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  His rapport with children and his paternal affection toward Leslie, combined with his ready embrace of Ethel’s parents, whom he called “Dad” and “Mother,” must’ve made him seem still more of a catch for her. He told her that he was a widower, bereavement lending them an additional bond. Ethel’s handsome younger brother—photographed in a Royal Artillery uniform, a peaked cap pulled over his forehead and a bandolier stretched across his chest—had been wounded in Flanders and later died in a hospital. Edgar was well-rehearsed for talking about the experiences that he and her brother had shared in the mud and blood of wartime Europe.

  Tightening the connection with her, Edgar said to her that Leslie reminded him of his own son, who had passed away two years earlier. Even though Ethel felt the intense social stigma of being an unmarried mother, she confided in Edgar that she’d given birth out of wedlock. Inside three months of becoming her parents’ lodger, Edgar supplied the antidote to this stigma. At the pretty Wesleyan Methodist Church in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, a district not far from their home, they entered into a bigamous marriage one unseasonably cool, breezy June day when fat clouds skittered across the blue sky.

  On the marriage certificate, Ethel described herself as a widow. Yet this falsehood was eclipsed by Edgar’s contribution to the paperwork. Besides marrying under his assumed identity and presenting himself as a “doctor of medicine,” he named his father as “Chief Wolfrobe” and his father’s rank or profession as “ruler,” the loftiness of that title contrasting with the mundane entry of “salesman” next to his father-in-law’s name.

  But marriage wasn’t the only good thing that happened to Edgar. Not that he’d have been aware of the other significant piece of luck from which he benefited. It consisted of Scotland Yard’s decision to drop their investigation of him, because “nothing of an improper nature” had been witnessed during the surveillance of his Leyland Road apartment. Of course, Edgar’s perceived moral rectitude owed everything to his absence from that address.

  Soon he’d be absent from his Manchester address, too. His ego, ambition, and wanderlust militating against any temptation to settle for an ordinary job and establish a conventional life there, he had—most likely through the booking manager at Charles Gulliver’s firm—secured employment in France. He was due to appear at the casino in Étretat, a fashionable seaside resort where the summer season had just begun.

  16

  Together with his new wife and stepson, Edgar set out for France. Journeying there would have involved them going through London to the busy port of Southampton, where liners to Australia, South America, and the Mediterranean berthed. Tourists in that era were mainly restricted to the middle and upper classes, who could afford both the requisite time off work and the ticket prices. Among them were numerous people undertaking pilgrimages to the battlefields and cemeteries associated with the recent war.

  Steamers took almost seven hours to complete the voyage from Southampton across the English Channel. In Le Havre, where the ships docked, Edgar would have had an opportunity to practice his French. He and his wife and stepson would’ve then had a sixteen-mile journey through the Normandy countryside, its grassy hills and cottage gardens exhibiting a carelessness more reminiscent of America than England.

  Crouched at the foot of lofty bluffs that curved around a small bay, the waters of which had drilled through the rock face at one end to form a colossal arch, Étretat was a fishing village that had grown popular with English tourists. It had a pebbly beach, screened by an embankment and punctuated by upturned ships’ hulls, pressed into service as fishermen’s storehouses. For Ethel and Leslie, accustomed to the soot and drizzle of Manchester, it must have seemed like a magical place. And, for Edgar, it must have seemed a world away from the bustling vulgarity of Coney Island, where popcorn and frankfurters flavored the salty breeze, where thousands of lightbulbs outlined the minarets and domes after nightfall, where the rumble of the roller coaster was counterpointed by the whistling and drumming of a cluster of smallish, semi-naked brown men and women from Borneo, who formed a living exhibit.

  Genteel in comparison, Étretat’s Casino, at which Edgar was due to perform, occupied a wide terrace near the beach. Within the building were several ballrooms, a concert hall, and a theater. Edgar started work there as emcee for a troupe of acrobats. He also sang two or three numbers and gave his bewildered audience a demonstration of “the Great Scalping Dance.”

  As mid-September arrived and the end of the summer holidays approached, Edgar, Ethel, and Leslie—whom he treated as his son—lit out for the French capital, where he had an engagement at a new venue run by a couple of Charles Gulliver’s business partners. Until the most hectic period of Paris’s tourist season finished a month later, every hotel room in the city was taken, likely compelling Edgar and family to launch an immediate hunt for rental accommodation. Few of the Parisians they encountered would have spoken English, so Edgar’s fluency in French, albeit of the French-Canadian variety, must have been useful.

  Edgar would surely have been struck by how Paris differed from other big cities he’d known. Unlike any of those, it was shaped by a single architect, its straight, well-kept boulevards hedged by stores and apartment blocks that seldom topped seven stories, their symmetrical, tawny gray façades endowing the place with unusual coherence. Yet its architecture was just one of many things setting it apart. Its gleaming patisseries were another. So, too, were its drivers, who sped down its cobblestoned streets with homicidal haste, all the while toot-tooting horns. Even its sidewalks held an air of novelty for Edgar, particularly during rush hour when homeward-bound workmen in blue overalls instigated a bantering conviviality so dissimilar to London. Comparably alien were the dense plantations of tables and chairs that narrowed the sidewalks at frequent intervals. The customers at these cafés often gave off the candy-sweet aroma of L’Heure Bleue perfume, jostled by the smells of cognac, garlic, hot chocolate, and cigarette smoke far more pungent than the smoke from American tobacco. Edgar had, however, spent so much of his life on the road that he never took long to make himself at home someplace new.

  He appears to have found an apartment for himself and his family on Passage Violet, an austere backstreet within earshot of two major train stations. Dotted with comfortable but not imposing hotels, this was in the crowded 10th arrondissement, sitting on the Right Bank of the Seine.

  All such apartments came with a resident concierge, invariably a woman who did her best to sustain her profession’s deserved reputation. Parisian concierges, feared by locals and out-of-towners alike, were notorious for prying into tenants’ lives. Often that involved scrutinizing the postmarks and handwriting on tenants’ mail before surrendering it to its rightful recipients. But Edgar was unlikely to have realized that concierges also provided a well-established information network for the police.

  * * *

  —

  Just five blocks separated Passage Violet from where Edgar had been hired to perform. As a belated substitute for his elusive appointment at Buckingham Palace, he’d secured an engagement at a different palace—the Palace Theater.

  Slotted into a cheerful stretch of the rue du Faubourg Montmartre, near to the cafés that were the favored haunt of the city’s actors, the Palace’s slender frontage didn’t even hint at the scale or recently refurbished opulence of what lay beyond. In collaboration with Charles Gulliver, it was managed by Henri Varna and Oscar Dufrenne, Varna’s willowy effeminacy and luxuriant hair contrasting with Dufrenne’s cushioned torso, sagging features, and retreating locks.

  Dufrenne and Varna formed a seasoned and exceptionally versatile theatrical team who codirected their own productions and even designed the lighting and scenery. Both of Edgar’s new bosses, famed for the sumptuousness of their gargantuan shows, were gay. Indulgent though the French legal system was of same-sex relationships, Varna remained bashful about his own proclivities, which sometimes involved dressing as a
schoolgirl and engaging in alfresco sex. No such reticence encumbered Dufrenne, a charming and outspoken socialist who possessed none of the blustering moralism of some of the provincial English theater managers Edgar had so outraged.

  Toutes les femmes (All the Girls), the show with which Dufrenne and Varna had reopened the Palace Music Hall, had been playing for several triumphant months when Edgar started working for them. Mildly scandalous, it filled the Palace’s thousand-seat auditorium every night, and it helped install Edgar’s new workplace on the list of must-see attractions for the camera-toting American tourists who were making themselves conspicuous. They flocked to the city in such numbers that the only other people around at that time of year were said to be the working class and Parisians seeking “to improve their English accent.” Driving this transatlantic tourist boom was the bargain exchange rate between American and French currency. A contributing factor was the number of American ex-servicemen who had visited Paris during the Great War and wanted to return.

  Part of what lent the city its appeal to Prohibition-era Americans was its bars, cabarets, and music halls. These made Paris a synonym for sexual license, for the type of louche entertainment epitomized by Dufrenne and Varna’s productions. Besides supervising Toutes les femmes, they ran Au Canari, a high-profile cabaret reached by a staircase leading down from the lobby of the Palace Theater. Edgar—or, rather, Chief White Elk—was booked as its star turn. The cabaret didn’t get under way until midnight, so Edgar could feed his theatrical interests by watching Toutes les femmes, which kicked off three and a half hours earlier.

  Nothing he had seen during rehearsals at the Woolwich Empire or in the vaudeville houses of America would have prepared him for Dufrenne and Varna’s show, portrayed by the French press as “Nude Music Hall.” Unfolding in a sequence of more than thirty tableaux, it was a camp extravaganza that passed in a swirl of feathers, artificial snow, sparkling costumes, precariously tall headdresses, and bare-breasted young chorus girls. Nominally at least, the darkly handsome Harry Pilcer—America’s most famous dancer before Fred Astaire—functioned as the headline attraction. He gave a virtuosic display, clad at one point in a dappled body stocking while he danced and mimed to Claude Debussy’s “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune” (“Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”), in which muted woodwind and strings combined to create a sinuous and erotic melody.

  Backstage, surrounded by dozens of chorus girls wriggling into costumes, many of these designed by the illustrious couturier Paul Poiret, Edgar probably met Harry Pilcer. A New York–born near-contemporary of Edgar’s, Harry had risen from prostitution to international celebrity, working with such venerated artistic figures as the writer Jean Cocteau and the composer Francis Poulenc. Harry and his lover, the enormously successful French singer Mistinguett, currently performing at a nearby theater, may have been present for one of Edgar’s appearances at the downstairs cabaret, where the management joked that smoking was obligatory.

  Au Canari pulled in customers from the cream of the Parisian artistic, literary, and theatrical worlds, who were all there to dine, drink, and dance as well as enjoy the show. Warming up the audience for Edgar was a selection of support acts. They included “the Beautiful Zoulaïka,” a thickly made-up young belly dancer with black eyebrows that looked like they’d been drawn on with the aid of a ruler. As she danced, her dark, wavy, center-parted hair and beaded metallic bra must have swayed in time to her gyrations. These were deemed so sensual that she’d been the target of an unsuccessful prosecution for obscenity earlier that year.

  Another of the support acts was the Crastonians, an eccentric British trio, comprising the lively son and fetching young daughters of the celebrated clown Joe Craston. Together they sang, danced, and larked around, extracting comedy and something akin to music from their unconventional instruments.

  Edgar would have benefited from both of these warm-up acts. He’d also have been assisted by the receptivity of French audiences to American popular culture, which had grown ever more fashionable since the Great War. So he received frantic applause when he performed his song-and-Cherokee-dance routine, which earned him as much as five hundred francs a night. He supplemented this with the cash he made from peddling postcards, more than likely comprising signed photos of himself in full costume. Often his stock of promotional materials depicted him in dramatic settings. In one of the most popular of his postcards—photographed when he’d visited Stanley Park, Vancouver—he loomed out of a dark tree hollow, the deeply grooved trunk of which parted around him like tied-back drapes.

  His earnings from selling postcards and performing at Au Canari were sufficient to buy himself a car. He invested in a new Native American costume from the nearby Galeries Lafayette department store, too. As ever, money slipped through his fingers when he wasn’t onstage.

  Outside working hours he was fêted in aristocratic salons. He paid recurrent trips to the city’s movie theaters. He attended official receptions. He got acquainted with princesses in pink evening gowns. And he strutted down the city’s boulevards in full costume and war paint, his clothes impressing one journalist with their “simplicity and majesty.” Frequently, he was accompanied by his stepson, Leslie, who eagerly embraced him as a substitute father.

  Every two or three blocks, Edgar and Leslie found themselves on a different boulevard, the boulevard de la Madeleine flowing into the boulevard des Capucines and so on. What remained constant, however, was the exuberant street life. Edgar’s unusual getup, which received a thorough eyeballing from locals and tourists alike, would surely have attracted the innumerable grifters who trawled the boulevards. The more furtive of those grifters touted pornographic postcards and trips to brothels and blue movie shows. Others tried to sell Algerian or Tunisian rugs, which were unrolled across the sidewalk at the faintest encouragement.

  As Edgar and Leslie explored the boulevards, they must have encountered the other routine components of those neighborhoods. There were the street fairs and sidewalk toy stalls, where Edgar could play the doting stepfather by buying gifts for Leslie and treating him to rides on the merry-go-rounds and roller coasters. Then there were the wheezing barrel organs, the buskers, the wiggly-assed, flashily dressed prostitutes, and the snatches of megaphoned commentary from “charabancs”—long, open-topped trucks that were the precursors of today’s tour buses. Along with Leslie, Edgar would also have passed some of the city’s ornate six-sided metal newspaper kiosks, more often than not tended by brisk little women, each of them with a yapping dog that patrolled the adjoining sidewalk. From these kiosks, Edgar probably purchased copies of Le Temps and other newspapers in search of references to himself. But the coverage of his visit was limited to just a few small stories, as well as ads for his performances at Au Canari.

  Fame addict that he was, Edgar tried to rectify the situation by detouring into a photo studio where he and Leslie had their picture taken by what appears to have been an American press photographer. When they posed for the portrait, Edgar—who had on a tasseled buckskin shirt and a neckerchief—let his eight-year-old stepson borrow his headdress. It came down over the boy’s eyebrows. The picture wound up in newspapers in Detroit, San Francisco, and elsewhere in the States. Quoted alongside the photo was his claim that Leslie would be inheriting his title as chief of their tribe.

  In the course of one of his walks through central Paris, Edgar strayed from the boulevards onto the rue de la Paix, where fashion houses stood cheek-to-impeccably-powdered-cheek with jewelers displaying giant emeralds, huge pearls, and diamonds so big they had their own names. He was soon accosted by what Parisians called a “midinette.” These vivacious young seamstresses and shopgirls from the fashion houses were a familiar sight promenading the streets during their short lunch breaks. Style-conscious like all midinettes, she’d probably seen the recent French magazine image of the celluloid heartthrob and trendsetter Rudolph Valentino, wearing an outfit just like Edgar’s.
She might even have mistaken Edgar for the man himself, who was visiting Paris at the time.

  With cheerful nonchalance, she asked Edgar for a kiss. He graciously obliged.

  * * *

  —

  Besides wandering the boulevards, he strayed north into Montmartre. That neighborhood, huddled around the steep hill leading to the white triple-domed cathedral of Sacré-Coeur, had an international reputation as the center of Paris’s gaudy nightlife; as the home of the Moulin Rouge, Folies Bergère, and other famous music halls; as somewhere every visitor should see. It also had a reputation both as a stronghold of street gangs, and—not unconnectedly—as somewhere you could buy cocaine and other drugs.

  Edgar, who must have needed to feed his narcotic addictions, took to spending a lot of time there. Only coming to life after dark, its lightbulb-strung streets harbored bars, shabby hotels, extortionate cabarets, sidewalk cafés with their own little orchestras, and jazz joints from which syncopated rhythms leaked, rhythms incompatible with the music Edgar sang. Pacing those streets were tourists, middle-class Parisians, and refugees from Russia’s communist revolution. There were also African American jazz musicians, enjoying freedoms denied them in the Jim Crow south. And there were small-time hoodlums, easily recognized by their proprietorial swagger and the colored silk neckerchiefs they wore. They were known as “apaches,” due to their wild, flailing style of dancing, which Parisians imagined to be analogous to the tribal rites of their Native American namesakes. Most of Edgar’s time in Montmartre was presumably spent with the local apaches, because his French became infused by their slang.