Le Grand Duc

The place, briefly

Le Grand Duc stood at 52 rue Pigalle, at the angle where the rue Pigalle met the rue Fontaine, one short block from Zelli's. It was in business by early 1924, and it was small even by the standards of French nightclubs: Langston Hughes, who worked in its kitchen, described small tables set very close together, an eight-foot bar, and a dance floor with room for a dozen couples. The club's first owner was Georges Jamerson, said to be a small-time gangster from a well-placed French family; the man who actually ran the room was his manager, Eugene Bullard, a Georgia-born veteran of the French Foreign Legion who had flown with French squadrons in 1917 as the first African American combat pilot. At some point Bullard bought the club outright with money saved from playing music, and later sold it, staying in the quarter to run a gym and then a bar of his own.

What filled the tiny room was Florence Embry Jones, the hostess and singer the smart crowd came to see. Her husband Palmer Jones played piano at the Ambassadeurs and reached the Grand Duc around three in the morning; until then Florence sang American popular tunes with the house orchestra, a couple of songs an hour between dances, and when Palmer arrived the two did their own numbers together. Hughes's memoir The Big Sea records that relations between Florence and the management were never warm, and in the spring of 1924 she left to front the club Louis Mitchell renamed Chez Florence for her — the room up the street that drew the theatrical celebrities and, eventually, was sold to Joe Zelli.

Hughes had arrived in Paris in February 1924 with almost no money. He worked first as a doorman at a small boîte on the rue Fontaine, hired by its Martiniquaise owner for five francs a night and dinner, and then the historian Rayford Logan — living in Paris at the time, later a professor of history at Howard University — sent word that the Grand Duc needed a second cook. He could not cook and said he could. "Fortunately the title, second cook, really meant dishwasher, so I got the job," he wrote. Eugene Bullard hired him at fifteen francs a night and breakfast, with work starting at eleven at night. He washed the club's dishes from about March to July 1924, and when business thinned he was moved out front as a waiter's helper, working in a wide-lapelled comedian's tuxedo that the dancer Louis Douglas, a regular of the after-hours crowd, gave him off his own back. Out of that two-by-four kitchen came some of the best pages of The Big Sea.

The kitchen had its own star. The cook, Bruce, was an enormous man and, in Hughes's account, no respecter of persons, from the star entertainer down to star patrons like Belle Livingston and Fannie Ward. His baked beans and his "golden brown Virginia corn bread that would melt in your mouth" had a public of their own, and his vagaries were tolerated accordingly. When the club's great fight broke out, Bruce put on his street coat and went to the corner bistro for a drink, since "who hit who," Hughes reports him saying, was no concern of his.

Hughes also preserves the guest list of the Florence months, name by name: Anita Loos and John Emerson, Lady Nancy Cunard, the Dolly Sisters, the writer Robert McAlmon, Belle Livingston with her son and daughter, the actress Fannie Ward, Prince Tuvalou of Dahomey — the Paris-based Dahomean activist Kojo Tovalou Houénou — Sparrow Robertson of the Paris Herald's sport page, Joe Alix, who later became Josephine Baker's dancing partner, and the surrealist poet Louis Aragon. Florence, Hughes adds, would notice none of them unless they were very celebrated or very rich. William Shack's history of the quarter widens the circle with the Montparnasse crowd that discovered the room: F. Scott Fitzgerald treated the Grand Duc as a home away from home, Ernest Hemingway followed, Louis Bromfield and Pablo Picasso appear among the patrons, and Man Ray and Kiki de Montparnasse became regulars.

The pages are about what happened after closing time. When the other clubs shut, the musicians came to the Grand Duc and played for themselves until seven or eight in the morning — Cricket Smith on trumpet, Louis Jones on violin, Palmer Jones at the piano, Frank Withers on clarinet, Buddy Gilmore at the drums, in Hughes's own roll call. He had no word for what he was hearing, because in 1924 the phrase jam session did not yet exist.

The break between Florence and the club came after a night Hughes gives a whole chapter, titled "Don't Hit a Woman." A French dancer named Annette — pregnant, unwell, and paid only in champagne commissions — was dismissed, said what she thought of the owner, and was slapped to the floor by the attendant sent to eject her. Florence rose from her table in a gold evening gown and orchids: "She's a woman and I'm a woman, and can't nobody hit a woman in any place where I work!" Ice buckets flew, the orchestra struck up a tune to drown the noise, and the room went to battle. Hughes, watching from the serving pantry, climbed onto the icebox and dropped the kitchen's two huge knives behind it, "not wishing," he wrote, "to view a murder before my eyes." After the fight, some evenings Florence would not sing a single song.

Florence's departure left the club without a drawing card as the tourist season approached. The management tried a female impersonator, tap dancers, and a Charleston expert, then cabled New York for a replacement. New York sent Ada "Bricktop" Smith of Connie's Inn in Harlem. Bullard met her boat train at Le Havre on 11 May 1924 and brought her straight to the club around midnight; the band, in the habit of striking up whenever the door opened, burst into a tune for what turned out to be the boss and a small, freckled newcomer. Hughes, who was there, wrote that she went around the empty room shaking hands and that you liked her right away — and also that she was startled to find the famous Grand Duc was about the size of a Harlem lunch room. Her own memoir puts it more sharply: a bar that would look crowded with six pairs of elbows on it. Her first night ended in the kitchen: the club sat empty until nearly dawn — "this is a late place," the manager kept explaining — until Bricktop gave up on the front room and came back to see, as she put it, what Bruce and Hughes "got back here." She stayed two years, made the room a success with Bullard, and in time opened her own club up the street at 66 rue Pigalle under the name everyone knew her by.

The Grand Duc ran on into the early 1930s as one of the favorite small rooms of the quarter's international clientele. Then the record of it goes quiet. The 1929 crash thinned Montmartre's American nightlife within a few seasons, and no source in hand records the club's closing date.

The building is still there, unlike most of its neighbors from the jazz decade, on a street that now carries the name rue Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. Nothing on the facade says what the address was.