight. It was an informal arrangement fueled by impulse and alcohol. Once in a while, someone managed to set themselves apart from the crowd, a civilian transformed briefly into a spectacle, exalted, illuminated by the gaze of others.
Kiki watched and listened like everyone else. Her friends had always enjoyed her singing when she entertained them after dinners, and they had encouraged her to do more of it, but she’d been far too nervous about the prospect of performing in public to give it any thought. She’d climbed onto the tabletops as a child to sing for coins, of course, but she’d been fearless then. For all the charisma she displayed in front of the camera, and among people she knew well, and at times among strangers in environments where she felt as comfortable as if she were in her own home, like the terraces of Montparnasse, Kiki grew panicky simply by going to unfamiliar places. She was, in her own way, an intensely shy person.
Something pulled at her while watching the amateurs vying for their time under the lights at the Jockey. Sometimes while watching and listening, she thought that what the moment’s star was doing, she, too, could do. Maybe even better.