Chapter 35

Life Is a Cabaret

AS NEWS OF my budding new relationship with the Showgirl spread, many who knew me were bemused that someone as elegant, accomplished, and downright beautiful as the Showgirl would be interested in the likes of me. How, they would wonder—often out loud and with more genuine incredulity than I cared for—did a geek like me land a class act like her? It was a question I heard often, most commonly from mates wishing to emulate my form, and in response I invariably shrugged and hinted at an animal magnetism that made me irresistible to all women.

The truth, though, was a whole lot more pedestrian. The science of Showgirl seduction was in fact deceptively simple. These girls are uniformly strikingly good-looking. Each night they take to the stage and become visions of exquisite feminine beauty. But because of the hours they work and the men to whom they are most commonly exposed, finding a decent fella is, for the average female cabaret dancer, nigh on impossible. Starting work at eight p.m., when most people are preparing to go out, and finishing at two a.m., when most people are preparing to go to sleep, means the sample of eligible bachelors whom the average showgirl meets is relatively small. The only men with whom they spend any real time are male cabaret dancers, a good 60 percent of whom are gay. Taken together, you have what dating experts might call a captive audience.

The secret to nabbing a showgirl, as I discovered, is actually quite simple. You just have to be able to hold your drink well enough to be still standing at five a.m., be relatively presentable, and have enough self-esteem and self-possession that you don’t mind feeling like the short, ugly kid at every one of their gatherings. Once you master that, life truly is a cabaret.

Courting a showgirl, I discovered, has many fringe benefits. Apart from the obvious, it affords an entrée into a most remarkable world. For it takes a special kind of person to become a cabaret dancer. First of all, you need to be unusually accomplished in the coordination stakes. A streak of physical beauty never hurts; nor does a natural tendency for performance and drama. But the most crucial prerequisite for anyone wishing to make it as a Parisian cabaret dancer is a casual relationship with reality.

Lizzy, one of the Showgirl’s dancing colleagues from the U.K., had that quality in spades. Unfailingly pleasant and possessed of a genuinely good heart, she had been dancing professionally since the age of fifteen, when she joined Julio Iglesias’s European tour as one of the crooner’s backup dancers. By virtue of Lizzy’s relative youth at the time and the extreme lifestyle into which she had been thrust, Julio reputedly took the young charge under his wing, calling her “my little baybeee” and taking a genuine paternal interest in her subsequent career. Life for Lizzy post-Julio had been a succession of dance contracts with various cabaret theaters before she landed the gig at the Lido, aged twenty-one.

She was a very attractive young woman, the sort whose height and beauty could cause an entire restaurant to fall silent when she entered. The problem was, she was acutely aware of her appearance, and Lizzy’s looks, as a result, were not so much a part of her persona as they were her persona. Worryingly, she had not only assumed the nickname “Barbie” within the ranks of the Lido dancers, but she actively encouraged people to refer to her using the less-than-flattering nickname.

The only thing more certain than Lizzy being late for work every day was that her tardiness would have invariably been caused by a melodrama of epic proportions. Lizzy was partial to the odd pet, a kitten here, a puppy there. They were usually named after her fashion designer of choice at the time. Hence Louis the puppy and Chanel the cat entered Lizzy’s life for brief but typically dramatic periods. One evening, as the Showgirl sat quietly in her dressing room applying makeup in preparation for the evening’s show, Lizzy came rushing in with tears streaming down her face.

“Shay,” she managed between sobs, “do you have a shovel I could borrow?”

In her thirteen years in showbiz, the Showgirl had been exposed to some interesting characters and had seen and heard pretty much everything. But this was a new one. Intrigued, she paused in the middle of applying enormous fake lashes to her eyelids and asked, “Now why would you need a shovel, Lizzy?”

“Louis has died,” Lizzy announced through tears. “I want to give him a proper burial. I want to bury him in Parc Monceau.” Parc Monceau is one of the city’s more refined public spaces. It is an oasis of calm, a carefully maintained, extremely proper French garden in the heart of one of Paris’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

“You can’t just bury a dog in a public park,” the Showgirl replied, doing her best not to laugh. “There are laws against that. Besides, what are you going to do? Carry him up there in a plastic bag and dig a hole when no one is watching?”

As well as being one of the senior dancers in the Lido troupe, the Showgirl—by virtue of her age, experience, and healthy relationship with common sense—was something of a den mother to the dysfunctional younger show sprites who surrounded her. It was to her that they turned when they couldn’t connect their phone, fill out their tax forms, or fathom the mysterious workings of French bureaucracy. Or, as it now seemed, when they needed to dig a hole in a public park to dispose of a dead pug. Eventually the Showgirl convinced Lizzy of the foolishness of scaling the twelve-foot-high wrought-iron fences of Parc Monceau by night to stage a midnight interment. Lizzy finally opted for a cremation of the unfortunate pooch. To this day the ashes of Lizzy’s much-loved canine (the same one for which she was prepared to scale a fence and break the law) are still sitting on a shelf in a vet’s office in Paris’s west, waiting to be collected.

Louis’s exposure to the mad world of Lizzy was at least mercifully short, but Chanel the kitten had to endure a longer sentence as her mistress’s pet. When one afternoon the ordeal apparently became too much, Chanel found a quiet corner of Lizzy’s apartment and hid out. The hysteria that ensued included a good half hour of Lizzy riding up and down her street on her small rhinestone-embossed metal scooter, calling her cat’s name and telling the ladies of the night (who used Lizzy’s street as a staging ground for their activities) that she had “perdu ma chatte.”

“Elle est grande, comme ça!” Lizzy explained to them earnestly, indicating with her hands the approximate size of her “lost pussy”—blissfully unaware she was using the French slang term for a woman’s privates. Exactly what they made of the toweringly tall young English girl scootering up and down their street, telling all and sundry she had lost her pussy, which was “about this big,” can only be imagined.

But if Lizzy was a constant source of amusing anecdotes from the Lido, she had no monopoly on eccentric behavior. Among the boys there was twenty-one-year-old Ross—or Diana, as he was known to his castmates. Among his many other interesting attributes (including the fact that his surname was Parker-Carr), Ross had pectoral implants. As a result, every shirt he owned featured a plunging neckline to maximize chest exposure—and those that didn’t were soon cut into compliance with a trusty pair of scissors. Ross liked to accentuate his newly (and expensively) acquired assets by massaging baby oil into his beloved chest. He also liked to share it with others. Many others. Often. Even sometimes at the same time. On any given evening he would rush into work after a night and day spent handcuffed to a strange bed for the S&M pleasure of a random stranger or three.

“Oh my god, sorry I’m late,” he would exclaim to the Showgirl, rushing into the dressing room. “I was with these three guys last night, and one of them was really into—”

“Okay, enough, Ross, spare me the details,” the Showgirl would interrupt, lest she be showered with gruesome details of her silicon-enhanced colleague’s less-than-conventional extracurricular activities. Ross, also from England, appeared to single-handedly keep the French fake tan industry in business.

He would often choose midperformance to make wry observations to the Showgirl. “I don’t believe in short people,” he once informed her, apropos of nothing in particular. On another occasion, while the pair of them were waiting backstage to make their entrance, he stared thoughtfully at her bare breasts before announcing that a colleague with whom he had worked the previous year in Monaco had also once worked with the Showgirl and was convinced that her breasts were not real. (Such, apparently, was the level of conversation backstage at the Lido.) Barely pausing to register the absurdity of standing seminaked in a showgirl costume while a gay man dressed as a bird of paradise questioned the provenance of her breasts, the Showgirl insisted they were just as God had given them to her and invited him to check for himself. Several counts before he “flew” on stage, he gave a perfunctory squeeze. Satisfied that they were the genuine article, he expressed his admiration, then disappeared toward the spotlight in a flurry of lycra and feathers.

Just another day at the office for the Showgirl.

Also from England, and also doing his bit to enhance the reputation of showfolk everywhere, was Luke. A natural redhead, Luke dyed his hair and eyebrows black each month in an intricate home-dye procedure involving tin foil and toothpaste. He also had a razor-sharp wit and a penchant for gossip—if you wanted something spread about the Lido in the fastest, most efficient way possible, all you had to do was tell Luke. And he had developed a series of unpaid debts at various corner stores in his neighborhood, such that being with him and needing to pop into a shop to buy a drink became a precarious undertaking.

“Can’t go in that one. It’s a Fraud Shop,” he would advise, referring to a scene of one of his petty crimes.

Others were truly charming, if a little crazy. Tobias “the human toothpaste commercial” Larsson was a freakishly tall Swede with a heart as big as his smile was bright. He traveled in a pack of fellow Swedes, all of whom were models and so impossibly good-looking you wanted to hate them—except that they were infuriatingly nice. Foremost among his gaggle of unfeasibly good-looking friends were Jan and Jon (pronounced yaan and yoon). I could never manage the subtleties to properly pronounce their names and hence referred to them as the Swedish Wonder Twins. One had blond hair, blue eyes, and a jawline to make Brad Pitt jealous. The other was dark-haired and brooding and seemed to always be in some exotic location shooting Chanel campaigns.

For his part Tobias had been a juggler, a tightrope walker, a fire-breather, an importer of Moroccan smoking pipes, and a free postcard entrepreneur and had even “done time” in Sweden for drunk driving. All by the age of twenty-three. Now he was earning a living wearing elephant masks and g-strings on the stage of the world’s most famous cabaret—the absurdity of which was completely, and endearingly, lost on him.

When summer rolled around, Tobias would talk incessantly of the beauty of his homeland, eventually convincing a troupe of us—including the Showgirl and me—to travel to the Swedish countryside, where his parents had a cabin. Jointly owned by his father Kent and his uncle Bent, the cabin was spectacularly located by a lake in a picture-postcard Scandinavian pine forest. Tobias had thoughtfully invited the Swedish Wonder Twins, plus two Brazilian male models with whom he happened to be sharing his apartment that month, plus their Australian male model friend. Suffice it to say, when it came time to strip down and swim in the lake, I feigned an earache and opted to stay safely clothed on shore.

Complementing the troupe of Lido male dancers were a handful of taciturn Russians. Direct from the Kirov Ballet, they had come to dance cabaret in Paris because it paid better and offered an official escape route from the dreariness of life in the former Soviet Union. The Russian boys were uniformly mute and would utter only a monosyllabic da in response to any question. Except for Alexei, who hailed from the Black Sea. Alexei loved to talk, and though he had a heart of gold, he had the memory of a goldfish. He was especially bad at remembering names and hence called everyone “darling”—which, delivered in a thick Russian accent, was actually quite charming.

Upon arriving in Paris, Alexei and his partner Michael had bought a cat. When their feline started to develop mobility problems, they took him to the vet.

“And wouldn’t you know it, darling,” he later explained to the Showgirl. “It turns out our little Plushka has acute arthritis, kidney failure, two hips which do not work, and as if this isn’t bad enough, is a hermaphrodite. Apparently he has both sets of sex organs. And his knees they bend to the side, darling!” Suffice it to say, with so much stacked against him/her, Plushka gave up the ghost early in his/her life. Small mercies, and all that.

Part of this heady backstage mix were a few intracast relationships, one of which saw a male Lido dancer dump his Moulin Rouge boyfriend to start dating a Lido showgirl. There was never a dull moment. That the Showgirl managed to survive eight years in Paris (four at the Moulin and now four at the Lido) without becoming a complete freak was testament to the fact that underneath the sequins and feathers, a sensible head sat atop her lovely shoulders.

My budding relationship with the Showgirl, and the fact that I had met many of the crew that made up the Lido cast during long evenings of extracurricular drinking, made me an honorary member of the Lido family. While waiting for the Showgirl at the stage door, postperformance, I would chirrup my hellos and dispense French-style double-cheek kisses to what seemed like a constant flow of beauties. Russians, Americans, English, Australians, French, and Dutch—they would pour out the door, greet me with a smile of recognition, and peck me on the cheek before being spirited off into the night by a waiting taxi, husband, or boyfriend. That I could barely tell one from the other, so tall and uniformly striking were they, seemed not to register with them. By cunningly employing a rolling series of noncommittal greetings—including “Hey, how are you!” and “Good to see you—did you have a good show?”—I was usually able to bluff my way out of most potentially embarrassing situations.

One night I stood at the stage door with a male buddy who was keen to meet a Creature of the Night of his very own. He hovered expectantly at my ear as the parade of air-kissing began.

“Who was that?” he would whisper insistently after another beauty fielded my inane “Have a good show?” inquiry before disappearing into the night.

“Absolutely no idea,” I would respond.

“And that one? What’s her name?” he would ask, after I had spent five minutes discussing in detail a tall blond dancer’s imminent plan to leave the Lido to perform on a cruise ship.

“Couldn’t tell you.”

But if the family into which I had been happily drawn was a sprawling and relatively dysfunctional one, and though its members were difficult to tell apart, there was no denying that it was a family in which everyone truly looked out for one another. Thrust as they all were into a topsy-turvy lifestyle, most of which was played out at night, and forced to spend most of their waking hours in one another’s company, the dancers enjoyed a distinct camaraderie. Together they weathered one another’s ups and downs, celebrated special occasions, and helped each other navigate the maze of daily life in Paris. Their network of mutual support spread beyond the dressing room of the Lido and into their daily lives.

What that meant, among other things, was that if a showgirl went away on vacation, she could expect her plants to be watered, her mail to be collected, and her pets to be minded. Even if that pet happened to be Harry.