Bricktop & Scott Fitzgerald (CpB #5)

The legend of Bricktop almost ended before it began. Despite not having a powerful singing voice, Le Grand Duc brought her to Paris because she had "the damnedest personality and she can dance."
By 1925, her popularity at the Parisian club that exported her from Harlem was seasonal.

In fact, there were nights when we'd play to a single customer, like in the old days. What made the difference was that the Montparnasse crowd of writers and artists discovered Le Grand Duc, led by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

What follows is six pages of BRICKTOP by Bricktop about virtually nothing but "a beautiful and fun-loving couple," Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald. "It was impossible not to like him," she wrote, "he was a little boy in a man's body."
This section also includes a joyful 1980-ish Harlem reunion with Scottie Fitzgerald.
Elsewhere in the book, Ms. Bricktop wrote that Scott Fitzgerald and Josephine Baker were the only two people to activate her maternal instincts.

I'll never forget the night–actually the early morning–when the doorman came in and said, "Madame, Mr. Fitzgerald is outside with two gendarmes."
Outside, I found Scott dripping wet, and two angry and confused policemen. One asked, "Do you know this man?" I said I did. "Well, you can have him."
I took him off their hands. He'd been at the Lido, he said. The Lido, on the Champs-Elyees, was an arcade-type building with a fountain in the middle. In those days it was famous for its tea dances. Scott and Zelda had been there and he'd decided to jump into the fountain. "Zelda," he said, "being a dutiful wife, jumped in, too."
When the police had arrived, Zelda had managed to get away, but they'd taken Scott and were going to lock him up, when he said, "You can't lock me up. I'm a friend of Madame Bricktop.

In Paris, the Roaring Twenties continued to roar well into the next decade. In the life of Scott Fitzgerald, however, the Roaring Twenties had a well-defined mute button.

F. Scott Fitzgerald published Babylon Revisited in 1931. (The highlight is mine.)

After an hour he left and strolled toward Montmartre, up the Rue Pigalle into the Place Blanche. The rain had stopped and there were a few people in evening clothes disembarking from taxis in front of cabarets, and cocottes prowling singly or in pairs, and many Negroes. He passed a lighted door from which issued music, and stopped with the sense of familiarity; it was Bricktop's, where he had parted with so many hours and so much money. A few doors farther on he found another ancient rendezvous and incautiously put his head inside. Immediately an eager orchestra burst into sound, a pair of professional dancers leaped to their feet and a maître d'hôtel swooped toward him, crying, "Crowd just arriving, sir!" But he withdrew quickly.

Blogger's Note
One more Scott Fitzgerald quote from the frontispiece of Brick's autobiography.
"My greatest claim to fame is that I discovered Bricktop before Cole Porter."