I'm not willing just to be tolerated

“Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.”

“Living is a horizontal fall.”

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”

“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?”

“A little too much is just enough for me.”

“I'm not willing just to be tolerated. That wounds my love of love and of liberty.”

“I am a lie that always speaks the truth.”

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (5th July 1889 – 11th October 1963)

A thing of strange beauty

“In his glory days of the 1920s, he entered the vaudeville stage or circus ring like a Ziegfield showgirl, swathed in ostrich feathers, stunningly gowned, bejewelled and bewigged. He then removed his headdress, cape and gown, and garbed in as little as possible to suggest near nudity but not run afoul of the law, Barbette began the acrobatic part of his act. He walked a tight wire, slack wire, and performed on the rings and the trapeze. He was a master of the dramatic, seeming to fall only to catch himself by a last second hook of his foot. He kept his audience aghast and amazed until he left the stage. When he returned to acknowledge the sustained applause, he doffed his wig, revealing his bald head and reminding all that they had marvelled at a man playing a woman.” [from Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers by Frank Cullen]

“I’d always read a lot of Shakespeare…and thinking that those marvellous heroines of his were played by men and boys made me feel that I could turn my speciality into something unique. I wanted an act that would be a thing of beauty - of course it would have to be a strange beauty” - Vander Clyde, aka the great Barbette.

In 1923 Vander Clyde took to the stage of the Folies Bergère in Paris dressed in full drag as Barbette. During the show Clyde performed incredible acrobatic stunts such as walking a high wire and dangerous trapeze-related tricks. Clyde’s appearance was so convincing that it left people to ponder the ambiguous performer’s true sexual identity.

Members of the French avant-garde community were captivated by Clyde’s portrayal of Barbette including one of France’s most influential creative minds the great Jean Cocteau, who was allegedly linked to Clyde romantically. Cocteau was so taken with Barbette that he commissioned surrealist photographer Man Ray to take a series of photographs showing Clyde’s metamorphosis into the ethereal, androgynous Barbette.







Ill-heath forced Barbette to hang up her trapeze in 1938, but she went on to provide inspiration for up-and-coming performers as well as collaborating with with some of Hollywood’s greatest stars – Orson Welles, Vincente Minnelli, Judy Garland, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and the legendary producer and director Billy Rose.


Judy stole this "look"

More on Barbette at Dangerous Minds, and also (of course) at the marvellous Queer Music Heritage archive.

Sadly, after years of dealing with chronic pain, Barbette committed suicide on 5th August 1973. RIP.

Wildflower: The Dramatic Life of Barbette is a biography of the great showgirl by Kyle Taylor.

The Last Troubador

"Without him, we all would have become accounting clerks." - Jacques Brel



From a tribute on the Bobby Darin website:

When Charles Trenet passed away in early 2001, France reacted almost as dramatically as America did following Frank Sinatra's death nearly three years earlier: it was a time of national mourning. Tributes filled the TV, and nothing but Trenet songs were heard on the radio.

He was a prophet so honored in his native land that not even the rumors that he was both a homosexual (apparently true) and, far more worrisome, a collaborator with the Nazis during World War II (probably not true, but it's complicated) could temper the national enthusiasm for the man, who was billed as "Le Fou Chantant" (the Singing Fool).

Patrick Bishop, writing in The Telegraph:

The advent of rock and roll dimmed his star, but he was back in 1969 with a concert to celebrate 30 years on the stage. By his last performance, in November 1999, he was established as an official national treasure, and singer-songwriters such as Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg acknowledged their debt.

Trenet recognised that his real strength derived from his contact with ordinary life. He once said: "I find my poetry in the street." That view was endorsed by one of his old collaborators, Serge Hureau. He said: "Trenet's death reminds us that he belongs to our collective memory, not like a monument but like the cafe on the corner."

"Trenet - 'The Last Troubador'." - Jean Cocteau

"Without Trenet, French chanson would not be as it is today." - Charles Aznavour.

"Do not publish your poems - sing them!" - Charles Trenet

Jacques Trenet - Boum!

Charles Trenet (18th May 1913 – 19th February 2001)

Life is a party

"Only an expert fabricator could survive the public tightrope walk required of someone trying to portray herself as both the taste-making doyenne of European society and a self-effacing American nobody." - biographer Sam Staggs

If you weren't invited to an Elsa Maxwell party in the mid-20th century celebrity whorl, you were nobody. She knew something about everyone.

Elsa Maxwell injected a sense of fun into post-war society parties, and the great and the good came flocking to her door to lap it up, from royalty to Hollywood. The superstars of the entertainment world all carefully kept the grande dame on side, for fear she would launch a tirade against them in one of her syndicated newspaper gossip columns or numerous TV appearances.

She not only entertained in person and in print, she also wrote books on "etiquette", wrote and produced music for theatre and film (and appeared in a few) - and in 1959 she even recorded an album of her own, Elsa Maxwell - Her Voice and Music [oh, if only I had a copy of that!].

A bizarre mix of contradictions, Miss Maxwell was renowned for being coarse and vulgar yet aspired to mix with the highest echelons, and she was probably a lesbian (and quite possibly a stalker at that) yet publicly decried homosexuality. Certainly, by all accounts she was a much-feared harridan.

Her endless name-dropping and not-so-subtle snobbery belied the fact that she was (in her own words) "a short, fat, homely piano player from Keokuk, Iowa, with no money or background, who decided to become a legend and did just that."

Yet when she died, aged 82 in 1963, barely a dozen people turned up for her funeral. The party probably wasn't big enough, or fun enough. Or maybe the joke had simply run its course.

"Life is a party. You join after its started and you leave before its finished."

"I don't hate anyone. I dislike. But my dislike is the equivalent of anyone else's hate."

"Nothing spoils a good party like a genius."

"Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can."

Elsa Maxwell (24th May 1883 – 1st November 1963)

At four o'clock, everything stops for...

...Coc(teau)!

Monstre sacre

From his obituary in The Independent:

Jeannot, as he was known to his friends and fans, was a monstre sacre of the French stage and cinema. He had a long career that took on mythical proportions. His friend (and one might almost say "creator") Jean Cocteau defined Jean Marais' appeal to both men and women: "It does not depend only on sensual grace. It flows from the child still at the heart of the mature man. That is the true source of the expressive beauty of his eye, of the way he looks at you, imposes his physical presence."

"Life is unfair. I got nothing but the best."

"As a child, I think I must have been a real monster. There was a show-off side to me, because I wanted to be an actor. I would do anything to attract others; and in order to do so I set out to improve myself in all those areas where I felt there was some lack in me. So people have always liked me, even loved me, but I often had the feeling that it was for the wrong reasons."

Jean Marais (11th December 1913 – 8th November 1998)