Early in 1928, Kiki and Man Ray threw a going-away dinner for Robert Desnos, who was headed for a writers conference in Cuba and a two-month tour of the Caribbean. Desnos often gave himself professional reasons to take trips to far-off places, following the Surrealist tenet that artists had to constantly uproot themselves to avoid growing too accustomed to any one way of living. Breton had laid out this strategy a few years earlier, as a series of commands at the end of his prose poem “Leave Everything”:
Leave everything.
Leave Dada.
Leave your wife, leave your mistress.
Leave your hopes and your fears.
Lose your kids in the woods.
Drop the spoils for the shadow.
Leave, as needed, your comfortable life, your promising future.
Take to the highways.
The music hall singer Yvonne George joined Kiki, Man Ray, and Desnos for the dinner. Desnos had been in love with George since seeing her sing in 1924, not long after she’d arrived in Paris from her native Belgium. Tall and waifish, with expressive violet eyes, she was an ethereal presence on stage in her long-sleeved dresses. Desnos plied her with gifts and looked after her cats when she went on tour, but his devotion wasn’t returned.
George and Kiki had much in common. Both were sensitive and battled stage fright. Both were heavy drinkers, smokers, and at varying times drug users. George preferred opium to Kiki’s cocaine. Both sang sad sailor songs brilliantly. (Kiki when singing sea shanties would wrap herself tightly in her shawl, as if shielding herself from a storm.) Both charmed Parisian audiences with their non-Parisian accents.
Stylistically they differed. George had none of Kiki’s knack for comedy. Kiki couldn’t match George’s crystalline enunciation and broader vocal range.
And George was the more financially successful performer. She’d already made several records. This caused no tension in their friendship. That each had her own distinct approach to her craft may have diffused any professional jealousy. If Kiki did feel competitive with George—and there is nothing to indicate that she did—she may have been comforted by knowing that George’s talent wasn’t the truly fiery kind that could propel her to being an idol rather than a peer. “She could magnetize only small groups,” Janet Flanner wrote of George. “She was unpopular with the masses, who were uncowed by such slight perfection as was hers.”
Desnos thanked his friends with a postdinner poem inspired by a discovery at a secondhand store in the Marais. He’d bought a starfish in a jar of formaldehyde that had come to function for him as a kind of symbol. He told them he stared at the starfish and meditated on the pain of losing love. No doubt he wanted to convey something to the unattainable George. According to his later partner Youki, Desnos never managed to see George as a real person but could only mythologize her. He would allude to her often as starfish or star in his writing.
Man Ray told Desnos that he could “see” Desnos’s poem. Not as a photograph or painting but as a film. He hadn’t touched a movie camera since the previous summer, filming revelers filing out of a church after the wedding of Marcel Duchamp to Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, daughter of a rich industrialist. “When Marcel told me of his getting married it had the same effect on me as if he had told me he was going to paint impressionist landscapes from now on,” Man Ray had written to their mutual friend Katharine Dreier. Kiki had helped him with the shoot. The marriage was over by the end of the year.
The idea of making a movie thrilled Desnos. He would sometimes watch several movies a day. He loved everything from popular crime fare (Les Mystères de New York; the Fantômas films) to German expressionist works (The Vampire Nosferatu; The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari) with their weird camera angles and creeping shots of labyrinthine streets. He left it to Man Ray to start the project while he was overseas.
At first he regretted rushing into the project but soon found his rhythm, drafting a scenario they finished together when Desnos returned. Kiki described Desnos as someone “you always saw running; you’d think he was in a hurry to live.” He was overflowing with ideas for the film and for a soundtrack that would mix popular tunes with human grunts, bursts of ecstatic shouting, and stretches of silence. They called the work L’Étoile de mer (The Starfish), subtitled Poem by Robert Desnos, as Man Ray saw it.
Following the title card, the first thing anyone saw was Kiki, topping the credits, playing “A Woman,” the femme fatale who inspires a poet’s obsession. She was listed not as Kiki Ray nor as Kiki Man Ray, as in the past, but as Alice (Kiki) Prin.
Man Ray said that “Kiki was the most natural choice for the woman’s part.” Desnos would play one of the two men obsessed with Kiki’s “Woman,” while Desnos’s young neighbor André de la Rivière played the other. They lacked the budget for professional actors. But in any case, the actors “would be mere puppets,” Man Ray claimed, dismissing Kiki’s importance to a project whose entire premise is founded on the intense magnetism of its female lead.
In truth, Kiki was the project’s third collaborator. Her presence electrifies the film and is vital to its effectiveness. Looking to produce a woozy effect, Man Ray shot most of the footage through a plate of stained glass or a lens coated with gelatin. The bulk of the action unfolds as if seen through a thick curtain of jelly, giving the viewer the sense of floating, like a starfish in a jar of formaldehyde. This gave the filmmakers an artful way of getting past the censors, who would otherwise have found issue with Kiki’s being fully nude on screen. (They did call for the removal of one short sequence showing Kiki undressing.) Nearly all of her performance was obscured by a hazy lens. But where a weaker personality would have faded completely into the background, Kiki shines through, grounding her character in reality even within such a surreal environment. She is constantly in motion, moving around the frame. She is the story’s unstable force, while her two suitors are slower and more passive, reacting to her actions.
They made the movie quickly, filming in a rented studio, and outside a parking garage, and in the Parc Montsouris south of Montparnasse. They made things up as they went, the three of them working madly under the “influence” of the starfish, as Desnos put it.
Their informal, collaborative way of working followed Montparnasse’s prevailing ethos of open artistic exchange. For all the gossiping, sniping, and public airing of minor differences in dogma, people in the Quarter for the most part encouraged each other in their artistic development. After all, the rewards for anyone’s individual breakthrough, however blazing, were still relatively small. Expertise was meant to be shared. Man Ray, for instance, had taught Brancusi how to take and develop photographs, and he accompanied him to buy a camera. And Man Ray’s visits to Brancusi’s studio, in turn, must have influenced his own sculptural and assemblage work, and perhaps how he thought about composing his photographs as well.
Few among the Montparnasse crowd felt pressured to restrict themselves exclusively to one medium. Desnos, a poet now trying filmmaking, also pursued painting and wrote criticism, film reviews, short stories, and later radio features, while trying to absorb as much knowledge as he could from friends working in these fields. Kiki had gone from posing and drawing to acting and painting. You couldn’t help but be swept up by the Quarter’s collective energy. “Every day was different,” said Gerald Murphy. “There was a tension and an excitement in the air that was almost physical. Always a new exhibition, or a recital of the new music of Les Six, or a Dadaist manifestation, or a costume ball in Montparnasse, or a premiere of a new play or ballet. . . . There was such a passionate interest in everything that was going on, and it seemed to engender activity.”
L’Étoile de mer plays out as something between a drunken conversation and a half-remembered dream, as though the scenario could have sprung straight from someone’s ramblings during “the period of sleeping-fits” six years earlier. Fragments of Desnos’s poetry appear interspersed among disjointed sequences, leaving it to the audience to piece together the puzzle of an erotically charged encounter involving two men and a woman. His words weigh the momentary pleasures of new love against the eternal pain of lost love, ultimately leaning in favor of pursuing love despite its heavy and inevitable toll. The film tries to make concrete the abstract notion of l’amour fou, which Luis Buñuel called “the irresistible force that thrusts two people together [and] the impossibility of their ever becoming one.”
The early scenes between Kiki and Rivière show a couple engaged in typical activities: walking in a leafy lane, climbing the stairs to her apartment. The story turns when Kiki undresses on a bed and lies back, but Rivière, rather than joining her, kisses her hand coldly and leaves. The film becomes more tense in scenes of Kiki sloshing red wine, lying on a floor littered with broken glass; of her and Rivière briefly reunited, though she wears an ominous domino mask, like Fantômas; and of her murderously holding a knife as she climbs stairs, followed by gauzy shots of the high walls of Paris’s La Santé prison, as though she can see where her crime will lead her. We then find her coolly smoking a cigarette by an untamed fire, and next posing proudly as Marianne, the symbol of France. In the final scene, she walks seemingly united with Rivière, until a second man (Desnos) appears and takes her away as Rivière watches. Rivière returns alone to his starfish floating in a jar. Kiki’s face is reflected in a mirror on which belle is written. The mirror smashes. A windowed door closes.
Breaking up these narrative scenes are sequences that are more abstract but similarly seem to be about the pain of leaving and being left. Trains leave stations, and ships leave harbors. Disembodied objects float in space. Glasses shatter. Nothing is fixed. There are spinning wheels, spinning bottles, spinning starfish. Newspapers get swept away by the wind. Relationships unravel. People fail to see each other clearly.
The Starfish debuted that spring of 1928 at Studio des Ursulines, the city’s premier venue for avant-garde film, built on the site of a former Ursuline convent. Man Ray hired a trio of musicians to perform the accompaniment, heavy on Cuban songs learned from records Desnos brought back from his travels.
The reviews were mixed but never indifferent. A writer for Variétés enjoyed the film’s hallucinatory qualities, describing its characters “circulating in a kind of Milky Way . . . or appearing as if one had taken hashish. Everything dissolves and then is reborn, evolving arbitrarily.” Those same “hallucinatory qualities” drew ire from the critic in La Nouvelle Revue française, who complained that you had to guess at what was happening for three quarters of the film, since the camera effect reduced the characters to “puddles of goo.”
On its opening night, L’Étoile de mer was paired with Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, starring Marlene Dietrich. It must have thrilled Kiki to watch the two films in sequence, to see Marlene Dietrich created on the same screen by the same beam of light that had created her as well, minutes earlier. And yet in this film, where her name featured most prominently in the credits, Kiki was also at her most unreachable, veiled by Man Ray’s tricky camerawork. It was her first and last proper lead role in a film. And it was the last film she made with Man Ray.
L’Étoile de mer at that time marked Man Ray’s most successful presentation of any kind of work in Paris. A young Simone de Beauvoir was apparently among those who found the film enchanting. It would be shown regularly for the next few years as an opener to others debuting in Paris, including popular comedic fare such as Howard Hawks’s A Girl in Every Port, with Groucho Marx. (Nearly three-quarters of the films shown in France at that time were imports from America, as the war had decimated the French movie industry.)
L’Étoile de mer closed with Kiki leaving one lover to take up with another. Life would soon mimic art. Of that spring and summer of 1928, their friends would tell stories of Kiki and Man Ray shouting while at cafés and parties, of thrown chairs and thrown bottles, more than in previous years. Man Ray continued to mock Kiki and the idea of romantic love as childish. People who knew him recalled Man Ray in this period playing at being the local misanthrope, growing silent and withdrawn even among old friends. In the middle of a casual chat about the neighborhood with a bartender, he’d burst out, “I can see no reason for the continuance of the human race. The sooner it dies, the better. Montparnasse has done much to help the cause.” He meanwhile wrote to Elsie of being “very homesick after my visit last year.” He’d seen a photograph of his new niece, Naomi, and thought she “resembled [him]. . . . One way or another the family is being perpetuated, it seems!”
By the summer, Man Ray had taken a second studio, this one across from the Paris Observatory, to paint, escaping the demands of his professional photography work, and escaping his and Kiki’s problems. He busied himself making furniture out of canvas and leather over ergonomic metal frames, which he’d designed to get the most use out of the space. Where the Campagne-Première apartment reflected all the chaotic comings and goings of his and Kiki’s domestic and professional lives, he tailored everything in the Observatory studio to fit snugly into place, from his own paintings and photographs, to the African masks he’d started collecting, to his rows of favorite jazz records, all carefully displayed.
Even with Man Ray often absent, working at the second studio, Kiki would stay away from their apartment for nights at a time. Having arrived somewhere with Man Ray, she would find another man to leave with. She would move in for a while with Treize and then return to Man Ray.
He was never fully able to hide how much he resented Kiki for having talent, even as he encouraged her to use it. He wanted her, after singing at the Jockey, to become “again the simple country girl, in love with me and the domestic setup.” When his own work kept him out late, he wanted her “home waiting to entertain me with the day’s gossip.” His descriptions of some of their socializing give evidence of the ways he tried to diminish her in public.
I did take Kiki with me sometimes to the cafés of my more intellectual friends, or to their homes. She was perfectly at ease and amused everyone with her quips, but got bored if the conversation became too abstract for her. Unlike the wives or mistresses of the others, who tried to keep up with the current or kept silent, she became restless; I took her back to her beloved Montparnasse. Someone once asked me whether she was intelligent: I replied shortly that I had enough intelligence for the two of us.
The relationship tore apart, either in late 1928 or early 1929. Kiki wrote nothing about why or how it happened. Man Ray insinuated in his memoir that she was the one to leave him, claiming that she wanted to have a child with him and he “disappointed” her. Of the three paintings by Kiki that we know for certain Man Ray owned, one is titled Babies (undated), a bizarre watercolor showing a woman who looks much like Kiki seated next to a massive chubby baby, twice the size of the woman, wearing a bib on which is written BABY. But Man Ray insinuated many things about Kiki that can’t be verified, for instance that he caught a “social disease” during a time of fidelity to her alone, prompting her to secure certificates from two separate doctors attesting to her health when he blamed her.
Man Ray also implied that their relationship’s end had something to do with Kiki’s rising popularity, as if it were the needs of her audience that ultimately pulled her away from him. Kiki left him “gradually,” he wrote, for the man with whom she was “collaborating on the editing and printing [of Kiki’s memoir]. She began frequenting the other night places that sprang up in Montparnasse. Her singing was in demand everywhere; her presence attracted the tourists who were now flooding the quarter.” If Man Ray was truly saddened by Kiki’s becoming increasingly “in demand” as an artist, perhaps it was because she was no longer as eager to shop and cook and clean and answer the phones for him as she’d once been.
Sometime in the first months of 1929, Man Ray accepted an invitation from the wealthy aristocratic couple Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles to make a film set at their villa in the hills above Hyères. The French architect Robert Mallet-Stevens had recently completed the building after three years of difficult construction. The Cubist-inspired house of reinforced steel and heavy stone, fronted by a zigzagging garden, constituted a modernist masterpiece in its own right. The Noailles commission was similar to the one Man Ray took from the Wheelers to make Emak Bakia, a kind of portrait of the patrons and their property posing as an avant-garde film. His ability to attract wealthy patrons had grown substantially in just a few years. He was no longer the outsider taking snapshots of people like the de Noailles at someone else’s parties. In another reversal from his early days in Paris, he refused to travel to design houses for fashion shoots, as he had to Poiret’s atelier back in 1921, but insisted that clients such as Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli send the models and outfits to the Campagne-Première studio, which he was building into a larger-scale operation with a complex multipoint lighting system.
After the success of L’Étoile de mer, Man Ray had grown bored with filmmaking. He saw little future for the kinds of movies he wanted to make in a medium now dominated by “talkies.” He did very little to promote the result that came from the Noailles commission, a maddening work titled Les Mystères du Château du Dé (The Mysteries of Dice Castle). Which raises the possibility that he took the assignment in part to give himself a reason to keep away from Paris for a few weeks, to put up a barrier of distance to stop himself or Kiki from yielding to the temptation to reconcile. He might have wanted to delay having to see her in public. Or maybe, sensing that she was about to leave him, he scurried to position himself as the one to make the definitive move to end their relationship, by disappearing to the Southwest of France for a few weeks rather than by facing her.
“There were no scenes nor explanations between us,” Man Ray wrote of his and Kiki’s break.
But in an interview, Kay Boyle said she remembered clearly Kiki’s reaction when she saw Man Ray come through the saloon-style doors of La Coupole, the neighborhood’s sleek new restaurant and nightclub, shortly after they’d split. “Kiki would be sitting at the bar. When she spotted him, she would pick up anything that was not nailed down and begin to throw it at him, shouting the most incredible obscenities. Man Ray would go down on all fours and crawl under the swinging doors.”