Memory Lane

Many a paunchy, jowly citizen of U.S. suburbia, when he thinks of his youth, remembers Alice Prin. For Alice, with the heavy purple rouge over the surrealist green powder, Alice, with the bright crimson cupid bow hiding her thin upper lip and the spit curl embellishing her low forehead, was the toast (to put it delicately) of Paris in the days when Expatria infested the Left Bank.

They knew her not as Alice, but more romantically as Kiki. Though she was flamboyantly real and fabulously full-blown, she was to most of the artists, revolutionaries, Babbitts, drunkards and dreamers more a symbol than a person. To the tortuous '20s in Paris, Kiki was what George du Maurier's lovely, fictional Trilby (whose tiny feet were called the most beautiful in the Quarter) had been to a former generation of Bohemians. Nobody ever looked at Kiki's feet.

Kiki grew up on a Burgundy farm with her two sisters and three brothers. "We were six little bastards," explained Kiki in her autobiography, Souvenir. Her careless mother brought her to Paris.

Lusty and busty, steatopygous and sinful, Kiki swung along her Paphian way from scullery maid to artists' model to become one of Montparnasse's topflight nightclub entertainers. The artists who immortalized Kiki's curves in oil and marble sometimes forgot to pay her, and Kiki never cared. Unconcerned, she tramped the streets in a threadbare overcoat and man's hat and some artist's castoff shoes. Later, in fancier finery, Kiki lounged in the wicker chairs at the Cafe du Dome or sang in her Pernod-husky voice ("I could never sing if I was sober") at the two-by-four cabaret called the Jockey Club.

There she remembers the huge Russian always willing to jump into a kazachok; the lovely, shy Florian doing her belly-dances; Henry, the manager, keeping the peace "by telling everyone in the room they were right"; or the little singer, Chiffon, crooning before an old piano "that drove the orchestra to desperation." And the beautiful-eyed Fernande, who "could make more noise by herself than a banquet for ten."

There was Kisling, "the swellest guy in the world," the mystic Stuckgold, who always placed his naked models in another room so he couldn't see them when he worked. There was savage, ascetic Soutine, who smashed his chair and table to kindling wood so Kiki could be warm; Soutine slept curled up on the floor while Kiki took his bed. And saturnine Maurice Utrillo, who was once so stirred by her magnificent peasant nudity that he painted a brilliant picture of a huge cow barn.

When the Germans took over. Kiki dropped out of sight. Sentimental Left Bankers typically believed a rumor that she had retired to the country and was raising a family of healthy children. But this happy ending was untrue.

However frustrating life may be in U.S. suburbia, life is harder still on such "toasts of Paris." Du Maurier's Trilby died miserably, drugged to the last by Svengali's evil eye. Last week, flabby and 45, her cheeks pasty white and sagging, Kiki shuffled out of the door of La Roquette Prison. Picked up a month ago near the old Dome for peddling narcotics, Kiki was out on bail so that doctors could treat her drug-shattered nerves.

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