Wild Lavender (39 page)

I thought André’s remark about people going to Elsa Maxwell’s ‘Come as you were’ party in their underwear was a joke, so when the bus came to collect us from my apartment I was shocked to see that it was true. Daisy Fellowes leaned out the bus door to greet us holding a pair of lace panties in her hand. But she was one of the more decently dressed people on the vehicle; several young women were wearing negligées and nothing else. In the early evening sun, you could see their nipples through the sheer fabric and even the dark triangle of hair between their legs.

‘
Bonsoir
,’ said the Marquis de Polignac. ‘Elsa has organised a bar. What would you like to drink?’ He was wearing an evening suit, the sharply cut top and tails that Englishmen liked to wear, and looked the perfect ‘man-about-town’ except that he wasn’t wearing any trousers.

I accepted a glass of champagne from the marquis but had no idea where to look. I was too embarrassed to stare at his bare legs and too uncomfortable to look at his face. I slipped my arm around André and pulled him down next to me into a seat. He had been lounging around on my sofa all day in his dressing gown and pajamas. I had taken the invitation literally and gone about my day as usual. Only that afternoon, despite the July heat, I had decided that I wanted to bake a cake, something I hadn’t done in years. When the bus arrived, I was presentably dressed but my blouse and apron were covered in flour.

‘As if we are going to believe Simone Fleurier cooks when she is at home,’ said Bébé Bérard, the designer, blowing me a kiss. ‘What were you doing, making a lemon tart for your man?’

Like André, Bébé was wearing a dressing gown but instead of having a book under his arm, he had a telephone attached to his ear and shaving cream on his chin.

‘I have always loved baking,’ I said.

‘Your apartment must be well ventilated,’ said Bébé, taking a sip of wine, ‘if you could bear to cook in this heat.’

Coming from Provence, I couldn’t understand why Parisians made such a fuss of the heat. Still, the bus was growing stuffy with dust and exhaust fumes. Elsa hadn’t counted on us getting caught up in traffic. The party was supposed to start at seven but it was already eight o’clock and we hadn’t even passed over to the Left Bank yet. The travellers resigned themselves to drinking the bar dry.

‘We might have to walk the rest of the way,’ slurred the Marquis de Polignac, peering through the windscreen at the procession of cars in front of us.

‘He is as high as a kite!’ I whispered to André. ‘Does he really think we can walk? Look at what everyone is wearing.’

‘Or what they are not wearing, you mean,’ he replied, kissing my cheek. I curled my fingers around his hand. No matter what we were doing, I was always happy to be with André. Every time I looked at him, I was aware that the man who loved me was one in a million. He was privileged, but he was also decent.

‘Hello, birdies,’ called out the Countess Gabriela Robilant, standing up to wave her whisky glass at a group of men waiting to cross the road. Somewhere on the journey she had lost her skirt and we were treated to the sight of her panties and suspenders.

Countess Elisabeth de Breteuil stood up and pushed Gabriela down. ‘Put on your skirt!’ she screamed at her. ‘This is disgraceful! Remember your position!’

Gabriela laughed, her head lolling to one side. The Countess de Breteuil’s cheeks reddened. She jumped up and marched down the aisle towards the driver. ‘Open the door!’ she demanded. ‘I refuse to travel with such scandalous company!’

The driver was about to let her out when Gabriela screamed, ‘To the Bastille,’ and lurched towards the countess. There was a ripping sound and, before we realised it, she had pulled the other woman’s skirt down.

André and I looked away but it took all our willpower not to laugh. So this was the French nobility? These were the people I was supposed to impress?

In Paris, time sped up. It seemed as if we had no sooner welcomed in the new decade than three years had passed and it was 1933.

‘Are you all right there under the lights, Mademoiselle Fleurier?’ the assistant director asked me. ‘It will take a while to frame the camera shot.’

‘For the moment, thank you,’ I said, although the lights were burning my skin and I was shading my eyes with my hand because I had promised the make-up artist that I wouldn’t spoil my powder by putting on sunglasses between shots.

I had a philosophy of not complaining on film sets. I considered it a privilege to be there and no one’s job was any more comfortable than mine. During the making of my first film, based on my show at the Folies Bergère, I had seen a camera man suspended from a track on the ceiling to get a 180-degree shot and in my second film, a romantic escapade, I had seen a sound technician knocked from a train platform. Luckily he wasn’t badly hurt, but his microphone was bent out of shape and I dreaded to think what might have happened had he fallen a few inches further either way.

Most music hall stars who worked in films found my enthusiasm for the medium extraordinary. ‘But you are boxed in by those chalk marks on the floor,’ Camille Casal moaned when I told her that I wanted to make at least one film a year. ‘And there is no audience to applaud you. How do you know if you are doing well or not?’

‘The director tells you.’

‘Yes, but after the shot,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘And how do you know that the audience will see what he does? He may be as disillusioned as you. All you have looking at you is that camera with its black eye.’

I was surprised at Camille’s impatience with the process of film-making; she was, after all, one of Europe’s most famous stars. She was doing less stage work these
days but was in demand for the screen. ‘
It’s easier to hide the wrinkles on film than it is under spotlights
,’ a columnist had written about Camille’s change of career. It was shallow bitchiness: at thirty years of age Camille was still a beauty, and there were much older stars still performing on stage.

I dropped my hand and glanced at Jean Renoir as he discussed the frame with the camera operator. ‘We’ll reblock the shot,’ he said. ‘I want to shoot through the window.’ I get to work with geniuses, I thought. And humble geniuses at that.

Jean Renoir was the son of the painter and every inch a great artist, although in a different medium. His camera movements were carefully choreographed and he sweated blood over the cuts with his editor. Although my first two films had been commercial successes, I had cringed when I saw the way I batted my eyelids and swung my arms around. My gestures were too extravagant for the screen. But in this, my third film, I was transforming under Renoir’s instruction.

‘Underplay, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ he told me from the first day. ‘You have real potential as a dramatic actress, only I don’t want you to
act
. I want you to
think
and to
feel
. The slightest movement of your eyes on screen can say as much as twenty lines of dialogue or one exaggerated sigh.’

I was lucky that such a brilliant director believed in me, but then someone had once said that Renoir was so gifted he could teach a wardrobe to act.

I watched the technicians relighting the shot. Joseph de Bretagne, the sound man, sent me a smile. The previous week we had been shooting on location in Montmartre for the scene where my lover and I say goodbye outside a jazz club. Renoir hated dubbing and believed in the sound being recorded on location. The only problem was the level of background noise in the street, which on that day included a goatherd blowing his pipe to attract the attention of housewives—a shot Renoir could use—and a sewage
wagon pumping the waste from a cesspool—something Renoir could not. Joseph had tried to dampen the background noise by surrounding me and my leading man with mattresses and hangings. None of that showed in the scene of course, but whenever I saw the film I thought of those mattresses propped around me like some sort of outdoor bedding store.

After the second take, Renoir was happy with my performance and Jacques Becker, his assistant director, called everyone to stop for lunch. Although my shooting schedule was only for the mornings—so I could rehearse for the evening shows at the Casino de Paris—I usually stayed for lunch. What I liked best about making films was the camaraderie of the cast and crew. Making movies was more fun in those days and more egalitarian.

‘So have you got yourself a yo-yo yet, Mademoiselle Fleurier?’ Jacques asked, filling my wine glass.

‘Oh, please,’ I said.

A craze had taken Paris by storm. You couldn’t walk anywhere without seeing grown men, and some women, spinning yo-yos. They swung them on the
métro
platforms, on trams and buses, in cafés and even during the interval at the opera.

‘Come on, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ laughed Renoir. ‘I hear Cartier has made one in gold. Only two hundred and eighty francs.’

After three years of balls and candlelight suppers with the
beau monde
of Paris, I could believe anything. I loved fashion, interior design and food, but I wanted to talk about other things as well. Elsa Schiaparelli was more interesting than the people who wore her clothes, and I accepted invitations to dine at her apartment just so I could hear about the art movements and new technologies that influenced her. Whenever
Tout-Paris
tried to be interesting it was pretentious. The latest thing was to take ‘adventure’ holidays. No longer was it enough to holiday in Biarritz or Venice, you had to go hunting in Peru or Africa, fishing in the Kuban or swordfishing in the Canaries. My thirst for
more substantial conversations was another reason I loved to make films with Renoir.

‘What has come over Paris?’ I asked him.

‘Denial,’ he answered, buttering a piece of bread. ‘Frivolity has always been the Parisians’ reaction to danger. We can’t deny the Depression won’t affect us any more. Our economy has slowed down and industry profits are falling. It’s not so bad in Paris yet but it has already hit the other cities. The rest of Europe is going the same way. Hitler would not be chancellor if it wasn’t for the state of the German economy.’

I sipped a spoonful of soup and gave the matter some thought. Perhaps that would explain the extravagance of
Tout-Paris
and their need for constant diversion. The previous month, André and I had attended a ball organised by his mother to raise money for the unemployed. When I spoke to some guests, I discovered they had no idea what the ball was for although they were more than happy to come. Eventually André and I learnt to not expect more of
Tout-Paris
.

‘If it wasn’t for my family’s position, and out of respect to my mother and Veronique, I would give it all away,’ André often said, when he was exasperated by the ignorance of the people in our social circle.

I wasn’t sure that was quite true. Now that he was twenty-seven, André was taking on more of the business as his father prepared to retire and hand over the running of the Blanchard company to him. André had once told me that he was a born entrepreneur, and there was no denying it. He may not have been keen on mingling with
Tout-Paris
, but he loved his work. I could see the pride in his eyes when he surveyed the plans for a new manufacturing plant or a hotel. His work kept him up late and got him out of bed early, but he was never tired. He was as passionate about business as I was about performing. You couldn’t separate the man from the talent, and to try to would be to kill his spirit.

‘You were there, weren’t you?’ Joseph asked Renoir. ‘When Hitler was made chancellor.’

Renoir’s face clouded. ‘I was trying to raise funds for a film. I thought I would stay to see history in the making but what I saw was a bunch of brownshirts forcing an old Jewish lady to crouch on the pavement and lick it.’

We fell silent. Renoir and I had shared many conversations about Berlin, because he liked Germans, despite having been wounded in the Great War, and I had fond memories of the city from my time there. ‘Berlin is a city in which the best and worst flourish,’ he told me. ‘War destroys in a matter of minutes what a slowly evolving culture has taken centuries to create.’

The location secretary rushed in. ‘Mademoiselle Fleurier, there is a telephone call for you,’ she said. ‘The gentleman says it is urgent. You can take it in the office.’

I picked up the receiver and was surprised to hear André on the line. ‘Are you almost done?’ he asked, trying to sound cheerful, but I caught the anxiety in his voice. ‘Are you able to skip the rehearsal this afternoon?’

‘Yes. Why?’ I asked.

‘Count Harry is here. And he needs to see us immediately.’

It wasn’t the first time Count Kessler had come to Paris. He had seen all my shows but we hadn’t heard from him for a few months. His health had not been good for a while but this time I sensed there was something more than that in his sudden need to see us.

‘Something is wrong, isn’t it, André?’

‘Come as quickly as you can,’ he said. ‘I am sending my car.’

As I put down the receiver I was overcome by a feeling of darkness that I couldn’t explain.

André and I met the Count in the apartment of one of his friends in île St Louis. The place consisted of two rooms crammed with books on lopsided shelves, but it wasn’t the disorganised clutter that shocked us, it was the appearance
of the Count when he met us at the door. Was this the same man? The eyes that had once been so full of amusement now darted around like those of a frightened animal.

‘I have good and bad news for you,’ he said, ushering us into the apartment. ‘The good news is that you will be seeing more of me than before, for a while anyway. The bad news is that I am in exile.’

André and I were too stunned to speak.

‘I have been denounced,’ said the Count, lifting his hand to his head. ‘By my manservant, would you believe?’

‘Denounced?’ said André. ‘What for?’

‘Oh,’ said the Count, gesturing for us to sit down at a table by the window, ‘in a police state it doesn’t take much.’ He explained that he had come to Paris with the intention of staying until the elections took place in Berlin. He had opposed the terror tactics used by the Nazis to put Hitler in power, and had supported a Freedom of Speech congress at the Kroll Festival Hall. It would have been dangerous for him to stay while there were storm troopers in the streets. But a friend had contacted him and warned him not to go back to Germany. The Count’s manservant, Friedrich, had informed on him. The Nazis had raided the Count’s house and found a republican flag in the attic.