In Jazz Age Paris, She Was Magnifique

“My greatest claim to fame,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “is that I discovered Bricktop before Cole Porter.”

In his story “Babylon Revisited,” the novelist nostalgically recalled the singer’s self-named bistro--the “lost generation’s” favorite watering hole, where toute Paris lined up at the door for one of the 14 tiny tables.

Ernest Hemingway and Evelyn Waugh also wrote about her; T.S. Eliot referred to her in a poem; and Cole Porter composed a song for her, “Miss Otis Regrets.” Bricktop’s nightclub attracted the Prince of Wales and the Aga Khan. She managed high-society bistros with her name above the door in Paris, Biarritz, Mexico City and Rome. Years later in the movie “Zelig,” Woody Allen’s chameleonic title character turns up with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Shirley Temple--and Bricktop. Not bad for a little girl from the West Virginia hills.

Bricktop is evoked in the current exhibition “The Jazz Age in Paris, 1914-1940” at the California African-American Museum, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution. Artifacts of her years in Paris are featured in the show, which is in the midst of a three-year, 12-city tour.

She was born Ada Smith in Alderson, W.Va., with a head of red hair. By the time she was 18, she was already on her own, working in cabarets north of the border in Canada, where Prohibition hadn’t caught on. Bricktop earned her performing stripes on the stage of a so-called Negro theater in Chicago, sailed for Europe for six months in 1924 and stayed for a quarter of a century. She’d followed the trail of Josephine Baker and sailed for Paris, where black entertainers were enjoying unprecedented popularity.

Within two years, she was operating her own nightclub in Montmartre. Her 1930 marriage to saxophonist Peter Duconge, a Louis Armstrong sideman, lasted two years. But the nonstop party ended as the threat of war loomed, and Bricktop sadly sailed for New York in 1939.

In 1943, during World War II, Bricktop had a club in Mexico City. Then, after a hiatus in America, she returned to the Continent and established a new base of operations, first in Paris and later in a cellar on Rome’s Via Veneto. Emigre novelist Henry Miller, in “Tropic of Cancer,” found it “too expensive.”

“Running a saloon is the only thing I know, and I can do it backward and forwards. . . . I paid dearly with my heart and with my money to learn how,” she said in a 1979 interview. “A man once said to me, ‘You’ve been in Europe all of those years and you don’t speak French?’ I said, ‘No, but I can count in it! That’s the important part.’ ”

“I always said I’m not a singer, but I have my own style, and I make it awfully tough on those singers who have to follow me.” And when she did sing, every man in the room was convinced the message was expressly for him. She would hike up her always-stylish gown (Else Schiaparelli gave her clothes, Cole Porter bought her furs), dance around the room in dainty slippers, and boast, “Every time I shimmy, a skinny woman loses her man.” She explained it this way: “John Steinbeck said, ‘When Brick sings “Embraceable You,’ she takes 20 years off a man’s life.’ ”

When Bricktop returned to Paris after the war, the celebrities’ names had changed. Tennessee Williams came, Norman Mailer--high on the crest of “The Naked and the Dead”--also dropped in. So did James Baldwin, there in the early 1950s when he was writing “Giovanni’s Room”; George Plimpton, creating Paris Review; and Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, filming “An American in Paris.” So did Art Buchwald, who raved in May 1950 in the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune about her “elegant” opening. Everyone predicted success. “But Paris had changed by then,” she said with a sigh, “the French no longer loved Americans.”

In Rome, Bricktop’s clientele was movie stars; long before the term “paparazzi” was coined, photographers would clutter the entrance of her club, sometimes offering bribes to get in. Her establishment was in a cellar off the Via Veneto. And yet they came: Montgomery Clift, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton (the couple made their first public appearance together at Bricktop’s). Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said Bricktop was “about the most fascinating person I have ever met.”

Through the years, many entertainers gave impromptu concerts in the club--Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sophie Tucker--but one of the most memorable was Shirley MacLaine. Bricktop said she always sang “sharp.”

There were times, she remembered that, “Yes . . . I had two or three kings in the place at once. Once a fellow said to me, ‘Bricky, you’re making history. Two kings at one time in your place.’ And, I said, ‘They’re only two men.’ I never forgot my roots.”

BE THERE

“The Jazz Age in Paris, 1914-1940,” from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, closes Sunday at the California African-American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park. Hours 10 a.m.-5 p.m.