During the writing of this book, I attended lectures and bookstore readings by respected and/or successful biographers. Several times I traveled to Paris to hear a writer I’d seen on TV. I remember the author of a biography of the Goncourt brothers saying she’d started from the position that every word the brothers wrote was a lie, and she’d left it up to them to prove they were telling the truth. A man who wrote a life of de Gaulle said he’d always felt that the general had suppressed certain facts about crucial events in Algiers. His suspicions had proved correct, but we would have to buy his book to find out what they were. I watched a Hitler scholar, a Freudian—this was a book I bought—claim that the explanation for everything Hitler did could be found in the architectural model he built, during his last days in the bunker, for remodeling his childhood home, the Austrian city of Linz.
But not once in all those speeches did I hear the biographers mention the dreams they’d had while working on their books.
Every night for weeks I dreamed about the photographer Gabor Tsenyi giving Lou Villars the business card of the Chameleon Club. Why was I fixated on that? It was hardly the most important event in Lou’s life. At that time I couldn’t afford a therapist who might have helped me understand the source of my obsession, and I had to puzzle it out on my own.
What if it was the most meaningful thing that ever happened to Lou? Didn’t everything follow from that? The friends she made, the people she met, the disparate circles she moved in.
I realize that it is not the biographer’s job to speculate on the meaning of dreams. In my case, it’s been hard enough to construct a narrative from bits and scraps. How fortunate that detailed financial records were kept, tracking the income and expenses at the Chameleon Club.
We know that Lou Villars worked there and later frequented the club from the late 1920s until she was asked to leave in 1935; a side note in her file cross-references a visit from Clovis Chanac, the infamous police prefect who rose to head the Municipal Council of Paris until a series of scandals obliged him to become the gangster he had always been, in his criminal heart.
We know that Yvonne began every evening with a song about a dead sailor. Then she welcomed the audience to the Chameleon. She told them to think of the club’s front door as a portal to a magic kingdom. Crossing the threshold, they could shed the false skin, the disguises they wore for the world. The butterflies inside them could emerge from their cocoons. They should think of themselves as infants restored to the family to which God intended to send them, before he misdirected the stork to their biological parents. Then because the weather got heavy when Yvonne talked this way, she joked about feeling free to take off their trousers and relax. Or put on their trousers, if they preferred!
Lou laughed along with everyone else, even when she felt like crying. She knew that Yvonne was telling the truth. Yvonne had created this place for her and for others like her: born into the wrong life, the wrong body, an innocent victim of God’s mistake.
No one asked where she’d come from or what she expected to find. Every so often someone looked at her—as Yvonne had, at first—as if they recognized her from somewhere. Had they seen her face on the posters? Or watched her perform at the Vélodrome d’Hiver? No one asked, and she told no one. As far as anyone knew, she’d been born with blood on her white clothes, on the day when Fat Bernard mistook her for the wine boy.
She missed her life as an athlete. She missed waking every morning in a state of hope. She missed the speed, the sting of the wind on her face, the blur of the world flying past her. She missed the sensation of her arm and the javelin becoming one, then separating like a rocket shedding its fiery tail. She missed knowing that she was getting stronger and faster every day. She missed the promise of the Olympics, the travel, the friends all over the country. She missed the hockey field at the convent. She even missed the tedious Vélodrome demonstrations.
She missed Sister Francis, but not Dr. Loomis. She tried not to dwell on what he’d done, on what he’d tried to do. She could never go back to them. But how did one become a professional without coaches or promoters?
Asleep in the tiny cubicle behind the Chameleon Club’s kitchen, she again dreamed of being murdered by bandits on a foggy country road. She woke in tears that lasted until she heard the clatter of dishes as Véronique, the bearded lady, began setting tables for the evening.
Meanwhile Lou enjoyed the jobs Yvonne assigned her. For a while she helped take coats and hats. She loved seeing what was hidden underneath the customers’ street clothes: the evening gown made from playing cards clacking under a man’s fur coat, the spit curls peeking out from the brim of a fedora, the Adam’s apple beneath the necklace, the painted-on mustache emerging from a shawl wound like a harem girl’s veil.
Lou had a gift for the cloakroom. She liked touching and stroking the clothes. And the smiles she gave the clients showed how much she admired their glamorous disrobings. She knew which coat belonged to which guest without using anyone’s name. She herself wore the uniform of a hotel porter. She loved its rough material, the ruts it left in the crooks of her knees and elbows, the circular red hollows the buttons dug into her chest. The jackets fit more comfortably if she continued to bind her breasts, as she used to, when she ran. She learned to cut her own hair, like a man’s.
After work she exercised in her room, as energetically as she could without disturbing the others. She had a tendency to gain weight, and she refused to let her body get rubbery and weak.
When bearded Véronique left the club to join the circus, Lou was given new trousers, a shirt, an apron, and sent out onto the floor to put out tablecloths and collect empty glasses. It was less fun than taking coats, but it was a promotion. In the cloakroom she’d made a friend named Vilma, a Polish girl who earned a few extra cents selling religious cards of Joan of Arc, dirty photos, and cartoons of hook-nosed Jews counting money and molesting children. Now Vilma pretended not to see Lou when they passed in the hall.
Lou had expected to be invisible as she cleared the tables, but she was anything but. Customers whispered as she walked by. She had no idea what they were saying, but she liked it that people were talking. Every time someone noticed her made it seem as if she wasn’t doomed to remain a former Olympic hopeful working as a busboy. She told herself she was still in training, lifting heavy basins of dishes and lugging them to the kitchen.
At night she prayed to Saint Joan for guidance on the path of obedience without resistance, a road she trod with a bowed head except when a flash of biceps beneath a sequined sleeve or the sight of a sailorette practicing splits recalled her vanished hopes. Then a customer might yell something like, Hey, little cream puff, why so gloomy?
After Lou’s first week as a busboy, Fat Bernard gave her an envelope and told her to sign her name in a ledger. In the envelope was enough money to buy cigarettes. This period marked the start of Lou’s lifelong dependence on tobacco and alcohol. Those of us who have faced and failed the challenge of conquering our self-destructive habits will find it easy to understand and forgive her, if only for this.
Like her coworkers, Lou kept her money tucked into her sock. She was saving to rent a place of her own, as Yvonne suggested.
Perhaps she’d become a waiter. Some of the waiters were legendary for their efficiency, tact, and discretion. Yvonne made very few hiring mistakes, so no one was ever fired, though a few employees had stalked out after lovers’ quarrels. During Lou’s first week, a clarinet player left her drummer girlfriend for a young, masculine German banker whom everyone but the clarinet player knew was a penniless, middle-aged American woman.
That autumn the gossip was that a dancer named Amazon Rose had gotten pregnant, thus ending the long debate about whether Rose was a female. Yvonne was using Rose’s departure as an excuse to update the revue. Monsieur Pavel, the choreographer, was seen going into her office. Which lucky Cinderella would exchange the scrub brush for the spangled sailor suit?
After closing, when the staff gath
ered to finish the wine in the bottles the customers had left, occasionally someone asked Lou if she liked girls or boys. She said she didn’t like anyone. Ha-ha, was she a virgin? It was none of their business. These moments of group hilarity were briefer than they might have been if Lou hadn’t been stronger than anyone except a few male dancers and possibly Fat Bernard.
She worked hard. Everyone liked her. When a customer slipped her a tip, she divided it with the others. Twice Yvonne absentmindedly patted Lou on the head.
One afternoon the staff was ordered to stay away from the club. The exterminators needed privacy to do whatever they did. There was nowhere Lou wanted to go. Some day she’d look for Robert, but not now. Not yet.
Heading out for an aimless walk, Lou got as far as the corner when she spotted Yvonne alone at a café table. Should Lou pretend not to see her? Yvonne beckoned her over. She asked Lou if she wanted a coffee. Lou nodded. A coffee with Yvonne! She didn’t trust herself to speak.
Lou stirred in three cubes of sugar. The coffee was delicious.
“You have a sweet tooth?” Yvonne said.
“No, not always,” Lou said.
They sat in silence for fifteen minutes. Lou swabbed the sweet grainy sludge at the bottom of the cup and licked it off her finger.
Yvonne said, “Can I ask you something?”
Lou wanted to say no, but nodded.
“Weren’t you on a poster for a performance at the Vélodrome d’Hiver?”
“That was me,” Lou admitted, bracing herself. For what?
“Let’s go back to the club,” said Yvonne. “The rats must be dead by now.”
A peppery cloud of pesticide hovered over the dance floor. The air tasted to Lou like the birthday cake that Robert had laced with pigeon poison. She’d just been thinking of Robert. Maybe that meant something. Yvonne asked Fat Bernard to air the place out, lest a customer have an attack. Many of them had weak lungs, as Bernard well knew.
In her office Yvonne motioned for Lou to push aside some silky garments on the couch. Lou sat on a high-heeled sandal. It was awkward, retrieving it and finding a place to put it.
Yvonne began to open her mail. Without looking up, she said, “Could you lift a small woman?”
“I think so.” Lou was lifting fifty kilos when she ran away from Dr. Loomis, but it was always wise to be modest.
Yvonne reached into her purse and took out her lizard, which she’d brought with her when the poison was being sprayed. Lou never understood how such a smart businesswoman and talented singer could cherish those nasty, scaly creatures. Once Lou overheard Yussef the dishwasher explain to an Algerian busboy whom he had a crush on: the Nazarenes had their rosaries, Madame Yvonne had her chameleon. “Love is strange” was what everyone said. It was practically the club motto.
Yvonne said, “Would you like my little friend to tell your fortune?”
It was the last thing Lou wanted. “Very much,” she said.
Yvonne shuffled a deck of playing cards and scattered them on the floor. She dipped the lizard’s feet in a rouge pot and set the creature down. Cupping her hands so he couldn’t escape, she let him roam over the cards, then gently dropped the chameleon back in his glass terrarium. She selected the cards marked with tiny red claw prints and studied them, frowning.
She said, “You will move extremely fast. You will be greatly honored. You will inflict a great deal of pain. You will die a violent, early death.”
Lou said “My God” as each sentence Yvonne spoke erased the previous one, leaving a few indelible words: Speed. Honor. Pain. Violent. Early death.
Yvonne said, “I am sorry to give you this troubling news. But isn’t it better to be warned? Now thank me and my little lizard.”
“Thank you both,” said Lou. What did a lizard know? A reptile with rouge on its feet! No French person would do such a thing. This charade was an import from a barbaric land of Gypsy sorcerers and cavemen.
A pattern emerges in retrospect: a chain of large and small events that would turn Lou Villars against foreigners, a prejudice that made her an easy mark for the false prophets who seduced her and the demons that possessed her. Though it’s also possible that these biases already existed, remnants from childhood, inherited from her father and impressed upon her by her British nanny. Someone else might have been alarmed by a lizard’s dire predictions without concluding, as did Lou, that it was a dirty Hungarian trick.
Later, Lou would tell this story to her women friends in the regional sports clubs, the innocent dupes from whom she extracted information to pass along to the enemies of France. She’d laugh when she described the fortune-telling reptile, but with a wince suggesting that a shiver of foreboding rattled her every time. She would offer the story as a confidence, and the women responded with secrets of their own.
After she’d given Lou the bad news, Yvonne said, “Can you lift two women? I mean, one woman at a time. For the new dance numbers. Both girls are tiny. You will be perfect. It requires more strength than grace. And there is something about you. . . . The crowd will love it. Don’t ask me why. Report tomorrow morning at ten to Pavel’s rehearsal studio.”
“How do I get there?” asked Lou.
“Ask Arlette,” said Yvonne.
Arlette Jumeau sang in the chorus during the grand finale in which a wooden boat filled with sailors dressed as the opposite sex sang a saucy but touching chorus about leaving for a warmer and more hospitable climate. The customers knew all the words and sang along with tears in their eyes.
Arlette was also going to Pavel’s for the first time, but she was Parisian and knew the city. She belonged to a small clique of girls who did errands for Yvonne, trips to the seamstress and florist. These girls were all very beautiful. Their principal job was to make male and female customers fall in love with them and get flustered and buy more drinks to relax. None of them was for sale. Prostitution was a firing offense. None of these girls had been fired.
In an early photo, a cheap publicity shot, Arlette perches cross-legged on a rock. She is wearing a modest bathing costume. Her head is tilted to one side, her chin balanced on one finger, a pose that, like everything in the picture, suggests a deficient imagination. Though the photo is in black and white, Arlette—clearly blond and blue-eyed—looks like a spoiled child’s expensive doll.
Arlette had many admirers, but her heart belonged to a boy named Eddie, who worked in a cheese shop and wanted to be a boxer. On Friday nights he drank too much and got loud and stupid. At first Yvonne had Fat Bernard throw him out of the club. But the customers saw the sweet spirit inside the handsome tough guy who reeked of Camembert. Or maybe they saw the handsome face and invented the sweetness. When Eddie was sober enough to be charming, he and Arlette glided from table to table, and the customers bought them champagne.
To Arlette, Lou was a busboy. Lou wanted to say she was more than that. But what would she have added? She was not about to tell a stranger about her past as a sports star-in-training. How pitiful it would make her seem, to admit how far she’d fallen. But who did Arlette think she was? Her voice wasn’t especially good, nor could she do backbends and midair somersaults like the dancers. Granted, she was pretty, which counted for a lot.
Arlette said nothing as they set off for Pavel’s studio. In the tram, which was so crowded that they had to stand, an expensively dressed pervert plastered himself against Arlette and was stealthily fondling her breasts. Lou jabbed him with her elbow so hard that he staggered off at the next stop. But Arlette seemed not to notice, let alone feel grateful for having been rescued. At the studio, she motioned for Lou to go upstairs first, ostensibly from politeness but in reality so they wouldn’t be seen arriving together.
Pavel shook their hands and wagged his head so that his pointed beard tipped back and forth like the second hand on a clock. Lou thought of Miss Frost’s book about a flock of winged infants who subsisted on pollen and nectar. The blossoms sustaining Pavel were dancers in pink tutus. He treated his students like artists:
future ballerinas. It was beneath him to mention the venues where they would practice their art.
Despite Arlette’s efforts to distance herself from Lou, the class knew they were the new ones, the only ones who listened when Pavel cracked his stick on the floor and announced, “I am not Diaghilev. I am something else.” The others continued doing bends and stretches while their teacher summarized his career. As a young man, he’d danced with Diaghilev, who’d fired him for some minor infraction. A heavy blow, but also a badge of honor that admitted him to the distinguished confraternity of the master’s former slaves.
For a while he had worked with the great Josephine Baker. But they had a falling-out when she’d gotten tired of shaking her behind in a skirt made from bananas and of appearing on stage nude but for a single flamingo feather. He’d told her the fans insisted on it, and he had been wrong.
His students went on with their leg lifts and knee bends. Lou liked watching her classmates perform strenuous exercises more targeted and effective than lugging tubs of dishes to the kitchen. She didn’t have to be an Olympic champion. She might not be graceful, but she was strong. She could be a dancer!
Warmed up, the students began the high kicks and splits, the cascading pretzels and contortions they’d made famous at the club. Pavel moved from one to the next, suggesting improvements, until he reached Lou and Arlette.
“Of course. Of course. I remember now. My little mermaid and her sailor.”
Apparently Yvonne and Pavel had discussed a number in which Arlette would dance the part of a mermaid. Lou would play the sailor who caught the sea creature in his net and fell in love with her while the others swam around them.
Lou’s other duties would include lifting a little Filipina named Florine, formerly the partner of the pregnant Amazon Rose. Surrounded by girls in skimpy kimonos, Florine would reprise her popular song about first love and cherry blossoms. Lou could wear the same costume she wore for the mermaid routine. They would see how the Madame Butterfly number worked without Amazon Rose.
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 Page 11