Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

interesting French people because she wanted ‘to increase her vocabulary’.
    Bruce, however, was certainly not stand-offish with the swelling American community in Paris. He made an effort to go to every
soirée vernissage
of exhibitions by young American painters however much he disliked their work. One exhibition which the Bruces attended with more enthusiasm than usual was that of Edward G. Robinson’s wife at the André Weill gallery. She was selling her paintings for charity to help rebuild a French village. Over the next few weeks, while Robinson was filming on the Côte d’Azur, Gladys enjoyed herself in Paris. The Bruces saw her again for lunch at Maxim’s, ‘slightly over-cocktailed but very funny’, before she staggered forth for a fitting with Marcel Rochas.
    One feels slightly weak when contemplating the resistance to alcohol required in those days. American influence in Paris had introduced a ‘cocktail hour’ in hotels, a sort of limbering-up session before going out to dinner and a show. But the cocktail hour was in fact two and a half hours long, fromsix to eight-thirty, a bibulous counterpart to the French period of
cinq à sept
reserved for adultery.
    There were half a dozen favourite places, very different from the austere French establishments with their zinc counters and tiled floors. The Crillon bar, full of journalists and Marshall Planners, was reputed to offer the best TomCollins in Paris. The Ritz barman André Guillerin was famous for his champagne cocktails. The passing tradefrom Hollywood tended to stay at the George V or the Prince de Galles, where the barman Albert remembered the taste and capacity of even the most infrequent customer. The Meurice and the Claridge had small, quiet bars for talking, while the bar of the Plaza Athénée offered the advantage of a quick snack before the theatre.
    Those visitors who could afford it wanted to go to the most famous places. Albert, the
maître d’hôtel
at Maxim’s, now back in his old job, bowed to the rustle of dollar bills, the currency of what the Communists called the ‘new occupying power’. The Tour d’Argent was still famous for its pressed duck and the view of Notre-Dame by night. On warm summer evenings, middle-aged romantics were tempted by the Pavillon d’Arménonville in the Bois de Boulogne, where they could dine out by the lake with Chinese lanterns in the trees, and the ubiquitous violinists playing Tzigane music. Or there was the Pré Catalan nearby, sited on the traditional duelling ground.
    For most Anglo-Saxon visitors with limited French, the theatre tended to mean the Folies Bergère, the Lido or the Casino de Paris, rather than the Comédie-Française. But for those who could understand the language, the Parisian theatre in the early autumn of 1949 had a lot of entertainment to offer. Jean Gabin was reputedly brilliant in Henri Bernstein’s
La Soif
at Les Ambassadeurs. David Bruce described it as ‘a sexy piece, rather old-fashioned in the sense that it is a repetition of all Bernstein plays’.
    On Saturday, 1 October, the Ballet de Monte Carlo, produced by the Marquis de Cuevas, opened its season. Tamara Toumanova and Rosella Hightower, one of the American principals whom Cuevas had brought over from the United States, were hailed as superb. George de Cuevas, a Chilean married to a Rockefeller heiress, had taken over the ballet in 1947 from Serge Lifar, with whom he had allegedly fought a duel. Nijinska was Cuevas’s
maîtresse de ballet
and he also recruited Lichine and Markova. The capricious and egotistical Cuevas renamed his company ‘Le Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas’.
    The following month,
Un Tramway nommé Désir
by Tennessee Williams opened and became one of the hits of the year despite hostile reviews. For those who had seen the controversial original in New York with Marlon Brando in his famously ripped T-shirt, the French versionoffered a different originality. Jean Cocteau, who adapted it, made many changes. For a start, his evocation of New Orleans was rather curious, ‘with some pretty odd erotic Negro dances’. David Bruce went to the first night in a large party with Paule de Beaumont, who had translated the play. The scenery was brilliant; it needed to be, since it was in competition with another European winter. The curtain rose to the sound of crickets to convey a sweltering hot southern night, but the audience was freezing.
    Although the critics were unimpressed by the