King Con Page 21
Through his forays into “the Butte,” as Montmartre was nicknamed, he’d have seen that it no longer merited its reputation. Over recent years, the nucleus of Paris’s bohemian life had shifted across the river to Montparnasse. By the penultimate week of September, Edgar had found his way there, presumably drawn by its fashionable status, along with its fame as a refuge for transgressors and as a magnet for American expats.
It was just a short drive from Passage Violet, though even short forays into the city’s anarchic traffic must have tested Edgar’s nerve and skill behind the wheel. He had to be alert for both other drivers and the carts that interspersed them, some towed by bicycles, others hauled by a combination of a man and a harnessed dog.
Straddling the boulevards Saint-Germain, Raspail, and Saint-Michel, where the university was located and where several thousand students lived, Montparnasse was fondly referred to as “Montparno” or “the Quarter,” short for “the Latin Quarter,” so named because Latin had been the language spoken by the university’s first scholars. On its streets Edgar would have glimpsed students of many nationalities—from fair-skinned Swedes to American girls in horn-rimmed glasses. Similarly conspicuous were the number of fashionable cafés, restaurants, and nightclubs.
Edgar swiftly installed himself as one of the “Dôme-ites,” regulars at the Café du Dôme. By some distance the Quarter’s preeminent meeting place, it presided over the intersection between the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail, its tables and chairs spilling over the sidewalk. These were so tightly packed that the scurrying waiters had difficulty weaving through them.
Around noon the Dôme was crowded with artists’ models and girls from the local mail-sorting depot, but it didn’t tend to get busy again until midevening. If Edgar arrived any time between 9:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., he would’ve had trouble finding a seat. He’d have then had to settle for a noisy, smoky spot at the zinc-topped bar, where English was the prevailing language among the customers but not the staff. From behind the cash register, the owner’s wife nodded affably to regulars like him. At the bar, he could buy tobacco and order what was jokily known as a “perpendicular” drink. He’d also have been able to sample Perroquet, Cinzano Cassis, and other cocktails and liquor not readily available outside France. Glass in hand, he’d have had the chance to assess the comparably varied clientele, who led one somewhat pretentious visitor to coo, “The Dôme is not a place: it is an atmosphere.”
Side by side were the impoverished and the affluent, the modish and the mangy, the young and the old, the unknown and the famous. Excited customers pointed out visiting stars, who justified the café’s longtime renown as a rendezvous for artists and writers. Edgar’s Dôme-ite peers included the poet Ezra Pound, sometimes joined by the prose writer James Joyce. The painters then frequenting the Dôme were Fernand Léger, Jules Pascin, George Braque, André Derain, and Moïse Kisling, their loud shoptalk audible across the café. Maurice Utrillo, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso dropped by once in a while, too.
Edgar’s new haunt was equally renowned for offering a vivacious floor show. It enticed limousines that pulled up at the curbside and disgorged rich American sightseers, keen to ogle its cultural celebrities, its mannish mademoiselles and mademoiselle-ish men, its smattering of outlandishly attired showboats like Edgar, who faced tough competition from fellow Dôme-ite exhibitionists.
Prominent among those was the painter and raconteur Nina Hamnett, given to brandishing a guitar and accompanying herself as she sang tuneful renditions of “Bollocky Bill, the Sailor” and her other favorite ballads. Also there was the amiable Ukrainian artist Sam Granowsky, dressed as if he were competing in a rodeo—neckerchief, Stetson, flannel shirt, the full rig—though people said he was incapable of riding even a seaside donkey. Then there was the black model Aïcha Goblet, so extroverted that she’d been known to dance in the street. And there was the pretty and effervescent Flossie Martin, an orange-haired former New York chorus girl–turned–occasional movie actress, who endeavored to sweep newcomers into her circle, hailing everyone with loud hilarity, often punctuated by her trademark expression, “I never laughed so much since Mother caught her breasts in the wringer.”
For the Dôme’s staff and clientele, the impact of Edgar’s costume was, in any case, diluted by the recollection of a recent, similarly attired Montparnasse visitor who claimed to be a Cherokee chief as well. The other man, named Gitche Manitou, appears to have been a genuine Native American. Knowing that his exotic presence attracted customers, the owner of the Dôme had, over a two-year period, employed him to sit there, eating and drinking. In a dismal precedent for Edgar, Chief Gitche Manitou now tended bar at a nearby nightclub.
Diluting Edgar’s impact still further was the current presence in Montparnasse of Willie Malies, a burly young African American jazzman and eccentric from the Deep South. Willie had reinvented himself as a Sioux chief, complete with buckskins, beaded moccasins, and ebony cheeks slathered in bright war paint. “This sure am a good town for Indians,” Willie later declared. Some of the people gawping at both Willie and Edgar may have wondered whether they were hallucinating, the potency of their hallucinations conjuring a third Native American chief. Prowling many of the same streets at the same time was Chief Deskaheh, an authentic Cayuga leader who, as he explained to the press, had come to Europe on a mission.
From Chief Deskaheh, Edgar stole the notion of being in Paris to air the grievances of his tribe at the scheduled December meeting of the Council of the Geneva-based League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations. Always drawn to roles that imbued him with the heroism he lacked, Edgar started telling people about the mission he was undertaking on behalf of his people. He even had his employers at Au Canari bill him as a “Delegate to the League of Nations.”
During the closing days of September, however, the French newspaper L’Humanité ran an article poking gentle fun at Edgar. It mentioned that one of its readers had seen Chief White Elk performing at the casino in Étretat. “Times are hard for the Last of the Mohicans,” it added before mischievously speculating on whether the man at the casino was merely someone pretending to be Chief White Elk.
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Around the start of October when cooler weather and heavy downpours heralded the end of the long, hot Parisian summer, Edgar was reunited with the charming Polish globetrotter who called himself Captain Walter Wanderwell. The reunion probably came about through a showbiz agent friend of Walter’s, who provided free access to cabarets such as Au Canari.
Since meeting Edgar three years earlier on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Walter had discarded his previous alias. He was now pretending to be an English officer named Captain G. Armstrong. His world tour had moreover evolved into a competition, which he and his wife liked to present as a “million dollar wager endurance race.” Journeying in separate cars, each supported by a team of passengers, the two of them were competing to see which of them could visit the most countries and clock the most miles on their way to the 1926 Philadelphia Exposition. Walter’s wife was still in America while Walter and his team had traveled to Europe that summer. His team comprised three young women, one of them Canadian, the others French and Peruvian.
Edgar began keeping company with Walter and his headstrong, convent-educated sixteen-year-old Canadian passenger, who, like Walter, wore a pseudo-military khaki costume with leggings and riding breeches. She’d recently joined his team. Her real name was Idris Hall, though Walter had jokily renamed her Aloha Hall after a building in San Francisco. Tall yet graceful, she had an attractive button-nosed, blue-eyed face and blond hair that brushed the shoulders of her jacket. She spoke fluent French and had a handshake as powerful as a prizefighter’s.
Walter’s showbiz agent buddy introduced her—and, in all likelihood, Edgar and Walter as well—to Rudolph Valentino. Starstruck though she was, Aloha managed to sustain a conversation with him about Italy, which she and Wa
lter had visited not long before. Edgar may have been able to chime in, because he’d inevitably have seen the reports from Italy that had provided a conspicuous component of many Canadian and British newspapers over the past fourteen months. Those reports detailed the factory sit-ins; the riots; and the bitter, socialist-sponsored general strike, which had presaged the previous fall’s march on Rome by thousands of fascist paramilitaries. Exploiting the situation, Benito Mussolini, leader of the fascists, had railroaded the elected government into stepping down. He’d since taken the post of prime minister, consolidated his power through what was euphemistically dubbed “electoral reform,” and established a reputation for himself outside Italy as the man who had saved his country from a blood-soaked, Russian-style communist revolution.
Aloha and Walter funded their travels to Italy and elsewhere by selling photos and regularly screening silent films shot en route. When Walter presented his film show, to which he gave the unimaginative title Journey Round the World, he supplied a live commentary. His footage included New York City from the air, Niagara Falls, and the Native American wedding in Montana where he and Edgar had crossed paths and where Edgar made a cameo appearance on film. In the commentary, Walter described Edgar as “the great Indian chief White Elk, who is a doctor of medicine and speaks twenty-one languages.”
Despite the affirmation offered by such screenings, Edgar was having to fend off skeptics by confessing to anyone who would listen that he was not “a purebred Red Indian,” that he was born in North Carolina five years after his tribe made peace with the U.S. government, that he was “the son of a redskin, Yellow Root, and a French mother.” In a flash of rare honesty, pervaded by a rueful acceptance of at least one aspect of the truth, he added, “If I didn’t have my outfit, I’d look like everyone else.”
* * *
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Though the Paris correspondent of the London-based News Chronicle questioned Edgar’s persistent claim that he was a delegate to the League of Nations, the advertisements for his midnight performances at Au Canari still carried that empty boast. By mid-October he was sharing the bill with Roseray and Capella, enticingly billed as “nude dancers.” They consisted of a lean, muscular man in a loincloth whose female partner—attired in just panties, a headband, and nipple tassels—struck balletic poses while balancing on his shoulder or being scooped off the stage by him.
In the theater upstairs, Toutes les femmes made way for a new, similarly spectacular girlie show called Oh! Les belles filles (Oh! The Beautiful Girls), which starred the Dolly Sisters. Well-established as American vaudeville stars and leading figures in “the Jazz Age”—a phrase lately popularized by the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald—they were identical twins from Hungary, who went in for a style of heavy, pert-lipped makeup that heightened their doll-like features. They wore identical clothing and performed a ballroom dancing routine in which they mirrored each other’s movements.
Very likely through his former Palace Theater colleague Harry Pilcer, who had worked for the Famous Players–Lasky film company, part of Paramount Pictures, Edgar snagged a job with the company. His new work, slated to begin after his engagement at Au Canari, was linked to the imminent release in Paris of The Covered Wagon. Easily the biggest budget Western to date, the film had already scored a huge success in London. It was being shown in Europe as a “road show”—the same strategy used for Before the White Man Came.
Famous Players–Lasky had hired a touring party of Native Americans to publicize The Covered Wagon, which—by a cruel irony—celebrated the westbound migration of the mid-nineteenth-century European settlers who drove those Native Americans’ ancestors from their homelands. The well-remunerated touring party, made up of Arapaho who featured in the movie, was also contracted to take part in a live prologue before each screening.
Half the Arapaho were set to travel from London to Paris during mid-December, ready for the French premiere. Since their chaperone couldn’t speak French, Edgar would be assisting him and functioning as emcee at screenings and press conferences.
Edgar met the Arapaho on the quayside as they disembarked from the Dover-to-Calais ferry. The party consisted of five long-haired men and four women. They had seven babies with them, each swaddled in multicolored, beaded blankets. Watching over this reticent group was their chaperone, Ed Farlow. He figured that the man calling himself Chief White Elk had no more than “a little Indian blood in him.” On the quayside Edgar complained to him about being broke. Farlow promptly doled out a modest loan.
Farlow was a beefy and jovial Midwesterner in his early sixties. He had a long face, heavy-lidded eyes, and a graying mustache, shaped like an upward-pointing arrowhead. To keep out the cold, he had on a dark topcoat, gloves, and cowboy hat. Before being employed by Famous Players–Lasky, he’d worked as a gold prospector, and as a rancher in Wyoming, where he had befriended members of the Arapaho and gotten to know their sign language.
Disdainful expressions registered on their faces when they saw that Edgar’s feathered bonnet was a cheap turkey feather replica. But he wasn’t the first fake Native American they’d seen on their tour. In London they’d attended a fairground sideshow where one of the performers was billed as “White Buffalo, an American Indian.” The man turned out to be a very light-skinned African American. Like Edgar, he had sported a turkey feather bonnet. The Arapaho had subjected White Buffalo to such derision that he wound up quitting his job. Edgar was now in danger of meeting the same fate.
* * *
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Waiting at the train station on the evening of Wednesday, December 12, 1923, was a large crowd. Press photographers clutching flashlamps were loitering on the same platform as reporters from publications as varied as Le Figaro and the European edition of the Chicago Tribune. Rumors about the arrival of a delegation of Native Americans had further swelled the crowd at the Gare du Nord. In muddled tribute to the visitors, many people were wearing moccasins, leather gauntlets, sombreros, and red neckerchiefs.
At nine o’clock that night, Edgar stepped from the express train that had just pulled into the station. He was decked out in a poncho, elbow-length suede gloves, and a broad-brimmed hat that looked as if it had been part of the wardrobe from The Covered Wagon. To make room on the platform, he shooed back the throng.
Dazzling light from the flashlamps perforated the nocturnal gloom as the Arapaho, one of them armed with a tomahawk, followed him onto the platform. Edgar then introduced them to the crowd. Included among the Arapaho were Lone Bear, Black Weasel, and Yellow Bird, as well as Old Eagle, the group’s leader. Edgar explained that a combination of seasickness and a grueling journey had left them feeling weary.
Blue-tinted sunglasses screening his eyes, the elderly yet straight-backed and glossily black-haired Old Eagle presented the most striking figure. He wore a dark robe gussied up with red and white beads, a shell-studded belt, and a necklace strung with buffalo bones. Forming a mismatched fringe was a shaggy tussock of someone else’s scalp, held in place by a thin gold chain. Alongside Old Eagle was his much younger wife. From her back hung a papoose with the head of a bobble-hatted baby protruding from it.
Once the introductions had been completed, Edgar announced to the crowd, “My friends are accompanying the film The Covered Wagon, which will soon be opening in Paris. Their tribe has used this opportunity to send them to France, the land synonymous with the freedom, equality, and fraternity that is denied Indians in their own country.” He said his friends would be contacting the League of Nations—the governing council of which had just held its scheduled meeting in the city. “It is the Arapaho delegation’s plan to submit a proposal to the League that the Utah Indians should be granted their freedom,” Edgar added, unaware that they were from Wyoming rather than Utah, where The Covered Wagon had been filmed.
“So you want an independent state of Utah, then?” asked one of the crowd.
“More humane treatment wo
uld be enough for the American Indians, who would like to be treated like other citizens—at the same time as maintaining their traditions and way of life.”
“Hopefully they’ll also maintain their picturesque style of clothes, which would be a great loss if they disappeared.”
“There’s nothing to worry about in that respect. You can count on that being preserved on film.”
Near the latter stages of the press conference, one of the reporters said, “Your countrymen will find the Parisian weather hard at this time of year.”
With a knowing chuckle, Edgar replied, “At the moment there’s three feet of snow in the Arapaho hunting grounds, which are in the northern part of the United States. Paris will feel as pleasant to them as the Riviera feels to you.”
Some fifteen minutes after Edgar and the others had arrived, the press conference came to an end. But not before chaperone Ed Farlow had spoken to the reporter from the Chicago Tribune. Farlow mentioned that none of the Arapaho possessed U.S. citizenship, so he was under strict orders from the American government to be sure they returned—in handcuffs, if necessary—to the Wind River Indian Reservation once their tour was over.
As Edgar ushered the Arapaho toward the roomy automobile that had been provided for them, someone in the crowd asked Old Eagle whether he’d be part of the delegation to the League of Nations.