Wild Lavender

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘Isn’t he a nice man?’ I asked, noticing his frown. ‘You don’t seem very happy for her.’

  Monsieur Etienne shrugged. ‘He is a wonderful young man. Very enterprising. It is more that I will miss Odette. She is like a daughter to me.’

  ‘What does Joseph do?’ I asked Odette.

  ‘He runs a prestigious furniture store.’ She smiled coyly. I had kept my promise never to mention Joseph until Odette did, but had Joseph kept his promise not to tell Odette about the money I had given him? I wondered. I had intended for him to propose to Odette as soon as he had bought a shop, but he had decided to wait until he was sure of the profitability of his business. Knowing Odette’s spending habits, it had probably been a good plan.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, squeezing Odette’s hand. ‘She will send him broke, you know that, don’t you? Then she will have to come back and work for you again.’

  Monsieur Etienne’s face brightened and he directed me into his office. Once we were seated he opened a folder crammed with letters.

  ‘I have a very good offer from the Folies Bergère,’ he said, passing me a letter from Paul Derval.

  ‘I am not sure I have forgiven him for saying that I wasn’t beautiful enough for the chorus line.’

  Monsieur Etienne sat back in his chair and wagged his finger at me. ‘You are going to have to move on from that. I doubt Monsieur Derval even remembers auditioning you. As far as he is concerned, you are “the most sensational woman in the world”.’

  ‘How success changes things!’ I said.

  ‘I have good offers from the Adriana, who would love to have you back, and the Casino de Paris, now run by Henry Varna. The record company would like you to cut another disc and I have film offers from three different countries, including Paramount in America. So yes, you are right: success does change things,’ said Monsieur Etienne. ‘Now, tell me, what are you going to do first?’

  ‘First,’ I said, picking up my purse, ‘I am going to Galeries Lafayette. Odette and I have to go shopping for her wedding present.’

  We wandered around the Galeries Lafayette for three hours. Odette didn’t want anything too practical like linen or a kitchen appliance. But as she and Joseph were going to live with her parents until they found a place of their own, we agreed that an unwieldy Chinese cabinet or a Grecian urn would be inconvenient. Finally, she chose mirrored placemats and silver bowls for fruit and nuts. She would be able to store those under her bed or in a cupboard until she moved. I organised for the store to have them delivered.

  Odette—married? I thought, watching her scribble out her address for the clerk. It had taken a long time to get to that point, but now everything was moving quickly. Would it be the same for me and André? Perhaps patience was a virtue and things did happen in their own time.

  Over coffee at La Coupole, I told Odette about what had passed between André and me on our trip to America and my worries about his family. She smiled knowingly. ‘I can’t say either of our parents would have made things easy if Joseph and I had rushed. Take your time and be patient. From what you have told me, André is very much in love with you and you should trust in that first.’

  I took Odette’s advice to heart. I decided to be proud of who I was and what I did, and I took up the prestigious offer from the Folies Bergère. Meanwhile, now we were back in Paris, André planned to introduce me to society. ‘They had better get used to seeing us together,’ he said. He was confident that, side by side, we would conquer not only the Paris audiences but Tout-Paris.

  ‘Kira,’ I said, placing her on the passenger seat of André’s new Renault Reinastella, ‘you have the Marquise de Crussol’s poodle and Princesse de Faucigny-Lucinge’s Great Dane to compete with. So show everybody how superior cats are and don’t jump out of the window or do anything else flighty. Agreed?’

  I turned to wave to André and his mother who were sitting in the stand. André waved back, smiling but with an anxious twist to his mouth. ‘You don’t have to win the Concours d’élégance automobile, Simone,’ he had said, watching his chauffeur give the glass radiator cap one last rub. ‘You just have to be seen.’

  ‘What is the point of that?’ I had ribbed him.

  ‘What does he think I am going to do?’ I muttered now, watching Comtesse Pecci-Blunt, the niece of Pope Leo XIII, drive across the field in her custom-made silver Bugatti. ‘Puncture someone’s tyre? We might be from the music hall but we do have some sense of propriety, don’t we, Kira?’

  Kira blinked at me. I hoped that having travelled several continents on trains and boats, she wouldn’t be fazed by an automobile and fashion parade.

  The official gestured to me to start up my motor. I checked over the knobs and controls although I knew perfectly well how to drive. André had organised lessons for me. Still, the Reinastella weighed a tonne and André had told me a terrible story the previous night over dinner. In one year’s contest, the wife of a diplomat had got so wrought up that she had confused the brake and accelerator and crushed three spectators against a tree. I realised that was probably why some of the contestants today had their chauffeurs driving them.

  I pressed the accelerator pedal and manoeuvred the car without incident to in front of the judges’ stand. On the panel were André de Fouquières, a debonair Frenchman who seemed to be found wherever attractive women were; Daisy Fellowes, the daughter of a nobleman and heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune; and Lady Mendl, whose lightly powdered skin and shell-pink dress gave no hint that she was almost seventy years of age.

  ‘Mademoiselle Simone Fleurier,’ an official announced through a megaphone. ‘Driving Renault’s Reinastella and accompanied by Kira.’

  Another official rushed forward to open my door. I picked up Kira, held her under my chin and glided out, not like a society debutante, as the others before me had, but as the star of the Folies Bergère. ‘The most sensational woman in the world,’ I laughed under my breath. Despite the way I was promoted, I didn’t really believe that about myself. I never once truly felt that I had ‘made it’. With each step I rose, the harder I had to work to maintain my position. As Mistinguett had once confided in me: ‘It is more difficult to keep your balance on top of the ladder than it is climbing up the rungs.’

  The sight of so many people threw Kira into a panic. She pressed her paw against my chest and veered away from me. But the applause stopped her short. She froze and ceased wriggling long enough for me to parade around the car.

  Daisy Fellowes’ eyes lit up when she saw what I was wearing. Paul Derval had introduced me to a new designer, an Italian called Elsa Schiaparelli. She was nothing like Chanel or Vionnet, whose feminine gowns I still wore to opening nights. Schiaparelli was modern. Her clothes followed the planes of the body rather than the curves, which gave them a stylised simplicity. My navy suit had wide shoulders, a pinched waist and leopard-print piping. ‘The cloche hat is dead,’ Schiaparelli had informed me, crowning me instead with a tiny hat whose black plume was so bristly that I thought it resembled a hedgehog. I wouldn’t have worn it if Paul Derval hadn’t assured me that I looked chic. My shoes and handbag were leopard print too, and Schiaparelli had ‘accessorised’ Kira with a matching collar and miniature plume of her own. Luckily, Kira was so terrified that she hadn’t noticed it or else she would have ripped it up like one of her toy birds.

  I paused near the bonnet of the car for the photographer from Le Figaro Illustré to take a picture. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Janet Flanner scribbling the words that would appear in her column in The New Yorker:

  The music hall muse, Simone Fleurier, stepped out of Renault’s latest top of the range model and announced to the world with her sleek suit and long legs that the flapper era of androgyny is gone. She was all woman—dramatic, bold and assertively seductive.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We are all champions here!’ I swung my arm around the Marquise de Crussol’s shoulder and clinked my glass against ‘The Best in Show’ cup sitting on my make-up ta
ble.

  André, who was leaning against my wardrobe and chatting with Comtesse Pecci-Blunt, shot me a sly smile. My dressing room was full of the descendants of France’s aristocracy. There were almost as many European ‘titles’ sitting on my zebra rug, nibbling on American fried chicken and drinking champagne, as there were chorus girls at the Folies Bergère. My hands-down victory at the Concours d’élégance automobile had elicited more than a few sulky glances and disgruntled comments about ‘outsiders’. It was not what André had been hoping for. ‘You were supposed to charm them, not humiliate them, Simone!’ he had hissed while driving the Reinastella around the field for my victory lap. ‘You were lucky my mother could get you an invitation at all. We are trying to get them to accept us as a sporting couple, not show them up.’

  ‘I’ll fix it,’ I said, holding up my trophy and waving. ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen!’ I called out in my best music hall voice. ‘I should like to invite the judges and all the contestants and their gentlemen for a champagne supper in my dressing room at the Folies Bergère after the performance tonight.’

  A thrill of excitement ran through the stand. Daisy Fellowes and Lady Mendl exchanged smiles. An invitation to behind the scenes with a star was better than winning another Concours d’élégance automobile or the best hat at the races. For while many performers filled their dressing rooms with hangers-on, all of Paris knew that my dressing room was ‘by invitation only’ and that my hospitality in that area of my life was rarely extended.

  In my dressing room that evening, the Marquise de Crussol clinked her glass to mine and tapped Daisy Fellowes, who was powdering her face in my mirror, on the shoulder. ‘Daisy, you must have Simone to your next party! She is such fun!’

  Daisy nodded and called out to a homely-looking woman who was trying on my Queen Nefertiti headdress. ‘Elsa, you will make sure Mademoiselle Fleurier is on my party list, won’t you?’

  André brushed past me. ‘I have nothing to teach you,’ he whispered, squeezing my hand. ‘Nothing to teach you at all.’

  The American writer Scott Fitzgerald once said that the rich were different and I discovered the truth of this for myself when my first Tout-Paris invitation arrived. It was for a party to be held at the house of the painter Meraud Guevara in Montparnasse.

  ‘What is a “Come as you were” party?’ I asked André, when he showed me the invitation. I was lying in the bath. A long, luxurious soak was my post Folies Bergère performance ritual.

  ‘One of Elsa’s creative ideas,’ he laughed, sitting on the edge of the tub. ‘She is sending a bus around some time that day and when the horn sounds we are to leave our apartments and join it, exactly as we are.’

  ‘So if I am in the bath then, I am supposed to get on the bus naked?’

  André smiled, his gaze resting on my knees—the only part of me that was visible through the bubbles except for my shoulders and head. ‘In theory,’ he said. ‘Some people will be waiting around in their underwear all day for that chance.’

  I reread the invitation. Elsa Maxwell, the American, intrigued me. She was everything that wasn’t chic. She was short, plump and had a face that scared children. And yet, even with her grating French, she was charming. Although she had no money of her own, she managed to persuade Tout-Paris to host ‘her parties’. She was certainly full of ideas. ‘It’s quite okay to choose music and laughter instead of a husband,’ she had told me the first time I met her, that night after the Concours d’élégance automobile in my dressing room. ‘Never be afraid of what “they” might say.’

  Unfortunately, I was a little too afraid of what Tout-Paris might say. André and I were lovers, but we still lived in separate apartments. Just like all the other hypocrites in that circle, we maintained an air of propriety. And even though on the surface we were welcomed everywhere, I was conscious of the backbiting that took place. I had heard it for myself once at a ball. I had gone to the ladies’ room and, while in the stall, overheard one society girl say to another, ‘Simone Fleurier is nothing more than a spiky southern weed trying to root herself amongst the roses.’ I understood the jealousy. I had stolen one of France’s most sought-after bachelors. I knew André didn’t care as much as I did about what those people said; he was only hoping to impress his father by showing that I had class and could mix with the best.

  I thought André’s remark about people going to Elsa Maxwell’s ‘Come as you were’ party in their underwear was a joke, so when the bus came to collect us from my apartment I was shocked to see that it was true. Daisy Fellowes leaned out the bus door to greet us holding a pair of lace panties in her hand. But she was one of the more decently dressed people on the vehicle; several young women were wearing negligées and nothing else. In the early evening sun, you could see their nipples through the sheer fabric and even the dark triangle of hair between their legs.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ said the Marquis de Polignac. ‘Elsa has organised a bar. What would you like to drink?’ He was wearing an evening suit, the sharply cut top and tails that Englishmen liked to wear, and looked the perfect ‘man-about-town’ except that he wasn’t wearing any trousers.

  I accepted a glass of champagne from the marquis but had no idea where to look. I was too embarrassed to stare at his bare legs and too uncomfortable to look at his face. I slipped my arm around André and pulled him down next to me into a seat. He had been lounging around on my sofa all day in his dressing gown and pajamas. I had taken the invitation literally and gone about my day as usual. Only that afternoon, despite the July heat, I had decided that I wanted to bake a cake, something I hadn’t done in years. When the bus arrived, I was presentably dressed but my blouse and apron were covered in flour.

  ‘As if we are going to believe Simone Fleurier cooks when she is at home,’ said Bébé Bérard, the designer, blowing me a kiss. ‘What were you doing, making a lemon tart for your man?’

  Like André, Bébé was wearing a dressing gown but instead of having a book under his arm, he had a telephone attached to his ear and shaving cream on his chin.

  ‘I have always loved baking,’ I said.

  ‘Your apartment must be well ventilated,’ said Bébé, taking a sip of wine, ‘if you could bear to cook in this heat.’

  Coming from Provence, I couldn’t understand why Parisians made such a fuss of the heat. Still, the bus was growing stuffy with dust and exhaust fumes. Elsa hadn’t counted on us getting caught up in traffic. The party was supposed to start at seven but it was already eight o’clock and we hadn’t even passed over to the Left Bank yet. The travellers resigned themselves to drinking the bar dry.

  ‘We might have to walk the rest of the way,’ slurred the Marquis de Polignac, peering through the windscreen at the procession of cars in front of us.

  ‘He is as high as a kite!’ I whispered to André. ‘Does he really think we can walk? Look at what everyone is wearing.’

  ‘Or what they are not wearing, you mean,’ he replied, kissing my cheek. I curled my fingers around his hand. No matter what we were doing, I was always happy to be with André. Every time I looked at him, I was aware that the man who loved me was one in a million. He was privileged, but he was also decent.

  ‘Hello, birdies,’ called out the Countess Gabriela Robilant, standing up to wave her whisky glass at a group of men waiting to cross the road. Somewhere on the journey she had lost her skirt and we were treated to the sight of her panties and suspenders.

  Countess Elisabeth de Breteuil stood up and pushed Gabriela down. ‘Put on your skirt!’ she screamed at her. ‘This is disgraceful! Remember your position!’

  Gabriela laughed, her head lolling to one side. The Countess de Breteuil’s cheeks reddened. She jumped up and marched down the aisle towards the driver. ‘Open the door!’ she demanded. ‘I refuse to travel with such scandalous company!’

  The driver was about to let her out when Gabriela screamed, ‘To the Bastille,’ and lurched towards the countess. There was a ripping sound and, before we realised it
, she had pulled the other woman’s skirt down.

  André and I looked away but it took all our willpower not to laugh. So this was the French nobility? These were the people I was supposed to impress?

  In Paris, time sped up. It seemed as if we had no sooner welcomed in the new decade than three years had passed and it was 1933.

  ‘Are you all right there under the lights, Mademoiselle Fleurier?’ the assistant director asked me. ‘It will take a while to frame the camera shot.’

  ‘For the moment, thank you,’ I said, although the lights were burning my skin and I was shading my eyes with my hand because I had promised the make-up artist that I wouldn’t spoil my powder by putting on sunglasses between shots.

  I had a philosophy of not complaining on film sets. I considered it a privilege to be there and no one’s job was any more comfortable than mine. During the making of my first film, based on my show at the Folies Bergère, I had seen a camera man suspended from a track on the ceiling to get a 180-degree shot and in my second film, a romantic escapade, I had seen a sound technician knocked from a train platform. Luckily he wasn’t badly hurt, but his microphone was bent out of shape and I dreaded to think what might have happened had he fallen a few inches further either way.

  Most music hall stars who worked in films found my enthusiasm for the medium extraordinary. ‘But you are boxed in by those chalk marks on the floor,’ Camille Casal moaned when I told her that I wanted to make at least one film a year. ‘And there is no audience to applaud you. How do you know if you are doing well or not?’

  ‘The director tells you.’

  ‘Yes, but after the shot,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘And how do you know that the audience will see what he does? He may be as disillusioned as you. All you have looking at you is that camera with its black eye.’

  I was surprised at Camille’s impatience with the process of film-making; she was, after all, one of Europe’s most famous stars. She was doing less stage work these days but was in demand for the screen. ‘It’s easier to hide the wrinkles on film than it is under spotlights,’ a columnist had written about Camille’s change of career. It was shallow bitchiness: at thirty years of age Camille was still a beauty, and there were much older stars still performing on stage.