30
I beached upon—imagine!—incredible Floridas
Where panthers with the skins of men
In flowers glide. Where rainbow bridles,
Horizon-wide, rein the ocean’s pearly herds.
ARTHUR RIMBAUD, “The Drunken Boat”
No matter how catastrophic the reverses at the front, and how ominous the news that Russia, now ruled by the Communists, was negotiating a separate peace, Paris plugged its ears and covered its eyes. “The worse the war is, the more depraved the civilians become,” novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline grumbled in Journey to the End of the Night. “Women seem to have a fire in their ass. In time of war, instead of dancing in the lobby, we dance in the cellar.”
Shifty people of every stripe gravitated to the rich pickings of a city at war. Among them were numerous rastaquouères: rastas for short, from the Spanish rastacuero, meaning social climber or nouveau riche. Rastaquouère became an all-purpose label for any suave but untrustworthy foreigner, the “oily Levantine,” typically from the eastern Mediterranean or Latin America, with enough money to live well and the manners to move in society. They were, almost by definition, crooked. Many were gamblers. Some dealt in drugs. Others worked as pimps or gigolos. Even before the war, they’d excited suspicion. The anarchist review L’Assiette au Beurre devoted an entire issue to them. The cover showed a dark-skinned hand, with a diamond ring on every finger, thrusting a knife through a queen of hearts.
Rastas clustered around the Opéra, where, in a phrase of Pierre Darmon, “a varied fauna had taken over the cafés and bars.” The security services kept an eye on these places. Reports filed by their spies are snapshots of a hermetic and fevered world. “Seen at Ciro’s, in an ultrafantastic uniform, young R——, son of a judge of the court of appeal and a regular in the fashionable bars. Also George M———, secretary general of the theatre Michel.” A black market flourished wherever the rich hung out, such as the bar at Maxim’s restaurant on rue Royale. “At Maxim’s, a fat man with the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur explained to a couple of regulars how he got cigarettes via his member of parliament.”
Foreign journalists congregated at the Café Napolitain on rue de Caumartin, along with artists and the better class of prostitute. In the basement oyster bar of the Cintra on Place Edouard VII, inspectors noted “pederasts both civilian and military, some of them in make-up, some young men who, astonishingly, had escaped the draft, and a number of strangers with the air of rastas.” The latter were probably there to buy or sell cocaine, or to trade in jewelry, often stolen.
Though it limited the number of foreigners accepted into the army, the French were more welcoming to aviators, who were harder to find and died even more quickly than infantrymen. American volunteers formed the Lafayette Flying Corps, whose fliers were frequently seen around the boulevards, wearing high-laced leather boots, riding breeches, smart jackets with lots of braid, and sometimes a leather flying helmet.
Among them was William Wellman Jr. of Brookline, Massachusetts. He volunteered to drive an ambulance, switched to the Foreign Legion, then, like Eugene Bullard, transferred to the Lafayette Flying Corps, achieved three confirmed “kills” and five probables, earned the Croix de Guerre, but was himself shot down. This left “Wild Bill” with a lifelong limp, which, he claimed, increased his attractiveness to women. He later married one of Busby Berkeley’s showgirls and directed such movies as Wings, Roxie Hart, andBattleground.
Real aviators, such as Wellman and the African American Eugene Bullard, drank at the Rotonde in Montparnasse, where Bullard became friendly with the painter Moise Kisling, or at Chez le Père Lebas on rue Caumartin, where he went with another pilot, Jean Navarre. The first time Navarre took Bullard there, the regulars fell silent at the sight of his black skin. Someone said to Navarre, “Where did you get that? And what is it? Whatever it is, put it in the toilet and don’t forget to pull the chain.” Furious, Bullard, who had boxed professionally, prepared to take the bar apart—until Navarre reassured him it was just the “hazing” dished out to all new arrivals.
Such men as Wellman and Bullard turned la mode d’aviateur into a fashion statement. In turn, it became a gay fad, like the uniform Poiret designed for Misia Sert’s ambulance service. Police scouting the métro station in front of the Opéra reported “two ‘aviators’ in make-up, wearing outrageously tight trousers, which roused the hostility of passersby and some poilus.” At the American cocktail bar in the Grand Hotel on rue Auber, they spotted more of them, “dressed in fantastic uniforms, with no badges indicating their unit, and wearing their kepis tilted on the back of their heads, like jockeys. These absurdities were regarded with disapproval by the public.”
“Powdered type, difficult to categorize.”
Any dedicated follower of fashion who found uniforms too butch could opt for the flâneur or boulevardier style: a flannel jacket with a nipped-in waist, slim-cut striped trousers, shoes with canvas spats, the whole topped off with a jaunty felt hat, a cane, and, often, a monocle. As this look flattered both men and women, even the police couldn’t tell them apart. At the Chatham on rue Danou and the nearby Tipperary bar, the clientele consisted of “officers, straights and shady characters, rastas, and some powdered types, difficult to categorize.”
A few doors from the Chatham was Harry’s New York Bar, where the Bloody Mary was invented; George Gershwin would one day compose Rhapsody in Blue in the basement. An American jockey, Tod Sloan, opened Harry’s in 1911. Believing Paris needed a place where New Yorkers could feel at home, he bought a Manhattan bar and shipped its fixtures and furnishings to France. Everyone on the staff spoke English, a fact promoted in its advertising, which included a phonetic rendering of the address as “Sank Roo Da Noo,” making it easy for thirsty tourists to ask directions.
Harry’s barman, Jimmie Charters, would later serve “behind the stick” at the Dingo Bar in Montparnasse, where Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald first met. When he published his memoirs, This Must Be the Place, Hemingway wrote an introduction, in which he couldn’t resist sniping at James Joyce and, in particular, Gertrude Stein, from whose salon he had been barred after a literary argument. “Jimmy served more and better drinks than any legendary woman ever did in her salon,” he wrote; “certainly Jimmy gave less and better advice.”