Wild Lavender (38 page)

‘You always will belong in my heart,’ I said, reaching up to kiss his lips. ‘Always.’

We returned to the hotel intending to make love, but instead found twenty telegrams from Ziegfeld demanding to know where we were. Some were several paragraphs long and written in such convoluted English that I could barely understand them. ‘Come to the theatre as soon as you receive this,’ the last one read.

‘Couldn’t he just leave a telephone message?’ asked André. ‘These must have cost him a fortune.’

We changed our clothes and caught a cab to Fifty-Fourth Street. ‘Something tells me this isn’t going to get easier,’ I said.

‘Do you want to pull out?’ André asked. ‘I am happy to if you want to. We can refund the money. I am in no mood to be treated like a dog on a leash.’

André was right, of course, but I told him we should at least see what happened when we got to the theatre that afternoon.

We arrived to find Urban and the set designers at work. The technicians were trying out the lights on a set of night-time Montmartre. The scene was breathtaking and André and I stopped short when we saw it. Urban used a method called pointillage to create the colours on his backdrops. It was the same painstaking technique Impressionist painters used: proportions of pure colour laid side by side so that when the lights were directed at them the hues mixed into one shade. The effect was a more vibrant and lifelike set than could be achieved using flat colours.

‘He wanted you to see it,’ said Goldie, greeting us at the door to her office. ‘It’s the set Miss Fleurier will be singing in front of.’

‘Is Mister Ziegfeld here?’ André asked. ‘We will tell him how much we like it.’

‘No,’ said Goldie. ‘His wife called and he had to go home. It’s his favourite dessert tonight: chocolate mousse with strawberries.’

With as much patience as he could muster, André asked if the rehearsals would begin soon.

‘Try-outs are tomorrow,’ Goldie told him. ‘You’ll start rehearsals in the afternoon.’

Over the next week, André and I were called in every day for the promised rehearsal but all we ended up doing was sitting through other cast members rehearsing or endless chorus girl drills. I couldn’t understand Ruby Keeler. She was a beauty with big eyes and pert features. She was also
a dancer with a technical agility that would be hard to match anywhere. But whenever she appeared on stage, she seemed nervous and distracted. In one rehearsal, she was overcome with stage fright and froze at the top of the staircase. Her husband, Al Jolson, who was sitting next to Ziegfeld, stood up and began singing her song for her. He performed the melodic twists perfectly.

‘That’s great!’ cried Ziegfeld. ‘We’ll use you in the show.’

It was a good ploy on Ziegfeld’s part. Al Jolson was one of America’s favourite entertainers. He had also been the first man to speak in the first sound feature film,
The Jazz Singer
. The inclusion of Jolson, however, only seemed to make Ruby more nervous.

‘What is it with that girl?’ André asked me. ‘I know you get nervous before an audience, but not at rehearsals. Given that “Show Girl” is to be her first big role, I don’t understand why she doesn’t seem more excited.’

I could understand her nerves. I was lucky that for my opening show I’d had Minot, André and Odette to support me. ‘Maybe Ziegfeld has worn her down,’ I said. ‘Or she’s tired of always been shown up against her husband. The gossips say she only got the part because of him.’

‘I think it is her husband that is the problem,’ said André. ‘I don’t like him. He is too old for her and he dominates her.’

André didn’t elaborate on that and I didn’t ask. We had enough troubles of our own. In my scene, an American tourist wandered around Paris, dreaming of returning home. I was to play a singing street urchin who transforms into a beautiful goddess. Performing alongside me would be the ballerina Harriet Hoctor and the Albertina Rasch ballet dancers. When the Gershwins finally gave me the song sheets, it was a week before opening night and some of my rehearsals lasted ten or twelve hours or took place late at night and ran into the early hours of the morning. So much for not tiring myself out.

At the first full dress rehearsal, the orchestra played my music at the wrong tempo and a light that had not been
properly secured crashed to the floor a few feet away from where the technical director was sitting. But Ziegfeld didn’t notice. He stood up from his seat, his arms folded across his chest and a frown on his face.

‘Bring me the costume designer!’ he bellowed.

‘I think he might be in bed,’ one of the stagehands offered.

‘I don’t care,’ shouted Ziegfeld, his face turning purple. ‘Bring me someone from wardrobe then.’

A while later the stagehand returned with a young man whose bleary eyes were not amused. ‘What’s the problem, Mister Ziegfeld?’ he asked.

‘Look at the sleeves on Mademoiselle Fleurier’s dress,’ said Ziegfeld.

I held my arms up from my body so everyone could see my sleeves. The chiffon gown had seemed fine to me when I put it on. I glanced at André, who shook his head.

‘What about them?’ asked the young man. ‘They are three-quarter length, like you wanted them.’

Ziegfeld’s face turned a shade darker. ‘Three-quarter length they may be but they taper towards her elbows when they should fan out like bells! She’s supposed to be a celestial being not a peasant girl!’

‘That’s what you ordered,’ the young man retorted.

Clearly he had not been employed at the Ziegfeld Theatre for long to give that kind of answer. And I feared from the way Ziegfeld’s hands shook that he wasn’t going to stay much longer either.

‘You idiot!’ Ziegfeld screamed, his voice booming around the auditorium. ‘Get out! Get out! I said “celestial” not “peasant”!’

The young man gave a disgruntled shrug and bolted out of the theatre. An enraged bull was less frightening than Ziegfeld when he was angry.

The impresario ran up the stairs and onto the stage, his eyes fixed on me. I had muddled some of the words in the song. ‘Eyes’ was next to impossible for me to pronounce. It always came out ‘aizzes’.
Paris is a feast for the aizzes.
Come here and look into my aizzes.
I froze on the spot, awaiting his rebuke.

He stopped, took my hand in his and spoke in a tender voice. ‘I’m wondering, Mademoiselle Fleurier, how you feel about this song? I’m wondering what the words say to you?’

His manner was soothing and such a contrast to his outburst that I was sure he was being sarcastic. I stared back at him. But he seemed oblivious to my confusion and fixed his intense eyes on me. ‘What I want to know, Mademoiselle Fleurier, is what the song says to you. As an
artiste
.’

I was saved from having to answer by the director calling the comedy trio of Lou Clayton, Eddie Jackson and Jimmy Durante onto the stage.

‘Show Mister Ziegfeld what you’ve put together,’ he told them.

But the comedians had barely made it through their first sketch, in which they played stagehands between the scenes, before Ziegfeld told them to get off.

‘Enough of that! Bring on the girls again!’ he shouted, then turning to me said, ‘I never understand comedians. I don’t get their jokes. I’d get rid of them if I could but the audience loves them.’

My nerves were no better on the opening night of ‘Show Girl’ than they had been in Paris. If anything, they were worse. Ziegfeld had been so adamant that I sing my part with reserve and poise that I had nothing of my real self, my French flamboyancy, to draw on. By seven o’clock my hands were trembling, and when I warmed up my voice I could barely keep it under control. I asked André to stay in my dressing room with me until the stage call.

‘Simone,’ he said, picking up Kira and placing her in my lap, ‘you shouldn’t get yourself so worked up. You know that the Ziegfeld opening night audience always comes
twice: first to take in the sets and the costumes, and the second time to enjoy the performers.’

The music from the show, which had already started, surged up loudly then died away. Someone knocked on the door. André opened it and a man dressed in tails swept into the room. He had a round stomach like a pumpkin and his beard was shaved in three stripes down his chin. I didn’t like the look of him. There was something sinister in his eyes.

‘Can I help you?’ André asked him.

The man shook his head and gave a snarling grimace. André and I exchanged glances.

‘There is some mistake,’ said André, assuming the man was a minor act who had come to the wrong dressing room.

‘No mistake,’ answered the man, inclining his head so that the light reflected in his sleek hair. He reached into his jacket and pulled out something long and black. For one terrifying moment I thought he had taken out a gun, and then I saw that he held a slim balloon in his hand. He pinched the balloon in sections between his fingers before twisting the sections so that the balloon resembled a string of sausages. The rubber squeaked under his touch but his fingers moved as nimbly as those of an origami master. André and I were mesmerised. The man folded the balloon and twisted the parts together, forming a neck and ears, two front legs, two hind legs and a tail. André and I let out a synchronised ‘ahh’ when he placed the figure of a cat on the dressing table.

The man gave us an idiotic smile and pulled a card with a ribbon in the corner from his pocket and hung it around the cat’s neck.
Good luck
, the card read.

‘The Zeigfeld Theatre wishes Mademoiselle Fleurier a wonderful performance,’ said the man, giving us a bow before retreating out the door.

Kira slipped from my arms onto the dressing table and sniffed the rubber cat. André burst into laughter. ‘He was a stooge,’ he said. ‘It is an American tradition. He is a special
performer sent in to make the stars laugh so they are relaxed before they appear on stage.’

‘
Mon Dieu
,’ I said, sinking back onto my stool. ‘I don’t feel relaxed at all. I thought he was going to kill us.’

‘Really?’ said André, clasping my wrists. My hands were steady and my palms were dry. He laughed. ‘I think I know what to get you next time you appear in Paris.’

Despite my fears, my performance was well received by the Americans. The Broadway audience was as sophisticated as the Parisians, although they applauded more easily and shouted out their approval before I had finished my number.

‘Thank you,’ I called out to them. ‘It is wonderful to be here in your exciting city.’

I had forgotten myself. This was a musical, not the music hall, and I had stepped out of my character. But the audience loved it and I received a standing ovation.

Ziegfeld had been right: the Americans wanted sentiment not humour from a French singer. I was exhilarated when the
New York Times
reviewer described my voice as ‘
a liquid instrument with the notes spun from gold
’.

Sadly, however, the show was not a success. While the comedy trio—especially Durante who was affectionately labelled ‘Schnozzola’ because of his enormous nose—along with dancers Eddie Foy, Harriet Hoctor, the ballerinas and myself were praised for our performances, the critics panned everyone else, including Ruby Keeler. ‘
She limps along with as much fire as a box of wet matchsticks rather than a gal from Brooklyn determined to make the big time
,’ said one review. Only a few weeks later, Ruby pulled out of the show, claiming ill health, and was replaced by Dorothy Stone. The Hollywood movie star upped the pace a bit but the show was pretty much as the critics described it—a slow, rambling farce where nothing much happens.

Ziegfeld blamed the Gershwins’ ‘hackneyed lyrics’ for the show’s failure and refused to pay them. The brothers
sued him, but by the time the case came before a court the stock market had crashed and there was no money to take from Ziegfeld anyway. He and most of New York were ruined.

As André and I left for South America, the newspaper boys were screaming headlines like: ‘Stocks Collapse: Nationwide stampede to unload’; ‘Unexpected torrent of liquidation’; and ‘Two and a half billion in savings lost’. The worst part was the stories of ruined businessmen leaping from windows thirty storeys high and from the Brooklyn Bridge.

‘If they calmed down things would stabilise faster. They might even see opportunities for fortunes to be made,’ said André.

I nodded my agreement. But I knew something that André didn’t; something those businessmen might have known too. I knew what it was like to be poor—and that once you had become rich, anything was better than being poor again.

T
he Paris André and I returned to in January 1930 was anything but depressed. The economy was good, the war reconstruction work was completed and the franc had stabilised. The only noticeable effect of the Great Depression on the city was that the American tourists had disappeared. But the Parisians were as lively as ever and in the mood to amuse themselves.

André had some business to attend to in Lyon with his father, and left for the south the day after we returned from Le Havre. The first person I went to see was Monsieur Etienne, who I had left in charge of business matters while André and I were away. When I had left for Berlin, Monsieur Etienne had agreed that, while he would continue to handle my business affairs in Paris—including publicity—André could seek out engagements for me. Whether Monsieur Etienne had been happy with that arrangement in the beginning, I couldn’t say. But things had worked out well for all of us after the Adriana shows, and the relationship between him and André was harmonious and cooperative.

‘You look well, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ he said, opening the door to the office. ‘And you have come back just in time. I have offers for you coming out of my ears.’

There was a dark-haired girl sitting at Odette’s desk. She seemed familiar to me and I remembered that she was the daughter of the concierge. Not the one who had been rude to me on my first day in Paris, but her replacement. I looked around for Odette and saw that she was filing some papers in Monsieur Etienne’s office.

‘New staff?’ I asked.

Monsieur Etienne’s face turned glum. ‘Oh, there have been changes here,’ he said. ‘Odette tried to reach you at the Ziegfeld Theatre, but I don’t think her letter was passed on to you.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ I said. ‘What has happened?’

‘She is getting married.’

Odette came out of the office and placed some files on the desk. She stepped towards me and we kissed each other’s cheeks. ‘Married? To whom?’ I asked, arching my eyebrows in mock surprise.

‘To an old friend of the family,’ said Monsieur Etienne. ‘Joseph Braunstein.’

‘Isn’t he a nice man?’ I asked, noticing his frown. ‘You don’t seem very happy for her.’

Monsieur Etienne shrugged. ‘He is a wonderful young man. Very enterprising. It is more that I will miss Odette. She is like a daughter to me.’

‘What does Joseph do?’ I asked Odette.

‘He runs a prestigious furniture store.’ She smiled coyly. I had kept my promise never to mention Joseph until Odette did, but had Joseph kept his promise not to tell Odette about the money I had given him? I wondered. I had intended for him to propose to Odette as soon as he had bought a shop, but he had decided to wait until he was sure of the profitability of his business. Knowing Odette’s spending habits, it had probably been a good plan.

‘Ah,’ I said, squeezing Odette’s hand. ‘She will send him broke, you know that, don’t you? Then she will have to come back and work for you again.’

Monsieur Etienne’s face brightened and he directed me into his office. Once we were seated he opened a folder crammed with letters.

‘I have a very good offer from the Folies Bergère,’ he said, passing me a letter from Paul Derval.

‘I am not sure I have forgiven him for saying that I wasn’t beautiful enough for the chorus line.’

Monsieur Etienne sat back in his chair and wagged his finger at me. ‘You are going to have to move on from that. I doubt Monsieur Derval even remembers auditioning you. As far as he is concerned, you are “the most sensational woman in the world”.’

‘How success changes things!’ I said.

‘I have good offers from the Adriana, who would love to have you back, and the Casino de Paris, now run by Henry Varna. The record company would like you to cut another disc and I have film offers from three different countries, including Paramount in America. So yes, you are right: success does change things,’ said Monsieur Etienne. ‘Now, tell me, what are you going to do first?’

‘First,’ I said, picking up my purse, ‘I am going to Galeries Lafayette. Odette and I have to go shopping for her wedding present.’

We wandered around the Galeries Lafayette for three hours. Odette didn’t want anything too practical like linen or a kitchen appliance. But as she and Joseph were going to live with her parents until they found a place of their own, we agreed that an unwieldy Chinese cabinet or a Grecian urn would be inconvenient. Finally, she chose mirrored placemats and silver bowls for fruit and nuts. She would be able to store those under her bed or in a cupboard until she moved. I organised for the store to have them delivered.

Odette—married? I thought, watching her scribble out her address for the clerk. It had taken a long time to get to that point, but now everything was moving quickly. Would it be the same for me and André? Perhaps patience
was
a virtue and things did happen in their own time.

Over coffee at La Coupole, I told Odette about what had passed between André and me on our trip to America and my worries about his family. She smiled knowingly. ‘I can’t say either of our parents would have made things easy if Joseph and I had rushed. Take your time and be patient. From what you have told me, André is very much in love with you and you should trust in that first.’

I took Odette’s advice to heart. I decided to be proud of who I was and what I did, and I took up the prestigious offer from the Folies Bergère. Meanwhile, now we were back in Paris, André planned to introduce me to society. ‘They had better get used to seeing us together,’ he said. He was confident that, side by side, we would conquer not only the Paris audiences but
Tout-Paris
.

‘Kira,’ I said, placing her on the passenger seat of André’s new Renault Reinastella, ‘you have the Marquise de Crussol’s poodle and Princesse de Faucigny-Lucinge’s Great Dane to compete with. So show everybody how superior cats are and don’t jump out of the window or do anything else flighty. Agreed?’

I turned to wave to André and his mother who were sitting in the stand. André waved back, smiling but with an anxious twist to his mouth. ‘You don’t have to win the
Concours d’élégance automobile
, Simone,’ he had said, watching his chauffeur give the glass radiator cap one last rub. ‘You just have to be seen.’

‘What is the point of that?’ I had ribbed him.

‘What does he think I am going to do?’ I muttered now, watching Comtesse Pecci-Blunt, the niece of Pope Leo XIII, drive across the field in her custom-made silver Bugatti. ‘Puncture someone’s tyre? We might be from the music hall but we do have some sense of propriety, don’t we, Kira?’

Kira blinked at me. I hoped that having travelled several continents on trains and boats, she wouldn’t be fazed by an automobile and fashion parade.

The official gestured to me to start up my motor. I checked over the knobs and controls although I knew perfectly well how to drive. André had organised lessons for me. Still, the Reinastella weighed a tonne and André had told me a terrible story the previous night over dinner. In one year’s contest, the wife of a diplomat had got so wrought up that she had confused the brake and accelerator
and crushed three spectators against a tree. I realised that was probably why some of the contestants today had their chauffeurs driving them.

I pressed the accelerator pedal and manoeuvred the car without incident to in front of the judges’ stand. On the panel were André de Fouquières, a debonair Frenchman who seemed to be found wherever attractive women were; Daisy Fellowes, the daughter of a nobleman and heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune; and Lady Mendl, whose lightly powdered skin and shell-pink dress gave no hint that she was almost seventy years of age.

‘Mademoiselle Simone Fleurier,’ an official announced through a megaphone. ‘Driving Renault’s Reinastella and accompanied by Kira.’

Another official rushed forward to open my door. I picked up Kira, held her under my chin and glided out, not like a society debutante, as the others before me had, but as the star of the Folies Bergère. ‘The most sensational woman in the world,’ I laughed under my breath. Despite the way I was promoted, I didn’t really believe that about myself. I never once truly felt that I had ‘made it’. With each step I rose, the harder I had to work to maintain my position. As Mistinguett had once confided in me: ‘It is more difficult to keep your balance on top of the ladder than it is climbing up the rungs.’

The sight of so many people threw Kira into a panic. She pressed her paw against my chest and veered away from me. But the applause stopped her short. She froze and ceased wriggling long enough for me to parade around the car.

Daisy Fellowes’ eyes lit up when she saw what I was wearing. Paul Derval had introduced me to a new designer, an Italian called Elsa Schiaparelli. She was nothing like Chanel or Vionnet, whose feminine gowns I still wore to opening nights. Schiaparelli was modern. Her clothes followed the planes of the body rather than the curves, which gave them a stylised simplicity. My navy suit had wide shoulders, a pinched waist and leopard-print piping.
‘The cloche hat is dead,’ Schiaparelli had informed me, crowning me instead with a tiny hat whose black plume was so bristly that I thought it resembled a hedgehog. I wouldn’t have worn it if Paul Derval hadn’t assured me that I looked chic. My shoes and handbag were leopard print too, and Schiaparelli had ‘accessorised’ Kira with a matching collar and miniature plume of her own. Luckily, Kira was so terrified that she hadn’t noticed it or else she would have ripped it up like one of her toy birds.

I paused near the bonnet of the car for the photographer from
Le Figaro Illustré
to take a picture. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Janet Flanner scribbling the words that would appear in her column in
The New Yorker
:

The music hall muse, Simone Fleurier, stepped out of Renault’s latest top of the range model and announced to the world with her sleek suit and long legs that the flapper era of androgyny is gone. She was all woman—dramatic, bold and assertively seductive.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We are all champions here!’ I swung my arm around the Marquise de Crussol’s shoulder and clinked my glass against ‘The Best in Show’ cup sitting on my make-up table.

André, who was leaning against my wardrobe and chatting with Comtesse Pecci-Blunt, shot me a sly smile. My dressing room was full of the descendants of France’s aristocracy. There were almost as many European ‘titles’ sitting on my zebra rug, nibbling on American fried chicken and drinking champagne, as there were chorus girls at the Folies Bergère
.
My hands-down victory at the
Concours d’élégance automobile
had elicited more than a few sulky glances and disgruntled comments about ‘outsiders’. It was not what André had been hoping for. ‘You were supposed to charm them, not humiliate them, Simone!’ he had hissed while driving the Reinastella
around the field for my victory lap. ‘You were lucky my mother could get you an invitation at all. We are trying to get them to accept us as a sporting couple, not show them up.’

‘I’ll fix it,’ I said, holding up my trophy and waving. ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen!’ I called out in my best music hall voice. ‘I should like to invite the judges and all the contestants and their gentlemen for a champagne supper in my dressing room at the Folies Bergère after the performance tonight.’

A thrill of excitement ran through the stand. Daisy Fellowes and Lady Mendl exchanged smiles. An invitation to behind the scenes with a star was better than winning another
Concours d’élégance automobile
or the best hat at the races. For while many performers filled their dressing rooms with hangers-on, all of Paris knew that my dressing room was ‘by invitation only’ and that my hospitality in that area of my life was rarely extended.

In my dressing room that evening, the Marquise de Crussol clinked her glass to mine and tapped Daisy Fellowes, who was powdering her face in my mirror, on the shoulder. ‘Daisy, you must have Simone to your next party! She is such fun!’

Daisy nodded and called out to a homely-looking woman who was trying on my Queen Nefertiti headdress. ‘Elsa, you will make sure Mademoiselle Fleurier is on my party list, won’t you?’

André brushed past me. ‘I have nothing to teach you,’ he whispered, squeezing my hand. ‘Nothing to teach you at all.’

The American writer Scott Fitzgerald once said that the rich were different and I discovered the truth of this for myself when my first
Tout-Paris
invitation arrived. It was for a party to be held at the house of the painter Meraud Guevara in Montparnasse.

‘What is a “Come as you were” party?’ I asked André, when he showed me the invitation. I was lying in the bath. A long, luxurious soak was my post Folies Bergère performance ritual.

‘One of Elsa’s creative ideas,’ he laughed, sitting on the edge of the tub. ‘She is sending a bus around some time that day and when the horn sounds we are to leave our apartments and join it, exactly as we are.’

‘So if I am in the bath then, I am supposed to get on the bus naked?’

André smiled, his gaze resting on my knees—the only part of me that was visible through the bubbles except for my shoulders and head. ‘In theory,’ he said. ‘Some people will be waiting around in their underwear all day for that chance.’

I reread the invitation. Elsa Maxwell, the American, intrigued me. She was everything that wasn’t chic. She was short, plump and had a face that scared children. And yet, even with her grating French, she was charming. Although she had no money of her own, she managed to persuade
Tout-Paris
to host ‘her parties’. She was certainly full of ideas. ‘It’s quite okay to choose music and laughter instead of a husband,’ she had told me the first time I met her, that night after the
Concours d’élégance automobile
in my dressing room. ‘Never be afraid of what “they” might say.’

Unfortunately, I was a little too afraid of what
Tout-Paris
might say. André and I were lovers, but we still lived in separate apartments. Just like all the other hypocrites in that circle, we maintained an air of propriety. And even though on the surface we were welcomed everywhere, I was conscious of the backbiting that took place. I had heard it for myself once at a ball. I had gone to the ladies’ room and, while in the stall, overheard one society girl say to another, ‘Simone Fleurier is nothing more than a spiky southern weed trying to root herself amongst the roses.’ I understood the jealousy. I had stolen one of France’s most sought-after bachelors. I knew André didn’t care as much as I did about what those people said; he was only hoping
to impress his father by showing that I had class and could mix with the best.