By the end of 1924, Kiki was performing regularly at the Jockey. It had started one night as a drunken lark, then became something she did every so often for a thrill. Soon enough she craved singing in public. And the Jockey crowd craved seeing her too. Whenever Kiki was rumored to be performing, the doorman had to turn people away.
Stylistically Kiki belonged among a small group of chanteuses réalistes, female singers such as Marie Dubas, Lucienne Boyer, and Kiki’s friend Yvonne George, who were having a moment by reimagining an old form: that of the great Belle Époque performers who’d specialized in wistful ballads of the streets and the seas, singing hymns to the small-time players of the underworld and eulogies for a France that seemed to be disappearing, a victim to greed and progress. The form’s spiritual godmother was the single-named Fréhel, whom people associated with the purportedly golden era before the Great War, though she was only a decade older than Kiki. By the 1920s, Fréhel showed the wear of years spent indulging her desires for drink, ether, and cocaine, which added to her mystique as a ruined, romantic figure.
A chanteuse such as Kiki was easy to dismiss as a mere nostalgia act with nothing to say about the present world. And yet the Jockey crowd found her more refreshing to watch and listen to than many of her contemporaries who sang the latest tunes. The gritty realism of Kiki’s performances felt jarringly out of place when set against the decade’s quick crazes and fast rhythms. There was something bordering on surreal in her putting forth such antiquated content, if somewhat altered by Desnos’s occasional lyrical input, in Montparnasse’s nightclub of the moment, there among so many forward-thinking urbanites.
While she claimed allegiance to no artistic movement, Kiki’s shows were imbued with the spirit of artistic experimentation going on around her. In repurposing the culture of the streets for the cabaret stage, she exhibited some of the provocation and silliness of Dada and shared in the Surrealist fascination with found objects. And while she ranked among the most glamorous parisiennes of the moment, Kiki’s country mannerisms and Burgundian accent contributed much to her allure. When she rolled her r’s as if there were three in a row (she said her birth name sounded like “Alice Prrrrin” to Parisians), the Jockey crowd went wild. It made her sound earthy and authentic to Parisian ears.
Kiki’s reputation as a performer grew slowly across the city and beyond as 1924 gave way to 1925. Her voice, worn from smoke and drink, was “weary, burning, and broken,” in the words of a reporter for Le Petit Journal. She had a “beautiful parigote [slang for Parisian] laugh, serious, mocking, inexhaustible, the laugh of a fatalist.” Kay Boyle found her “heavy-featured and voluptuous, her voice as hoarse as that of a vegetable hawker, her hair smooth as a crow’s glistening wing.” To the teenaged Canadian poet John Glassco, recently arrived in Paris, there was “no mistaking the magnetism of her personality, the charm of her voice, or the eccentric beauty of her face, beautiful from every angle, but . . . best in full profile, when it had the lineal purity of a stuffed salmon.” Thora Dardel described Kiki in simpler terms: “God! What an experience it was to see her!”
A typical Kiki performance at the Jockey would begin around midnight, when the crowd would start to chant for her. “Kiki! Kiki! We want Kiki!” She would slink into the lights, wait until there was something close to silence, and then sing.
Come my little man
There’s not too much shit
I may not look like much
But you’ll see
I’ll be your bad little piggy
I’ll show you a good time!
And you’ll give me twenty sous for the effort
She underplayed the song’s naughtiness, which made the crowd laugh even more than if she’d turned it into an all-out burlesque. “While singing, Kiki would lower her head, moving it from side to side,” recalled Jacqueline Barsotti. “All her movements were economical and rounded. She made a light dance with her hips, very slow and almost imperceptible.”
Next Kiki would lean against the piano and start in on “Nini peau d’chien” (literally “Nini Dog-Skin,” slang for a prostitute), a nod to the previous generation and the city’s other bohemian enclave. A few decades earlier the legend of Montmartre’s Le Chat Noir, the red-scarfed cabaret performer and impresario Aristide Bruant, had first made the song popular. These kinds of songs, with their grit and grime, helped bring the customers who’d come merely to slum, repeating, whether they knew it or not, an updated version of the nineteenth-century practice known as the Grand Duke’s Tour, in which members of the middle and upper classes made titillating forays into the underworld. Treize, hat in hand, would seek them out among the crowd, knowing they tended to leave the most money.
Hilaire Hiler allowed the practice because it meant he didn’t have to pay Kiki. But after a few weeks of Kiki appearing regularly, seeing how heavy Treize’s hat could get, he started demanding a cut. Kiki and Treize took their revenge by pocketing bills and misrepresenting their final counts. Some nights they could pull in enough for them both to live well for a month. Kiki’s relationship with Hiler could be adversarial at times, but there was always much affection between them. She liked to poke fun at Hiler, who, as she wrote, “never lets you know what he’s really thinking . . . as he hides behind his giant ears.” One night when Hiler, talking to some friends, spent too long lamenting the loss of a woman who he said had abandoned him, Kiki, overhearing, announced that he was full of nonsense and that woman had been in the club the night before, yelling at him that he’d mistreated her, rather than the other way around.
At the Jockey, the tourists tended to sit or stand by the back wall, happy to carry on their conversations and turning occasionally to watch. Every so often Kiki would halt her song midway to keep them in check. One night she stopped singing in the middle of a line, waiting for everything to go silent except for a chattering British couple in the back. They stopped talking, mortified. Kiki savored the silence. Made sure the audience savored it too. And soon it became clear that Kiki had created this awkward moment on purpose, so that the audience, too, could feel theatricalized—had created the awkwardness precisely so she could break it, rescuing them all from the moment as she continued with her song. She sang, and the relieved crowd joined her for the happy chorus.
There were, of course, times when Kiki plain forgot the lyrics, and she used these pauses to buy time. In these cases, Treize with her indefatigable memory would whisk over and whisper the missing words.
Kiki would sometimes make the rounds for donations at the end of the night instead of Treize, continuing the connection with her audience that she’d begun on stage. She enjoyed having strangers giving her the attention and affection that were so hard to extract from Man Ray.
Seeing Kiki standing in front of him one night, waiting to collect, a young Austrian student and would-be writer, Frederick Kohner, felt so flustered that he handed her a fifty-franc note, worth a week of his budget. Kiki asked if he was an American, the likeliest candidate to throw around that kind of cash. He shook his head, leading her to hold the bill up to the light for closer inspection. Satisfied with its legitimacy, she lifted her skirt and slipped it between her garters. A few decades later, after Kohner and his wife fled Nazi Germany and settled in California, he would craft his singular literary invention: Gidget, the princess of 1950s Malibu—perhaps inspired by his overheated memories of Kiki, the queen of 1920s Montparnasse.
Kiki wrote of these kinds of postperformance encounters: “When strangers come talk to me I usually understand none of whatever story they’re trying to tell . . . since I only know French and a bit of English. Who’s he? What’s he saying? It’s probably better that way since the reality will be more disappointing than whatever I’m imagining.”
Kohner wasn’t Kiki’s only Teutonic admirer to achieve future public notice. The architect and sculptor Arno Breker, who became Hitler’s favorite sculptor and tried to represent Nazi ideology in physical form, thought Kiki “without question the most glorious [woman in Paris], a true phenomenon of carnal beauty and plenitude.” Her “audacious” profile reminded him of Minoan statuary and her body of Venus de Milo’s torso, only fleshier. He was surprised no one had yet tried to sculpt her. (He never approached her himself with the idea, for whatever reason.) He described Kiki’s performances as equal parts singing and declaiming, rousing her “motley choir” of spectators to join in for the choruses. He recalled that her pull was as strong offstage as on. When strangers passed her in the street, their heads would swivel reflexively. Anywhere she sat, a crowd immediately gathered, everyone sitting “frozen in astonishment” at “this masterpiece of nature.” Breker said it was impossible to describe Montparnasse in the twenties without first “conjuring the dream-image of a woman who looks like Kiki.”
Not all of Kiki’s interactions with her fans were so placid. The effectiveness of her night’s performance depended largely on her presenting herself as a rough-hewn, streetwise woman, and some watchers struggled to see where Alice Prin ended and the character of Kiki began. One night a man groped her rear, while she was in the middle of the song. Without reacting, not even looking at him, she said: “Don’t wear yourself out. I only feel my lover.” Following her performances, she would sometimes have to push away men who’d decided she must be as available in life as her avatar had them believing she was from the stage. Once when a man roughly grabbed her breast, she hit him in the face and chased him into the street until the Jockey’s bartender, who’d followed her out, lifted Kiki up bodily and brought her back inside.
The more regularly she performed, the more Kiki grew anxious. An increasing number of strangers came to watch her, close enough to touch her, demanding to be entertained. She wrote in her memoir of the crushing responsibility she felt for putting every one of them at ease. She felt like she was throwing a party and had to make her guests feel as welcomed as they would feel in their own homes hosting her. She never thought of herself as above her audience. If anything, it was the other way around. She saw herself as someone there to serve them. And she felt pressured to bridge the gap between what was expected of her on stage and who she really was. “Getting ginny” helped, she wrote. “I can’t sing when I’m not drunk. I’m shocked by these women who can sing just like they’re going pee.”
Cocaine helped, too. Fears about drug smuggling, a loss of army efficiency, and the potential dangers of the drug itself had led France to outlaw cocaine in 1916, along with opium, morphine, and their derivatives (except codeine), as well as marijuana, punishable by a maximum ten-thousand-franc fine and two years in prison. French parliamentarians arguing for the legislation suggested that the German army had introduced cocaine into France to weaken the country’s helpless youth. But drugs remained as easy to come by as they had before the law passed, and Kiki, like many people in her circle, was a fairly regular user:
At the start, I thought it was great! I would get depressed sometimes, fixating too much on the past. I tried to put it out of my mind but it would always come back. So, a pinch of powder . . . and I felt lighter, no more worries, no more boredom. . . . The singer’s job’s not always easy. It’s hard to be the cabaret’s main attraction. It’s great on the days when you want to have fun, but there are others when you just want to be home having a quiet time. But then, and this is the horrible thing, all it takes to get you back on stage is one little sniff.
After only a few months of regular performing, she gained confidence in her form. She felt like the cabaret was a train, and she its conductor. “By the end of the night it’s hard to tell who’s the patron and who’s the artist; we’re just one big family coming together to enjoy the passing moment.” But such happiness could be costly. Kiki found herself needing badly to be on stage, even as she struggled with it. She’d been seduced by the cabaret life. Soon she was going without a day’s rest between performances. “Even while I was suffering” she wrote, “I was always at my post.”