35

The Beds in the West

Where is the home of love so dear?

Where but here—yea, here?

Here love and danger snatch the flower

Of life perchance a single hour,

Mate and die.

Here they lie—yea, here!

RUTH GAINES, “Paris 1917”

For almost a century, expatriate Paris had belonged, at least in culture, to the rich and educated. War alerted a much larger group to its pleasures. People moved there who would never have contemplated doing so before. Gertrude Stein wrote, “We saw a tremendous number of people but none of them as far as I can remember that we had ever known before. Paris was crowded. As Clive Bell [art historian and brother-in-law of Virginia Woolf] remarked, they say that an awful lot of people were killed in the war but it seems to me that an extraordinarily large number of grown men and women have suddenly been born.”

One newcomer was songwriter Cole Porter, the lone contribution to American culture of Peru, Indiana. Notwithstanding having written a flop Broadway musical called See America First, Porter arrived in Paris in July 1917, supposedly to work for a war relief charity but actually to study composition with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum. He later claimed to have taught gunnery to American soldiers at the French Officers School at Fontainebleau, and to have joined the recruiting department of American Aviation Headquarters. Other versions have him serving with the Foreign Legion in North Africa. In Night and Day, a deliciously ridiculous 1946 biopic starring Cary Grant, he’s shown leaning against a palm tree, inspired by drums and some softly humming Zouaves to compose “Begin the Beguine” (actually written in 1935 during a Pacific cruise). In its obituary, the New York Times wrote, even less probably, that “he had a specially constructed portable piano made for him so that he could carry it on his back and entertain the troops in their bivouacs.”

In a pungent and more accurate summary of Porter’s Paris years, J. X. Bell wrote, “He made up stories about working with the French Foreign Legion and the French army. This allowed him to live his days and nights as a socialite and still be considered a ‘war hero’ back home. Paris parties during these years were elaborate and fabulous, involving people of wealthy and political classes. His were marked by much gay and bisexual activity, Italian nobility, cross-dressing, international musicians, and a large surplus of recreational drugs.”

Another new arrival was Henry Sturgis Crosby of Back Bay, Boston, Massachusetts. The nephew of financier J. Pierpont Morgan, Crosby was tall, with startlingly good looks. He volunteered to drive an ambulance, and in November 1917 his vehicle took a near direct shell hit. “The hills of Verdun,” he wrote deliriously of the experience and his survival, “and the red sun setting back of the hills and the charred skeletons of trees and the river Meuse and the black shells spouting up in columns along the road to Bras and the thunder of the barrage and the wounded and the ride through red explosions and the violent metamorphose from boy into man.”

Unlike Hemingway, who survived a similar attack at the cost of shrapnel in his legs, Crosby was untouched—except, perhaps, psychologically. The moment he could leave the service, he moved to Paris and began squandering his trust fund on opium, alcohol, sex, religion—he founded his own cult, revering the sun—even publishing. His companion, Polly Peabody, renamed herself Caresse and acquired a whippet called Clitoris. Together, they founded the Black Sun Press, pioneering the published-in-Paris movement.

In 1929, returning to New York with his mistress, Crosby shot her in the head, then shot himself. He was thirty-one. transition, the magazine that published Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Hemingway’s early stories, as well as Crosby’s poems and photographs, ran an obituary by Kay Boyle. Her incoherence captured a sense of his fevered life but also that of Paris at war.

There was no one who ever lived more consistently in the thing that was happening then. If he crossed the sea, it was never a stretch he looked upon as wide rolling water, but every drop of it stung in him because he did not know how to keep things outside himself; every rotting bit of wreck in it was heaped on his own soul, and every whale was his own sporting, spouting young adventure. If he went into retreat, into his own soul he would go, trailing this clattering, jangling universe with him, this ermine-trimmed, this moth-eaten, this wine velvet, the crown jewels on his forehead, the crown of thorns in his hand, into retreat, but never into escape.

Not immune to the pleasures of Paris, even General Pershing enjoyed his creature comforts, living in a borrowed mansion with a garden at 73 rue de Varenne, close to the Hôtel des Invalides. It was there, as he awaited the first draft of troops, that he and his inner circle planned the United States’ involvement in the war.

In their leisure hours, members of his staff, helped by their new acquaintances at the Union Interalliée, discovered fine dining and beautiful women. Harry Crosby’s diaries offer a commentary on the pleasures of a Paris where, increasingly, old rules no longer applied. In a gesture toward its expanding international clientele, the city’s most select brothel, La Chabanais, rebranded itself The House of All Nations. Crosby paid a visit, and gave his approval of “the Persian and the Russian and the Turkish and the Japanese and the Spanish rooms, and the bathroom with mirrored walls and mirrored ceilings, and the thirty harlots waiting in the salon.”

The house prided itself on accommodating all tastes. Crosby saw “the flogging post where men came to flagellate young girls and where others (masochists) came to be flagellated.” Voyeurs satisfied themselves in a room with peepholes. Men who enjoyed entering a vagina lubricated with the semen of another were invited to wait in a rear corridor until the first client left, then slip in. By special arrangement, fetishists could enjoy the latest in glamorous sexual sensations—a hot omelette slid sizzling from the pan onto their nude body.

The Crosbys also frequented an apartment on rue du Bois converted by a rastaquouère named Drosso into a luxurious fumerie. Caresse recalled “a series of small fantastic rooms, large satin divans heaped with pillows, walls covered with gold-embroidered arras, in the center of each room a low round stand on which was ranged all the paraphernalia of the pipe. By the side of each table, in coolie dress, squatted a little servant of the lamp. The air was sweet with the smell of opium.” After they changed into kimonos, Harry sprawled on a couch with one arm around a beautiful French girl. Caresse snuggled under the other.

Drosso would cater private opium parties, bringing the drug to one’s home, along with all the paraphernalia. Attractive congees, or servants, kept the pipes filled, as well as providing other services to any guests not wishing to enter what Baudelaire called the “artificial paradise” of drugged dreams.

To the French, one attraction of brothels and fumeries was the same as that of dinner parties: conversation. Men visited such places for the whole evening, or for days, and in some cases didn’t sample the pleasures of the house at all. Lulled by the relaxed atmosphere, the drugs, and the company of beautiful women, gentlemen might exchange useful confidences, even secrets. Under the law that forbade pimping, only a woman could manage a maison de tolérance, but the actual proprietors were businessmen, politicians, even artists—Marcel Proust was part owner of two homosexualmaisons closes—who recognized information as a commodity more precious than money.

Despite the execution of Mata Hari by a French firing squad in February 1917, nobody in Paris was unduly preoccupied with espionage. A wakeup call came toward the end of the year. Members of the American Field Service, including Hemingway, liked to gather at Harry’s New York Bar on rue Danou, near the Opéra. Nobody suspected eavesdroppers, but in January 1918 the manager, a Monsieur Tepé, was arrested and interrogated by the security services. Later that day, he was found dead in the street below an open window. Evidently, more was going on behind the scenes than anyone suspected. Even then, nobody took such things very seriously. There was a general feeling that, with the Americans having tossed their hat in the ring, the whole business would be over by Christmas. Writing in July, Albert Flament predicted, “The arrival of General Pershing will mark the definitive dispersal of those mists which, no matter when we looked, so heavily obscured our horizon.” Who could have foreseen that peace was still more than a year away, and that the hardest was yet to come?

“Black Jack” and “Papa”—Pershing and Joffre.

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