by Baxter, John
A barman makes his real profit from the tips. . . . [Also] professional services [are] offered free by doctors, lawyers, and others among his clients. Then, too, in France he obtains reduced rates at the theater and cinemas, and some less-distinguished night-life resorts. When we steered clients to such places, we received up to 60 per-cent commission, and there was always 25 per-cent commission from gambling houses, as well as free meals and drinks when we called. The barman also gets a small commission from the French liquor people: a franc a bottle for gin, brandy, and whisky, fifty centimes to a franc for bar champagne, up to five francs for the expensive champagne in the cabarets, and twenty-five centimes on everything else.
Card for Harry’s Bar, watering hole of international barflies
French bars found even more cunning methods of swindling customers. Expatriate publisher Nancy Cunard and two friends ordered gin fizzes at a café on boulevard Saint-Michel but found them undrinkable. Once the owner produced the gin bottle, they understood. The label said AMERICAN GIN. Not content with distributing their bathtub mixtures in the domestic market, the bootleggers had got into export.
“I know you,” said an American voice, interrupting my musing.
It was the man who’d been drinking pastis. Belatedly I recognized Andrew, the academic I’d replaced as guide.
“I went on one of your walks,” I reminded him.
“Yes, of course . . .” He made the connection. “Oh, and you took over from me.”
“Well, Dorothy said . . . some health problem . . . ?”
“Oh, I don’t mind. I was grateful, to tell the truth. Mind if I sit down?”
He subsided into the seat opposite. Out of the sun, he looked less young. Nor, I intuited, was that pastis his first of the day.
“I knew I was being boring,” he said, with the frankness most drinkers believe is disarming but is mostly just embarrassing. “But teaching college gets you into bad habits. You know what it’s like. Students who haven’t read anything older than the last vampire novel. . . . You get used to explaining everything.”
In her novel Foreign Relations, Alison Lurie’s American academic in London visualizes self-pity as a sad dog that follows her about. As Andrew talked, I felt the snuffling of his particular pooch and patted it under the table. How exactly he fitted the pattern of those intellectuals who came to Paris, intent on making their name and, disillusioned, settled instead into monosyllabic misery, fed by booze. James Wood, writing about Richard Yates, creator of the bleak Revolutionary Road, and a member of the Montparnasse Class of ’51, evoked a series of “homes identical in their shabby discipline of neglect. In each there was a table for writing, a circle of crushed cockroaches around the desk chair, curtains made colorless by cigarette smoke, a few books, and nothing much in the kitchen but coffee, bourbon, and beer.”
Changing the subject, I said, “No coincidence we should run into one another here.” Looking round, I went on, “This must be the place.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Data bubbled out unstoppably.
“Ah, you’re thinking of Harry’s Bar. Jimmie Charters was at the Dingo, not here. And after that at the Jockey, then Harry’s, 5 rue Danou. . . .” He gave a patronizing little laugh. “Or, as they used to spell it out, phonetically, for those who didn’t speak French, ‘Sank Roo Doe Noo.’ Hemingway drank here at the Closerie, of course. And wrote too—Big Two Hearted River, for instance. But Charters . . .”
“Let me get you another.” I said hurriedly. “Pastis, is it?”
“Oh, yes. Thanks.” Then he was off again. “Though I suppose it should be a Montgomery . . .”
The Montgomery martini was a Hemingway invention: fifteen parts of gin to one of vermouth—the superiority of troops under his command that Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery required before he would fight.
“Maybe later,” I said, imagining the effect. “For the moment, I’ll stick to Campari and orange.”
The barman took our order. In the days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, he’d have been confidant, confessor, co-conspirator, pimp. Today, he also served as historical source. In documentaries about Hemingway, waiters and hoteliers chat as if he’d been an old friend. “Sure. Papa came in here all the time . . .” When he died, French TV rounded up three authorities to summarize his life: a bullfighter, Sylvia Beach—and the barman at the Ritz.
Nobody mentioned the inconvenient fact that, before World War II, Hemingway almost never visited the Ritz. For a start, it was on the Right Bank, far from “the Quarter.” As a struggling writer in the 1920s, he might have come if invited and someone else was picking up the tab, but normally he couldn’t afford its prices, which were—and remain—astronomical. When he did have money, he preferred the Crillon, looking out on Place de la Concorde.
Nevertheless, after his death the Ritz canonized him as its patron saint, even to creating a Hemingway Bar. It’s artfully done: a bronze portrait head, photographs from les années folles, a few books for added color. Supposedly writers can even have their mail sent there, as used to be the case at the Dôme and the Rotonde, which kept racks by the door for that purpose. But Hemingway never drank in the bar that bears his name. In his time, it was the Ladies Bar, a ghetto for the women who, in those days, were excluded from the big bar. “A tiny box-like room,” jeered one 1927 guidebook, “scarcely more than fifteen feet square . . . densely packed [with] American flappers, cinema queens, stage belles and alimony spenders.” Another christened it “the Black Hole of Calcutta . . . the steam room” and noted that “about six o’clock at night, the place is filled to suffocation and has a delicate perfume faintly reminiscent of attar of roses in a bottle of old Bourbon.” If you like ironies, in 1997, Princess Diana, fleeing the paparazzi by using the side entrance, hurried past this former shrine of misogyny en route to her death.
The Ritz and Hemingway only embraced one another after 1944. After “liberating” the Odéon, he led his group across the Seine, gathering members as he went, until more than seventy invaded the Ritz bar. According to tradition, Hemingway ordered Montgomeries all round. A grateful management installed him in one of its best suites, on the inner side overlooking the courtyard, and catered to his every whim. His mistress and later wife, Mary Welsh, moved in next door, and it was supposedly in the basement of the hotel that, decades later, she found the suitcases containing the “forgotten” manuscripts that became, among other books, A Moveable Feast.
It was Scott Fitzgerald, not Hemingway, who made the Ritz and its bar legendary. He used it for scenes in Tender Is the Night and a number of short stories, in particular the elegaic Babylon Revisited, and routinely drank himself insensible there—no struggle, since he would, as one friend wrote, dissolve in alcohol like a paper flower after only two or three drinks. When Gatsby was back in print and his star was on the rise, visitors to the Ritz asked about Fitzgerald, but nobody remembered just another drunk. In A Moveable Feast, the barman even asks Hemingway “Papa, who is this Mr. Fitzgerald who everyone asks me about? It is strange that I have no memory of him.” But, acknowledging that a barman is just as ready to whip up an anecdote as a cocktail, he confesses that he tells them “anything interesting they will wish to hear; what will please them.”
Hem and his cronies would have sneered at my caution about spending the rest of the evening getting drunk. And I agree it was tempting, in the cozy companionship of the Closerie des Lilas, to order a round of Montgomeries, then another and another. The barman, loyal to his craft, would keep them coming, along with salty nuts and crisps to maintain our thirst. Once the pianist arrived, we’d soon be cocking our heads and nodding in recognition of The Last Time I Saw Paris or Mad About the Boy. Predinner couples would fill the remaining tables—including perhaps some people we knew, who’d join us, and we’d call to the barman, “M’sieur, s’il vous plaît, encore la même chose . . .” And then, in the long inglorious tradition of l’heure bleue, the night would be drowned and lost.
Chapter 28
T
he Last of Montparnasse
We slid down the hill to 1939 the way the period of the nineties slid down to 1914. We sank into the abyss as into some kind of pleasure.
PAUL MORAND
In summer, the cafés of Paris fold back their glass walls so that one sits on the sidewalk, with pedestrians brushing your tiny table, sometimes rattling your eau à la menthe or jangling the coffee cups. Apologies can end in an invitation to sit down and share a drink, and occasionally even more.
Not surprisingly, Gelenter was to be found every summer morning at Deux Magots, eyes darting among the passing women, body poised and ready, given the slightest encouragement, to bolt after one of them.
“You look just like our cat,” I said. “He quivers that way when he’s stalking a bird.”
“Mmm?”
“Nothing. You said you had an idea?”
He dragged his mind back from the turn of an ankle, the play of muscle under a tight skirt, the tremble of a breast.
“Oh, yeah. Some people who’ve taken the Odéon walk want to know if you do any others. Around Montparnasse, maybe, so I was thinking . . . art?”
I could see why art looked like a logical choice for a walk.
At the turn of the twentieth century, every artist wanted to study in Paris. They flocked here. The Académie des Beaux Arts and private schools like the Académie Julienne and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière could barely keep up. So many students crammed into the life class at Julienne, all puffing self-importantly on pipes, that those at the back complained they couldn’t see the model for smoke. Artists colonized Montparnasse and Montmartre. The cafés overflowed with painters and models. Their annual Bal des Quat’z Arts—the Ball of the Four Arts—was legendary for the costumes of the men and the nudity of the models, among whom anything more than a coat of body paint was looked on as overdressing. “The students are the pets of Paris,” said one indulgent writer in 1899. He even justified the Bal des Quat’z Arts as educational: “Its marvellous brilliancy, its splendid artistic effects, and its freedom and abandon, has a stimulating and broadening effect of the greatest value to art. The artists and students see in these annual spectacles only grace, beauty, and majesty; their training in the studios, where they learn to regard models merely as tools of their craft, fits them, and them alone, for the wholesome enjoyment of the great ball.”
Painting became a spectator sport. The competitive shows, called salons, were as much social occasions as the races at Longchamps. It was particularly à la mode to attend the preview, known as a vernissage, or “varnishing,” after the custom of allowing an artist a last chance to retouch his work. For the vernissage of the biggest event, the Salon des Artistes Français, fashionable Paris turned out en masse. A painting of 1911 shows the glass-roofed Grand Palais at the foot of the Champs-Elysées, cavernous as a railroad terminal, crammed with gorgeously gowned women and men sweating in formal dress. Here and there, a life-size statue lifts its head above the swirling, chattering mass, unacknowledged and ignored. Whatever these people were there for, it wasn’t to admire the art.
Except for fashionable portraitists, few artists were rich. For the truly creative, the pleasure was in doing it; money was a by-product. Before starting work each morning, Renoir or Cézanne would dash off a few little watercolors “to get their hand going” and use them later to light the fire. Renoir, painting in the countryside with Cézanne, asked if he had something to use as toilet paper. Cézanne handed him a watercolor, which Renoir had already crumpled to wipe himself before he thought to take a look. Once he did, he decided it was too good to waste. Ironed out, it hung in the Hollywood home of his filmmaker son Jean, a reminder that works of art hadn’t always carried a price tag.
A vernissage, or private view, in the Grand Palais, 1890s
But run-of-the-mill painters extracted every franc from their work. They’d produce as many copies of a canvas as people would pay for, at different sizes to order. Gertrude Stein, looking at some paintings, remarked that the legs in one canvas didn’t please her. “Cut them off if you like,” urged the dealer. “The artist won’t mind. He just wants the money.” For these artists, the 1920s were a bonanza. Tourism flourished, and tourists wanted souvenirs. In 1928, Sisley Huddlestone complained about Montparnasse tours that offered a visit to “a real artist’s studio.”
At the top of some ricketty stairs, the guide pushed open an attic door to surprise a model posing naked while the artist daubed at a smeary canvas. While the painter protested and the model fled, the punter offered profuse apologies and, to cover his embarrassment, showed an exaggerated interest in the artist’s work. Before long, the guide hinted that the painter might part with his masterpiece at wholesale rates. Half an hour later, the visitor left with the canvas under his arm, sure he had a bargain. The guide hung back to collect his cut, after which the model made coffee while her lover propped another old canvas on the easel, daubed some fresh paint on it, and awaited the next tour.
Worse, in Huddlestone’s eyes, was the fact that serious artists were involved. Tsuguhara Foujita, Moïse Kisling, and Jules Pascin were inspired self-publicists. Foujita arrived at a Montparnasse ball mostly naked, to show off his tattoos, and trailing a wicker cage containing his wife, Fernande, likewise lightly clothed in not much more than a hair ribbon. The sign on the cage read WOMAN FOR SALE. Such a lifestyle left the Montparnos chronically short of funds, which they remedied by hectic salesmanship. Salvador Dalí was shameless. He’d arrive at the crowded La Coupole with a canvas under his arm and prowl the tables for a buyer.
André Breton had launched surrealism as a literary movement, but it soon belonged to the artists like Man Ray, de Chirico, Magritte, and in particular Dalí. As the young Spaniard hijacked his ideas and announced himself as surrealism’s creator, Breton despairingly assigned the avaricious upstart the anagramatic nickname “Avida Dollars.” Dalí left for the United States, and the art market followed.
It’s hard to feel censorious about the painters of Montparnasse in the 1920s. What Roger Shattuck wrote of the period before 1914 is just as true of the decade after 1918: “The cultural capital of the world, which set fashion in dress, the arts, and the pleasures of life, celebrated its vitality over a long table laden with food and wine.” Theirs was the art of the brothels, cafés and streets; art that didn’t take itself too seriously, and, above all, reflected appetite, not intellect. They became known as the School of Paris because the city and its citizens were their preferred subject. Earlier painters had gone to the country, believing truth lay in nature, but the Montparnos, as they were now being called, had no time for landscapes. They preferred people—either flamboyantly costumed or nude, and invariably behaving badly. Foujita threw scandalous costume parties. Francis Picabia loved fast cars. Many smoked opium or drank absinthe. Fifty years later, the same self-destructive spirit flourished in New York with the Beats, Andy Warhol’s Factory, Punk.
The painter Foujita, a classic Montparno
Occasionally, I caught a whiff of those days. While researching a biography of Federico Fellini, I tracked one of his actresses, Marika Rivera, to her disordered studio in suburban London. Proudly, she reminded me her father was the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, and her mother the Russian artist Marevna, one of the mistresses-cum-models who became poster girls of les années folles. Marevna painted a group portrait of their circle—Rivera, Soutine, Kisling, Modigliani. It includes the young Marika. I tried to reconcile that solemn little girl with Astrodi, the heavy-bosomed middle-aged whore she plays in Casanova. During the production in Rome, Fellini, entertaining a group of money men at Cinecittà, invited Marika and some other actors to join them at lunch. As the food was served, he unexpectedly asked her to “bless the meal.” After a few hints, she realized he wanted her to open her bodice and let her enormous breasts dangle over the table.
“Is there such a custom in Italy?” I asked.
“Not that I ever heard of.”
“What did you do?”
> She gave me the only answer one would expect from a Montparno. “Oh, just as he asked, of course.” Placing her fingers between her breasts, she mimed ripping apart her blouse. “He was the maestro, after all.”
I almost heard the collective gasp as the cornucopia of her bosom spilled out, putting into the shade the fettucini al forno and vitello con funghi. Fellini knew his audience. After a show like that, they wouldn’t dare refuse him anything.
Chapter 29
The Fuzz on the Peach
A normal man, given a group photograph of school girls and asked to point out the loveliest one, will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Lolita
Although Gelenter’s idea for a guided tour about art seemed simple enough, I found it hard to come up with a structure.
“It depends what sort of art you were thinking of.”
“Oh, you know. Kiki of Montparnasse, surrealism, Picasso. Modigliani . . . all that stuff.”
“Great idea—except that the surrealists met in Montmartre. They almost never came to Montparnasse. And Picasso lived in the Marais . . .”
He dismissed my objections with a you’re-not-getting-it look.
“Suggest something else then.”
“Forget the whole thing?”
“Nah.” This was too good a plan to abandon just because it wasn’t true. “There must be somewhere that artists still hang out.”
I could think of only one place in Paris where greed, lust, and art cohabited in the great tradition of the 1900s, and while it was only a pale shadow of the old days, it did preserve a scrap of that naked venality.
