Travelers' Tales Paris (31 page)

But toward the end of our week's stay, I felt that I had to see more of Paris by night than the
interior of that sordid, unclean bathhouse; I would splurge just once and go to the famous
Boeuf sur le Toit
bar, the meeting place of all the richest, most famous, talented, and beautiful homosexuals; it was said that Jean Cocteau and his gorgeous lover Jean Marais were there almost every night. Young men—painters, playwrights, poets, actors, musicians—had been discovered there; careers had been born. It was a must for an impecunious, ambitious young man.

I rested in bed all afternoon and early evening in order to look my best; I brushed my best suit, made sure I had kept a clean shirt for the occasion, selected my most handsome tie. A drop of cologne went behind each ear, more was sprinkled onto the pristine, hand-hemmed Irish linen handkerchief which was arranged to peep just a little more flamboyantly than usual from the jacket's breast pocket. With hair brushed vigorously
en brosse
and with considerable trepidation, I entered the door of this elegant, dimly lit bar.

Drinks were exorbitant, I had been warned, but less so at the bar than at tables. I went to the bar, where not many places were taken, and sat down three stools away from a little woman in a rather mannish grey skirt and jacket with matching hat. I ordered a gin fizz because a tall drink can be made to last a long, long time.

The mirror behind the bar reflected the whole room, and in it I began to notice that the men seated at the tables behind me were glancing at me—no, openly looking at me. I was very surprised, but there was no doubt of it: they were watching me, studying me; I was tremendously flattered and elated by this attention. Was it because I was a new face there? Was it my crew cut—not yet fashionable at that time in Paris? Whatever it was, I glowed in all those admiring looks; I preened, pretending not to have noticed them; I gave the room the benefit of first one profile, then the other; I toyed with my glass, and dipped a finger into the gin and made it fizz and pulled my finger back out again and licked it ever so sensuously. I was a vamp of the silent screen; I looked dreamily into
the far distance, and then swiveled slowly, seductively around on my stool, leaned back on one elbow against the bar, posed with my legs thrust apart, and looked directly at the men who were looking at me.

But they were
not
looking at me, nor had they been at all. Not one of them had paid any attention to all my ridiculous posing and preening. Their eyes were all directed to my right, on the drab little woman three stools away—and no wonder, for now that I had become used to the dim lighting, I saw that this woman was Marlene Dietrich.

Oh, the shock of it! The realization stunned me so much and I was so mortified that I gulped down the remainder of my drink and knew that I couldn't afford to order another one when the highly efficient bartender immediately appeared to serve me. The entire pretentious bar, all the men and that famous actress in it—the whole of Paris had become hateful. I wanted to run away, but I sat still, as if I were glued to the seat of my humiliation, pretending to the barman that I was waiting for someone, a rich admirer, a handsome lover, the editor of the
Spectator
who had asked me to allow him to publish my story about meeting the King of Swaziland; a theatrical producer who had begged me to design the decor and costumes for his next opera at La Scala, at Covent Garden, at Bayreuth. But, as in the best remembered line of my favorite book,
it was all play...a striving and a striving, and an ending in nothing
. I was a miserable failure.

And then, as in a dream or a film with a happy ending, a tall and well-dressed man rose from one of the tables and on his way out of the bar made a little detour and came right up to me. Without stopping, he said “Do you plan to waste more time here, or will you go home with me now?”

I was rescued. I followed him out of that dark bar and to a taxi which drove us around the Place de l'Etoile into the tree-lined Avenue d'Iéna to a late 19th-century mansion which had been converted into apartments, and, in an incredible
fin de siècle
elevator that was all glass and bronze, we went up to his flat.

He switched on a table lamp and I found myself in a small, very
neat studio room, sparsely furnished in what seemed to be a military style, with framed ancient photographs of quaint groups of soldiers all over the walls. “This is not my home, you know; I live mostly in England. It's just my little Paris
pied-à-terre
, a foot on the ground, you know. I have others in Cairo and Lahore.”

I was impressed. My rescuer was clearly a rich and cultivated man. As Oscar Wilde had pointed out, the possession of several addresses inspires confidence—and not only in tradesmen. His charmingly old-world upper-class English accent was more reassuring, too. I knew he was a real gentleman and that I would come to no harm with him.

While I looked at the photographs he had taken the fur rug off the narrow bed and folded it neatly. “Go to bed,” he told me. “I'll join you.” And he went to the bathroom, from which he reappeared after I was between the sheets. I caught a glimpse of him, naked and very thin and tall, a silhouette against the doorway before he turned out the light behind him and came to bed. He smelt clean and good, and we were both tired, and I went to sleep in his arms.

When I awoke the next morning, pale daylight was coming into the room through the window blinds. My host appeared from the bathroom in a magnificent floor-length Eastern robe and went into the kitchen. “I'll make us a pot of hot chocolate before you leave,” he called out. It was a strong hint that he did not want me to linger, and I was disappointed.

I dressed and walked around the room to look more closely at the framed sepia photographs that filled the walls, all of which
depicted groups of late 19th-century soldiers of the British Army—
officers and gentlemen
—sitting with spiked and plumed Shikar helmets held on their laps, their ceremonial swords or sabres beside them, wearing highly polished, spurred boots almost to their knees, very tight trousers, and uniform jackets criss-crossed over and over with masses of heavy braid and tassels, fancy facings on the sleeves and on the high-necked collars, and ornamented shoulder epaulettes. Their legs were always thrust far apart in manly poses; most of them sported fierce moustaches. Behind them, or demurely posed at the sides of the pictures, were their native servants in turbans and white robes with wide sashes across their chests, some holding regimental mascots—mostly dogs, but an occasional goat. In the background there were tents, trestle tables laid for elaborate meals featuring many bottles of wine, bungalows set among palm trees, or the veranda of a gymkhana club.

Some of the pictures were not of large groups but showed only four, five, or six officers, bachelors all, at their ease in front of the stuccoed white chummery in which they lived, one reposing gracefully on the ground and the others sitting on camp stools behind him, with their household servants, their grooms, their polo ponies, and their pets arranged artistically around them.

All these military group portraits were handsomely framed behind glass, and on their cardboard mats they bore in black or in embossed gold letters the names of the regiment, the date, and location, and, in small type, the names of each man pictured. It was a delightful, unusual collection of photographs, and when my host returned with the hot chocolate I complimented him on them. “They're so amusing, so quaint, such fun,” I said. “Wherever did you find them all?”

“
Find
them? What
can
you mean?” he said, quite sternly.

“They're mine, of course. They're my regiment; I'm in every one of them.”

It was impossible to extricate myself from my faux pas. “But they're all so old,” I said, feebly.

“Of course they're old. So am I. I fought at Majuba Hill,
you know.”

This was inconceivable. I had gone to school in Johannesburg and knew South African history. “Majuba Hill!” I cried. “But the battle of Majuba Hill was in 1881!”

“So it was, and a bloody mess it was, too. I was a nineteen-year-old subaltern.”

He walked to the two windows and snapped down the little acorns at the bottom of the blinds so that they rolled up and let in the sunlight. It shone upon him like a spotlight. He was not Frankenstein's Monster—not quite—but the gentleman with whom I had shared a bed was all too obviously 86 years old.

It was a shock, and I felt extremely foolish, but the lighting in the bar, in the street outside it, in the taxi, in the lobby and elevator of the apartment building had all been very dim. The flat had been lit only by the small table lamp. I had never clearly seen his face the previous evening; all that had mattered to me, was that a kindly and well-spoken gentleman had rescued me from that hateful bar and taken me to his cozy bed.

“But who are you? Are you a general?” I asked this ancient warrior who had played an active part in the rise of the British Empire and then witnessed its fall.

“What does that matter?” he said. “No questions, no pack drill.” We drank the hot chocolate, which was delicious.

He had been up the Nile with Wolseley in 1885, and in the Afghan Frontier Campaign of 1897, and then back in Egypt and the Sudan in 1898, and at the battle of Omdurman.

“
Omdurman!
” The cavalry charge—Winston Churchill was in that,” I said in awe. I was an ardent admirer of Britain's great wartime Prime Minister.

“Yes, and what a nuisance he was, too.”

After that he had returned to South Africa and fought in the Boer War. “And in the First World War?” I asked.

“That was not a war for gentlemen,” he said curtly.

He wanted me to leave. I finished my hot chocolate; we shook hands; he took me to the glass-and-bronze elevator, and watched
me descend in it.

I did not know whether to feel ashamed or proud of my exploit as I walked down the Avenue des Champs-Elysées to the rue du Colisée to have breakfast with John and Neville and exchange accounts of our night's adventures. Unlike wines and violins, bed companions are not prized for their age. I felt that I had made myself ridiculous—but, on the other hand, I had inadvertently made an interesting link with the past.

In 1958 we went to the Folies-Bergère like good Americans, lured by Jo Baker as mistress of ceremonies. She shimmied and shimmered. She wore a clinging black gown and danced a variation of a tango with a slinky but sturdy partner who lifted her and draped her around himself in the best ballroom dancing tradition—elegant and detached. She changed into some ruffles by Balmain—a simple country girl who warned you not to touch her tomatoes but threw favors out to her guests from time to time. We were all her guests—that was what was most striking. She gathered up us thousand souls and hugged us to her as closely as those volumes of
mousseline
would permit. She was glamorous and folksy. The stage was her living room and she wanted you to be as comfortable as she was. She went to great lengths to teach us the words and melody of the refrain, allowed us to sing it once and then shifted on to another song like
tout de suite
.