Violets for Kiki

Ernest Hemingway said she was the only woman who, "as far as I know, never had a Room of Her Own." Her real name was Alice Prin, but she was known in Montparnasse as Kiki. She came from the province of Burgundy, where she had been, as she said, "one of six little love children." She arrived in Paris at the age of twelve, on the eve of World War I, and the Paris underworld drew her in. At 13: "My mother has some artificial geraniums on the mantelpiece; I swipe a petal every day to rouge my cheeks and mouth." She worked in a war factory oiling soldiers' boots, in a munitions plant, in a bakery. An old sculptor asked her to pose for him. "That was something new, to strip like that, but what else was there to do?" Her mother caught her stripped and disowned her.

Hungry and cold in the streets, she was befriended by a streetwalker, and by a drug addict who introduced Kiki (aged 16) to cocaine. A pimp seduced her, beat her arid threw her out because she "wasn't good for anything." One night a girl friend told her that there were "nice suet cakes and tea to drink" at the house of a Russian living in the Cite Falguiere. The girls stood shivering on the doorstep, afraid to knock. A neighboring painter, as poor and as cold as themselves, but a man of talent, took them in.

The Mascot. Chaim Soutine, whose work hangs in many galleries, painted a portrait of Kiki, and soon other painters sought her out. Foujita, the Japanese artist with the rice-bowl haircut, sketched her a score of times. Kiki became a professional model. Artists liked to paint her because she always seemed gay, never whined in self-pity, and though dope, drink and uninhibited sex all touched her, she somehow kept a kind of innocence.

She had slanting, catlike, green eyes; she bobbed her hair and wore black bangs with spit curls. She was hardly out of her teens when the Left Bank became the last stop for the lost generation. Suddenly she was"'Kiki of Montparnasse"--a mascot. She is the sensuous young nude in the misty photographs in which Man Ray typed the period.

She drew sketches and wrote about herself and her friends. On Modigliani: "All he did was growl; he used to make me shiver from head to foot." On Jean Cocteau: "He gave me a necklace fit for a queen." On Utrillo: "Once, after I had been posing for him, I went around to take a look and was knocked off my pins to discover that he had been drawing a little country house."

Some friends set her up in a nightclub called Le Jockey. "The walls are covered with the weirdest sort of posters you could imagine. Everybody drinks a lot and everybody's happy. Scads of Americans, and what kids they are!" Kiki discovered she had a voice, but "I can't sing unless I'm ginny." Too much gin broke her health, also put her in a Villefranche jail, from which she was bailed out by U.S. sailors.

Valedictory. "We don't have to worry about her kidneys," wrote Hemingway. "She comes from Burgundy, where they make these things better than they do in Illinois or Massachusetts." But the era was over, and Hemingway's tribute was a valedictory: "She was wonderful to look at. Having a fine face to start with, she made of it a work of art. She had a wonderfully beautiful body and a fine voice."

Kiki, as mascots have an awkward habit of doing, lived on. After World War II she reappeared in her old haunts, a plump woman, rather heavily made up. Last year she began to show signs of liver cirrhosis, and she spent a couple of months in the hospital. Last week, at 51, she was dead. There was no room for her in Montparnasse Cemetery, so her friends buried her at Thiais, out beyond the Porte d'ltalie. Foujita was there, his fringed hair now white. One by one the old Bohemians dropped their bouquets on the coffin, and then an old lady, clearly no Montparnassian, stepped forward with her floral tribute. She had been in the same hospital as Kiki, and had loved her gay talk. Cheerily Kiki had said: "When I die, bring me violets."

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