Secrets and Showgirls

by Catherine McCullagh

  ‘You nearly blew it with that matador fling,’ she said in a low voice. The ensuing pause in the hubbub sufficed to tell Lily that this was the general consensus.

  ‘I did,’ she admitted humbly, ‘don’t know what came over me really ...’ Several of the girls laughed.

  ‘Did you see Madame’s face?’

  ‘I thought she was going to have a fit!’

  ‘You were very good,’ cooed another voice and Lily turned, smiling, towards this girl, ready to reward the compliment. But something in the way the girl regarded her so intently stopped her in her tracks. She was slender and dark, her hair a glossy cap that fitted her head snugly like a 1920s cloche cap. Her eyes feasted on the new arrival in a manner that left Lily entirely unsettled. A touch on her arm rescued her.

  ‘Hello cherie, I’m Poppy, don’t mind Sabine, she’s a bit different, if you know what I mean.’ Lily had not the least idea, but smiled sweetly, grateful to Poppy for her intervention. Poppy was as tall as Lily, with coiffed strawberry blonde hair that sat in huge curls under a bright yellow hairnet.

  ‘Are you Sybilla’s replacement then?’ asked Sadie, the flossy blonde. Lily was lost for a reply.

  ‘I suppose I am,’ she replied candidly, ‘I answered an advertisement that said there was a vacancy here for a dancer ...’

  ‘Yes, she’s Sybilla’s replacement,’ Sadie announced to the gathering, ‘they don’t take long, do they?’ Lily looked at the girls in mute incomprehension.

  ‘What happened to Sybilla?’ she asked Poppy quietly, conscious that she might be reopening a festering wound. Wild looks greeted her question and she was struck instantly by the fear that she had destroyed any chance of an effortless assimilation into the group. She bit her lip. But Poppy was intent on a successful salvage and gave her a reassuring smile.

  ‘Plenty of time for that,’ she said, patting Lily’s arm gently, ‘I’ll explain everything once you’re settled. Shall I take you to your room at Madame Gloria’s?’ Poppy glanced at the clock in the corner of the room. ‘It’s only eleven — she might still be sober.’ Lily’s look of astonishment prompted the blonde dancer to add, ‘she’s fond of a drop, spends most of her day sozzled, really, but she’s an absolute darling.’ Lily’s head reeled and she wondered whether she had come to a madhouse rather than a cabaret. Too confused to argue, she raced to find her luggage before following Poppy to meet Madame Gloria, ready for whatever lay in store.

  Madame Gloria was the concierge and landlady of the first of two apartment-cum-boarding houses that accommodated many of the dancers and artistes who worked at Le Prix. Her apartment sat directly behind the theatre in a happy marriage of dilapidation and shabby comfort that would have verged on the eye-catching with a fresh coat of paint. Behind the three-storey building that housed Madame Gloria’s fine establishment was a small courtyard overlooked by another, larger apartment building, ostensibly better maintained and generally in a healthier state of repair. Madame Gloria’s apartment however, had the distinction of sitting closest to the theatre that squatted ostentatiously to its front.

  Struggling under the weight of Lily’s bags, the two long-limbed dancers heaved their way through the ornate front door of Madame Gloria’s apartment boarding house. Inside, the entrance hallway was patterned with diamond black and white tiles, while polished timber dressers and hallstands lined the walls.

  ‘Hellooo Madame Gloria!’ sang Poppy as the two girls struggled through the door. A small sound greeted the call and Lily shook her head in disbelief. It sounded just like the popping of a champagne cork. It was. A short, rounded woman in her fifties with a softly pretty face and brightly dyed, coppery brown hair emerged from a door opposite the base of the staircase clutching a champagne bottle, the delicate waft of bubbles that issued from its neck telling of the cork’s recent release.

  ‘Ooh Poppy dear, is this our new little girl?’ Madame Gloria exuded fumes and maternal warmth in equal proportions as she beamed a welcome to her new tenant. Lily laughed mentally at this small, comfortably built woman calling her a ‘little girl’. Madame Gloria barely reached Lily’s shoulder.

  ‘Yes, Madame, this is Lily,’ announced Poppy, her voice slightly raised and her words slow and deliberate in recognition of the befuddled state of her landlady.

  ‘Hello Lil, my dear,’ chirped Madame Gloria, brandishing the champagne, ‘I must have known you were coming! Shall we celebrate?’

  ‘Thank you Madame,’ replied Lily graciously, ‘a little early for me perhaps ... the bubbles do go to my head!’

  ‘And to mine, dear,’ replied Madame Gloria as if this were par for the course in her apartment.

  ‘Shall I show Lil to her room?’ intervened Poppy, aping Madame Gloria’s slurred rendition of Lily’s name.

  ‘Yes, yes, dear, Sybilla’s old room,’ to Lily, ‘you don’t mind, do you dear?’

  ‘Not at all,’ answered Lily uncomfortably, torn between the wish to keep her new landlady happy and a coursing desire to know what had happened to the unfortunate Sybilla. They resumed their stagger, bowed by the weight of Lily’s bags and this time with the added difficulty of a flight of stairs. Madame Gloria waved them off as if they were embarking on a voyage and returned to her kitchen where the clinking of glassware announced that the champagne would soon be further liberated.

  At the top of the stairs the landing opened out to a series of rooms that flanked a shabbily comfortable sitting area cluttered with mismatched, overstuffed sofas and a menagerie of cushions. The stairs continued to climb behind them, announcing the existence of a further storey to the building.

  ‘This way,’ called Poppy, hauling Lily’s tapestried bag through the sitting area to one of the rooms on the side closest to the top of the landing. She pushed the door open to reveal a room that was homely and cheerful, furnished with a large bed, a heavy wooden wardrobe, easy chair and a shelved table with a washstand, a large china dish and jug perching on top. At the far end of the room was a window dressed with chintz curtains that looked out over the tiny courtyard and towards the other apartment building that stood companionably on the far side and which Lily had glimpsed from the alleyway below. The courtyard was so small and the buildings so close that Lily stifled the urge to reach out the window and pick a geranium from the windowbox of the apartment opposite.

  ‘Welcome to your new home, cherie, the bathroom’s down the end of the corridor.’ Poppy dropped the tapestried bag at one end of the bed and plumped on its soft covers, springing and bouncing with delight. Lily plumped next to her, enjoying the sumptuous feel of the thick covers and the soft bedspread. It was a pretty, light room that felt happy and loved. Lily’s concern over the fact that this had been the late, lamented Sybilla’s room began to recede slightly. Nonetheless, this was a subject she felt duty bound to tackle.

  ‘Poppy,’ she began directly, ‘what happened to Sybilla?’ Poppy sighed and stopped bouncing.

  ‘Sybilla was big and tall like you and had loads of blonde hair and ... mon Dieu, what a cleavage! She was great fun and everyone loved her ... we all jostle along rather well, you see.’ She paused as if studying the picture she had painted for Lily. ‘But Sybilla had a bit of a problem,’ Poppy sighed again. ‘She liked men ... a lot. She didn’t care whose they were or were they came from ... “variety is the spice” she used to say.’ She stopped to study the toe of her court shoe, black with a series of little red hearts that tripped along the edge. ‘She also loved a drink — she would have had that drink that Madame Gloria offered you when you walked through the door without even thinking about it, she loved champagne ... bit too much really.’ Another sigh before the narrative resumed. ‘Anyway, one night she had a little too much champagne — that was her style, so we didn’t think anything of it — and off she went with her man of the moment in his sports car. Wasn’t long before we heard the clanging of the ambulance bell. Seems she was larking around in the car with her gentleman friend and she fell out and was collected by a passing truck. Th
e man scarpered because he was married — and not to her, if you get my meaning.’ Poppy shook her head. ‘Poor Sybilla, it was bound to happen really. That was the way she lived — too much champagne, too many men, too fast a life.’

  She paused and a heavy, mournful silence threatened to settle, flattening the cheerful ambience of the room. Lily was not keen to spend time mourning her predecessor who sounded as if her fate was not entirely unexpected, nor did she want to stifle the warmth of her new friend Poppy. She let the silence reign for a brief moment before pulling Poppy back into the bright sun of the living.

  ‘Way to go, though,’ Lily murmured, smiling impishly and casting a glint-eyed look at the other girl. Poppy mused for a moment before she too broke into a grin.

  ‘Yes, what a way to go!’ she answered. ‘She had the best life really. She was the envy of us all. No-one else dared live like that, but she didn’t give a hoot what anyone thought. Maybe she knew it wouldn’t be for long.’

  As Lily unpacked, Poppy regaled her with stories of the other girls and the artistes who populated life at Le Prix. To Lily each seemed fascinating, particularly as Monsieur Maurice, who managed the theatre, followed a strict policy of allowing the girls’ private lives to remain precisely that. To Lily this was a show business version of the French Foreign Legion where every soldier began a new life, often with a new name to match and no questions asked. Monsieur Maurice asked only that the girls could dance. He chose not to enquire too closely into the nature of their past lives and what occupied them in their spare time.

  Poppy’s stories quickly revealed that this was a company with an extraordinary mix of personalities. While Madame Claudette was the dance mistress and choreographer, Monsieur Maurice was the business head behind Le Prix. He was also manager of the diverse array of staff who ranged from the accountant and office boy, the musicians of the orchestra, the seamstress and her assistants, the bar manager, the gnome-like janitor and the artistes, performers and showgirls. It seemed to Lily that Le Prix was characterised by the peculiar. The Master of Ceremonies was a dwarf named Chinon who told ribald jokes, sang, danced and performed a series of acrobatic stunts alongside the prancing showgirls. The boyishly sensual Coco titillated patrons with a captivating burlesque routine before strutting the stage dressed as a bondage mistress. Orlando, an enormous, hairy-chested Spaniard, was an illusionist who performed a series of magic tricks enticing female members of the audience onto the stage. The charismatic Spaniard’s smouldering good looks and red-sequined cutaway costume that revealed tanned, rippling muscle and a hairy chest laced with gold chains, ensured there was no shortage of volunteers. The glamorous and seductive Crecy Duplessis was a female impersonator who sashayed his way through a seductive routine that left many of the male patrons convinced that he was a voluptuous, curvaceous siren. Ambiguity was Crecy’s byword and he delighted in an aura of mystery, uncertainty and allure. Le Prix also boasted a number of singers and dancers, many of them guest artistes who performed for a few weeks and moved on, while the regular performers lived in the apartments behind the theatre. But it was the bevy of a dozen lithe showgirls who attracted Lily’s attention and held it for the first few days as she found herself immersed in a kaleidoscopic, layered world where nothing was as it seemed. With mounting excitement, Lily realised that she was in for a fast ride in this, her new home.

  Chapter 3

  Creatures of the mind

  Lily quickly found her niche in Le Prix d’Amour. As she had initially suspected, Le Prix gradually revealed itself as a cornucopia, a veritable collage of mesmerising characters. The air of mystique was deepened by the fact that most of the dancers and artistes who populated its red velvet interior were less than forthcoming on the fascinating subject of their previous lives and their reasons for joining the company. More’s the point, no-one asked; they co-existed in the happily unstated knowledge that their past was a Pandora’s box that might never be opened. Each inhabited a personal glass house in a little world where no-one threw stones.

  The cabaret itself was the property of a wealthy French industrialist with a penchant for dancers who had bought the bankrupt club several years earlier and rebuilt the business, his sole motive his desire to maintain a personal collection of obliging showgirls. For three years he had lived a life of unadulterated bliss until an automobile accident had robbed him of the use of his legs, forcing him into a wheeled bath chair and a life of dependence on his devout Catholic wife who had remained mercifully ignorant of his cabaret indulgence. Madame knew only that her husband owned a business he referred to as ‘Le Prix’ which she had misguidedly deduced to be an accountancy firm peopled by clerks — all model citizens, philanthropists and regular churchgoers like her husband.

  Monsieur Le Prix’s Owner had engaged Monsieur Maurice to manage his cabaret, poaching him from his dull but ordered life as a bank manager with the promise of pecuniary compensation and a titillating workplace to boot. Monsieur Maurice’s wife, Madame Claudette, was Russian, a classically trained ballerina who was melodramatically proud of her tragically displaced heritage. Her family had lived in middle-class comfort until the revolution of October 1917 had forced them to flee to Paris along with several thousand exiled compatriots where they formed a voluble and strident community of musicians, dancers, writers, poets and other artistes, all passionately homesick and loud in their denunciation of the Bolsheviks who now replaced the Black Death as the single worst blight on the face of human history. Monsieur Maurice had caught sight of the beautiful ballerina and immediately set out to woo her, promising her the stability of a comfortable home and a secure income. She had brought colour to his life and introduced the neat little banker to the world of dance and the theatre. She had retired from ballet at the age of thirty-five and was immediately engaged to choreograph works for small dance companies, gradually moving into theatre and the avant-garde world of experimental dance. Despite her traditional training, Madame Claudette was innovative and gifted and loved the flashy colour and glitz of cabaret life. She brought discipline and hard work to the flighty, tempestuous coquettes who tended to populate the Parisian night world.

  Lily was used to hard work. She was also used to being surrounded by girls whose appearance, personalities and peccadilloes ranged from the fascinating to the downright bizarre. For Lily, this was all part of the attraction. She felt sure that she could never work in ‘respectable’ occupations, smacking as they did of security and dependability. This spelt predictability and the danger of a slow death from monotony and the suffocation of expectation. No, Lily was far happier in the constant eddy of the cabaret, the dizzying pattern of personality, the recurring thrill of performance and the rapture of the suited, slavering audience that clinked its glasses and thundered its applause through a veil of misty grey smoke.

  Le Prix was one of a well-patronised coterie of cabarets in Paris, rubbing its glitzy shoulders with the likes of the renowned Moulin Rouge, Le Chat Noir and Folies Bergère. While Le Prix was smaller and less renowned than its celebrated companions, it never suffered a paucity of customers and, happily for both Monsieur Maurice and his employer, Monsieur Le Prix’s Owner, turned sufficient profit to pay their performers, keep the gold-hued, red velvet Le Prix in sparkling shape, and allow them to live a life of modest comfort. The Paris of the late 1930s was clearly sufficiently hedonistic for all its cabarets to pay their way.

  Lily devoted herself to learning her routines and becoming acquainted with her new colleagues in the dance troupe, many of whom were also her fellow tenants in Madame Gloria’s apartment boarding house. Madame Gloria occupied the ground floor of the apartment building which was taken up with the kitchen, dining and bedrooms, salon, sitting rooms and laundry. The first floor saw showgirls Sabine, Sadie, Lily and Poppy residing alongside two of the show’s artistes, female impersonator Crecy Duplessis and the boyish burlesque dancer and bondage mistress known only as Coco. Upstairs, the rooms were occupied by several more of the dancers. The remaining girls,
Madame Claudette and Monsieur Maurice, and the other artistes lived in the rather smarter and larger apartment building across the courtyard at the rear of Madame Gloria’s, dominated by the exacting Madame Fresange whose chief occupation was spying on her own and Madame Gloria’s tenants. It was a close little community in which trials and tribulations were shared equally alongside the occasional tantrum and lashingly fierce quarrel.

  The girls were used to newcomers, as cabaret performers formed a typically transient population, and Lily found herself accepted almost immediately. Had she been looking for a place of refuge, a sanctuary in Paris, she would have found it in Le Prix d’Amour. In those early weeks she listened, watched and learned and spent all her time with her new friends. The days were long, filled with hours of relentless practice that began in the mornings on days when the cabaret was closed and in the early afternoon from Wednesdays through to Saturdays when the cabaret opened in the evenings. On opening days, the girls assembled at the theatre in the early evening to be dressed by Mademoiselle Gris, the dowdy little costumier whose creations were incongruously magical, ethereal and dazzling. Lily was intrigued by Mademoiselle Gris who seemed to pour all her colour into her costumes leaving herself entirely bleached, devoid of hue of any description. She was assisted by a flock of dressers, women who swarmed in at costuming time, buzzed excitedly around the performers, fitting and robing them in their glitzy creations, and then disappeared into the wings ready for the costume changes. They chattered excitedly among themselves, rarely to the dancers who they appeared to regard as living mannequins, referred to always in the third person.

  Once the evening show had concluded, the dancers became waitresses, moving among the tables of patrons with bottles of champagne, cognac, wine and exotic spirits, their task to persuade their clientele to imbibe as much as possible and boost the cabaret’s tills. The girls wore long, sequined dresses with deep cleavages and thigh splits that hugged the curvy contours of their bodies. They wound their way through the misted landscape, the tables islands of bubbling joviality where they anchored until they could persuade the island’s residents to purchase a bottle of golden elixir. Some of the girls — including the ill-fated Sybilla, according to Poppy — became rather more acquainted with their patrons and provided services not covered by Monsieur Maurice’s charter. Monsieur himself never enquired and was never told.