All Blood Runs Red

by Phil Keith

  LE GRAND DUC

  Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith was her given name, but because of a thick shock of bright red hair, she was more commonly known as “Bricktop.” Another woman would become Eugene Bullard’s wedded wife, but Bricktop, the enormously talented singer and dancer became, for many years, his “business wife.” Their relationship was always turbulent yet it was also enduring.

  Ada’s doting mother was born a slave in 1861, and Ada came along in West Virginia in 1894. Ada’s father was an Irishman, which is how she came by the red hair and freckles. “A smallish man, slightly hunchbacked,” he ran a barbershop that catered only to white people—somewhat puzzling given that his wife was not. He died when Ada was young, and she and her mother plus three siblings relocated to Chicago. Ada was educated in integrated schools and did well academically, but her natural talent was with her music. Her singing was so astonishingly good that it garnered invitations, at the tender age of sixteen, for her to perform in some of Chicago’s chicest clubs.

  Bricktop’s big break came when she was hired to perform at the Cabaret de Champion, owned by Jack Johnson. “He was a wonderful man,” she recalled about the boxer, learning only years later of Johnson’s connection to Eugene Bullard. “When he hit the door of the place at night, the millionaires from Lake Shore Drive and everybody else would be screaming, ‘Jack, come over here!’ He would just stand there with his big, wonderful self and say he’d be right over. Sooner or later he’d hit all the tables, having a drink at each. He never drank anything but champagne.”

  Through the World War I years and immediately afterward, Bricktop worked many of the popular clubs in the Windy City: “Those days were great days for entertainers in Chicago,” she often said.

  Alberta Hunter was becoming noticed for her blues singing. The great trumpet player King Oliver came up from New Orleans, and after he had established himself, he brought along a trumpet-playing protégé named Louis Armstrong. Bricktop worked with a dancer named Bill Robinson, soon to be known to millions of cinema goers as “Mister Bojangles.”

  After Chicago, she performed at clubs in Los Angeles and San Francisco and ended up staying in California from 1919 to 1922. She fell in love there with a man named Walter, but left him when he couldn’t kick a heroin habit. Bricktop returned to Chicago, but the enactment of Prohibition had tossed nightlife on the rocks. A visiting club owner named Barron DeWare Wilkins offered her a job in New York City, and Bricktop leaped at it.

  “It was 1922 and Harlem was really jumping,” she recalled in her autobiography. “Harlem was the ‘in’ place to go for music and booze, and it seemed like every other building on or near Seventh Avenue from 130th Street to 140th was a club or a speakeasy.”

  Bricktop sang at her patron’s place, Barron’s Exclusive Club, and among those who had gigs there, too, was the comedian Frankie Fay, the singer Al Jolson, and a chorus girl named Lucille LeSueur, who would later find Hollywood stardom as Joan Crawford. Regular patrons included the actor John Barrymore, the gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, the composer Cole Porter, and the young bandleader Duke Ellington.

  While Bricktop was performing a guest gig at a club in Washington DC, in 1924, a black entertainer named Sammy Richardson sought her out. His message: come to Paris, an audience waits for you there. The timing could not have been better. About to turn thirty, Bricktop was ready for a new adventure. She booked passage on an ocean liner to Europe and was told a man named Eugene Bullard would be greeting her when she arrived.

  The timing was good for another reason: people in Paris were going crazy for black performers from America. In early 1924, there was only a handful, including Richardson, a piano player; plus a cornet player nicknamed Gut Bucket; and a singer named Florence Jones. The latter had been performing in a nightclub called Le Grand Duc but had just announced she was going to switch to a better-paying gig at another club. Bricktop was recruited to Paris because she was black and she was wanted at Le Grand Duc and she was an attractive and proven entertainer.

  She gave up her longtime association with Barron’s Executive Club at the right moment, and her departure from Wilkins would be the last time Bricktop would see him. There was mounting competition among the bootleggers trying to control the Harlem trade. One night in May 1924, Wilkins received a shipment of tainted booze and refused to pay for it. Tempers flared, and soon after, Wilkins was shot to death by a junkie named Yellow Charleston. Seven hundred mourners walked through the streets of Harlem for Wilkins’s funeral, but soon thereafter, the Executive Club shut down.

  Bullard’s success at Zelli’s, where he observed how much money Joe Zelli himself was raking in, made it inevitable that he would want to emulate his mentor and run his own club. In the spring of 1924, Bullard moved in that direction, leaving Zelli’s and relocating a few doors away at Le Grand Duc (“The Great Duke”). This spot had opened a few years prior under the stewardship of the French entrepreneur George Jamerson who reportedly had ties to nefarious types involved with local prostitution, drugs, smuggling, and “protection.” The name of the club, which Bullard retained to maintain its clientele, referred to an era some thirty years in the past when French nobility was known for club crawling at all hours of the night.

  There is some question as to whether Bullard actually owned the club or simply managed the property. It may have belonged to someone else—with Jamerson still involved, quietly—and Gene simply performing the duties of maître d’, talent scout, and accounts manager. He acted as if he owned it, and always wrote and claimed that he did. Like many municipal records from this period (and the 1930s) scads were destroyed in the coming war, and so there is no official means of confirming ownership.

  It had actually been Bullard who had tasked Sammy Richardson with recruiting Bricktop to come to Le Grand Duc. Ownership issues aside, Bullard ran the place, and it was his responsibility to book a new act to replace Florence Jones. He had heard about the talented redhead from American ex-pats who were beginning to frequent Le Grand Duc.

  Knowing the scheduled arrival date of Bricktop’s ship, Bullard took a little time away from his duties to travel to Le Havre to welcome her. He found a woman desperate to regain her “land legs.”

  “It had taken eleven miserable days,” was how the seasick passenger described her journey on the steamship America. “I was so happy to see land again that I knew conquering Paris had to be easier than getting there.”

  They would go about conquering Paris together. Bricktop’s first impression of Bullard was of a “tall, handsome American Negro,” and she liked him immediately: “He was so self-assured, and I needed to be with somebody who knew what he was doing.”1

  They took the boat train from Le Havre back to Paris. On the way, they emptied the bottle of champagne Bullard had brought along. In the City of Light, he checked Bricktop into a hotel and then they headed to 52 rue Pigalle. Her first impression of Le Grand Duc was not as positive as the one of Bullard. They walked into a small room with twelve tables and a tiny bar. “My, this is a nice little bar,” Bricktop said, smiling. “Now where’s the cabaret?”

  “This is the cabaret,” Bullard replied. “This is Le Grand Duc.”

  Bricktop burst into tears. Back in Harlem, she had been backed up by a twelve-piece band. She had come all the way to Paris to perform in something like a closet? She couldn’t control her disappointment...until a black busboy emerged from the back, who said, “You need something to eat.” He led her to the kitchen and prepared some food and assured Bricktop that she would like Paris and especially Le Grand Duc. This act of kindness made her feel much better.

  The busboy was a young ex-cook and tramp steamer sailor named Langston Hughes. Bullard had hired the twenty-two-year-old a few months earlier not knowing, of course, that he would go on to great fame as a poet, playwright, and novelist. Hughes would become well-known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of African Amer
ican art, music, and literature that took place in the late 1920s and ’30s. In Paris, however, he was simply a wanderer, having recently departed the ship that had employed him as a crewman as it meandered along the west coasts of Europe and Africa.

  Hughes wrote about his carefree days in Paris, including Eugene Bullard and Le Grand Duc, in his 1940 best-selling autobiography, The Big Sea. Bullard was always proud of his mention in the book. Like many writers before 1924 and since, Hughes found Paris to be an inspiration. While washing pots and pans in the tiny kitchen of Le Grand Duc, he listened to the singers (soon to include Bricktop) and musicians until the club closed at dawn. Hughes had a room in a tall old house near the Place Clichy. After catching some sleep, he sat at the window overlooking the chimneys of Paris and worked on his poems, influenced by the view and the jazz music still reverberating in his head.

  It was during his stint at Le Grand Duc that Vanity Fair sent him $24.50 to publish three of his poems. It was the first time Hughes had been paid for his writing. Despite Bullard promoting him to “waiter,” Hughes believed his best prospects would be back in America as a poet. He found a job as a deckhand on a ship going to New York, and he left Paris and Le Grand Duc behind in late 1924.

  Parisians found Bricktop to be a stunning talent with her singing and marvelous dancing. Soon, she began to draw even more enthusiastic crowds to Le Grand Duc than her predecessor (the aforementioned Florence Jones). Bullard had to turn people away on many nights. The size of the room was indeed a drawback. It had an odd triangular shape with a narrow doorway fanning out to a dance floor and stage, surrounded by tables and banquettes against the walls. In fairness, none of the Montmartre clubs, even the most popular ones of that era, were very large. Le Grand Duc could, perhaps, cram in two hundred people at a time, though most would have to stand.

  Le Grand Duc had struggled to be profitable ever since its 1921 opening under Jamerson. It continued to lurch ahead, even with Bullard and Bricktop at the helm. He had to beg for talent, and couldn’t pay full price, at first, but several well-known names came forward and performed for free because Bullard had helped them get their starts when he was doing the hiring at Zelli’s. Thus, he was able to headline the great jazz drummer Buddy Gilmore and the bandleader and singer Arthur “Dooley” Wilson.

  Wilson had his own band in the 1920s, a group called the Red Devils. Though predominantly a singer and drummer, he is, today, best known for his piano playing. He was cast as the piano player in the immortal 1942 film Casablanca. Dooley was “Sam” of “Play it again, Sam” fame though, in reality, that specific line was never uttered in the film by any character—not Humphrey Bogart, not Ingrid Bergman, not anyone.2 Wilson did not even play the piano. In the movie, he does sing the famous song “As Time Goes By,” but his piano playing was performed by Eliot Carpenter, with Wilson emulating Carpenter’s piano strokes, which he could see a few feet away and behind the cameras.

  As Le Grand Duc began to pick up momentum, thanks to gratis performances from famous jazz greats and Bricktop’s magic, the club started to blossom with a list of famous attendees, a virtual “Who’s Who” of Paris cabaret habitués from the 1920s. There was Jack Dean and Fannie Ward, an acting couple of great fame who had starred in several silent movies, most directed by the legendary Cecil B. DeMille. Another frequent patron was Nancy Cunard, heiress to the Cunard steamship fortune. She was also a sometime poet and lover of many, including Aldous Huxley and Ezra Pound, and muse to others, including Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray, and James Joyce. Another patron was the young composer and playwright Noel Coward.

  Also squeezing into Le Grand Duc was Anita Loos, the screenwriter, actress, playwright, and author perhaps best known for her comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The Dolly Sisters, Rose and Jenny, were identical twin sisters, born in Hungary, both actors and dancers with a proclivity for rich men, thereby earning them the label of the “Million Dollar Dollies.” A performer who would sub for Bricktop from time to time was Mabel Mercer, the cabaret singer with a velvet voice. Her greatest fan would be a young crooner by the name of Frank Sinatra.

  It was not unusual for Bullard to greet Sophie Tucker at the club’s front door. The Ukrainian-born comedian, actress, and radio personality, who became the “Last of the Red Hot Mammas,” was known as a great supporter of up-and-coming black entertainers. Whenever Charlie Chaplin was in Paris, which was often, he could be found at Le Grand Duc. The same could be said for Gloria Swanson, emerging as one of Hollywood’s brightest film stars. Gloria was extremely popular with the Grand Duc crowd, having made several French-themed films and marrying a French Marquis, Henri de la Falaise (her third husband). Another silent film star patron was Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle—until his career was overcome by scandal for an alleged rape and murder of a young Hollywood starlet.

  Perhaps the most intriguing customer of all was Edward Windsor, Prince of Wales. He even sat in with the orchestra on several occasions, as he was an accomplished jazz drummer. He would break into a broad grin when two of his favorite young performers stopped by, Fred and Adele Astaire. The brother and sister had triumphed in London in 1924 starring in George and Ira Gershwin’s Lady, Be Good. Side trips to Paris had to include Le Grand Duc, when patrons would push tables up against the walls to make room for an impromptu dance by the Astaires.3

  * * *

  1 “Tall” to describe Gene might have been a matter of perspective, as he was barely 5’11”.

  2 “Play it again, Sam,” was said in a movie, but not until 1972 when a Herb Ross–directed film with that title, based on a Broadway play written by Woody Allen and produced three years earlier, was released.

  3 As it turned out, Fred Astaire would portray the dancer and aviator Vernon Castle, with Ginger Rogers as his wife, in the 1949 film The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle.

  13

  “GRAND” GOLDEN YEARS

  For Langston Hughes, toiling as a dishwasher in the tiny kitchen at Le Grand Duc, acclaim as a major American writer lay in the future. But in the mid-and late 1920s, there were plenty of emerging and established literary lights who came in through the front door.

  One of them was Ernest Hemingway. As he chronicled in his late-life memoir A Moveable Feast, he and his (first) wife, Hadley, and their baby son Jack, who they called “Bumby,”1 were poor but otherwise happy expatriates in Paris. Hemingway was working on short stories that would soon be published in the United States as a collection entitled In Our Time. He was simultaneously working on a full-length manuscript that would attract a lot more attention, the 1926 blockbuster novel The Sun Also Rises.

  Despite their precarious finances, the Hemingways scraped together enough francs often enough to become regulars at the cafés and nightclubs. They also took summer vacations in Spain and winter skiing excursions in the Alps. Hemingway always returned with fresh eyes for his adopted city. He wrote, after an excursion in 1925, “When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely. The city had accommodated itself to winter, there was good wood for sale at the wood and coal place across our street, and there were braziers outside of many of the good cafés so that you could keep warm on the terraces. Now you were accustomed to see the bare trees against the sky and you walked on the fresh-washed gravel paths through the Luxembourg gardens in the clear sharp wind.”2

  Hemingway’s acquaintances were Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and others involved in advancing literature from beyond the days of Henry James and Mark Twain. When not at the cafés, Hemingway and many of his writer friends frequented Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop owned by Sylvia Beach, who had taken a huge risk in 1922 by publishing Joyce’s groundbreaking Ulysses.

  Although unnamed, Bullard always took great pride in what Hemingway wrote about him in The Sun Also Rises: “At Zelli’s, a black, southern-accented drummer sings and exchanges pleasantries with Lady Brett Ashley, who acknowledges to Jake Ba
rnes, the novel’s protagonist, ‘He’s a great friend of mine.’”

  For Bullard’s nightclub, however, another writer outshone even the stellar Hemingway. As Bricktop recalled, “What made the difference was that the Montparnasse crowd of writers discovered Le Grand Duc, led by F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

  Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were also American expatriates, and during these years he was newly famous for the novel considered his greatest work, The Great Gatsby. When the Fitzgeralds first entered Le Grand Duc in the fall of 1925, “Scott was almost thirty, but he acted like a big, overgrown kid,” Bricktop observed. “He was so mischievous, he’d take over the whole place. It was impossible not to like him. He was a little boy in a man’s body.”

  The Fitzgeralds also had a young child at home, so on many occasions Scott came to the club by himself or with friends, without Zelda. He tended to drink copiously and there were times when Bullard or Bricktop had to help him get home. He was a generous tipper, and Bullard was glad to see him because many of Fitzgerald’s friends also enjoyed champagne and could easily afford it.

  Another notable who became a regular at Le Grand Duc was the songwriter and former Barron’s patron Cole Porter. He, too, had wealthy and influential friends, and where Porter went, they followed. Porter owned a home in Paris and spent as much time as he could there during the 1920s when taking breaks from his frenetic Broadway schedule. The first night he entered Le Grand Duc, Bricktop happened to be performing, at that very moment, one of his songs, “I’m In Love Again.” Porter fell head over heels for Bricktop’s style and her dancing. It was the beginning of a long association and Porter was instrumental in Bricktop being able to open her own club a few years later.

  During that heady decade the famous names who found their way or were led to Le Grand Duc were legion, but there was one more that must be added to make the story complete: Josephine Baker.