Kiki watched her neighborhood changing. In a piece written during World War I but published posthumously in 1920, Guillaume Apollinaire had prophesied, “without wishing it to come true,” that one day “Montparnasse would have its nightclubs and cabaret singers to go along with the painters and poets,” and that “Cook’s Tours would bring its busloads.” By the closing years of the decade, Apollinaire’s prediction had largely come to pass.
As early as the summer of 1926, an estimated one thousand to two thousand American tourists were visiting Montparnasse daily. Between June and September of that year, more than a hundred passenger ocean liners sailed from New York to Le Havre or Cherbourg. The publication of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, also in 1926, played a huge role in increasing the neighborhood’s international appeal. Travelers to Paris wanted to see where Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley had played out their drama. Their mutually frustrating tussles would surely have taken place in the Hôtel Istria, according to some ingenious tour guides happy to point out the specific room for a sum. And they wanted to see the already legendary Rotonde, even if it was to imagine themselves too in-the-know to bother going inside a place already past its prime. They’d been tipped off, after all, by Jake Barnes himself. “No matter what café in Montparnasse you ask a taxi-driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they always take you to the Rotonde,” he complains in the novel.
In 1927 an American woman could write home about making the “inevitable” visit to Montparnasse: “Telling about the Café du Dôme and its sister the Café de la Rotonde is like reciting ‘to be or not to be.’ There’s so much precedent.” Rare was the visitor arriving without some preformed opinion of the neighborhood. It was too loud; too neon; too Jewish; too American (even the Brits thought so); too crowded; too ugly.
Kiki’s friends tended to go out of their way to ignore the tourists. But Kiki enjoyed them. Most of all she enjoyed teasing them. If she happened to notice a conservative-looking family gawking at her from across one of the café terraces, she would stand up, ask the crowd in French, “What can we do for those nice people?” and then turn around, hike up her skirt, and moon them.
Already people were talking of the recent past as a bygone era. Kay Boyle recalled McAlmon, on a desultory summer night at La Coupole, seeing Kiki and Hilaire Hiler and remarking that they “were no more than survivors of another and far gayer company and of a wilder, more adventurous time.” McAlmon judged that “the lines that people spoke now were as flat as stale beer . . . and the props, the scenery, no longer had any meaning. So as to change the look of things, there was nothing to do except have one more drink . . . and then one more, and then another after that.”
Life on the terraces held less of a spark than it once had. Where once you could sit back and wait to see who would show up, knowing that eventually someone would appear to turn the evening into an impromptu adventure, now there were fewer chance encounters and more and more prearranged outings. “The telephone was the death of Montparnasse,” said Jacqueline Barsotti, decades later. And those organized parties unfolded just as they were expected to unfold. If giddiness remained the prevailing feeling at these gatherings, it was no longer due the group collectively experiencing a spontaneous burst of energy but because everyone in attendance knew they were expected to act giddily. They would disappoint one another if they didn’t try to do something wild. They’d gone from ingénues to seasoned veterans in just a few years.
Kiki was changing, too, as the decade neared its end. The Canadian writer Morley Callaghan described her at a party (when she would have been roughly twenty-eight to his twenty-six):
She was still beautiful, but quite plump now, and there was something of the clown in her lovely face. . . . Going up the stairs ahead of me was Kiki, and being the lovely clown she was, she began to go up the stairs on all fours. Whereupon I reached down, and threw her skirt up over her head. Undisturbed, she continued to go on up on all fours while I played a drumbeat with both hands on her plump behind.
In early May 1929, Kiki completed what would be her last posing session of the twenties, sitting for the first time for the then relatively unknown Alexander Calder. He would recall his attraction to her “wonderful nose that seemed to spring out into space.” In his ratty studio a half-block south of the Montparnasse cemetery, Calder fashioned a wire sculpture of Kiki’s likeness while a Pathé camera rolled to collect footage for an English newsreel titled Montparnasse, Where the Muses Hold Sway, a three-minute tour through the studios of what it called “this famous suburb of Paris [where] eighty thousand artists are neighbors.” Foujita, described as “a well-known painter of women,” also appears briefly, as do several unidentified artists, while Foujita’s wife Youki, and Kiki represent the “muses.” The newsreel captured Calder brusquely swiveling Kiki’s head with his hand to stand in perfect unison with the profile of his sculpture, as she smiles nervously. Calder holds up the wire sculpture to show how neatly its pointy nose matches Kiki’s.
On May 30, 1929, Paris-Montparnasse hosted a variety show at the Bobino, a popular music hall on rue de la Gaîté. While the main goal was to promote the fledgling magazine, some of the ticket sales went to support a food bank for artists—“to help fight the miseries our modern bohemians so often hide behind their masks of eccentricities,” as one reporter put it. Man Ray did not attend.
The crowd watched a trapeze artist leaping from the balcony; a jazz orchestra and dance troupe pulled together from some of the nightclub players; a child singer billed as the Youngest Artist in France; and a handsome oddball calling himself the Cowboy of Montparnasse, who when out of character was the painter, occasional model, and part-time janitor Samuel Granowsky, and whose act consisted of dressing up in a check shirt and cowboy hat to shout American words in an accent that, if meant to be American, came out American by way of Ukraine, with a good deal of Yiddish thrown in. Foujita did a mime routine in a garish clown costume; Vassilieff sang and danced to Russian folk songs; a local boutique gave a fashion show; a diminutive singer named Chiffon belted out some tunes; and for the penultimate act, Treize, Kiki, and a few other women under the name Les Montparnasse Girls danced a cancan. Each woman moved to her own rhythm. Treize had to stop them midway through to try to get them into unison, going so far as to bring each dancer a glass of Pernod to calm their apparent nerves, which failed to improve their performance, adding to the hilarity.
The event’s main draw and final act was Kiki, solo, reprising her best-known songs, a move meant to publicize the upcoming publication of Kiki Souvenirs.
Alone on the wide stage, bathed in bright light, a peasant blouse draped to reveal a shoulder, a flower behind her ear, she sang “Les Filles de Camaret,” nodding toward Robert Desnos in the audience.
Unlike the grandstanding performers who had preceded her, Kiki moved lightly about the stage. Her gestures were far more reserved here than at the Jockey, as if she sensed, counterintuitively, that doing less in this big venue would go further with the audience than trying to do too much. The effect on the crowd, at least according to Broca’s summary of the show in Paris-Montparnasse, was “astonishing.”
The gala ended with an elaborate mock ceremony in which Kiki was crowned as Queen of Montparnasse. From then on, she would be remembered as Kiki de Montparnasse. The de mimicked royal lineage but held a double meaning, reinforcing that she was Kiki of Montparnasse, literally descended from the neighborhood. For those who knew their local history, there was a further tongue-in-cheek connotation to Kiki’s being named Queen, owing to the nineteenth-century tradition of giving the title “queen of the bal [dance hall]” to a particular prostitute deemed by popular acclaim as especially charismatic or desirable, cementing her place in the public imagination and elevating her rank to one of the select grand courtesans who could have their pick from among the city’s wealthiest clients.
A few hours after the show, a few dozen friends celebrated Kiki’s title in the big dining room of La Coupole, showering her with roses and playing at being her courtiers, paying homage to their sovereign while the waiters whisked between the tables like nurses in their medical whites.
There among her chosen family, plates and glasses filled, talking, listening, taking note, being noticed, her story off at the printers waiting to be told, Kiki was likely as happy as she’d ever been in her life.