Across Montparnasse the bar owners were offering free champagne and brandy to Americans. Kiki and Man Ray joined in the seven nights of whooping and dancing and reliving the aviator’s feat from all angles: Charles Lindbergh had landed northeast of Paris, thirty-three and a half hours after leaving Roosevelt Field on Long Island, in a single-engine plane lacking fuel gauge, parachute, radio, and any instrument other than a compass to guide his flight, during which he hallucinated ghosts shooting into the cockpit.
It was late May 1927. Hundreds of thousands went to see the Spirit of St. Louis swooping down in the klieg-lit night to land in the capital of America’s sister republic. Along their way to Le Bourget airfield, they invented France’s first traffic jam, drivers ditching vehicles midroad to march along with the throng. They missed seeing the new hero up close. As soon as Lindbergh landed, a car pulled alongside so the plane could be cordoned off by a phalanx of soldiers. Lindbergh, dressed in common army gear, was led to a hangar while French pilots lifted decoy Lindberghs onto their shoulders at various points around his cooling plane, the French linen of its wings and fuselage already shredded by those seeking souvenirs. During the drive into the city, Lindbergh asked to stop to buy some bouquets of roses and cornflowers, then to be taken to the Arc de Triomphe, where he laid them on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was one in the morning. He hadn’t slept in three days. This was how heavily the memory of the Great War weighed on a twenty-five-year-old American who’d been too young to serve, nearly a decade after the Armistice.
Lindbergh had descended into a Paris that was running at an unprecedented pitch, a city at the summit of what would be remembered as les années folles, the crazy years. As the spread of modern industrial technology sent goods, people, ideas, and money around the globe at whiplash speeds, the treasures of imperial trade rushed in and out from the stations and the Seine: rubber tapped from the trees of Indochina, ivory pulled from the elephants and feathers from the ostriches of Africa. Businesses got built in days on the strength of novelties lasting weeks. The brightest display in the City of Light belonged to the maker of some of its fastest machines, as the glittering letters C-I-T-R-O-Ë-N climbed the Eiffel Tower with the power of a quarter-million bulbs and four hundred miles of electrical cable.
Kiki, too, was then at her most incandescent, flitting back and forth across town to perform at the Jockey and, increasingly, at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, in the upscale eighth arrondissement on the Right Bank, within earshot of the great organ of the Madeleine church. For Kiki, Le Boeuf sur le Toit inspired its own form of devotion, one of several cabaret-bars opened by the impresario Louis Moyses that felt to her “like beautiful churches.”
Along with the Montmartre clubs run by the African American dancer, singer, actress, and entrepreneur Ada “Bricktop” Smith—the Music Box and Chez Bricktop, where Kiki often went to drink but not to perform—Le Boeuf sur le Toit rivaled the Jockey as the city’s hotspot that year. It attracted just as motley a crowd as the Jockey’s, though veering higher end. “A not unassuming place,” as the composer Virgil Thomson described it to a friend back in America, “frequented by English upper-class bohemians, wealthy Americans, French aristocrats, lesbian novelists from Rumania, Spanish princes, fashionable pederasts, modern literary & musical figures, pale and precious young men, and distinguished diplomats towing bright-eyed youths.” Cocteau, the club’s unofficial mascot, sometimes tried his hand at playing drums with the house band. Alongside a few Man Ray photographs on the wall, Picabia’s L’Oeil cacodylate (The Cacodylic Eye) surveyed the dance floor, the canvas filled with signatures and messages from many of the artists and musicians who haunted the place, each one marking up Picabia’s painting like someone’s cast. Man Ray signed himself directeur des mauvais movies.
Kiki sang at restaurants, too, all over the city, weaving between the tables with champagne in hand. Best for her were the moments near closing, after she’d finished, when she would hear some otherwise shy drinker in the corner, blood loosened by her performance, singing to his friends “more soulfully than could any of the greats.”
She was still posing, occasionally, mostly for close friends with whom she was comfortable. Kisling painted her nude in Kiki (1927), legs splayed, with a daringly intimate representation of her sex, a detailed rendering not found in any other of her posing work nor any other of Kisling’s nudes.
And people started approaching her with all sorts of projects that echoed the zaniness of the time. The would-be filmmaker and future gallerist Julien Levy wanted to make a movie starring her based on T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. The project fell apart, with Levy later blaming his and Kiki’s inability to get along after he’d turned down her advances. According to Levy, when he refused her invitation to sleep with her, she told him, “Tu n’es pas un homme, mais un hommelette!” a play on words that doesn’t translate its wit neatly into English.
Meanwhile death circled the Quarter. The tubercular Ernest Walsh, editor of This Quarter—Hemingway called him the poet “marked for death” in A Moveable Feast—died from hemorrhaging in October 1926, not long before the birth of the daughter he fathered with Kiki’s friend Kay Boyle. The inventive modern dancer Isadora Duncan, who’d based herself in Paris since 1900—her brother Raymond had influenced Foujita and others in Montparnasse with his Greek revivalism and founded a cultlike colony whose members briefly included Boyle—died in September 1927, choked by her scarf when it caught in the wheel of her car as it sped along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was asphyxiated by gas one night that December in her Paris apartment, along with her dog, closing a life “spent in poverty, adventures, liberty, logic, and eccentricities,” as Flanner eulogized.
Cocteau, sensing that he was coming close to the edge, checked into a clinic in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud in late 1928 to kick his opium addiction. He survived the times, but others did not. Soon to come were the deaths of Serge Diaghilev, friend and patron to so many in Montparnasse, in Venice in August 1929; of the dissolute American expat writer Harry Crosby in a murder-suicide or suicide pact five months later; and of Jules Pascin the following summer, by suicide, just as money and fame were coming to him. (Kisling discovered his body; Pascin had written Adieu Lucy in blood on his closet door, a message for his great love and the subject of many of his paintings, model Lucy Krohg, wife of Per.) One night two young women in Kiki’s orbit, the dancer Lena Amsel, who’d copied Kiki’s habit of keeping a pet mouse, and Lena’s friend Florence Pitron, were speeding down to Barbizon while tailing André Derain’s Bugatti, when Amsel’s car hit an oil slick caused by greasy leaves fallen from farmers’ carts during the sugar beet harvest. Both were killed. Amsel, Pitron and Derain had been watching Kiki perform at Le Boeuf sur le Toit hours before.
Kiki was especially shaken by Amsel and Pitron’s deaths. Amsel, “very beautiful, very sporting, and very rich,” as Kiki described her, had asked Kiki to join her on the drive to Barbizon. But she’d thought the better of it “after a night when we’d been drinking a lot more than just water,” though she didn’t try to stop Amsel or Derain from driving.
Kiki was someone who covered her face in fear when riding in a car. She may have been in the fast life, but she was never of it. Lingering on stage in the lights, drawing out her words, playing with silence, Kiki always remained a step removed from the action, narrating the night from her bird’s-eye post as it unfolded. She wondered “what they were all searching for, these people at the cabaret; what do they think they’ll find?” as she wrote in her memoir. Over her years of watching, she’d learned to become, she thought, “a kind of seer.”
And what she saw she found fascinating: the minor dramas of the cabaret, “where every instinct is allowed to come out.” She grouped audience members into types: the addicts, who came every night, almost as if hypnotized, and the loud ones “who feel entitled to everything” because they were paying. While entertaining her audiences, Kiki started entertaining herself by making up stories about their lives. She would dream up love stories to connect two strangers seated on the same banquette.
“These nighttime revelers come to binge,” she wrote. “They deliver themselves before me. And I, in observing them, come to know them much better than do their daytime companions.” Everyone she sang for fascinated her in their own way. Soon she would channel some of their stories into her finest work yet.