Madame Sélect … had a high colour, shrewd eyes, and a bosom like a shelf; she wore little black fingerless mittens that kept her hands warm without preventing her from counting the francs and centimes. Monsieur Sélect, who made the Welsh rarebits on a little stove behind the bar, had long melancholy moustaches like Flaubert’s.
The chief attraction of the Sélect, however, was that it stayed open all night.
For many Americans, Paris meant a welcome escape from Prohibition, which had been in force throughout the USA since a year after the Armistice. In his memoirs, Being Geniuses Together, McAlmon harps like a boastful schoolboy on the number of drinks he and his friends consumed, and Hemingway often writes in similar terms when describing his Paris life to friends back home: ‘I morted a fiasco of wine at lunch … and I drank a cup full of 3 star Hennessy to see me homeward.’ Some of the French drinks were as dubious as the stuff the bootleggers were selling in New York and Chicago. Jimmie Charters says that one bar where he worked sold a good deal of mint julep, made from so-called ‘Green River Bourbon’ that had been left behind during the war by the US Army. It eventually turned out to be neat alcohol with added flavouring. Other examples were encountered of what Jimmie calls ‘the bootlegger’s Miracle of Cana’.
Jimmie Charters himself was a principal feature of the Quarter. He turns up in most published reminiscences of Montparnasse at this era and features in several novels. He was a Liverpool-Irish prize fighter, an ex-professional flyweight, who had come to Paris in June 1921 to learn French in the hope of qualifying for a head waiter’s job back home. His first Paris job was at the Hôtel Meurice in the rue de Rivoli – much favoured by rich Americans – and after working in other establishments he landed up in 1924 at the Dingo in Montparnasse. ‘It seemed a bit off the beaten track, but I liked the idea of working with English and Americans.’ He later moved to the Falstaff, a bar in rue du Montparnasse decorated in what was supposed to be the style of an English pub, and his customers came with him. John Glassco caught him in his Falstaff days:
The Falstaff gained a special charm from the contrast between its rather stuffy oak panelling and padded seats and the haphazard way it was run by the bartender Jimmie Charters … and the waiter Joe Hildesheim, who came from Brooklyn and was known as Joe the Bum. The Falstaff was owned jointly by two Belgian gentlemen who also shared a mistress, a very plump handsome grey-eyed woman called Madame Mitaine. The three of them sat quietly in the ingle of the fireplace every evening and did not interfere in any way, being content to count the cash when the bar closed … Jimmie and Joe ran the place on the principle that about every tenth drink should be on the house, so that regular clients, and still more the casual visitors, were constantly being surprised by a whispered intimation that there was nothing to pay.
In his novel The Façâde (1927), the English writer Douglas Goldring describes how his hero Rex, a veteran of Montparnasse, returns there from an absence to find that Jimmie is not in his usual bar, and will not rest until he has found the establishment where
… dressed in a spotless white coat and polishing a glass, stood the diminutive figure of the most popular barman in the Quarter. Having discovered Jimmie, Rex was now quite certain that he would meet during the evening all of his friends and acquaintances who happened to be in Paris.
‘Hullo, James’, he cried.
Jimmie’s face became wreathed in smiles as he put down his glass and held out his hand.
Goldring writes of Jimmie’s ‘fertile imagination’ at creating ‘every form of poisonous drink’, and particularly mentions Jimmie’s ‘knockout’ which was
never composed until half an hour or so before closing-time. Its composition varied with the inspiration of the moment … ‘I had to give up serving them at the “President Wilson”.’ Jimmie once admitted. ‘People started climbing up lamp-posts and knocking down policemen and revolving like teetotums between the Dôme and the Rotonde. It gave us quite a bad name.’
Jimmie also observes, in Goldring’s novel, that Americans ‘don’t seem somehow to enjoy themselves in a bar until they’ve punched someone in the jaw and smashed the place up’. Bar fights among Americans were certainly common in Montparnasse. A friend of Hemingway’s, Mike Ward, told Hemingway one day that he had been in a certain bar where he had heard ‘two men talking about you. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I kept hearing the name Ernest Hemingway. So I went over to them and I said, “Are you friends of Ernest Hemingway?” And they said, “No.” So I socked them both!’
Jimmie himself liked a fight. McAlmon describes how ‘when liquored up he was apt to remember his fighting days, and insist upon “protecting” friends he drank with. Sometimes his protection resulted in a night in jail for both Jimmie and his friends.’ On his very first night in Paris, Jimmie had picked an inebriated fight with a street-corner fire alarm, resulting in three weeks in the Santé prison. Samuel Putnam, another Montparnasse habitué, recalls Jimmie using his fists to keep order in his own bar: ‘I can see Jimmie … reaching across the bar, gentle like, to put an obstreperous customer to sleep … then, one hand on the bar and he’s across, picking the guy up, dusting him off and sending him home in a taxi – and paying his fare! That was Jimmie. I often wonder how he made any money.’ Hemingway describes gentler treatment from Jimmie: ‘I can hear him saying, “You should go home, sir. Shall I get a taxi?”’ According to McAlmon, Jimmie would even use his fists on himself: ‘When his blood pressure was too high from overeating and drinking, Jimmie had a habit of going to his room, banging his own nose so that it would bleed, and thereby reducing his blood pressure.’
Jimmie did not know absolutely everybody in the Quarter; he was under the impression, when dictating his memoirs in the early 1930s, that ‘Mr Joyce … leads a very retired life and never visits bars … [but only] attends quiet little gatherings now and then when the intellectuals foregather’. But he saw plenty of Hemingway; he describes how Hemingway ‘came to my bar frequently and we would have long conversations about boxing or he would tell me about bull fighting … On my night off we often went to boxing matches together … Sometimes he would start sparring in the bar and almost knock someone over.’
In his memoirs, Jimmie describes a cross-section of lesser-known Montparnassians. There was Captain Walker, a ‘pseudo-English officer with a game leg’, who claimed to have sailed a destroyer across the Atlantic in record time in 1917 to tell President Wilson to declare war at once; Captain Walker said that the President was ‘forced to agree, and declared war that same day’. There was Panama Al Brown, the black American boxer and ‘ankle dancer’; Jimmie recalls his notable impersonation of a short man dancing with a tall woman. There was an American named Learning who claimed to have been a monk in Russia and said he had come to Paris for a rest from ‘monking’; and there was
old Mitrony, the Roumanian with a grey beard, poor as a beggar but extremely erudite. He carried a quantity of books and papers under his arm … and said he was writing a history of the Jews, though no one ever saw him write anything. At night he slept on chairs in the chauffeurs’ restaurant near the Gare Montparnasse. Every week or so he would disappear, and then a rumour went around that he was dead … He spoke ten languages fluently and I sometimes called him in to interpret for me.
Jimmie also recalls
Joe Goodman, the song writer, author of ‘Rose of Washington Square’ and ‘Second-hand Rose’ … with his lawyer, Finnety. Goodman could not survive more than a few minutes without his lawyer. It was a joke in the Quarter to try and separate Joe from Finnety. They both lived at the Hôtel Lutetia, and Joe, who spoke not a word of French, could use the telephone, when he was out somewhere, to reach Finnety at the hotel with great ease. Joe … would say ‘Cigar carrot cat carrot wheat’. The number of the hotel was Ségur quarante-quatre quarante-huit. He always got the number without difficulty.
And there was Captain Vail, who ‘purchased second-hand airplanes, fixed them up so they would fly (once anyway)
and sold them. He would deliver them himself, which was proof that they were airworthy. Vail was one of the heaviest brandy drinkers I have ever known. “You haven’t been anywhere until you’ve had the D.T.’s,” he used to say. “Those are real travels!”’
Marcel Duchamp points out that ‘colourful but non-productive characters’ like these often ‘contributed to the success of the creative group’ in Montparnasse. Though non-workers themselves, they provided an entertaining backdrop for those writers and artists who really were doing something, and not infrequently became ‘material’ for paintings and novels. As McAlmon puts it, ‘Bohemian centers [like Montparnasse] present in concentrated form their share of human types and manifestations.’ Those who complained about lazy Montparnassians, about bar-flys and café hangers-on who did no work, were missing an essential point about the place.
In The Façade, Jimmie Charters sums up the drop-outs of the Quarter: ‘“I think the people who come here regularly, sir, have, as you might say, given up everything. This is the end, so to speak.” Jimmie beamed, his small round eyes twinkled. “They have a lot of fun, though, when they get to that stage.”’
*
In his memoirs, Jimmie says: ‘One of my best friends among the writers is Bob McAlmon.’ John Glassco observes that ‘McAlmon’s own capacity for alcohol was astounding’, and says that during the half-hour of their first meeting McAlmon ‘drank half a dozen double whiskies with no apparent effect’. This capacity to remain comparatively sober while making the rounds of the bars meant that McAlmon was one of the more observant chroniclers of the Quarter’s night-life.
By the summer of 1923 he had been in Paris for a little over two years, Hemingway for eighteen months. This was the first year after the war, says McAlmon, that ‘foreigners began again to congregate numerously in Paris’. The steamship companies had started to introduce cheap transatlantic fares, and the American community, already well established, was being further swelled almost daily by new arrivals who had docked at Le Havre and caught the train to the capital. When Ezra Pound first came to Paris before the war he had been introduced to an elderly marquise who had never before met an American. By 1923 this seemed an impossibility. Pound reported to Ford Madox Ford that Americans were arriving ‘like leaves in autumn’, and said the place was beginning to seem like Eighth Avenue, New York.
On the night of 13 July 1923, France began its annual three-day celebration of the fall of the Bastille, and this year, says McAlmon, Montparnasse ‘extended the gala days to a three months’ period’. Jimmie Charters says it was quite normal for parties in the Quarter to go on for three days without sleep or rest, so naturally an official festival like Bastille Day became the excuse for prolonged saturnalia. ‘Enough of afterwar recklessness and enough of dawning hopefulness were about,’ writes McAlmon, ‘for dissipations to have a mass velocity.’ This 13 July, McAlmon himself had just returned to Paris from the Forest of Rambouillet, ‘where I had been for two months writing on a two-decker novel. I felt entitled to a letdown … The idea of Paris in drunken festival and me not one of the drunkest there, was austere.’
Montparnasse night-life would begin at around five thirty, the hour at which a few habitués would start to drift on to the terrace of the Dôme, seat themselves at separate tables, and order a drink and sip it slowly while glancing at the paper or a book. Laurence Vail, a regular in the place, writes of this time of day: ‘The first hour in Paris and I am hopefully searching the terrasses for a drinking companion, a boon Pernod pal.’ There was also the Rotonde or the Sélect, or even the Coupole, a little way down Boulevard du Montparnasse, but by general consent the Dôme was the expatriates’ headquarters. The novelist Sinclair Lewis, who spent some months in Paris in 1924 to 1925, writes that ‘among the other advantages of the Dôme, it is on a corner charmingly resembling Sixth Avenue at Eighth Street, and all the waiters understand Americanese, so that it is possible for the patrons to be highly expatriate without benefit of Berlitz’.
This Bastille evening McAlmon had half arranged to meet an American painter friend, Kenneth Adams, at the Dôme, but when he arrived there could see no sign of him. However, ‘it was impossible not to hear Florence Martin as soon as I entered the Quarter. She was at the Dôme bar, electing herself Dowager of the Dôme, Queen of Montmartre and Montparnasse … Queen Bee of drinkers.’
Florence Martin was a New York chorus girl who had been sent to Paris for voice training. ‘But,’ says Jimmie Charters, ‘she did little studying and finally stopped entirely. The fascination of the Dôme terrasse in the daytime and the Dingo at night were too much for her.’ Hemingway describes her as ‘a splendid sort of two-hundred-pound meteoric glad girl … the only really gay person during the time I frequented the Quarter’.
McAlmon portrays her as ‘a dashing bit of colour, of the Rubens type. Her orange hair was piled neatly above her clear, baby-smooth skin. It was easy to believe that the Flossie of some years back, when some pounds lighter, had been one of the more dazzling of Ziegfeld’s show-girls.’ Jimmie calls her ‘pretty and very jolly’ and says she was ‘not too selfish in her pleasures … Many a chap, temporarily down and out, was helped financially by Flossie, though she had no large sums at her disposal.’
At one stage in her Paris career Joe Zelli, the Montmartre night-club king, gave Flossie a so-called ‘job’, paying her simply to be in his club every night since her mere presence and exuberant gaiety would attract a crowd. ‘I have been told,’ says McAlmon, ‘Zelli did the biggest business of his career during the six months Flossie stayed at his club!’
Laurence Vail says she would regularly begin her day at 6 p.m. with a ‘breakfast’ of potatoes and gin, and would thereafter quickly reach top form. McAlmon singles her out as one of the few people with whom Joyce could not cope: ‘He had difficulty in believing that such a person really existed.’ The Bastille celebrations always found her at her most exuberant; one July she was seen, says Jimmie, sitting next to the trombonist on the bandstand outside the Coupole. ‘Every time the trombonist took his instrument from his lips Flossie kissed him!’
Seeing her at the Dôme at the beginning of his evening, McAlmon realised that ‘she was sure to be sounding off for the next twenty-four hours’. Already she had in tow a somewhat dismayed young Frenchman, who was muttering ‘Quelle type!’ The patron of the Dôme shrugged and smiled: ‘Mais alors, c’est Mile Flora. Elle est jeune. Toujours gaie.’ To which, says McAlmon, Flossie – who did not speak French – responded ‘Koochy, koochy’ and tickled the patron under the chin.
McAlmon had no sooner greeted her in his usual laconic fashion than they were joined by Sylvia Gough, ‘slender and beautiful in a fawnlike way’. The daughter of a diamond millionaire, she had been married to the son of a general, and also to an American sculptor; like Flossie she had appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies. Her sons, whom she never saw, were at Eton; Augustus John and one of the Rothschilds had been cited as co-respondents in her divorces. This evening she was ‘depressed over newspaper publicity’, and she complained languidly to McAlmon, ‘delicately weary, with aristocratic and oh, so worldly ennui’. McAlmon bought her several drinks. ‘Life began to stir in her,’ he writes. ‘“Bob, you are the most adorable … the most generous darling … He’s the only man who doesn’t try to come to bed with me every time we get drunk together.” “Merde!” Flossie exploded.’ (It was her only word of French.) ‘“Lay off your crap of being the gushing lady! We’re all bitches together.”’ Harold Loeb says that Flossie claimed to be a virgin, but ‘no authentic data on the subject’ had been collected.
McAlmon decided that buying Flossie and Sylvia drinks was too expensive a pastime for so early in the evening, so in an unobserved moment he slipped away to the Stryx, a new Swedish restaurant in a side-street near the Dôme, already popular for more ‘intimate’ sessions. ‘At the Stryx, I found Ezra Pound talking to an English girl, and describing America as it never was … Ezra was not drinking.’ (He rarely drank.) Also, ‘Floriann
e was sitting at a table with Yvonne Georges and Kiki.’
Yvonne Georges was a famous Belgian cabaret singer who performed at the Boeuf-sur-le-Toit; she had an Eton crop and immense melancholy eyes. Her companion Florianne liked to behave as the ‘French queen’ of Montparnasse just as Flossie Martin thought of herself as the ‘American queen’; of Spanish blood, she invariably came and went in taxis, being supported by a champagne manufacturer who, says McAlmon, ‘gave her thirty thousand francs a month’. She could afford the luxury of the Right Bank but ‘preferred the casual camaraderie of the Quarter’. Her penchant for taxis was shared by a British girl whom Jimmie Charters calls simply ‘Peggy’, who would ‘ride all over town in a taxi without a sou in her pocket to pay the fare’. No sooner had she arrived in a bar than the door would burst open and the driver would shout for his money: ‘“Pay?” she said. “Pay? You frogs! We paid in 1914. You have been paid many times. We paid with our lads and our money!”’
Florianne’s other companion at the Stryx, the celebrated Kiki, was the truly regal figure of Montparnasse, mascot and figurehead of the Quarter. Hemingway writes of her: ‘For about ten years she was about as close as people get nowadays to being a Queen.’ At the Dôme she presided over a central table on the terrace, which had a ‘reserved’ sign and was known as ‘Kiki’s table’. Hemingway compared her memoirs, published in the early 1930s, to Defoe’s Moll Flanders; Samuel Putnam, who edited and translated them, said he was reminded of Fanny Hill.
Kiki was born Alice Prin, in Burgundy in 1901, and was brought up in poverty. At the age of twelve she was sent to Paris where she sold flowers, and began to pose for a sculptor, eventually moving in with a pimp. By the age of sixteen she would ‘go by the Dôme or the Rotonde and look in to see if I could spot any artists … young painters that I went home with, to spend most of my nights in posing and singing’. When that failed she could get ‘two francs for showing my bosom’ to old men behind the Gare Montparnasse. ‘Sometimes I got five francs. I have a terrific bosom.’
Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Page 13