The photograph in Hemingway's wallet
Bruant or Woollcott?
Gerald and Sara on the beach at Villa America
Chapter Ten
I watched with hypnotic fascination as one of the men at a nearby table poured a couple of fingers of green absinthe into a glass. Balancing a flat, perforated spoon across the rim of it, he placed a cube of sugar on the bowl. From a small pitcher with a long and narrow spout, very, very slowly, with a steady hand, he began to trickle water onto the sugar cube. Drop by drop, the sweetened water dripped through the holes of the spoon to combine with the green liquid in the glass. Swirls of opalescent mist turned the mixture opaque white. After the long ritual, he raised the glass to sip.
We were in a café a couple of streets from the fleabag hotel, killing time and knocking back some good booze before our dinner hour. The air was heavy with the eye-watering reek of Gitane cigarette smoke, stale booze, and unwashed bodies. A sad-looking little man playing an accordion occasionally crooned the words of the song he was playing in a deep nasal tone, words my high school French was insufficient to interpret. The conversations were loud and animated, and at times I wasn’t sure if they were passionate arguments or simply excited revelations. Occasionally, laughter broke out. Once, a man pounded on the bar and with sweeping gestures yelled something passionate at le barman before storming out of the café.
All sorts of characters walked in and out of the place, and most times the waiters greeted the customers with warm congeniality and delivered plates of oysters and mussels and crusty bread and cheese and liters of white wine. We appeared to be the only Americans here, and we were looked over—Aleck’s costume and Harpo’s crazy facial gestures, notwithstanding, Mr. Benchley and I were decidedly American tourists to the eyes of the regulars. This café catered to the laborers and vendors of the neighborhood, and the many veterans of the War proudly wearing Croix de Guerre ribbons or the yellow-and-green Médaille Militaire on frayed and dusty lapels. Through observation, one could guess at the professions of the clientele from their utilitarian garb and soiled hands and faces, the very poor by the worn collars and cuffs and patched coats. In New York, the standard dress at a nightclub often belied the small income of the lowly clerk or housemaid. But here, within ten minutes of each arrival, the trials of their workdays appeared to abate with the help of drink and convivial conversation. This type of gathering is of universal appeal, and such is the case in neighborhood speakeasies in American cities. The clientele may vary, but as I was seeing here, watering-holes around the world serve well for shedding the day’s hardships while offering a palliative for pangs of loneliness.
I was enjoying my first taste of night in the city, trying to absorb its atmosphere and observe its people, while half-listening to Aleck’s continuing oral exegesis on “how to behave with the French.”
“I used to come here during the War,” he had prefaced, “with Frank and Ross and Jane.”
Frank is Frank Pierce Adams, the famous columnist, Ross is Harold Ross, the publisher of The New Yorker, and Jane is Ross’s society-columnist wife. They are our friends and fellow Round Tablers.
“Ah!” said Mr. Benchley with self-congratulatory cheer in his voice. “One of the phrases I taught you in the cab: ‘Ici est où nous used to come quand j’étais ici pendant la guerre!’ Just throw in the extra names wherever you see fit.”
“Shut up, Bob; I was telling Dorothy never to smile at people or look at them directly in the eye, if you can avoid it. We’re not in New York. They will think you are an imbecile.”
“That’s right,” said Harpo, “or they will think you are looking for sex.”
“That’s true, Harpo. I’ve told you to stop smiling,” said Aleck. “The Parisians think you are mentally deficient and a pervert.”
“Yeah, but I’m getting plenty of sex!”
Harpo received the bone-crushing Woollcott glare, which was magnified tenfold by Aleck’s thick spectacles.
“As I was saying, don’t ever apologize to anyone, Dorothy,” said Aleck, ignoring Harpo, who sat there cross-eyed with a silly grin on his face, counting his fingers. “It’s admitting culpability and a sign of weakness. And, if someone knocks into you as you’re walking along the street, don’t expect a ‘pardon.’ And don’t you say it, either. It’s bad manners.”
“Yikes!” I said. “You mean, if someone slams a door in my face, I can’t call him a shit?”
“Now, that won’t happen. A Frenchman will always hold the door for the next person. It is requisite good manners, even if it winds up that you are forced to trot the distance of a football field to reach it. Then, you have to hold the door for the next long-distance runner, or you are thought a brute.”
“When I used to come here during the war,” he continued, “I always—”
“Ah-ha!” interjected Mr. Benchley, “You see how useful that phrase has become? Why,” Mr. Benchley barreled on, putting to rest Aleck’s lecture, “the first time I came to Paris après la guerre as a correspondent for the Dairyman’s Age and Trade News to cover the peace conferences in ’nineteen, I was barred because I didn’t have a passport.”
Mr. Benchley ignored the loud harrumph! expelled by Aleck.
“I had no documentary record of ever having been born, and, in view of this serious deficiency in my credentials, I was held by the officials to be a de facto, but not a de jure, member of the human race, and therefore not entitled to a passport to leave the country, because, according to the law, I had never entered it.
“Furthermore, I made the mistake of smiling at one official, hoping to win him over, and he charged me with ‘obscene behavior toward a government agent.’ When I begged his pardon for my misadventure, he said my apology meant that I had indeed confessed to perversions of a sexual nature. When he opened the cell door for me to enter, I said, ‘Merci,’ and then returned the gesture, and united through common pleasantries, together we spent the night in jail playing pinochle and talking about old times.”
“All right, Bob; you’ve made my case,” said Aleck, resigned to the madness, “if in a rather peripatetic way.”
We had another round of drinks and then it was time to leave for the restaurant. We walked out onto the street, and turned toward the boulevard, Harpo taking my arm. He was telling me his thoughts about the women of Paris, the places he had visited with Aleck as his tour guide that he found most exciting—the Moulon Rouge to see the big show, and best of all, his visit to Notre Dame.
“A very famous church. You didn’t get baptized, did ya?”
“I know, I’m Jewish, but I feel a kind of sympathy for Quasimodo, you know? I might pretend to be a fool, but he was the original village idiot.”
“Harpo! I didn’t know you’ve read Victor Hugo’s book,” I said.
He stopped short, and threw me the oddest look. “Who said anything about reading any old book?”
“Well, you said—”
“Lon Chaney played the part in the picture show.”
Harpo and Aleck are an odd couple. Aleck, who considers himself an intellectual, believes that Harpo Marx is the most brilliantly funny man in the world. On stage, Harpo can do no wrong; his comic off-the-top-of-his-head improvisation, along with his brothers’ antics, is flawless. It was Aleck who discovered the team of Vaudevillians when he decided to review their first Broadway show, I’ll Say She Is!, when no other first-string critic would bother to waste an inch of column space under their bylines for a show with the cast of an old Vaudeville act. His effusive raves in the New York Times drove in the crowds to fill the seats of the theatre, and the Marx Brothers became the toast of Broadway. (“Add a little cream cheese and lox, and we taste as good as we look.”)
Aleck, often the pedantic curmudgeon, becomes less officious and more lighthearted when Harpo is around. Harpo in turn is getting an education. Aleck has figuratively adopted Harpo, the Upper East Side kid who had no formal education and usually has no idea what the man is saying when he bandies ab
out his ten-dollar vocabulary. Aleck’s affection has always been reciprocated. For Harpo, that he should be included in, and accepted by, the notable friends of my little circle who meet every day for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel dining room, is a source of amazement. Like Aleck, we all love Harpo’s unaffected charm; you never know what he will do or say, and there is an edge of excitement in that. There’s always pure, good-humored fun when he’s around.
“Oh, look!” said Harpo, pointing to a man on the other side of the street, standing in a doorway and lighting a cigarette.
“Hey! Hey, there, Jimmy!” he called out with a wave of his arm, but the man walked away and around the corner.
Harpo turned to me and said, “What’s he doing here? I didn’t know he was in France.”
“Who? Someone I know?”
“Sure, someone you know. Jimmy! Jimmy Durante!”
“Well,” prefaced Mr. Benchley when we were out of earshot of our friends, “if that man is following us, he’s not following the Duchess Sofia.”
“He’s following us, hoping that we will eventually lead him to her. We have to keep away from the Murphys’ apartment,” I said. “How much did you tell Gerald and Sarah about the Duchess and everything that’s been going on?”
“Just that she was the intended victim of a kidnapping by Soviet agents, and the location of her safe house had been compromised, so she needed somewhere to stay for a couple of days until things could be sorted out. They were more than willing to help. As a matter of fact, Gerald suggested that Richard and Claude drive her down to their Villa America tomorrow.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” I said, as we entered through the deco glass doors of the Café Michaud on the rue des Saint-Pères.
The restaurant was crowded with diners, and people were milling about the entrance and the bar, waiting for tables, so there was a festive mood alive with chatter and movement as the maître d’ welcomed the new arrivals and bade farewell to those departing. Waiters scurried to and from the kitchen with platters of marennes, flat and orangey-colored oysters, and steaming tureens of soup, and trays stacked with crabe Mexicaine and fried potatoes and tournedos with Béarnaise sauce. The sommelier poured out first sips of the Châteauneuf du Pape or the Pouilly-Fuissé for discerning diners. The steaming parade of food made my mouth water. I spotted Hem at the bar with Mathew. As we were inching toward them, Gerald and Sara arrived. The maître d’ saw the couple’s arrival and with obsequious attention had us seated within a minute at a table along the wall, from whence I could see all the action.
Mathew talked about his new assignment as foreign correspondent for the Detroit Register and how much he admired Aleck and Harold Ross and Frank Adams and Heywood Broun’s columns, and gosh, he’d love to meet those famous fellows someday.
He had once seen the five Marx Brothers and their mother, Minnie, on the Vaudeville circuit when they played an Albee house in Detroit and thought them very funny. Harpo brought us up to date: Gummo had retired from Showbiz and Minnie was too busy managing the boys’ careers to be onstage anymore.
Aleck turned to Gerald and said, “So this is the young man you were telling me about, Gerry?”
“Yes,” replied Gerald, “this is our boy, Ernest; friend of Scott’s, too.”
“I understand your book will be published. Sorry I missed you in New York. Did Bob and Dorothy show you a good time?” he asked in all seriousness as he hungrily devoured the menu with his eyes.
“Did we, Ernest?” I asked.
“You bet! I’m returning the favor, showing Bob and Dorothy around.”
“We shall later discuss the itinerary,” said Aleck, possessively.
Soledad appeared, dressed in a lovely fuchsia velvet dress under a dolman-sleeved black satin coat. She was on her way toward our table when she suddenly turned and greeted a family dining a few tables away. After a few minutes, she arrived and Mr. Benchley held her chair.
Aleck’s eyes lit up at the sight of the beautiful Soledad; Harpo crossed his and grinned. She laughed as lightly as a dinner bell, and Hemingway looked at her with newfound admiration. He said, “That’s Joyce, Joyce and his family you were speaking with at that table over there.”
“Yes, Ernest, James Joyce and his wife, Nora, and their children, Giorgio and Lucia.”
“I didn’t think—I mean, I didn’t know you were friends.”
I could see that, for Hem, the mystery writer had just climbed five rungs up the ladder of literary importance.
“Yes, well, we made each other’s acquaintance in Trieste before the war,” she said, looking over to the table where the man with the thin face and thick eyeglasses was engrossed in cutting his chops. “I was on honeymoon with my first husband, Arthur, who later died at the Somme. James taught me a little Italian.” She chuckled. “He just asked if I had come to Paris to resume my Italian lessons. You know that Italian is the only language they speak at home? He’s almost mastered Russian, he told me.”
“Joyce, did you say? The man who wrote the book that was banned?” asked Aleck. “A polyglot, too?”
“He’s a Mormon,” whispered Harpo, “who writes dirty books?”
“Yes,” said Soledad, in answer to Aleck’s question. “But Sylvia Beach has since published it herself.”
“Sylvia’s a good friend of mine and Joyce and Ezra Pound, you know; I’ll bring you to meet her at her bookstore,” said Hemingway.
We placed our dinner orders, Aleck instructing the waiter in flawless French that his tournedos of beef must under no circumstances be too rare or lose all color.
“La viande doit être rose mais pas trop saignante ou je vais le rendre. Cinq douzaines huîtres à partager. La soupe d’abord, un consommé de boeuf et après des poireaux à la vinaigrette. Aussi, apportez-nous une bouteille de vin blanc pour le faire descendre; et pour la viande donnez-nous un bon bourgogne.”
I nodded to the waiter and pointed to Aleck. “I’ll have whatever the big man’s having.”
Gerald and Sara talked about their participation in l’Académie des Cinq Arts Festival of Fools, scheduled for Tuesday night, and insisted that we all get fitted for costumes. Aleck assured the Murphys that he had taken charge of the wardrobe we were to wear. When Mr. Benchley was informed he would be costumed as King Louis XVI, he stated unequivocally that he would not wear a wig that was in any way curled like Lillian Gish’s hair, let alone dance tights.
“Who will you be dressed up as, Gerald?” I asked.
“Sara and I will be dressed as what, not who: automobile engine parts.”
“Oh!” cheered Soledad, “don’t you just love it? How inventive! I am so dull to appear as Oscar Wilde!”
“You’ll be dressed like a man, in trousers,” noted Hem. “Why Wilde? Why not George Sand?”
“I don’t smoke cigars,” she tossed back, and turned to Aleck. “And you, Monsieur?”
“Moi?” said Aleck. “Catherine the Great.”
“Oh, jeez . . .” I said. “Yes, I can see the resemblance. What horror have you planned for me?”
“Little Bo Peep.”
“Not on your life.”
“You’ll be adorable.”
“Shit.”
“He wants me to dress up as a court jester,” said Harpo.
“It’s in your nature,” said Aleck.
Harpo jerked his thumb at me. “Dottie said it.”
After two hours of eating and laughing and gossiping, Gerald picked up the diner bill. “Where shall we go now?” he asked. “Let’s go to a club.”
“A jazz bar,” suggested Soledad.
Harpo said, “Let’s stop in at Bricktop’s. There’s a little dancer there—”
“Yes,” agreed Soledad. “It’s quite a gay club, and we should all be gay tonight for Dorothy’s first night in Paris.”
Hem wasn’t enthusiastic. He begged forgiveness for declining, but he wanted to go home. He encouraged Mathew to go on with us. Tomorrow we would “lunch with the Fitzgeralds,” and he w
anted us to meet Gertrude and her friend Alice, so he would pick us up at our hotel at noon. Mathew looked torn, but Hem pressed him to join us, “if only to see the less salubrious haunts of the city.” So we all piled into a cab and were on our way.
Aleck said that when Cole Porter first saw the incomparable Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith, better known as “Bricktop,” perform in her club, Chez Bricktop, he was overwhelmed by her long, beautiful legs. She had “talking legs and talking feet,” he said, and asked if she could dance the Charleston. She did. And then he asked if she could teach the dance to him and his friends. She did. Night after night, Cole brought his famous friends to her little club, including the Murphys, and they in turn brought more friends. Soon, the failing enterprise of a few months before became the most exciting cabaret in Paris.
When Harpo was introduced to the red-haired, freckled-faced American Negress, he was so tickled that he poured his highball over his head to cool off.
And the club was hopping, all right. The band was pumping out a hot little number when we walked in, and people were dancing and chatting away, and it was so jam-packed with color and loud with laughter and drunk with cheer that if you took a stick to it, the little room would have exploded like a Mexican piñata. I just loved it!
[Dorothy Parker 05] - A Moveable Feast of Murder Page 15