14
Beatrice Behlen
In Force of Circumstance, the third installment of her autobiography, Simone de Beauvoir remembered the look of the rising star of her local Paris neighborhood Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In the autumn of 1947 the aspiring actress Juliette Gréco had turned into “a beautiful young girl with long black hair” who dressed in “the new ‘Existentialist’ uniform.” Beauvoir traced Gréco’s style back to Italy via the French Riviera: “The musicians from the various caves [italics in original] and their fans had been down to the Côte d’Azur during the summer and brought back the new fashion imported from Capri—itself originally inspired by the Fascist tradition—of black sweaters, black shirts and black pants” (Beauvoir 1975: 152).2 In reality, Gréco would not go to the south of France until the summer of 1949, but this slight confusion on Beauvoir’s part does not affect her interpretation of Gréco’s style. What are the origins of the polysemy of Gréco’s clothing that seems to oscillate between fascist and fashionable?
In August of 1944, Paris had been liberated after more than four years of German occupation. Already in June of 1943 Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir’s partner, had published L’Être et le Néant [Being and Nothingness], the bible of the new existentialism and in the autumn of 1945 began what Beauvoir later called their “Existentialist offensive” (1975: 46). Within three months, the couple brought out three novels, began to publish a new journal, Les Temps Modernes, and staged a play. During this period, on October 29, Sartre took the métro to the Maison des Centraux not far from the Champs Elysées to deliver his lecture “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” The next morning French newspapers reported that there had been such a crush that women fainted (Cohen-Solal 1987: 249–252). Susan Weiner (2001:123) describes Sartre as “the first media personality of the period” and his lecture as “one of the first media events.” Beauvoir became a celebrity in her own right and the couple duly featured in the popular American weekly Life as the “King and Queen of Existentialism” (Frizell 1946: 59). Whether they liked it or not, the “existentialist” label was freely applied to anything that could vaguely be related to Sartre-Beauvoir, including what was possibly the first postwar youth subculture (Beauvoir 1975: 151–153; Cohen-Solal 1987: 266). Its figurehead was the beautiful girl with the long black hair.
In the autumn of 1947, Juliette Gréco was twenty years old. Born in Montpellier in 1927, she was the second daughter of Gérard Gréco, a Corsican police officer, and Juliette Lafeychine, a Bordelaise from a bourgeois background.3 The ill-matched couple had separated not long after Juliette’s birth and the two sisters had been brought up with their maternal grandparents in Bordeaux before moving to Paris with their mother in 1933. After the outbreak of war, Madame Lafeychine had returned with her two daughters to the southwest of France and had become an active member of the Resistance. When their mother had been arrested in 1943, the two teenagers had fled to Paris but had soon been caught. Madame Lafeychine and her eldest daughter had been interned at Royallieu-Compiègne before being deported first to Ravensbrück, then to Holleischen concentration camps (Audhuy and L’Herminier: 90, 189). Juliette had been imprisoned in Fresnes to the south of Paris. After three weeks, in October of 1943, the sixteen-year-old had been released onto the cold streets of the capital, wearing “des chaussures de raphia à ses pieds gelés, une veste assortie et un mince robe bleu marine” [raffia shoes on her frozen feet, a matching jacket and a thin, navy blue dress] (Gréco 1982: 63). Gréco had found refuge with her former teacher, now turned actress, Hélène Duc, who lived near the Church of Saint-Sulpice in the sixth arrondissement.
Aspiring to be an actress, Gréco landed a few small parts on the stage and met the journalist Anne-Marie Cazalis, three years her senior and already well-known in the quartier. Cazalis introduced Gréco to Marc Doelnitz, the well-connected son of an affluent art dealer who had appeared in a few plays and films before the war but now worked as a fashion illustrator. This “sacré trio” [sacred trio] (Gréco 2012: 86) and their friends needed a place to congregate at night. In the winter of 1946, Gréco discovered Le Tabou, an all-night bistro, which served the employees of a nearby courier company. The bistro’s cellar had served as “un cabaret bizarre” [a bizarre cabaret] during the German occupation but had been closed by the police some months earlier (Gréco 1982: 104). The necessary authorizations obtained, the Club de Tabou opened for business on April 11, 1947 (Gréco 1982: 105–106). Doelnitz acted as Master of Ceremonies, Cazalis was in charge of Communications, and Gréco became the cellar’s main attraction. Less than a month after the club’s opening—on May 3, 1947—the first page of Samedi-Soir, a successful weekly newspaper run by one of Cazaliz’s friends, was dominated by a photo of the nineteen-year-old future film director Roger Vadim and Juliette Gréco. On page six, the more than 400,000 readers of the paper could learn about the lifestyle of the “troglodytes” [cave-dwellers] of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Samedi-Soir [95]: 6). The first sentence of the article introduced the name of the new subterranean culture: “Il ne faut plus chercher les existentialistes au café de Flore, ils se sont réfugiés dans les caves” (Samedi-Soir [95]: 6). Soon the Tabou was inundated with society visitors staring at Gréco who vented her discomfort by pinching the ankles of “diorised” and “new-lookised” women. Doelnitz and Cazalis, however, were having a great time (Gréco 1982: 106).
Juliette Gréco claimed that her style was due to practical reasons. During the winter of 1943, her lack of suitable clothes forced the teenager to stay indoors until her boyfriend, the painter Bernard Quentin, gave her a threadbare brown suit, a sweater, and an old shirt. Quentin’s clothes were too large and Gréco had to roll up her trouser legs (Gréco 1982: 69 and 2012: 65). When a generous female donor enabled Gréco to replace her raffia footwear with an almost new pair of crepe-soled shoes (Gréco 1982: 70), Jujube—as Gréco calls herself in her first autobiography—was ready to explore her neighborhood: “Dans la rue, les gens se retournent sur elle, un peu supris [sic] de son accoutrement, mais Jujube, elle, se sent fière allure. Elle ignore qu’une nouvelle mode vient de naître” (Gréco 1982: 71). [On the street, people turn round, a little surprised by her outfit, but Jujube thinks she looks great. She does not know that a new fashion has just been born.] Several photographs show Gréco apparently in the kind of clothes she describes including the image accompanying an article about “Bohemian Paris” shot by Carl Perutz which appeared in Life magazine at the end of September 1947. Gréco is slow-dancing wearing a large, light-colored sweater over wide trousers of a medium hue with rolled-up legs (Life 1947: 146)4 (Figure 14.1).
Figure 14.1 Juliette Gréco wearing what seem to be men’s trousers at Le Tabou, published in in Life magazine, September 29, 1947. Photo by Carl Perutz, © Pete Livingston, www.perutz.net.
It is surprising that Gréco was still wearing what looked like Quentin’s donations in the autumn of 1947, for by this time she had another source of clothes: her close friend François Bamberger, a “résistant devenu industriel” [resistance fighter turned industrialist] (Dicale 2001: 141). Bamberger descended of Alsatian Jews who had moved to Lille in the north of France to remain citizens of the French Republic after the annexation of Alsace-Moselle by the German Empire in 1871. There they began to manufacture men’s clothes and between the wars, Hauser et Cie, as the company was called from 1923, obtained lucrative government contracts producing post office and air force uniforms. During the German occupation of Lille, Hauser et Cie was “aryanized,” transferred to non-Jewish owners and probably produced uniforms for the German army. François Bamberger joined the Resistance at the age of eighteen in September 1940 and occupied several important roles despite his young age. After the war, his father having been killed in Auschwitz, Bamberger sacrificed a promising political career to run the family business. Bamberger had many friends in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and even after regaining the company, he divided his time between Lille and the capital (Bamberger 2015).
In a TV program devoted to her life first broadcast in France in 1962, Gréco seems to suggest that necessity, or maybe opportunity, resulted in her sartorial move toward black:
Les choses commencèrent comme ça. D’abord, on fut vêtu de draps kakis, par la force des choses, de la guerre. Et ensuite, on eût droit à un certain lot de loden gris-verts, qui probablement devaient venir de l’occupation allemande, j’imagine. Et puis alors, vint la période faste, la période de la gabardine noire!
Et nous fûmes tous habillés, par la force des choses une fois de plus, en garçon parce que la maison de confection de François ne comportait pas de département féminin. Nous étions habillés comme des garçons, vous savez: de grandes épaules carrées, des petits boutons, dans le mauvais sens. On était finalement assez élégants et c’est comme ça que commença la mode de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. (Juliette Gréco 1962)
[This is how things started. At first we were dressed in khaki cloth, out of necessity, because of the war. And then, we got hold of a lot of grey-green Loden cloth, which probably, I imagine, stemmed from the German Occupation. And then came the good times, the period of the black gabardine!
And we were all dressed, by necessity once again, “en garçon” because François’ ready-to-wear company did not have a womenswear section. We were dressed like boys, you know: large square shoulders, little buttons fastening the wrong way. We were actually quite elegant and this is how the fashion of Saint-Germain-des-Prés started.]
Not all of Gréco’s clothing consisted of menswear manufactured in Lille. Both Cazalis and Gréco took their fabric allocations to “une ravissante Tahitienne” [a lovely Tahitian] who could sew “comme une fée” [like a fairy] and wielded her scissors like none other (Gréco 1982: 107). On August 2, 1947, Samedi-soir ran an article on Taï Moana Kermarec,5 the Tahitian dressmaker who, it was claimed, had just presented the first “existentialist collection” at Le Tabou. The article was accompanied by photographs of Taï with her sewing machine, a Tabou regular in what looks like a perfectly ordinary striped summer dress and Cazalis in a kind of night gown made of batik fabric. No doubt Gréco could have had her black gabardine fashioned into a dress or skirt suit but she continued to wear trousers, albeit better fitting ones, which for this article she coordinated with a long-sleeved Breton shirt and white sandals (Samedi-Soir [108]: 9) (Figure 14.2).
Figure 14.2 This still from Jacques Baratier’s “Désordre” filmed in 1947–1948 shows Juliette Gréco in fitted black trousers. “Désordre” by Jacques Baratier © 1949 Argos Films. All rights reserved.
The Cazalis-Doelnitz-Gréco triumvirate did not leave their local village often, but occasionally they walked across the Pont Alexandre III to explore the Rive Droite. While Gréco’s clothes had been tolerated—even admired—in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, they did not find favor here:
Avec mes pantalons noirs, mes cheveux longs et lâches, mes yeux soulignés de crayon noir et ma bouche sans fard, on me jette des regards stupéfaits, surpris par mon excentricité et mon allure provocante. (Gréco 2012: 89)
[With my black trousers, my long and loose hair, my eyes underlined with black crayon and my make-up-free mouth, I am being given stupefied looks, surprised by my eccentricity and my provocative appearance.]
Marc Doelnitz remembered the treatment the friends received during an expedition to the Champs-Elysées:
Nos tenues—dites existentialistes—déclenchèrent immédiatement sur la rive droite un tollé de sarcasmes et d’injures qui me fît me souvenir du temps des zazous. Le noir étant la dominante de notre vêture, nous eûmes droit à des: “Saint-Anne, c’est par là”, “Maman j’ai peur”, “Vous vous habillez chez Borniol?” et autres amabilités … (Doelnitz 1979: 168)
[Our clothes—so-called existentialist—immediately sparked off a torrent of sarcasms and insults on the right bank, which reminded me of the times of the zazous. Black was the dominant feature of our clothing, and we earned ourselves the “Saint-Anne, that’s this way,” “Mum, I’m afraid,” “Do you buy your clothes at Borniol?” and other niceties.]
Saint-Anne was a psychiatric hospital in Paris and Maison Borniol a famous undertaker. This last allusion was not entirely off the mark, as Gréco is said to have obtained her black sweaters from a store for ecclesiastical vestments near the Church of Saint-Sulpice, the area where she first lived after her prison release (Dicale 2001: 140).
So what was it that annoyed the inhabitants of the beaux quartiers [beautiful quarters] so much? It was probably not just the color black. Anne-Marie Cazalis also recalled a foray to the Champs-Elysées—it is not unlikely that the three friends described the same traumatic experience. Cazalis claimed that stones were thrown at the trio because of Doelnitz’s hairstyle and Gréco’s trousers, despite the fact that Christian Bérard had devised them. As these designer trousers were not made of black gabardine but of check fabric (Cazalis 1976: 89; Gréco 1982: 107), it was more likely the garment itself that shocked the bourgeoisie.
Photographs taken on the streets of Paris during and just after the war suggest that women rarely resorted to wearing slacks. André Zucca’s extraordinary images from the period of the Occupation include one of a young female cyclist on the Cours de Vincennes wearing what seem to be men’s trousers. Zucca might have photographed the young woman because this was such a rare sight, but we also know that she reminded him of a popular actress (Zucca 2008: 136). The more than two hundred of Zucca’s images published in 2008 do not seem to depict any other women wearing trousers but the garment creeps into his oeuvre in other ways. Above the window displays of “Fashionable,” a shop in in Montmartre, a large sign advises potential female clients in 1943 “Pour avoir chaud cet Hiver! … Portez le pantalon à semelles de bois” (Zucca 2008: 66). [To be warm this winter! … Wear trousers with your wooden soles.]
It might have been more acceptable to wear trousers in winter. Henry-Georges Clouzot’s film Quai des Orfèvres, filmed between February and May of 1947 and released later the same year, is set in the cold season. At the beginning of the film, we briefly see a young woman in slacks climbing up some stairs. Simone Renant as the photographer Dora Monier wears trousers in her studio but not outside, and her sartorial preference might also have been used to allude to her sexual inclination. When Elle revealed the secrets of the coming winter fashions in October of 1946, the magazine reported: “Sur les Pantaloons … [sic] tout le monde est unanime: il en faut un.” [With regards to trousers … everyone agrees: you have to have them.] But these were trousers by Balmain (for the cold city, for the snow and for the home), Hermès (for everywhere), and Lanvin (a “jupe-culotte” for cycling and for walking) (Elle 1946 [46]: 5). Trousers had also previously appeared in several summer issues of the fashion magazine, but they appear to be associated with holidays by the sea, rather than urban wear.6 Judging from the issues of Elle published between April 1946 and October 1947 trousers were acceptable on certain occasions and when necessity demanded, for a short period after the war. The arrival of Dior seems to have put an end to their use.
Jane Aubaile, born in August 1929, was brought up in the capital and lived there after the war. Jane, then called Huguette, accompanied her older brother to the popular haunts of Saint-Germain-des-Prés where she encountered Juliette Gréco, two years her senior, several times. Huguette/Jane remembered that trouser-wearing women were indeed rare:
Juliette Greco et ses pantalons! Encore un moyen de se faire remarquer car le port du pantalon n’était pas courant, et même exceptionnel. Les femmes qui en portaient étaient rares, il n’y avait aucun pantalon dans les boutiques pour femmes. Il fallait alors les faires [sic] faire par une couturière. Moi j’ai porté quelque fois des pantalons qui étaient faits par ma mère mais je ne le portais pas pour sortir dans la rue. (Aubaile 2014)
[Juliette Gréco and her trousers! Another means of getting herself noticed, as wearing trousers was not common, in fact exceptional. Women who wore trousers were rare, you could not get any trousers in women’s shops. You had to have them made by a dressmaker. I sometimes wore trousers which my mother had made, but I never wore them on the streets.]
Gréco’s trousers became a symbol, a shorthand, and a cliché for a world that was upside down, where the young preferred to live beneath the earth. During the 1950s, Leo Malet published a series of crime stories each set in one of the capital’s arrondissements. In La nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés [The Night of Saint-Germain-des-Prés], the detective Nestor Burma, having to make way for a small group of American tourists, muses about the reasons behind the recent fame of the quartier:
Je songeais, qu’en somme, le nez de Cléopâtre de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, c’est un falzar d’homme porté par une fille. […] Ça a suffi pour changer, sinon la face du monde, en tout cas l’atmosphère de ce quartier, plutôt familial et bourgeois, et le rendre célèbre dans les contrées les plus reculées de la planète. Tout cela du jour où une jeune fille qui n’avait pas plus de fric pour aller chez le coiffeur que pour s’acheter une jupe à l’Uniprix de la rue de Rennes a emprunté le grimpant d’un copain. (Malet 1973: 18–19)
[I think, in short, that the Saint-Germain-des-Prés’ equivalent of the nose of Cleopatra are a pair of men’s trousers worn by a girl. […] That’s been enough to change, if not the entire world, in any case the atmosphere of this neighborhood, rather family-orientated and bourgeois, and make it famous in the most remote regions of the planet. All this because of the day when a girl ran out of dosh, could not go to the hairdresser or buy herself a skirt in the Uniprix in the rue de Rennes, and borrowed the trousers from a male friend.]
The two photos by Serge Jacques gracing the dust cover of a small book on La légende de Saint-Germain-des-Prés [The Legend of Saint-Germain-des-Prés], published in September 1950, each show a young woman with long hair in slacks. The Gréco lookalike on the front in her light sweater, black culottes, and espadrilles is unnamed while the pensive looking woman on the back in check trousers and Breton shirt is identified as the teenage actress Anouk Aimée. Inside, twenty-four hours in the life of Saint-Germain-des-Prés are charted in eighty-seven black and white photographs, which seem to have been taken over a number of years. Two further Gréco doppelgangers can be found toward the end of the book looking tired in the Tabou at 5 a.m. and, even more tired, waiting for the first metro, an hour later (Tavriger 1950). The sparse text and the captions were printed in both French and English, making the book a perfect souvenir for Americans in Paris.
Gréco is at pains to point out that she never intended to start a new fashion, but that she was fully aware of what was happening:
On commence à copier sa façon de maquiller ses yeux. Un célèbre visagiste lui donnera le nom d’oeil de biche. On copie aussi sa non-coiffure, la couleur noire et les pantalons font fureur. Elle regarde. Indifférente. Elle ignore la mode. (Gréco 1982: 114)
[They start to copy how she makes up her eyes. A famous beautician calls her doe-eyed. They also copy her non-hairstyle, the color black and trousers are all the rage. She looks on. Indifferent. She does not know what fashion is.]
Gréco’s main imitator was her friend Annabel Schwob de Lur, later Buffet, who even followed suit when Gréco had her nose modified. Doelnitz described how Annabel, after a hard day’s work as a model for Jacques Heim, changed each night into a sweater and black trousers to haunt the quartier (Doelnitz 1979: 187). The two young women were often photographed together and, in one series taken by Georges Dudognon in 1950, Gréco in black and Annabel in check trousers were shot in a variety of locations, at one point being joined by a third, trouser-wearing woman7 (Figure 14.3).
Figure 14.3 Juliette Gréco, Annabel, and an unidentified woman walk past the bar Le Montana in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1950. Georges Dudognon/adoc-photos.
The many photos taken in the cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés depict the odd women in slacks but not many entirely in black. In June of 1947, Simone de Beauvoir described (in English) a recent visit to the Tabou to her lover, the American author Nelson Algren:
So about midnight I went to a very crazy but funny place where the young French so-called intellectual people dance and drink with very pretty pseudo-intellectual girls. It is a long cave under a little bar, a rather dark cave with reddish walls and ceiling, little tables and stools and hundreds of people dancing where there is place only for twenty of them. But it is nice because boys and girls were dressed in a very fancy way, with many colors, and they dance in a very fancy way too; some boys have brain [sic] and some girls very good faces. (Beauvoir 1999: 26–27)
Was black clothing really such an unusual sight? The street photographs taken by André Zucca during the Occupation include many women wearing black.8 The somber color seems to have been slightly more favored by women of a certain age and above, even if younger women can also be seen dressed in black. Jean Baronnet, in his text for the book about Zucca’s images, stated that particularly in working class areas such as Belleville or Ménilmontant, rules relating to mourning attire were still strictly observed and “beaucoup de femmes portent encore des vêtements noirs” [many women still wore black clothes]. The degree of mourning was affected by the closeness of the relation to the deceased. Even in the 1940s, the loss of a husband necessitated wearing a black veil for many months (Zucca 2008: 142). The reason behind someone’s choice of color is difficult to tell from a photograph. Some women might have been in the same position as Simone de Beauvoir after the Liberation who owned only very old clothes except for “a black suit that I kept for special occasions” (Beauvoir 1975: 19).
Black could be fashionable. In April 1946, Elle magazine declared that it was now clear what women wanted to wear in the spring. This included—for the period from noon to dusk—“robes noires” [black dresses] which are described as “très ‘amusantes’; très décolletées; vonlontairement ‘pauvres’” [very “amusing”; “very low-cut” voluntarily “poor”] (Elle 1946 [2]: 6). In July of the same year, Monique Danon advised Elle readers that if one felt like appearing “toute simple, unie, sobre, ‘mono-tone’” [simple, plain, sober, “mono-tone”], black was acceptable even for the summer. The non-color, however, had its disadvantages, including that it was difficult to wear, showed up stains, and was “sans pitié” [without pity] demanding a perfect makeup (Danon 1946: 6–7).
It seems to have been the color black in combination with the trousers which reminded Beauvoir of fascists, presumably the Italian “Blackshirts” rather than the German occupiers who, as we heard above, preferred grey-green loden cloth. Whether and how the fascist penchant for black relates to the color’s popularity in Capri in the late 1940s is still to be determined. This penchant was picked up by British Vogue in November of 1948 in the article “Black on the Beach” (Vogue 1948: 60–61). The anonymous writer of the very brief text and image captions singled out “the covered-up look,” “the cult of identical shirts for men and women,” “the passion for poplin” and “the prevalence for black.” One of the Clifford Coffin photographs show the Count and Countess Uberto Corti acting as a “foil to the brilliance of sun and sea” in their black beach shirts, while in another image the countess “muffles herself in a huge turtle-necked black sweater” and “black velvet knee breeches.” The Count and Countess Rudolfo Crespi looked resplendent in “identical open-necked shirts in black poplin” by Simonetta Visconti that “had great chic at Capri this summer” (Vogue 1948: 61). This Caprese fashion for black seemed to have lasted a long time, perhaps as an attempt by the aristocrats to hold on to the recent fascist past? Go, the short-lived British postwar travel and leisure magazine, reported only in its Holiday Number for 1953 that “Beach clothes are bright and gay this year. The Capri vogue for unrelieved black is on its way out. The trend is for vivid colors and nonsense clothes” (Go 1953: 20).
Gréco’s near contemporary Huguette, already mentioned above, did not aspire to become a Juliette Gréco imitation. She preferred feminine clothes and in her view
Le noir s’imposait en opposition à la rue fleurie: en ville, les femmes portaient les robes fleuries aux multiples couleurs. Elles s’habillaient en couleurs exubérantes pour marquer la fin des années sombres, tandis que les existentialistes revendiquaient la couleur noire.
Les existentialistes vivaient en « ambiance close », tournés vers un « intellectualisme » trouvant sa source dans la négation. Les jeunes écoutaient cette forme de philosophie, dont Juliette Greco, ne devaient pas comprendre le fond. Qu’importe, on était existentialiste! (Aubaile 2014)
[Black positioned itself against the florid street: in the city, women wore flowery robes in multiple colors. They dressed in exuberant colors to mark the end of the somber years, while the existentialists laid claim to the color black.
The existentialists lived in a “closed environment”, turned towards an “intellectualism” that had its roots in negation. The young people listened to this kind of philosophy, including Juliette Gréco, but did not really understand it. It did not matter, one was existentialist!]
Whether or not the existentialists really wore black does not really matter. The color seemed to fit those who lived by night as well as the popular conception of the philosophy they were said to follow. This can be gleaned from an article written by Sartre in December of 1944 for the communist weekly Action in defense of his version of existentialism against the most commonly voiced criticisms. Existentialism had been accused of “upholding nihilistic doctrines” and corrupting the youth encouraging them to turn away from action and to “cultivate a refined despair” (Sartre 1944: 155). While Sartre protested against the idea that existentialism was merely a “mournful delectation” (Sartre 1944: 160), he also made it clear that his was not an uplifting philosophy and that despair, anguish, and a feeling of being alone were necessary.
Sartre explained that existence preceded essence: “man first is, and only subsequently is this or that.” Man creates his own essence: “it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself” (Sartre 1944: 157). Since there is no set morality, nor are there guidelines; man is alone in his decisions but at the same time responsible for everyone else. This “total responsibility,” according to Sartre, rightly induces fear and anguish. Despair stems from the realization that man “can count on nothing but himself: that he is alone, left alone on earth in the middle of his infinite responsibilities, with neither help nor succor, with no other goal but the one he will set for himself, with no destiny but the one he will forge on this earth” (Sartre 1944: 159). While for Sartre despair is the origin of optimism and he speaks of man rejoicing “in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all” (Sartre 1944: 159), existentialism’s bleak reputation is maybe not surprising. Anguish, despair, being alone, being “nothing” before making something of oneself seem aligned with darkness rather than light and might have made the assumed preference of the cellar-existentialists for black clothes seem natural.
There is another aspect of the color black. During the First World War, African American soldiers had reached France in large numbers. Many stayed, followed by artists, writers, and musicians, who contributed to the popularity of jazz between the wars. The condemnation of jazz by the Nazis during the Occupation made it into a symbol of anti-fascism and it became an essential part of the existentialist culture and myth. One of the main promoters of jazz was Boris Vian, another pillar of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Born in 1920, Vian was a jazz fan from an early age, who played the trumpet professionally, and wrote novels, plays, articles, as well as music reviews for the magazine Jazz Hot. He gained notoriety for his translation of a novel of the black American author Vernon Sullivan, allegedly banned in the United States for its subject matter and graphic descriptions of sex and violence. I Shall Spit on Your Graves was one of the best sellers of 1947 but in 1953 it was revealed what many had suspected: that Vian had been the real author of the story.
The real or mythical preference for the color black by the so-called existentialists is probably not a conscious symbol of solidarity with black Americans or Africans. Nevertheless, the latter’s presence in Paris might have heightened what James Naremore, the author of More than Night, calls “a noir sensibility” (Naremore 1998: 11). It is not surprising that this emerged after the Occupation, a period often referred to as the “années noires” or “black years.” This preoccupation with darkness also had other symptoms. In 1945 Marcel Duhamel founded the Série Noire, a publishing imprint for Gallimard, which released crime fiction mainly by Anglo-American authors but also Vian’s pseudo-translations. And it was French critics who coined the phrase “film noir” to describe Hollywood crime dramas (Naremore 1998: 15–16).
As if there were not enough already, there are further connotations of the color black. Huguette, described a postwar fashion for “slumming it”:
Dans ces clubs il y avait les « snob de la pauvreté ». Etaient-ils si pauvres? Ils étaient en tout cas toujours habillés en noir. Le noir vient certainement d’un refoulement du mode de vie des bourgeois, peu importe leur richesse. (Aubaile 2014)
[In the clubs you had the “snobs de la pauvreté.” Were they so poor? Regardless, they were always dressed in black. Black certainly came from a suppression of the bourgeois way of life, regardless of wealth.]
This is a theme picked up by Anne-Marie Cazalis:
En 1945, la France était pauvre. Il y eut un snobisme de la pauvreté. François de La Rochefoucauld,/duc de Liancourt, se fit portier du Tabou. Gréco fut une fille pauvre qui inquiète parce qu’elle belle. Quand les journalistes disaient: « Elle a les cheveux trop longs » ou « Je n’aime pas ses pantalons », c’est de la pauvreté qu’ils essayaient de nous dégoûter. Mais c’est sa beauté qu’ils lui reprochaient secrètement. Belle sans argent, Gréco fut le symbole de notre après-guerre. (Cazalis 1976: 91–92)
[In 1945, France was poor. There existed a snobbery of poverty. François de La Rochefoucauld, duc de Liancourt, became the doorman of the Tabou. Gréco was a poor girl who disturbed people because she was beautiful. When the journalists said: “Her hair is too long” or “I don’t like her trousers,” they tried to put us off poverty. But her beauty served as secret criticism of them. Beautiful without money, Gréco was the symbol of our post-war.]
At times Gréco’s black clothes seem to have been an act of passive aggression, a way of trying to attract attention while pretending to want to blend into the background, similar to her often-mentioned silence during the conversations of friends. Black also highlighted her beautiful face and hands, an effect that she was to employ throughout her life.
Encouraged by Sartre, Gréco took up singing in 1949 at the same time as Doelnitz had been asked to revive the faded interwar glory of a cabaret off the dreaded Champs-Elysées (Schlesser 2006: 94–95). On June 22, 1949, Gréco made her debut at the Bœuf sur le Toit wearing her customary black trousers and sweater, albeit accentuated with gold sandals. Not long thereafter, Gréco appeared at the Rose Rogue, another Left Bank subterranean establishment but far removed from an existentialist cellar. Chanteuses did not wear trousers there and the cabaret’s owner Niko Papatakis dragged Gréco to the sale at Balmain, where he purchased a long black dress with a train of gold satin. Unhappy with this intrusion of lightness into her wardrobe, Gréco cut off the offensive appendage (Gréco 1982: 138).
Black was not an uncommon choice for a female French singer and Gréco was following in the footsteps of Damia and Edith Piaf. But the severity of Gréco’s working wardrobe—the long, narrow sleeves, the absence of jewelry, the lack of makeup, and the often mentioned long hair—was nevertheless deemed to be scandalous, at least for a while (Figure 14.4).
À cette époque, et pour la majeure partie des gens, l’image de la femme que je représente n’est pas recevable. Ma propre personne, ma voix, mon interprétation, mes formes ne sont que provocation. Dans ma robe noire moulante, les cheveux défaits, la voix grave, je suis une image violente, un scandale, un interdit! (Gréco 1982: 155)
[At that time, and for most people, the image of woman that I represented was not acceptable. My own person, my voice, my interpretation, my shape was nothing but a provocation. In my figure-hugging dress, my hair undone, the deep voice, I was a violent image, a scandal, something forbidden!]
Figure 14.4 Juliette Gréco behind the scenes at the Paris music hall theater Bobino, November 1951. Photo by Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty Images.
Doelnitz went even further, explaining that in the eyes of the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth arrondissement:
Juliette n’eût pas été plus indécente uniquement vêtue d’une feuille de vigne. […] Mais cette trop grande simplicité choquait le conformisme endiamanté. Comment pouvait-il y avoir du talent là-dessous, alors qu’on n’avait même pas fait un effort de toilette pour se présenter devant les gens convenables! (Doelnitz 1979: 196)
[Juliette couldn’t have been more indecent if she had worn a fig leaf … But this simplicity, which was too much, shocked the bejeweled conformism. How could there be talent underneath, if one hadn’t even made an effort with ones clothes to present oneself to respectable folk!]
Gréco likened her working wardrobe, “le noir de travail” [the black for work] to a blackboard liberating the imagination of her audience (Gréco 1982: 138). Maybe she still remembered her school days when as a teenager she stared at the “tableau noir qui m’ouvre son monde imaginaire” (Gréco 2012: 44) [the blackboard that opened its imaginary world to me]. In her first autobiography, Gréco had separated Jujube, the real Juliette, from Gréco, her public persona, and her choice of working wardrobe similarly suggests that the singer used black as a shield or coat of armor to protect her true self. The blackboard analogy also seems to suggest that the color black had no meaning. As we have seen, that was not the case.
Acknowledgments
With many thanks to Jane Aubaile, Marion and Olivier Bamberger, Sarah Piettre and Melina Plottu.
English translations in square brackets have been provided by the author.
Notes
1 “Black being the dominant colour of our wardrobe …” (Doelnitz 1979: 168).
2 For the use of autobiographies to recover Saint-Germain-des-Prés see Benjamin Steiner, particularly part 3, chapter 2: “Individuelle and kollektive Erinnerung an Saint-Germain-des-Prés” [Individual and collective memories of Saint-Germain-des-Prés] (2004: 95–104).
3 The main sources for Gréco’s biography are her two autobiographies Jujube (1982) and Je suis faite comme ça (2012) as well as Bertrand Dicale’s biography (2001).
4 See also Serge Jacques’s photograph of Gréco and “Le Major” (Jacques Loustalot) at the Café Flore, c. 1945–1947, in Caracalla (1993: 154).
5 The last name was difficult to make out on the micro-film of Samedi-Soir held at the Bibliothèque Nationale. According to Gréco, the dressmaker became the wife of the lawyer Jean-Pierre Le Mée (Gréco 1982: 107).
6 See Elle (33), July 2, 1946: 10–11; Elle (37), July 30, 1946: 12–13; Elle (44), September 17, 1946: cover and 5.
7 See photos by Georges Dudognon on the website of the adoc-photos picture library, image numbers: 00024078, 00024079, 00024085, 00024094, 00056952 (accessed October 29, 2015).
8 See in particular Zucca’s photos of the “Terasse du Colisée sur les Champs-Elysées” (2008: 26–27); “À l’angle du boulevard des Capucines et de la place de l’Opéra” 1943, (60–61); “Place de la Republique,” 1943 or 1944 (72); “Foire du Trône,” 1941 (132–133); “Boulevard de Clichy,” 1943 (148–149); “Rue de Belleville, 1944” (158–159).
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