Chapter 37
Allez, Allez Lido!
AS THE BLACK CURTAIN draws back and the band strikes up, she floats down a set of mirrored stairs, swathed in an 18,000-euro ostrich-feather coat. A tall, stylized crown of diamanté sits atop her head and glitters under the spotlight. Striding center stage, she pulls open the coat and, with arms outstretched, glides toward the audience. A necklace of jewels cascades over perfectly formed breasts. A belt of tiny white rhinestones spills over hourglass hips. Legs that seem to go forever lead up to that smile, that wonderful, infectious smile. She is infused with the joy of dance. Her body moves with effortless grace. Each movement is a fluid, sensual celebration of the human form, of music and beauty.
I sit in the darkened auditorium, my eyes glued to her. To watch her on stage is truly inspirational. The auditorium is full tonight, and the audience is breathless, mesmerized by her every move.
The music builds to a crescendo, and massive pieces of elaborate set pull back to reveal forty-five dancing girls, each sporting a barely there mirror-mosaic dress, a golden sequin-encrusted hat, impressively high heels, and a backpack with a huge spray of purple and black feathers. They move as one downstage, envelop the Showgirl with their feathers, and in a rolling series of high kicks and precision turns, spin on their heels and strike a long-legged pose. The stage is a riot of gaudy color, a heady confection of sequins, feathers, legs, and smiles. The audience is on its feet, applauding wildly. There are now sixty dancers on stage and almost a thousand people in the auditorium. But as far as I am concerned, there are only two of us in the room tonight. As the song hits its final high note, a phalanx of burly Russian male dancers thrusts her up into the air. Hovering in midair, she looks my way, catches my eye, and gives me the subtlest of winks. My heart soars.
THE LIDO DE PARIS is widely considered the most prestigious cabaret revue in the world. In the heady, albeit rarefied, sphere of international cabaret, it is the granddaddy of them all. If Paris created the revue format, the Lido has perfected it, setting the standards by which all similar shows—be they in Las Vegas, Seoul, Shanghai, or up the road at Montmartre—are measured. In years gone by the Lido was the venue du choix for a tuxedo-and tafetta-wearing jet set. For a good thirty years after its opening in 1946, a night spent quaffing Champagne in a candlelit booth at the Lido was considered the height of international sophistication.
These days the venue plays host mostly to French families on a special night out, middle-aged couples up from the country on a once-in-a-lifetime visit to the nation’s most prestigious cabaret, Eurostarring Brits across for a night of Champs Elysées glamour, dodgy Russian businessmen with busty blondes in tow, and busload upon busload of Korean, Japanese, and Indian tourists. Though the clientele has changed over the years and the venue has become decidedly less exclusive, the Lido remains a proud part of the French national heritage. Tell a French person you work as a Lido dancer, and they will almost bend over double in reverence. Tell them you are going out with a Lido dancer, and they marvel out loud at your incredible good fortune.
“Les Bluebells,” as female Lido dancers are called (after the iconic former ballet mistress, Madame Bluebell), are considered to be the quintessence of Parisian sexy chic. As a result, Lido girls enjoy a mild kind of celebrity in Paris—which they are generally happy to assume, especially when it means special service at restaurants, line-jumping at nightclubs, and rarely having to pay for a drink at a bar. Their status is certainly not hindered by the fact that most Lido dancers spend the better part of each night on stage in a state of semi-undress.
As one of several revue shows in Paris, the Lido de Paris features a line of dancing girls who perform topless. The Showgirl was among them. So I had to become accustomed to the fact that my new girlfriend made her living by dancing every night, twice a night, with her breasts exposed to a room of up to two thousand strangers. But I have never been the jealous type, and—not to put too fine a point on it—the Showgirl had spectacular breasts that frankly deserved a standing ovation every night.
Besides, in the context of the Lido spectacle, and presented as they were draped in jewels and swathed in feathers, breasts were about the least noteworthy aspect of the Lido show. Okay, perhaps that’s overstating it a little. A stage full of beautiful, leggy women with exposed breasts is noteworthy no matter what the context. But in France, where an exposed buttock and set of breasts are routinely used to advertise yogurt on the sides of buses, a high-end revue at an esteemed cabaret venue on the respectable Champs Elysées in which a few women in elaborate feathered costumes just happen to have their tops off is actually considered quite tame.
Moreover, unlike people in more prurient countries, the French have always been very comfortable with the female form. They are neither offended nor threatened by the naked female body. For them, cabaret is a proud form of artistic expression, one that has been simultaneously celebrating the joy of dance and the beauty of the female physique for centuries. And as the French explain patiently to the sniggering ranks of titillated tourists who come to see cabaret shows: they are breasts—more than half the world has them. Get over it.
“But doesn’t it make you feel strange?” people would often ask me.
“To have your girlfriend dancing topless in front of so many people every night?”
Strange, never. Proud, always. And if that sounded odd, I would defy them to watch the Showgirl dance and not be moved by the beauty of it. Her every move on stage was executed with studied poise. The tilt of her head, the flourish of her hand, the flick of her heel. The choreography seemed to start somewhere in her soul, then pass like a wave through her body before finally being released in a carefully poised extremity. One continuous, graceful movement segued smoothly into another. On stage the Showgirl would nightly make the improbable look effortless, the physically demanding appear graceful, and the excruciating seem elegant.
Excruciating it sometimes was. For make no mistake, beyond the glamour there was grind. The Lido is open 365 nights a year. The dancers perform two shows a night, six nights a week. The first show starts at 9:30, and the second starts at 11:30, finishing at 1:30 a.m. The revue in which the Showgirl danced, Bonheur, had cost more than nine million euros to stage. The costumes alone cost three million euros. Because of the size of this investment, Bonheur was scheduled to run at least five years to recoup costs.
The female dancers perform in four-inch heels, often wearing feathered backpacks weighing up to twenty pounds and headgear weighing up to ten pounds. Because they high-kick on the same leg every show, twice a night, six nights a week, they often suffer ankle and knee injuries from the repetitive strain. Backs and necks are creaky, hips and hamstrings are strained, and bodies are bruised from being lifted awkwardly by enormous Russian dance partners. Their lives—and jobs—are not unlike those of professional athletes. And like professional athletes, they expect similarly brief careers. Pushed to extreme physical limits in the execution of their daily work, suffering injuries as a matter of course, most dancers stay on stage only until their mid-thirties, when fatigue and injury force them off.
As a principal dancer and “swing,” the Showgirl was one of only a handful of cast members who knew how to perform all eighteen of the different female roles in the show—and regularly did so without so much as batting a false eyelash (a fact that never ceased to amaze me). For her, each night on stage was different from the one before. One night she was the featured principal dancer; the next she was a Bluebell in the chorus line. In recognition of her seniority and star quality, she even regularly replaced the singer, striding about the stage as the star of the show.
This variety helped keep her fresh, but she and the majority of her colleagues still had to step into the spotlight each night and perform the same show, every night, twice a night, for up to five years. Their challenge was to maintain enthusiasm, to dance each night as if it were their first. The task was made all the more onerous by the sight of Korean tourists slumbering in the front row. As any showgirl will tell you, herniating the disks in one’s back on a nightly basis for the entertainment of snoring Koreans can sometimes prove a little disheartening.
It wasn’t that they needed a riotously applauding audience each night. They didn’t need to be showered with long-stemmed roses during each curtain call. But audiences that had the courtesy to stay awake, or at the very least not snore loudly during some of the show’s quieter moments, were considered infinitely more pleasant to perform for. And it wasn’t as if the show was boring. All the impressive sets, fancy costumes, and energetic dance performances—not to mention breasts—gave plenty to keep audiences on the edge of their seats.
And even occasionally off the edge of their seats.
During one matinee performance near Christmas the Showgirl was distracted from her onstage exertions by the sight of four waiters carrying the slumped form of an elderly gentleman through the auditorium toward the exit. We later learned that the old fella’s heart had given out midway through the Lido spectacle. He was watching the show with his wife, having received tickets from their children for their golden wedding anniversary. The couple had traveled to Paris from their tiny provincial village in southern France to realize a long-held dream, to see the Lido de Paris, and it had all proven too much. At least for the husband it proved too much. But that wasn’t going to stop the wife from enjoying the show. As her partner of fifty years was extracted from the seat next to her, she sat tight in her chair, refusing to budge until the revue was over. She was later overheard telling bemused maître d’s and ambulance men that after waiting all those years and traveling all that way, she was not going to miss the end of the show.
The Lido creates a little bit of quintessentially Paris magic on stage each night. For those sitting in the auditorium, it offers up a world of grace, poise, and glamour, a trip back to a gentler, more elegant age. But step backstage at the Lido during a performance (as I had the unmitigated pleasure of doing on several occasions), and you found yourself in a whole other world. Down in the dressing rooms before the show, body makeup is slapped on with a common garden-variety sponge, of the type usually reserved for car washing. Fake eyelashes are applied to eyelids using Copydex wood modeling glue, apparently the sworn favorite of showgirls and drag queens everywhere. In fact, seen close up, full showgirl makeup looks not unlike that sported by drag queens. So bright were the stage lights, the gunk had to be applied with a trowel to give the desired glamour-puss effect.
On stage, and with the spotlights upon them, showgirls are elegance personified. They perform each carefully choreographed move with grace and delicacy. The second they step out of the glare of the spotlight, however, they become instantly ungainly and rambunctious. They clump off stage like a herd of frenzied, sequined giraffes. Dressers stand ready to collect the hats, feathers, and backpacks they discard as they gallop—in four-inch heels—to the dressing rooms, where another team of dressers waits to help them into whatever outlandish costumes the show requires next.
Remarkably enough, despite the thunder of hooves and the blaring of music, each showgirl is so adapted to her environment that she is capable of maintaining an uninterrupted flow of conversation with her colleagues, whether on stage or off, from the second the curtain goes up to the minute it comes down. They talk about where they had their legs waxed that day, problems they are having with their boyfriends, advice on how to fill out a tax form, plus whatever gossip and chitchat has filtered up from the dressing rooms below. And they continue these conversations on stage, while they are performing a series of complicated dance steps.
“Did you manage to fill out your tax return?” Step, ball change.
“No, not yet. I’m going to ask François to take a look at it.” Double pirouette, turn, and smile.
“Are you two still seeing each other? I thought you’d dumped him.” Turn, two, three, four.
“I did. Well, I will. Once he’s helped me with my tax return.” Prepare, pull up, back bend, and pose.
No topic of conversation is too banal. No language is too bawdy. And since the dancers hail from more than twenty different countries, at any given moment during the show the backstage area echoes with obscenities exclaimed in four different languages.
Witnessing a stream of obscenities pour from the perfectly painted mouth of an otherworldly creature, taller than your average Amazon woman and dressed as a pink feathered pompom, is nothing short of surreal. Even more surreal is to find yourself in conversation with one of them during a lull in onstage proceedings.
During one of my backstage sorties, while researching the much-talked-about article I had finally found a magazine to commission, I was approached repeatedly by dancers whom I had met socially through Shay. Dancers, I hasten to add, who each time I had interacted with them previously had been fully clothed. As they stood there making small talk in their sequined g-string and not much else—their unusual height and four-inch heels conspiring to ensure that my eyes were exactly at breast level—it was all I could do to concentrate on the conversation at hand.
Maintain eye contact! Maintain eye contact! I thought to myself over and over, nodding politely as they explained to me where they had been on vacation the week before.
This was the thing about Paris showgirls. Because they did what they did every night, six nights a week, they saw nothing even remotely unusual about their job. They were dancers; the Lido was a regular job and a prestigious gig to boot. Some people wore suits, sat at a computer, and sent e-mails for a living. They just happened to wear sequins and feathers and high-kick their hearts out.
Down in the dressing rooms they were surprisingly unpretentious. Contrary to popular expectation, the dressing-room camaraderie among dancers was considerable. Sure the Showgirl would occasionally return home with tales of backbiting and bitchiness, but for the most part the cast comprised one big, happy, well-fed family. And while you might expect that they passed the time between shows (the entr’acte) touching up their makeup, replying to sacks of unsolicited love letters, or checking the number of carats in the diamond trinket sent by a love-struck Romanian prince, what they really did was eat. A lot. Indeed, despite their amazing physiques—or perhaps, infuriatingly for other women, because of the metabolisms that went with those physiques—the human species Showgirlis heightus maximus appeared able to eat more than most mere mortals. Every cast member’s birthday was marked with a dressing-room party, for which each dancer baked or bought an edible treat. These twenty-minute eating marathons invariably involved more cakes, chips, dips, cheese, chocolates, cookies, quiches, and pastries than you could poke a size-ten waistline at. And with a cast of sixty, there was usually a birthday every week, meaning the Showgirl seemed to be constantly tripping off to work with a plate of her signature homemade, all-butter, pink-iced cupcakes. A showgirl is weighed when she starts dancing at the Lido and is thereafter contractually obliged to neither gain nor lose more than five pounds during the period of her contract, but your average dancer would rather give up breathing than go on a diet.
During the early months of our courtship, the Showgirl and I would make semiregular visits to the Cloche d’Or, an all-night eatery in Montmartre that caters to a strictly showbiz clientele. Given that it was usually around two a.m., I tended to opt for something light and easy to digest, in full expectation that I would be lying horizontal in the next two hours. If the Showgirl was feeling peckish, she’d settle for an oven-baked Camembert as her entrée, followed by a confit du canard with potato dauphinois. If she was feeling ravenous, she’d tack on a crème brûlée for dessert. At another of my favorite late-night watering holes, Le Tambour, the Showgirl would turn up after work, take her place at the table of whatever drunken reprobates I happened to be consorting with that night, and promptly order a steak frites with Roquefort sauce. I used to sit and watch her devour her food in amazed admiration. A red-meat-scarfing, red-wine-guzzling gastronome trapped inside a Paris showgirl body. What was not to love?
Somehow, between the two cabaret shows a night, the two a.m. finishes, and my nominal nine-to-five existence, our courtship continued along its merry way. It was an essentially nocturnal affair, played out under the neon lights and rain-slicked streets of early morning Paris. It was unorthodox in the extreme, but not without its own unique romance.
BACK IN THE AUDITORIUM, the show is drawing to a close. As I sit sipping Champagne, watching my beloved do her job with strength, pride, and obvious joy, it occurs to me how extraordinarily lucky I am. And then, as if reading my thoughts, and just before she makes her entrance to perform the show’s signature love songs, she fires off a quick text message.
This one’s for you Curly.
Minutes later I watch her make her entrance and slink slowly downstage in a figure-hugging red-sequin dress. Finding her mark, she steps into the spotlight, seeks me out in the darkness, makes eye contact, and smiles, then sings:
Amoureuse,
Je me perds dans le bleu de tes yeux,
Amoureuse de tes mains, tes cheveux
Plus je te vois, et plus je te veux
Amoureuse
Si tu m’aimes, sur les quais de la Seine à Paris
Dans tes bras jusqu’au bout de la nuit
Toi et moi ensemble pour la vie
Si tu m’aimes.
It’s a song about love. About lovers in Paris, and how love found in Paris lasts forever. And I know it is a song written for the show. And I know if it were any cheesier, the Frogs would have long ago packaged it up and exported it with great success. And yet in that quiet moment in the dark, I let myself imagine that the song was written just for us. That she is singing it to me, declaring her love in a blaze of high-kitsch cabaret glory. And I feel like the luckiest man on the planet.