Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  Writers, publishers, and art dealers from all over stayed at the Pont Royal or met there. Fred, the Swiss concierge, knew them all and kept a fatherly eye out for me. When I came home from work, he might tell me, “Monsieur Skira left this morning to visit Monsieur Matisse in Vence. Monsieur Matisse didn’t sound a bit pleased when he telephoned.” (The Swiss publisher Albert Skira was chronically late and never answered letters, which infuriated the supermethodical Matisse.) Or he might say, “Monsieur and Madame Miró are arriving tomorrow from Barcelona for a week. Monsieur Curt Valentin is expected from New York Tuesday.” (Curt Valentin was the most imaginative New York art dealer of the day.) “Monsieur Stephen Spender came in from London and was looking for you.”

  My room with its Turkey red carpet, brass bed, and nubbly white coverlet offered few amenities: one chair; an old-fashioned stand-up wardrobe; watery lights. The telephone was cradled uneasily on two metal prongs. Its function was mainly symbolic. Even the most exasperated jiggling rarely caught the attention of the standardiste. Often it was quicker to go out, buy jetons, and call from a café. Once, in a rage of frustration, I stormed down to confront the telephone operator face-to-face, only to find her standing in her cubicle, tape measure in hand, intently fitting a friend for a dress while her switchboard flashed futile appeals.

  The bar, downstairs from the lobby, was conspiratorially dark and filled with deep and overstuffed brown leather armchairs and sofas. This was my club, a quintessentially Parisian listening post where you went to find out who’s in, who’s out, and who’s gone away and will never come back. Publishers and authors negotiated over the new fashionable drink in France: le scotch. The painter Balthus, more Byronic than Byron himself, would drop by and give me news of Picasso. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were regulars. At that time their fame and the provocative aura that surrounded the word “existentialist” (practically nobody knew what it meant) had made them objects of universal curiosity, and they had abandoned their previous headquarters at the Café de Flore for the less exposed Pont Royal.

  Later, when I had an apartment, I continued to see Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, though neither of them cared much for Americans in general. Once, when Sartre came to lunch, he gave an offhand demonstration of mental agility: without stopping the general conversation, he deciphered, one after another, the formidably difficult word-and-picture puzzles on my Creil dessert plates.

  Although I moved from the Pont Royal, I never left the quarter. It was, and is, a neighborhood of bookstores and publishing houses. The grandest, Gallimard, is a few steps from the Pont Royal. I used to go to its Thursday afternoon garden parties every June; they were long on petits fours and short on liquor. Alice B. Toklas lived around the corner from my office and was always ready to receive the favored visitor with enormous teas. She was exquisitely polite, and even when very old she would insist on serving the guest herself.

  In Paris, you are on easy terms with the past. I would nod to Apollinaire, a favorite poet, as I went by 202, boulevard Saint-Germain, where he lived after coming back wounded from the front in World War I. I liked going by the Jesuit-style Eglise Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, set back from the boulevard, where Apollinaire was married, with Picasso as witness. On my way to Nancy Mitford’s, I would go by 120, rue du Bac, a handsome house from which Chateaubriand set off every afternoon to visit Madame Récamier. Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, George Sand, Madame de Staël, Voltaire, and Wagner (he finished Die Meistersinger in Paris) were among the friendly neighborhood ghosts.

  It is often said, and with some reason, that Parisians are not hospitable to the foreigner. But what an abundance of generosity and hospitality came my way! I remember Picasso rummaging through the indescribable chaos of his vast studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins to try to dig up some drawings I wanted to publish. Fernand Léger lined up his recent work for me and asked which canvases I liked best. Matisse received me with all the books he had illustrated, meticulously opened out so that he could explain in each case what problems he had solved and how. The admirable, austere Nadia Boulanger (who taught so many American composers, beginning with Aaron Copland) invited me to her icy apartment on the rue Ballu to hear her latest protégé. The composer Francis Poulenc, a bulky, pear-shaped figure, was droll beyond words and yet indescribably poignant as he accompanied himself on a small upright piano and sang the soprano solo of a woman desperately trying to hold on to her lover—from his La Voix Humaine. President Vincent Auriol took me on a tour of the Palais de l’Elysée after a press conference to point out the famous Gobelins tapestry. And I remember the ultimate Parisian accolade: a great French chef, the late René Viaux of the restaurant in the Gare de l’Est, named a dish after me. It is reproduced in color in the Larousse Cuisine et Vins de France. He later became the chef at Maxim’s, where I always got special treatment.

  A few years after my Pont Royal days I was starting my own art magazine, L’ŒIL, in a minute office at the back of a cobbled courtyard on the rue des Saints-Pères.

  For the magazine, we needed good writers and got in touch with a young English art critic whose weekly column in the London Sunday Times was indispensable reading if you wanted to know what was going on not only in England but on the Continent as well. It was clear that unlike many critics, he loved art; he wrote about it with informed enthusiasm, and he wrote in crystalline prose. There was not a dull phrase to be weeded out in translation (French translation did wonders for some of our German, Dutch, Italian, and English-language contributors), and, what’s more, he knew France and the French language very well.

  We corresponded. He sent in his articles—on time. We met. Our conversations centered on ideas for features and deadlines. I had the intense seriousness of the young and the harassed, and I was producing a monthly publication on a shoestring as thin as the one Man Ray wore in lieu of a tie. In private life both of us were programmed, to use computer language, in other directions. Unlikely as it seems, I had no idea that while I was discovering Paris and the Parisians, he was working on a book about Paris.

  Some eighteen years later, reader, I married him. Only then did I discover John Russell’s book Paris (originally published in 1960). Here was sustained delight. No one else could combine the feel and the look, the heart and the mind, the stones and the trees, the past and the present, the wits, the eccentrics, and the geniuses of my favorite city with such easy grace.

  Reading this book, for me, was like sauntering through the city where I had lived so long. By my side was a most civilized companion who casually brought all the strands together and made them gleam—not forgetting to stop for an aperitif and a delicious meal en route. The book was long out of print, and I felt it unfair to keep this to myself. I showed it to a publisher friend. He immediately agreed that others would enjoy John Russell’s Paris as much as we did. He suggested it be brought up to date, in an illustrated edition.

  The author and I went to Paris to gather the illustrations. There was some confusion about our hotel reservation, and the receptionist at the Pont Royal apologized for giving us a small room on the top floor. Here the circle closes in the most satisfactory of ways: it was the identical room, No. 125, in which I had lived when I first came to Paris. The Turkey red carpet was now royal blue, the furniture was spruced-up modern, there was—is this possible?—a minibar. And there was a push-button telephone that clicked all of Europe and America into the streamlined receiver.

  We stepped out onto the little balcony. Deyrolle, the naturalist’s, where I used to buy crystals and butterflies, was still across the street. There were some new chic boutiques, but the noble eighteenth-century facades still stood guard over the past. We looked around happily: there they were, our cherished landmarks—the Invalides, the Paroisse Sainte-Clotilde, and the Eiffel Tower on the left, and on the right the former Gare d’Orsay, soon to be a museum of late-nineteenth-century art, the Sacré-Cœur, and the Grand Palais.

  The huge open sky overhead had drifted in from the Ile-de-F
rance. The bottle green bus bumbled down the rue du Bac. The tricolor flew the way it flies in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. I was back again, this time in John Russell’s Paris.

  Janet Flanner (Genet)

  In 1990, I wrote an introduction to the former New Yorker writer Janet Flanner’s book Men and Monuments: Profiles of Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Malraux, which was originally published in 1957 and then republished by Natalia Danesi Murray for Da Capo Press in 1990.

  I can still see Janet Flanner as I first caught sight of her in the late 1940s, when I was a young woman in Paris on my first job and she had been for almost a quarter of a century the acclaimed author of the “Letter from Paris” in The New Yorker.

  She had arrived in Paris from her native Indiana in 1922, at the age of thirty. Like hundreds, if not thousands, of other American would-be writers at that time, she couldn’t wait to make the most of the freer air, the richer culture, and the smaller expenses that Paris had to offer.

  Before long, her letters back home struck her friend Jane Grant as just what was needed for the new magazine of which her husband, Harold Ross, was editor. Its name was The New Yorker. And in October 1925 it carried the first “Letter from Paris,” for which Janet was paid forty dollars. Like all the letters that were to follow, it was signed “Genet”—the nom de plume that Ross had chosen for Janet.

  I did not of course know at the time of our first meeting that Janet was to go on writing for The New Yorker until she was in her eighties. Nor could I know of the lengthy profiles that she was to research with such exemplary care and yet manage to present, in print, as if they had given her no trouble at all.

  The day-to-day detail of life in Paris was her prime and lifelong concern. Like the Parisians themselves, she loved a good murder and was fascinated by scandals of every kind. She was forever in touch with whatever was newest in art, in the theater, in literature, in music, and in the fashion industry. Nor did she neglect the sociabilities to which those interests gave rise.

  She had a very good eye for an eccentric, and—again like the Parisians—she adored a good funeral and could sum up the deceased with an admirable and lively concision. She enjoyed state occasions, too, and brought them alive in a way that was the envy of every other foreign correspondent. On the American in Paris, from Gene Tunney to Edith Wharton, and from Alice B. Toklas to Isadora Duncan, Marian Anderson and Josephine Baker, she was at her most observant. But she was in Paris primarily for the Parisians, and in dealing with them—Georges Clemenceau, Paul Poiret, Suzanne Lenglen, the Duchesse d’Uzès, Maurice Chevalier, François Mauriac, Erik Satie, in no particular order—she was consummately and enviably at home.

  Much of this came out in just a phrase or two. But she could also turn her hand to monumental reportage with a skill that caused William Shawn—the most perceptive of editors—to rank her with Rebecca West. What Rebecca West was to the Nuremberg trials, Janet Flanner was to the looting of art by the Nazis and its subsequent salvaging by the victorious American forces.

  Characteristically, it was in a bar that I first saw her. After the end of World War II, foreign correspondents in Paris lived in the Hôtel Scribe and used its bar as their meeting place. Later they moved for drinks only—the rooms were too expensive—to the Hôtel Crillon. And that is where I saw her, talking, talking, talking. What she said was always incisive, well modulated, with the words so well chosen that they could have been wafted, unchanged, onto the printed page. She smoked the whole time, eyes crinkled above the smoke. And, from that small frame, there would emerge a surprisingly Falstaffian laugh.

  For Janet, though not frail, was small—delicately chunky, one might say. With good reason, she was proud of her elegant little feet. (She wore size four and a half.) When custom-made shoes were a luxury but not a financial catastrophe, she had all her shoes made by a famous bottier. In her chosen mannish style, she was always very well dressed. Every year, she had one suit made by a top couture house—Chanel, it might be, or Molyneux. She loved bright silk scarves and usually had one—knotted with seemingly casual care—round her throat. In later years, the red ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur made a bright accent on her every lapel.

  For decades, she lived in a mansard room in the Hôtel Continental on the rue de Castiglione. How she could live permanently in such tiny quarters was a mystery to me. She had a little balcony with a view over the Tuileries, but I doubt she ever took the time to step out and have a look round.

  Some of the furniture was hers. Its main feature was a boulle bureau plat—heaped, of course, with books and papers. She had spied this luxurious table in the front window of a butcher’s shop on the Left Bank. Maybe a client had left it there on consignment. Anyhow, Janet marched right in and bought it. There were papers of all kinds everywhere. Janet read all the newspapers, and there used to be a great many of them in France. She had a batch of fat red and blue pencils, and she would go through the newspapers imperiously marking any item—however small—that might nourish her fortnightly “Letter from Paris.” “You have to look even at the smallest items at the bottom of the page,” she used to say. “That’s where you might find something.” She clipped and clipped. There were mounds of clippings all over the place. Perhaps only Marcel Proust’s bedroom had such a shifting sea of papers.

  Underneath the boulle desk, she kept a wicker hamper stuffed with papers. And then, when Janet was going away for a few months—to America, to Italy—the papers got shunted elsewhere. Marie, the floor maid, and her husband, Emile, one of the hall porters, would transfer Janet’s clothes into the hamper, which would then be taken down and stored in the bowels of the hotel.

  The staff of the hotel adored Janet. They waited on her, took care of her, took pride in her. She was a particular favorite with the barman, who acted as informal host to the streams of people who came, in later years, to see Janet (or in hopes of seeing her). She gave appointment after appointment in the bar, and people took their turns, edging along the narrow banquettes until they were next to the large leather armchair that was her throne.

  She was totally undomestic and quite proud of living, as the French say, like a bird on a branch—with no permanent anchor anywhere. She lived the life of a convivial homme de lettres—monocle and all—who just happened to be a woman.

  She was generous—with her time, her person, her resources. I only discovered after her death that a number of people—Alice B. Toklas, among them—were getting small (and sometimes not so small) checks from Janet. It was in character that after a friend of hers had dropped dead when about to have dinner with her, she paid for the funeral expenses.

  She loved to invite her friends for a splendid meal in a good restaurant. On festive occasions, or to celebrate when, for once, her “Letter from Paris” had gone off to The New Yorker on time, we used to go to a bistro called L’Ami Louis that she especially liked. I still remember the foie gras sautéed with grapes, followed by little roast birds. She was a good judge of food and wine, yet she didn’t know the first thing about cooking.

  Although her Paris letters and her profiles read with seamless clarity, she agonized over them. How many telephone calls did I get at the small office where I edited the art review that was my reason for being in Paris! “I can’t get it finished!” she would moan. She could only write at the last minute, with the deadline hanging over her like a sentence of death. Only then would she attack her typewriter in a frenzy, working through the night until four or five in the morning. On some of the longer pieces, and after months of research, she would be closeted in her room like a desperate bear, working on her private marathon until driven out in search of food.

  Though she knew her worth as a writer, she could be curiously shy and uncertain of herself. When she was preparing the profile of Georges Braque, she asked me if I would mind taking her to Braque’s house on the rue du Douanier (now renamed the rue Georges Braque), up by the Parc Montsouris. Perhaps I could introduce her and generally hang around? Later, she sent me
two pages of typewritten notes, along with an affectionate scrawled message, asking me to correct or add anything that I remembered from the interview.

  Until age and infirmity slowed her down, Janet went everywhere—to concerts (she loved music), art exhibitions, political meetings, cabarets, parties. Deep down, she disliked the theater, perhaps because as a child she had been pushed onto the stage in amateur productions by her mother, who was a passionate and gifted amateur actress. But the fact is that she could have been an actress. When called upon to speak in public, or on television, she was immediately in command. She never used notes. Her wit, her unexpected and cogent turn of phrase, never failed her.

  News was her business, but it was not in her nature to intrude in order to get it. For a long time, after the end of World War II, she would sit just a few feet away from Picasso night after night in the Café de Flore. She never presumed to speak to him, but some fifteen years later, when she was taken to his house in Cannes, he said, “But of course I know you! How often did I not see you at the Flore! Why did you never speak to me?” and threw his arms around her.

  As a talker, she could be sharp, incisive, jaunty, and ribald, though never malicious. But she was also—unlike André Malraux—a natural listener. She had great reserves of compassion and was poignantly responsive to the tribulations of others. One morning, when she was sitting over a cup of coffee in the garden of the Ritz in Paris, she heard of a friend’s bad news. On the instant, heavy tears began to course, uncontrollably, down her furrowed cheeks.