Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  The people whom this man lived with, slept with, his wife, the men and women he thought he knew—he hadn’t known them at all. They were still killing and cooking and eating human beings!

  The truth was too much for him. He went crazy. Disintegrated completely. Hallucinations, raving, the naked sprint through downtown Singapore at high noon on a weekday. Two months in the local jail. The family savings squandered on shipping him home from Asia.

  At least he blackmailed his former tribe into bringing their masks to the boat.

  Even now, he has attacks. Some days are better than others. Some days he remembers less.

  Picasso finished his story. He said, “Lionel, what’s that cut over your eye?”

  “Is it bleeding?” I asked. It bled like a statue of a miracle-saint whenever I got excited or drank. I’d been beaten up by some right-wing hoodlums outside the Chameleon Club. I’d gotten fed up with the jingoistic floor show that whipped the crowd into a joyous frenzy. Even in a cross-dressers’ club, where you might not expect it.

  One night I decided I’d had enough and staged a little personal protest. I shouted that a chorus line was no better than a military parade. Like soldiers, the dancers were puppets who had lost their souls. And that phony slut of a mermaid never had a soul to begin with! As I was escorted out onto the street, I told my friends I’d see them later.

  A half block from club, three thugs were leaning against a wall. The only question was how bad it was going to be. All in all, it wasn’t so bad. A few kicks, and we were done. Mild, as warnings go. Even so, the message was clear: don’t screw up again.

  I explained all this to Picasso. I got the sense that he already knew about it. Maybe that was why he’d told the cannibal story.

  He said, “The French are cannibals. Those Malays or whoever they are have nothing on the French. You can live with them and admire their food and culture and fall in love with their women. But finally they are Frenchmen. And finally you are not.”

  Picasso said that he and I, an American and a Spaniard, were the same to the French. They would eat us when they get hungry, when there was no one younger or juicier around to braise with carrots and red wine.

  Picasso was a celebrity with important, powerful friends. He’d just had a major retrospective. No matter what, he would be safe. The cannibals wouldn’t eat him. No one was going to kick him to the curb outside the Chameleon Club. Whereas I was a defenseless turtle without a shell. The French could boil me into a broth and slurp me down for breakfast. Sure, I had the American embassy, but to them I was fish food.

  Picasso said, “That’s how the French are. Like everyone else, only worse.”

  He said he hoped they left the Jews in peace, for the obvious humanitarian reasons and also for selfish ones. All his dealers were Jewish.

  I told him, “Let’s hope for the best. After all, Pablo, don’t forget. This is the land of Baudelaire, of Rimbaud and Rodin!”

  Picasso took out his pen and drew a few lines on his napkin. Then a few more lines. I watched the image take shape.

  It was a guillotine.

  He showed me the guillotine, and we laughed.

  “That too,” I said. “I know.”

  “Cannibals,” said Picasso. “It’s almost dawn. I’m tired. I’m going home.”

  I wish I’d taken the napkin. He probably would have let me. Though maybe he wouldn’t, by then. He’d already gotten careful. He folded up the napkin and put it in his pocket.

  In any case, this isn’t primarily a story about Picasso, though I would like to thank him for the detail of the guillotine. I’m grateful for the drawing that I could have taken and have taken, but only in words on the page. Words, which turn out to be worth so much less than a scribble on a napkin. I could have been a millionaire if I’d picked up that drawing and sold it and invested the money.

  I’ve included this anecdote only to give my readers a sense of the conversations we had as we neared the end of those brilliant, insomniac nights in Paris.

  Yvonne

  THAT FIRST DAY at the choreographer’s studio, when the little slut asked permission to sing a song about a mermaid, Yvonne thought, Why not? The girl was cute. The customers were excited by her and the sexy boyfriend who smelled like cheese and couldn’t hold his liquor.

  Sometimes the crowd still clamored for Yvonne to perform. But she had stopped singing completely. She spared her customers the rasping crow’s caw roughened by cigarettes, spared herself the reminder of the widening gap between her current self and the woman whose lovers had sailed into her arms and back out to sea. She learned to live without the adoration of the crowd, and without the grief of the crowd, mourning her dead sailor. She never even sang to herself, when she was alone, to see if, by some miracle, the damage had been reversed. If she counted her losses, which she tried not to, she resolved to transmute her grief into determination.

  Across the border in Germany, clubs like hers were being shut down. And if the wrong people came to power here, the Chameleon would be closed.

  Meanwhile she had a business to run. Her clients may have thought of themselves as the most loyal creatures on earth, but eventually they would hear about a new club with a more stylish crowd and a dirtier floor show. It was no longer enough to have a place where customers could dress up and know they would see someone more dressed up, a place where they could feel sure that the cops had been paid off, a place where they could cry their eyes out every time Yvonne sang.

  She’d known the girl’s song would be a hit. She was ashamed of the venomous spirit that had infected her club, and her shame increased exponentially when Arlette added the hateful new verses. But the register receipts consoled her.

  Everyone liked feeling superior, and if something compelled you to dress as the opposite sex, it was pleasant to be reminded that you were still several rungs above the impotent American and the greedy Jew. On good days Yvonne thought, It’s only a song. But in the hours before dawn she awoke hearing Arlette’s squeaky voice and thinking, I will hear this song over and over when I am burning in hell.

  One night, just before the show began, Yvonne noticed that her entire staff, except for Bernard, had taken a bathroom break.

  Clovis Chanac, the prefect of police, had walked into the club.

  For years, Police! Open up! had been the password to get in, but the humor had worn off. Since Chanac started showing up, Yvonne told her doormen to politely inform the customers that the joke was no longer funny. Chanac didn’t come often, but whenever he did there was trouble. Fatima would still be dancing there if not for him. He was an unpleasant drunk: touchy, easily aggrieved, certain that he was being insulted. These qualities reminded Yvonne, oddly enough, of Lou. She would never have imagined that Lou and Chanac had anything in common.

  Except for a few out-of-towners, everyone recognized Chanac, principally because of his trademark mustache, which he waxed into points and teased perpetually, with one finger, like someone plucking a violin string. Accompanying him were two detectives in suits, a uniformed cop, and two pretty girls with short skirts and long legs. An empty table appeared out of nowhere. Fat Bernard was a genius.

  Yvonne herself took their order. Welcome, Monsieur le Préfet. Chanac ordered the best champagne. If he paid, which was doubtful, a cop would stop by tomorrow to pick up the envelope in which Yvonne would put what Chanac had spent, including his stingy tip.

  The crowd was unusually lively. What bigger thrill could there be than making merry, all dressed up, beside the guy who tried to run Marlene Dietrich out of town for wearing pants in her hotel lobby? Paris liked Chanac. Street crime and auto accidents were down. Even though so many citizens were starving and out of work, the city felt safer than it had in years.

  Chanac had almost lost his support when he’d tried to get rid of the public urinals. The population went mad! The Communists claimed that this proved he was a fascist, while the right insisted that it was just like the Bolsheviks to make a case about pissoirs, and th
e liberals accused Chanac of being dominated by his prudish, older wife, who had all the money.

  As a Corsican, Chanac was officially one of the foreigners he despised. But Napoleon had been Corsican, which, Chanac claimed, made Corsicans more French than Parisians.

  The musicians and dancers knew that the prefect was in the house. Most of them hated cops. And yet they found his presence mysteriously inspiring. The clarinetist played more melodiously, the starfish gyrated harder. By the end of the evening, several contortionists required medical attention. And lazy little Arlette outdid their most strenuous efforts.

  From the first notes, she beamed her song directly at Chanac. Twitching her mermaid bottom, she pulled her eyelids into a Chinaman face, then flapped her hands like flippers to play the pitiful Jew, even though these gestures were usually part of Lou’s role.

  Lou looked on, bewildered. Was Arlette imitating her? Arlette was getting big laughs and applause. Why did she need Lou? To save her from drowning.

  Rescued by the French sailor, Arlette gazed past Lou at Chanac. By the sea, by the sea, my darling French boy and me. The police prefect was Arlette’s French boy, and the mermaid was everything that Clovis Chanac had ever wanted in a woman: blond, skinny, sexy, not too bright, with politics and ambitions closely matching his own. Arlette would go home with him, if not tonight, then later. And though Yvonne forbid her employees to have relationships with customers, she would make an exception.

  Soon enough, Chanac would get tired of watching his mistress hump her lover—her former lover—onstage. He would not only make her quit the club, but he would also erase the Chameleon from Arlette’s résumé. Still the Chameleon would survive. Or so Yvonne hoped.

  Lou’s heart would be broken. But it would heal. Pavel would find another way to use Lou’s talents, or they would retire her from the stage and promote her; Bernard needed an assistant. Yvonne would hire another singer, someone more like herself, someone who could move the crowd with something besides the pride of being French and the shame of being anything else.

  From The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

  BY NATHALIE DUNOIS

  Chapter Six: “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932”

  ENTIRE BOOKS HAVE documented the creation of a single work of art: a jazz recording, the Sistine Chapel, a film by Hitchcock or Truffaut. But nothing, to my knowledge, has been written about the making of Gabor Tsenyi’s photograph “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.”

  This silence seems all the more puzzling, given the forests sacrificed to pontificate on certain overpraised photos by white male Americans with their frigid Puritan aesthetic: churches, gnarled trees, battered storefronts. How can one compare those soulless images with a double portrait that communicates so much about the sorrows and joys of love, the complexities of gender, the birth and death of passion, the pain of the human condition. The genesis of evil!

  Perhaps the general reluctance to explore the sources of this masterpiece stems partly from the feelings that Lou’s image generates—even in viewers with no idea who she was. Does the subject—a pair of lovers, two women, one dressed as a man—inspire responses so unlike those produced by Tsenyi’s photos of entranced heterosexual couples?

  In the photo Lou and Arlette are anything but entranced. They’ve been drinking, but not enough. Motionless, unblinking, they look like two nervous wrecks who have been ordered to relax. Maybe they are sorry they agreed to sit for their portrait. Maybe only one of them thought it was a good idea. They’re as stiff as newlyweds in a wedding photo, instructed to look brave, to make the best of what they both already know is a disaster. Somewhere in my own archives is a photo from my first wedding, a picture in which you can plainly see that same glazed look in the eyes of the young bride (me) and the groom whose name I will not dignify by mentioning it in these pages.

  For a while Gabor Tsenyi had an assistant, a German-Jewish girl waiting to emigrate to the United States. She kept a journal, and it is to her that we owe our knowledge, however sketchy, of what transpired that day.

  Tsenyi’s studio was in a former salt and sugar warehouse directly across from Le Mississippi dance hall. On damp summer days, the cool air rising from the cellar was so briny and sweet that pedestrians stopped to inhale its scent of sea air and vanilla. The windows were blacked out so that Tsenyi could control the light.

  It unnerved Lou to enter a building with black windows. Possibly this was another of her premonitions. Later she would work in the interrogation cells whose windows were also black, though for different reasons.

  Lou wished Arlette had come with her. But they’d argued late into the night, and this morning Arlette had begged for a few minutes more of sleep. She’d promised to meet her here at ten. If it hadn’t been raining Lou might have waited outside. But she was wearing a tuxedo under a heavy black cloak, and she had cut and pomaded her hair especially for the photo.

  When she rang, the concierge sent her upstairs. The double doors to the studio were slightly open. Lou eased them farther apart. The baroness was tearing something—a photograph—into pieces while the Hungarian tried to placate her and pleaded with her to calm down.

  The baroness wore a leopard skin hat and a leather jacket, dozens of bangles, and black harem pants tucked into high riding boots studded with shiny hardware. She was shouting as she tore up the photo. Scraps fluttered to the floor.

  “Let me get this straight. I spent all that money, (tear) hired the phony hearse, went to all that trouble (tear) so eternity could see (tear) her legs sprawled on the pavement?” More fragments fell to the floor.

  “Whose legs?” the photographer said.

  “I’m not an idiot,” the baroness said. “You think all women are stupid. You imagine that we idiots are paying you to (tear) immortalize stupid girls who will only hold you back.”

  Lou would not have realized that the baroness was referring to Tsenyi’s photo: “Rainy Paris Street. The Dead Girl and Her Aura,” for which the model had been his lover, my great-aunt Suzanne.

  What did strike Lou was the coincidence. She and Arlette had also fought about a photo—in their case, the portrait for which they were sitting today. Arlette had said that a picture was like a tattoo: the permanent record of something stupid you’d done in a weak moment. It could follow you for the rest of your life, and you couldn’t erase it. Arlette told Lou that she was being naive to underestimate the power of the past to come back and bite you.

  Arlette was being unreasonable. They’d be making decent money for essentially no work. And the Hungarian was famous. His photograph of them might bring more customers to the club. When they outgrew the Chameleon, a professional studio portrait might help them take their act to a more glamorous venue.

  Lou would have liked to tell Arlette how the posters for her show at the Vélodrome d’Hiver had attracted crowds. But no one could accuse her of being naive about the past. She never mentioned her own past, certainly not to Arlette. The less likely it seemed that they would be together much longer, the more Lou bored Arlette with her fantasies about their magnificent future.

  When Lou realized that nothing more dramatic than a lover’s quarrel was going to happen in the photographer’s studio, she went back downstairs. She propped the front door open so as not to involve the concierge.

  Lou’s lips moved in silent prayer: please let Arlette show up. But to whom was she praying? She doubted that the God of her childhood approved of her love for Arlette.

  It seemed to Lou that she and Arlette were still connected by the telepathy they’d developed as dance partners and as lovers. Because just as Lou emerged onto the seedy boulevard, Arlette appeared, wobbling toward her on perilously high heels.

  Arlette had never looked so beautiful as she did then to Lou, with the platinum light glinting off her snail curls, rinsing the last traces of color from her anxious little face. The fringes of her evening gown hung below a heavy, red-fox fur coat. Who had given her that coat? How had Lou not seen it?
And why was Arlette wearing a fur coat on a warm, rainy morning in May?

  Maybe Lou was a little rough as she dragged Arlette into the building, pushed her upstairs, and knocked on the half-open door. The baroness crossed the loft in time to her clinking bangles. She welcomed them to the studio, then summoned over a waiter who offered them glasses of champagne.

  Ashamed of how desperately she wanted a drink, Lou said, “So early? It’s only ten-thirty.” Then, suddenly afraid that Arlette might think she was commenting on the fact that she was half an hour late, Lou lunged for a glass before it could be taken away.

  “Why not?” the baroness said. “It’s always midnight here in the studio.”

  “In that case,” said Lou, putting back the glass, “can we make mine whiskey?”

  “Champagne, please,” Arlette said primly.

  The baroness took their coats and showed them to a table exactly like their regular table at the Chameleon. The same crumpled pack of Balto cigarettes, the same ceramic ashtray showing two English gents in a carriage beneath the words Horsey and Smalley ltd, the same glass of cardboard straws, the same straw wrappers, Arlette’s half full glass of absinthe, Lou’s decanter of whiskey, the bottle of champagne on ice in case a friend dropped by, ashes dusting the cloth. Lou’s cigarette lighter stood on end, a tiny monogrammed silver tombstone, close to the edge of the table.

  In an early draft of this manuscript, I was quite taken by the idea that people who look at the photo might react subconsciously to the cigarette lighter that was later used as an implement of torture when Lou worked for the Gestapo. Only in revision did I (fortunately!) realize that the lighter in the photo wasn’t the one Lou used in her interrogations. That lighter was a present she got later, from her lover, the German racer Inge Wallser. I was so reluctant to sideline this interesting train of thought—the connection seemed so perfect—that even now I must remind myself that the cigarette lighter in Gabor Tsenyi’s photo is neither notorious nor historic.