Kiki of Montparnasse Is Brought Back to Life

By Mary Blume

Published: SATURDAY, JUNE 12, 1999

PARIS: By the 1920s, Montparnasse was so famous that one could, it was said, buy a direct ticket from Des Moines, Iowa, to the Café du Dome. The quarters ample hub was Kiki, the artists model and good-time girl who was, Ernest Hemingway wrote, "about as close as people get nowadays to being a Queen but that, of course, is very different from being a lady."

Hemingways words come from his preface to Kikis memoirs, written in 1929 when she was just 28. There is clearly something to be said for writing memoirs when young: along with Kikis, the liveliest evocation of the period is John Glasscos "Memoirs of Montparnasse," completed when he was 23 and thought, wrongly, that he was dying from tuberculosis. "The celebrated Kiki" was one of the first locals he met.

"Her maquillage was a work of art in itself … her mouth painted a deep scarlet that emphasized the sly erotic humor of its contours," Glassco wrote. "Her face was beautiful from every angle, but I liked it best in full profile, when it had the lineal purity of a stuffed salmon."

Kiki was painted by Soutine, Modigliani, Foujita and Kisling and most famously photographed by Man Ray, whose lover she was for eight stormy years. She sang bawdy songs in nightclubs, showed her naive paintings at what the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune called "the most successful vernissage of the year," and in 1929 was named Queen of Montparnasse.

The memoirs she wrote that year were republished this spring in Paris by Hazan (an American edition came out last year) in a richly illustrated edition compiled by Billy Kluver, who was a student in Paris when Kiki died in 1953 and remembers the newspaper pictures of Foujita and other artists gathered at her deathbed. The New York Times printed an obituary and Life magazine gave Kiki three pages, ending with a memory from one of her chums, "We laughed, my God how we laughed."

Born Alice Ernestine Prin in Burgundy, Kiki had a wretched childhood that could only lead to laughter or despair, and being solid and brave she chose laughter. Her parents were unmarried, her mother, a linotypist, went to Paris and left Kiki with her grandmother, whom she adored. She didnt learn much in school, she wrote, because her teacher disliked the poor and when, at 12, she was obliged to join her mother in Paris to find work, she boarded the train with a sausage and red wine "to show off and to hide my sorrow."

Harsh, degrading jobs followed, lightened by her lifelong joy in decorating herself. She would crumble a petal from her mothers fake geraniums to give color to her cheeks and was fired from a nasty job at a bakery because she darkened her eyebrows with burnt matchsticks.

With her large and splendid body she drifted into posing for artists, including Utrillo who, to her astonishment when she looked at his canvas, had painted a landscape. She was also doing such menial jobs as dishwashing. "I was so filled with gaiety that I wasnt affected by my poverty and words like the blues were like Hebrew to me — I simply didnt understand them."

Large in spirit and, increasingly, in girth as Man Rays photos over the years show, Kiki was a natural for Montparnasse, but even naturals can use help; she moved in with an amiable journalist named Henri Broca after breaking up with Man Ray in 1929.

Djuna Barnes had already described Kiki for an American magazine, "Charm," in 1924, and local English-language newspapers regularly recorded her activities; Broca created a little news magazine, "Paris-Montparnasse," and published the first chapters of her memoirs.

Edward Titus, who had a small publishing house in Paris and had just published "Lady Chatterleys Lover," hired Samuel Putnam to translate Kikis memoirs. Bennett Cerf of Random House ordered 150 copies, which were seized by American customs officers. Even today, Kluver says, the memoirs are kept in a special reserve section of the New York Public Library.

It is hard to see why. They are filled with a buoyant innocence, not naive but generous. Her shamelessness meant that she remained simple, not that she was corrupt. "All I need in life is an onion, a bit of bread and a bottle of red wine, and Ill always find someone to give me that," she said late in life.

Her memoirs tell of her squalid childhood, the early days in Montparnasse when "Papa" Libion, the otherwise lovable owner of La Rotonde refused her entrance to the cafés main room because she didnt have a hat. She quickly invented a conical cap and became one of Libions favorites.

"I had found my real milieu," she wrote. "The painters adopted me. Finished, sadness. Sometimes I didnt have enough to eat but the jokes made me forget all that."

In 1923 she spent three months in New York, bewildered by the local habit of drinking booze from teacups — she doesnt seem to have heard of Prohibition — and hoping for a film contract. However, on the day of her Paramount test, she realized she had forgotten her comb and never showed up. "Its for the best," she remarked typically. "Its much nicer to go to the movies than to make them."

Two years later, in scandalous Villefranche, where homosexuals and local tarts competed for visiting sailors ("Cocteau and I had the same passion for all that comes from the sea," she delicately noted), she slugged a café owner and a policeman and was put in the pokey. She got a suspended sentence, when Man Ray arrived with funds to pay the fine, a medical certificate stating she was of nervous disposition, and letters from Aragon and Desnos saying she was a serious artist.

Thereafter she seems to have stayed in Montparnasse where, she wrote, "People are broadminded and where what would be crime elsewhere is just a peccadillo." In her later years she roamed the cafés, singing in a cracked voice and cadging drinks. Even in poverty, she visited elderly hospital patients to bring them cheer and what gifts she could find.

By the early 1950s Ronald Searle sketched her in a café, a diminished figure with straggly hair and, worse, terribly thin. Only her steeply canted nose ("She had a wonderful nose that seemed to jut out into space," said Alexander Calder, who portrayed it in a wire sculpture called "Kikis Nose") suggested the former Kiki. In 1953, she collapsed outside her flat on the rue Brea in the heart of Montparnasse, and died.

Her cheerful carnality remained a symbol of the golden age of Montparnasse, even to the distinguished scholar Leon Edel, biographer of Henry James, who described his return during the liberation in 1944 to a city of glum despair. "For a brief moment the cafés were filled with people: I suddenly remembered Kiki of Montparnasse; in the midst of war, in the thronged street, I could smell chicory and Pernod, the pervasive tabac and stale beer."