THE AMERICAN LIBRARY EN FETE

GOING CRAZY IN MOERN MONTPARNASSE

“Round up the usual suspects….” Today’s expat writers on parade.

           For decades, the annual Gala of the American Library in Paris was a major event on the expat social calendar. Held in the Cercle de l’Union Interalliée, a marbled mansion revamped during World War I as a place for members of the high command to let their hair down, it invited library suporters to pay a dizzying price  for the chance to rub shoulders with actual writers. A distinguished name was invited to deliver a keynote speech. We lesser lights were scattered among the tables, literally singing for our supper.

Recently the gala has languished, but this week it was revived, on a more modest scale, as an années folles costume party. As usual, a few writers were invited to add local colour, and the event took place not at the up-market Interalliee but in a basement in Montparnasse – specifically the dance hall of La Coupole, one-time temple to the tango.

From the start of the twentieth century, les dancings - clubs with a dance floor and a permanent band -  proliferated in Paris, particularly in Montmartre but increasingly in Montparnasse where premises were more spacious. After the Rotonde turned its upstairs room into a dance hall, and hotels and cabarets around Gare Montparnasse and rue de la Gaité followed suit, the designers of La Coupole, a new café being built with Americans in  mind,  realised a provision for dancing was essential, and added a basement dance hall.

The tango arrived in France from the Argentine via Marseille, traditional port of entry for every variety of crime and vice. By 1909, it was already being danced, if rather stiffly,  in the boites of Montmartre. In 1921, a virtuoso screen performance by former taxi dancer Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse guaranteed his stardom and that of the tango. By the time La Coupole opened in 1928, it was the most popular dance in Europe.

Rudolph Valentino shows how it should be done.

French dancers lost no time in giving it their distinctive twist. Out went the macho strut of Buenos Aires, where pimps sometimes danced it together in the brothels. The French tango was slinky, a ballet of seduction, the woman almost swooning in the arms of her partner. In his enthusiasm for its intricacies, Georges Gourat, alias the illustrator Sem, entangled himself in mixed metaphors. "The tango of Paris, you see, is the skin of a stinking animal arriving from the depths of Siberia, soiled and smelly,  which the magic hands of furriers have made into a precious sable to caress the perfumed and fragile shoulders of Parisiennes. It is a black and juicy Havana, metamorphosed into a slim golden cigarette. The tango of Paris is the Argentinean tango without the nicotine."

  Couturiers  re-cut gowns in "tulip" style, with overlapping skirts that left the legs free for the tango's long loping steps, its swerves and kicks. In the interest of more supple hips and pelvises, corsets were abandoned. Hats with vertical plumes replaced those with horizontal feathers that might swipe a man across the face, but serious dancers discarded them altogether. Since, however, no decent woman could be seen in public without a hat, they preserved propriety by adopting the forehead band popularised by exhibition dancer Irene Castle.

  La Coupole became the mecca for Paris tangomanes.  Led by Argentinean Juan Bautista Deambroggio, known as "Bachicha", in the period's racist slang,  an orquesta típica played authentic tangos with the traditional instrumentation of two violins, flute, piano, double bass, and the Argentinean accordion known as a bandoneón. They looked a little comical in their gaucho outfits, complete with the baggy pants worn in so dashing a style by Valentino but, inspired by the music, the dancers prowled and swivelled across the floor as if possessed by Terpsichore, the muse of dance herself. 

Surprisingly few writers and painters addressed the phenomenon. An exception was Dutch artist Kees van Dongen, whose Tango With Death saw it in a sinister light. A delirious dancer, apparently unaware she is almost nude, surrenders to a partner whose face is buried in her neck with a vampire’s relish but who boasts, incongruously, a pair of angel’s wings. Nothing so interesting took place this week, at least not while we were there. In the small hours, however, who knows what revenants of the roaring twenties materialised from the shadows?