GAY PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s: Background, People, Places, Personalities, Pleasure, Style, Fashion, Arts, Poetry, Music and Adventure. According to Maximillien de Lafayette.
Mon Dieu! To be and live in Paris during "Les annees folles", between the end of 1917 and 1934, especially if you were an eccentric artist, an intellectual adventurer, a frou-frou femme fatale, a genius or an independently wealthy American, willing to spend a lot of money on arts, dating and women. Ask Madonna, Leah Furman, Penelope de Vassy and Louise de Chambertin. Really "real" America's la crème de la crème was there. The "real" American high society, the privileged class, the snobs (Although it was too early for the Americans to know how to be a snob), les bourgeois, wealth filthy characters, the hustlers with a style, the scandalous adventurous women, the schmoozers and the cruisers, the handsome gigolos, the champagne, the caviar, the kisses and the misses, sex, the drama and all the "chic" pleasures of the era. Hemingway was here. Paramour Stein too. Why Paris - what made everybody want to come here and create, and drink, and dance, and paint, and write stories or invent them? Women? obnoxious, over-cultured and over-sophisticated Frenchmen? Bubbly champagne? Sinfully good wine? Nice plat de fromage? A nostalgia? A fantasy? A new social, political and artistic era? A modern Parisian revolution? Yes! Yes! All of the above! Paris was a magic. And the people who lived in Paris were fabulous and delightfully mad! Tout le monde etait fou et philosophe, meaning "Everybody was crazy and a philosopher." Mistinguet, Edith Piaf, Sacha Guitry, Leo Ferre, Charles Trenet, Fernandel, Patachou, Jean Cocteau, Jean Gabin, Marlene Dietrich, Aristide Bruant, Jane Avril, La Goulue, Zozo Baker, Ernst Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso lived that magical era.
FAMOUS
PEOPLE OF THE ERA. THE WHO'S WHO OF GAY PARIS
Photo, left: Marlene Dietrich. Right: Mistinguet.
Mistinguet,
Toulouse-Lautrec, Edith Piaf, Sacha Guitry, Leo Ferre, Charles Trenet,
Fernandel, Patachou, Jean Cocteau, Jean Gabin, Marlene Dietrich, Aristide
Bruant, Jane Avril, La Goulue, Zozo Baker, Ernst Hemingway, Gertrude Stein,
Picasso, Amadeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Constantin Brancusi, Fernand
Léger, Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Appolinaire, Juan Gris, Max Jacob,
Coco Chanel, James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky, Tristan Tzara, Francis
Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Sylvia Beach, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard,
Andre Breton, Prevert, Bourvil, Man Ray, Margaret Anderson, Kiki, E.
E. Cummings, Georges Braque, Erik Satie, Ezra Pound,
Ford Madox Ford, Matisse, André
Derain, Darius Mihaud, Lucienne Delysle, Charles Boyer, Michele Morgan,
Diaghilev, Paul Renouard, Jean
Wiéner, Carlos Gardel, Maria Felix, Gershwin, Youmans, Andre Marlaux,
Jane Bathori, Maurice Chevalier, William Carlos, Nina Hamnett, Zyg Brunner,
Debussy, E. Renaudin, Leonide Massine, Poulenc, Auric, the shadow of
Mata Hari, Stravinsky, Jacques Rivière, Honegger, Paul Méral, Charlie Chaplin,
Paul Claudel, Mayol, Rolf de Maré, George Antheil, T. S. Eliot, Roger de la
Fresnaye, Marcel Duchamp, Filippo Marinetti,Jacques
Leclerc, Alice B. Toklas, Philippe Soupault, Walter Benjamin.
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