When Beauvoir touched down at Orly airport at dawn on Sunday, May 18, he was still in bed with Dolorès. The American woman had decided that she would not exit the stage for Simone unless Sartre promised to marry her. Beauvoir had given Sartre the extra week he’d requested, precisely so that he could “properly” see Dolorès off. In her last letter to him, Beauvoir had been clear: “I really do want to feel completely calm and free of problems in Paris, at least during the first days. I beg of you, my love, fix everything nicely so that we can be on our own for a long time, and nothing spoils the happiness of being back with you.” Before finishing with “My love, I know I’ll be happy this Sunday when I see you again. I love you.”5 When she reached the Gare des Invalides at ten thirty in the morning, after a long and exhausting flight and with two huge leather suitcases bursting at the seams, she was shattered to learn that the woman she would from now on refer to only as “M” in her writing had not left. She knew better than to press Sartre with questions. She had to endure it until vindication time. Despite the cool hand she played, she was unsettled and depressed, especially as she had left a man with whom she had fallen in love. She had never considered betraying her pact with Jean-Paul, even for a great passion. But what about Sartre? Did he want to end their relationship? Beauvoir coped with antidepressant pills. Meanwhile, Algren wanted her to commit to him. She was torn.
Often preached but rarely put into practice, sexual faithfulness is usually experienced by those who abide by it as a mutilation: they try to get over it by way of sublimation, or with wine. Many couples, like Sartre and myself, make a pact, that is to maintain a certain fidelity despite some misbehavior. Sartre and I were even more ambitious, we wanted to engage in “contingent loves,” but there was one question we had overlooked: how would the third party react to our mutual arrangement?6
For Paris’s existentialists, friendship seemed as complicated as love. Fallings-out and reconciliations came in quick succession, politics and sex playing a central part. Albert Camus’ La peste had been published in June 1947 and was his first real commercial success. After a week, his publisher Gallimard was already reprinting and predicting sales of at least eighty thousand copies before the end of the summer. Now reconciled with Sartre and Beauvoir, Camus, who had just quit the editorship of Combat again, was seeing more of his old friends. Sartre was corresponding with Koestler and they, too, were back on amicable terms. Camus could see that Sartre was the butt of vicious attacks from the Communists and he admired him for tirelessly confronting them with their own contradictions. “Between Sartre and the Communists, ties were severed. The Party’s intellectuals were hounding him precisely because they feared he would steal their influence on the youth. The Communists thought Sartre all the more dangerous because he actually felt close to their cause.”7
Janet Flanner had received an advance copy of La peste from Gallimard and had devoured it. She was eager to let her readers know about it before the American translation hit the New York bookstores. “Camus and Sartre have set a new protagonist pattern. Human mediocrities are used, like a very common denominator, to decipher the problem of present-day life. This new French novel style represents the greatest break yet with the Balzac style, though Balzac’s most important theme was also the pestiferous corruption of French society.”8
Sonia Brownell eagerly followed the latest Left Bank spats and loved La peste as much as anyone. She arrived back in the French capital in early July. The married Maurice Merleau-Ponty was expecting her with trepidation. He had fallen for her a year earlier, and this time there was no letting her go. They spent all their evenings together in Saint-Germain-des-Prés’ jazz clubs. There, in the midst of the heavy tobacco fug, Sonia fell in love.
After a few weeks jiving wildly with the dance-obsessed Merleau-Ponty, Sonia was not looking forward to returning to burned-out London and “courtship à l’anglaise with its homegrown tactics of pounce and grab,”9 the kind practiced by Koestler. However, when she eventually left Paris, Merleau-Ponty promised that they would meet again in the autumn. He said he would try to find her a job in Paris. Alternatively, if he failed, he would come to London. Beauvoir and Sartre, who liked Sonia, cheered her up by announcing they would soon be on their way to London and were relying on her to introduce them to interesting people. They had been invited to the opening of the London production of Sartre’s plays The Respectful Prostitute and Men Without Shadows (the British title of Morts sans sépulture). The West End Lyric Theatre had assigned the plays to a twenty-two-year-old theater director named Peter Brook.
Beauvoir and Sartre did not stay long in London, but they insisted on visiting the Gargoyle Club at 69 Dean Street in Soho. Sonia had protested, apologizing in advance and warning that the Gargoyle was a poor substitute for Parisian cafés and jazz clubs, but Simone was adamant, she had to go. The three friends settled on little stools in the coffee room one evening. They were merrily complaining about Englishmen when the intense-looking, curly-haired young painter Lucian Freud entered the room. Sonia, who knew him, invited him to join them. Simone soon revised her opinion of Englishmen and appropriately left the Gargoyle on Lucian’s arm.10
A few weeks later, Richard Wright was facing existentialist dilemmas in his private life, not unlike the one Sartre and Simone’s agreement had caused. He had embraced Parisian life and its many ambiguities perhaps a little too readily. In Paris, his literary star continued to rise. Native Son had been published in French just before his arrival, and now Uncle Tom’s Children and Black Boy were being released in quick succession in France, to excellent reviews. The non-Communist French intelligentsia embraced him with all its might, in the same way they had lionized Arthur Koestler. Wright was thrilled to be treated as a public intellectual; as an outsider, he felt he could see things more clearly. Being an intellectual in France was, however, a full-time job: French journalists were seeking his opinion on almost all American subjects and wanted his perspective on French matters, too. Wright took it in his stride with a newly found confidence.
In fact, he had fallen head over heels for the Parisian life. Fêted and invited everywhere, the Wrights were going out almost every night. Ellen didn’t fail to notice her husband’s susceptibility to the charms of other women. There was a Dr. Polin, a female gynecologist. “I can’t help but marvel at how intensely feminine and at the same time intellectual the French woman is,” he wrote in his diary on August 17, 1947.11 And two weeks later: “I must hide this journal. Ellen is looking at me as though she has read some of it.”
The temptations were manifold. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to meet Richard Wright, the famous American writer. While Ellen and Julia were vacationing in the South of France, Richard received a telephone call from a young stranger. Her name was Edith Anderson Shroeder and she was a Jewish girl from the Bronx and a Communist. She was in Paris, with little money, waiting for authorization to join her husband, Max Shroeder, in Berlin. Was it the texture of her voice? Was it what she said or how she said it? The same afternoon Richard invited her to tea at his empty home. They talked politics and then he tried to kiss her. She resisted. “Is it my color?” he immediately quipped. “Dick fell in love with me just because I said no,”12 Edith Shroeder later recalled. She eventually said yes, though. After Ellen’s return, Richard and Edith would meet at night to talk and kiss in his Oldsmobile, which he parked in a dark spot near the Bois de Boulogne.
LE TABOU
Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s students and lovers, the younger generation of the Left Bank, the war’s children, loved pranks and plotting. After their favorite lair, Le Bar Vert on the rue Jacob, closed at one in the morning, they had nowhere to go except the sidewalk, where they sat and talked until dawn, and this drove the locals crazy, especially the artisans who had to get up early in the morning to go to work. They had become used to spilling the contents of their chamber pots onto the heads of the youngsters below to make them leave. Juliette Gréco, Anne-Marie Cazalis, and their cohort of friends soon started go
ing to another café, which was open all night and catered to the printing workers on the rue Dauphine. The place smelled of ink, coffee, and croissants served from the nearby bakery. One very cold morning, while looking for her coat, Gréco discovered a small door giving onto very steep wooden stairs leading to a vast and empty vaulted cellar.
Gréco and her friends talked the owners of the café, the Guyonnets, a couple from Toulouse, into letting them run what they said would be a rehearsal room in the underground space. After four months, the Guyonnets finally relented. Le Tabou was about to be born. “This taste for underground places, for vaulted cellars, was strange,” admitted Gréco in her memoirs. “Was it a habit taken up during air raid alerts during the war? Was it a secret desire to remain outside the daily grind of life, to remain at the margins of society in places that smelled of old, forgotten wines and worm-eaten old furniture?”13
In the spring of 1947, Le Tabou opened its doors at 33 rue Dauphine. “I sometimes acted as the doorwoman,” explained Gréco almost seventy years later, “and I was ruthless, believe me. There were nights when I only let philosophers in!”14 After a few weeks of gramophone music, Boris Vian moved in every night with a little band formed for the occasion that he called Les Grrr. The bathrooms were covered in graffitied slogans like “Go to the bar and ask for an arsenic with mint, this will quench your thirst for eternity,” or “I would like to be reborn as a train crash.”15
Anne-Marie Cazalis thought of mounting a rather cheeky self-promotional operation. Perhaps the former youngest award-winning poet who had once lunched with Paul Valéry was eager to get her own picture in the newspaper? On May 3, 1947, Samedi Soir dedicated its front page to a long story headlined THIS IS HOW THE TROGLODYTES OF SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS LIVE. It ran beside a picture of a tall, handsome, disheveled, dark-haired nineteen-year-old man (the aspiring film director Roger Vadim) holding a candle to a young woman wearing trousers, her long black hair covered with cobwebs (Juliette Gréco). Samedi Soir’s journalist Robert Jacques asked them: “What do you believe in?” Anne-Marie Cazalis knew what she was doing when she fired back: “Existentialism.” “Those poor young Existentialists,” wrote the journalist, “are drinking, dancing and loving their lives away in cellars until the atom bomb—which they all perversely long for—drops on Paris.”16 No need to say more, a whole generation was nailed in just two lines: indigent, indecent—in other words, Existentialist.
Beauvoir and Sartre were more annoyed than amused. They were getting so much flak already from the Communists and the bourgeoisie, now they were pointed at for perverting the youth. Existentialism was about a body of philosophical ideas, not about jazz-soaked beboppers. Too late. The news had spread fast and its effects rippled all the way to Beijing, Jerusalem, New York, London, Berlin, and of course, most important of all perhaps, Moscow. Two Soviet journalists who claimed to have visited Le Tabou just after its opening wrote in the Literaturnaya gazeta [Literary Gazette]: “These poverty-stricken young people live in squalor and ask you to pay for their drinks. It is a youth reveling in the most vulgar sexuality.”
LA FEMME FRANÇAISE
Despite its detractors, Le Tabou would eventually become a tourist attraction, with people flocking from all over the world to observe Paris’s perverted youth. However, for twelve months Le Tabou remained a place for friends, and friends of friends, and not for the world at large. As Juliette Gréco recollected in her memoirs: “Cocteau and Christian Bérard, Gaston Gallimard and François Mauriac, Jean Genet and Simone Signoret, Orson Welles and Truman Capote, and so forth. They were in turn dazzled by the beauty of the teenage models from the fashion couture houses, known by their first names.”17 There was the androgynous, short-haired Annabel (future wife of the painter Bernard Buffet), the blond, ballet-trained Sophie (later married to Hollywood film director Anatole Litvak), the feisty red-haired Bettina (future companion of Prince Aly Khan), and the divine sapphire-eyed Hélène (future wife of the perfume tycoon Marcel Rochas).
Those very young women, who turned heads wherever they went, were about to embody the Parisian woman and become, for at least the next decade, among the most photographed mannequins in the world. French couturiers were ready to roar again. Now that Parisian couture houses were starting to get back on their feet with the lifting of fabric and material restrictions, Paris was abuzz with creativity. The French capital was about to reclaim its title as the world headquarters of fashion. Two months before the opening of Le Tabou, the first couture collection of a plump and bold forty-two-year-old had sent shock waves through the fashion world. His name was Christian Dior. The American Carmel Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, branded his collection “le New Look.” The expression stuck. Colette liked referring to it in writing as “le nioulouque.”
Christian Dior had had another life before the world discovered him as a couturier. In 1928 he had opened, with the help of his wealthy parents, an art gallery where he had exhibited Henri Cartier-Bresson’s first (and rather bad) paintings but also Giacometti, de Chirico, Calder, and Dalí. Ruined by the financial crash of the late 1920s, Dior, who liked drawing as a pastime, looked for a job and started selling fashion patterns and sketches to couturiers and film and theater producers. Lucien Lelong’s maison de couture then hired him. Just after the war, the textile industrialist Marcel Boussac, also known as “the cotton king,” saw his talent and struck a deal with him. He set up the Maison Dior, 30 Avenue Montaigne, and gave him as much fabric as he wished in exchange for his designs.
His first collection had been presented to a select crowd and world fashion editors on February 12, 1947. After years of hardship and rationing, Dior had suddenly reintroduced glamour and luxury, with full skirts made of twenty yards of fabric instead of just three, aptly named corollas. He had also invented a new sexy silhouette of nipped-in waist, high, round bosom, narrow shoulders, and legs uncovered up to the calves. The waist and hips played an important part in his designs: skirts, shirts, and dresses flared out from the waist to dramatic effect, giving anyone wearing them a very curvaceous shape. Hollywood stars started demanding to be dressed by Dior as part of their contracts. Marlene Dietrich had been in the front row at the presentation of his first collection, and from that day on she would wear only Dior in real life, onstage, or on-screen. A few months later, when Alfred Hitchcock offered her the leading part in Stage Fright, she had replied, “Yes, on one condition.” “What is it?” Hitchcock had asked wearily. “No Dior, no Dietrich.”
POPPING PILLS
In June, her mind distracted by Sartre’s indecipherable intentions, Beauvoir had thrown one last party at the Cave des Lorientais on the rue des Carmes before it closed down and the twenty-two-year-old “jazz hot” clarinetist Claude Luter joined Boris Vian at Le Tabou. For the Beaver’s homecoming party, Boris Vian decided to run the bar himself. The engineer-trumpeter-novelist mixed and stirred “implacable” cocktails that knocked everyone out from the first glass. The alliance of alcohol and Orthédrine, of which she was taking too much, put Beauvoir in a stupor. Giacometti passed out on the floor. Supported by Sartre and le petit Bost, Beauvoir managed to get back to her hotel room, but without her bag and wallet. One guest (a friend of Boris Vian’s) had even left behind his glass eye.18 The following afternoon, nursing a terrible hangover, Beauvoir collected both the glass eye and her purse. None of her guests could quite remember what they did that evening.
The first summer days of 1947 in Paris proved stiflingly hot, with peaks in the triple digits. Simone had all the windows and doors of her hotel room open for ventilation; however, she still found it almost impossible to work, so she often lay down on her bed, motionless, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, thinking of Algren and Sartre. She had not felt so depressed in her life and was prone to panic attacks, which she nursed with whiskey and pills. Dolorès had finally gone back to New York without any marriage prospects, and the philosophers’ relationship had withstood the storm, but it remained somewhat strained.
Beauvoir was not al
one in mixing alcohol, tobacco, sleeping pills, and amphetamines on a daily basis. Sartre, too, was taking drugs. In fact, everybody seemed to be at it in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Orthédrine was a freely available “upper,” or excitant as it was known in French. It had been the stimulant of choice of the résistants during the war. Sartre preferred Benzedrine or Corydrane, another stimulant freely available over the counter, which he said he was taking to both relax and focus.19 “But whereas journalists would take a tablet or half-tablet to get them going, Sartre took four. Most people took them with water; Sartre crunched them.”20 Besides Corydrane, Sartre smoked two packets of unfiltered Boyards a day and gulped down liters of coffee and tea. At night, he usually drank half a bottle of whiskey before taking four or five sleeping pills to knock himself out.
There were other freely available amphetamines with exotic names: Luminax, Leviton, Tranquidex, Psychotron, Lidepran. Developed in the 1930s, they were particularly used during the war years and used not only by Left Bank intellectuals on a writing spree but notably by cyclists on the Tour de France. In 1955, they were available only by prescription, and many were later banned from sale, though Corydrane was declared toxic and dangerous only in 1971.21
Those drugs not only were a way to unwind or sharpen the mind, they were literally work tools for Left Bank intellectuals and writers. Drugs turned them into work machines. “Under the influence of the drug, instead of writhing in anguish, Sartre wrote at white heat.”22 One cannot explain their incredible prolificness other than by their drug habits. They would unfortunately pass this habit on to the younger generation.
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