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ISBN: 978-1-4967-4556-9
ISBN: 978-1-4967-4557-6 (ebook)
First Kensington Trade Paperback Edition: August 2024
For the fallen in the fight for freedom
PART 1
THE PHONY WAR
CHAPTER 1
PARIS, FRANCE—SEPTEMBER 12, 1939
Nine days after France and Britain declared war on Germany for invading Poland, Ruth Lacroix—a twenty-year-old American nightclub singer—entered a crowded dressing room of a cabaret named Bal Tabarin. Music, coming from the orchestra that was warming the crowd, resonated through the backstage changing area. Female dancers put on can-can dresses layered with colorful ruffles and frills, and Ruth slipped into a sleek black evening gown. The entertainers—crammed inside the room with costume designers, make-up artists, and hair stylists—were preparing for the evening show.
“You’re giving Parisians an escape from their worries of war,” Ruth said to her friend Lucette, a statuesque dancer with toffee-blond hair.
Lucette’s eyes filled with gratitude. “You are, too.”
“That’s kind of you to say,” Ruth said, “but we both know that patrons are here for dancers, not singers.”
“Clientele adore you.”
“Merci,” Ruth said.
“I wish I had a dulcet voice like you.”
“Would you like me to teach you to sing?”
“Oui,” Lucette said. “That would be lovely.”
Ruth slipped a faux diamond bracelet over her wrist. “With a few lessons, you’ll be warbling like a goldfinch for France’s victory celebration.”
Lucette smiled and buckled the ankle straps of her high-heeled shoes.
Bal Tabarin—home of the French can-can—was a palatial cabaret on Rue Victor-Massé in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. The lounge, large enough to seat a few hundred guests, was a towering space with an elevated parquet floor stage that jutted into the audience like an oversize runway for fashion models. Well-dressed patrons, who were seated at small tables covered with fine linen, sipped champagne and cocktails while being entertained by dancers. Each of the performances, which had elaborate themes and costume designs, were separated by brief intermissions of music and song. Bal Tabarin attracted some of Paris’s best dancers, many of whom had attended ballet academies. Unlike the other performers, who’d been trained by professionals to develop their artistry, Ruth had learned to sing by listening to records on a wind-up gramophone.
Prior to arriving in Paris in 1937, Ruth lived at her parents’ apple orchard on the outskirts of Lewiston, Maine. She was the only child of Sarah, a Parisian Jew, and Charles, an American Protestant. Her parents had met during the Great War, when her father, a soldier with the American Expeditionary Force, was stationed on the western front. Sarah—a volunteer nurse at a French Red Cross field hospital—had dressed a shell splinter wound to Charles’s shoulder. During his recovery, the two became friends and soon fell in love. After the war, they were married in a civil ceremony and set sail for the United States to create a life on the Lacroix family apple orchard. A month shy of their first wedding anniversary, Sarah gave birth to Ruth, a six-pound-two-ounce baby girl.
Ruth’s musicality came naturally. She could sing in perfect pitch by the time she reached kindergarten and, throughout her school-age years, her parents fostered her ardor for music by buying her a secondhand gramophone and loads of jazz records. She was a steadfast member of school and community choirs, even though she was dissatisfied that the repertoire was usually limited to folk songs. It’s not that Ruth had an aversion to tunes of Americana, but their lyrics and melodies didn’t feed her heart like jazz, swing, and big band music. Lewiston lacked jazz vocal teachers, so Ruth developed her craft by modeling her style, timbre, and vibrato to recordings by the likes of Ruth Etting, Ella Fitzgerald, Ethel Waters, and Lucienne Boyer. In her free time, she performed duets with the voices of famous singers flowing from her gramophone. However, much of her practice was a cappella—without instrumental accompaniment—while she completed chores of harvesting apples, making cider, pruning trees, and driving the farm tractor. She cherished her private rehearsals, but her fondest memories were of entertaining her parents, hunkered on the living room sofa with their family dog, a black Labrador retriever named Moxie.
“Magnifique!” her mother had cheered as Ruth finished singing a rendition of Billie Holiday’s “What a Little Moonlight Can Do.”
“Bravo!” Dad shouted, fending off Moxie’s wagging tail.
Ruth’s chest swelled with pride. She relished how music could bring people joy, and she knew, deep down, what she would do for the rest of her life.
Ruth’s father—a pragmatic man by nature—encouraged her to attend nearby Bates College to obtain a teaching degree. But Bates, as well as every other university in the country, didn’t have a curriculum for jazz studies. Besides, Ruth wanted to entertain for a living and the best way to make a go of a singing career, she believed, was to live in a big city with a thriving music scene. Places like New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Chicago would have been fine choices, but ever since her first visit to Paris she aspired to perform at the Casino de Paris.
At seventeen years of age, Ruth made a three-week trip with her mom to Paris to visit her mother’s sister. She’d forged a close relationship with her aunt Colette, uncle Julian, and cousin Marceau through the exchange of letters and family photographs. Also, she’d developed a sibling-like bond with Marceau, who spent most summers working on her parents’ apple orchard. During their visit to Paris, Colette and her mother surprised Ruth by taking her to a show starring Lucienne Boyer, a famous Parisian singer, at the Casino de Paris. Boyer, in addition to being well known in France, was quite popular in the United States, given that she had made many recordings with Columbia Records. Ruth had never been to an esteemed music hall, nor had she attended a live performance by a prominent singer. Ruth’s exhilaration soared through Boyer’s performance, and she imagined what it might feel like to be onstage, singing emotionally infused songs to a vast audience. And while Boyer took bows for her standing ovation, Sarah—as if she could sense her daughter’s yearning—leaned to Ruth and said, “Follow your heart, ma chérie—I believe in you.”
Ruth, her eyes filled with tears of happiness, applauded until her hands ached.
Upon returning home to Lewiston, Ruth, with the support of her mother, informed Dad of her aspiration to someday perform at the Casino de Paris, and that she planned to move to France to live with Aunt Colette. Charles was stunned by the news. But after much time and discussion—and Ruth explaining to her father that the Casino de Paris was a prestigious music hall, not a gambling house—he eventually accepted her decision.
After high school graduation, Ruth worked as a waitress and labored on the orchard through the fall harvest to earn money. She purchased a third-class ticket on board the SS Champlain, sailed from New York to Le Havre, France, and moved into Aunt Colette’s and Uncle Julian’s apartment in Le Marais, a Jewish neighborhood in the 4th arrondissement of Paris. Julian was a doctor and Colette was a nurse, and they worked together at Saint-Antoine Hospital. Her aunt and uncle, a sweet and benevolent couple, gave Ruth a spare room next to her cousin Marceau, who was studying chemistry at the University of Paris. Ruth adored her Parisian family, especially Marceau, whom she’d grown fond of when he selflessly worked a summer school break on her parents’ orchard while her father recovered from an appendectomy. To Ruth, Marceau was more like a brother than a cousin. He looked after her like an older sibling by showing her around Paris, including the safest routes to and from the 9th arrondissement, where many of the music halls and theaters were located.
The first year in Paris had been difficult for Ruth. She failed three auditions at the Casino de Paris, and she had trouble landing singing gigs, except for an unpaid part in musical theater. Some of her rejections had little to do with her vocal capability, considering that more than one casting director had informed her that they were seeking a tall female singer with a voluptuous physique. Ruth—a slender, five-foot-two-inch woman with wavy auburn hair and childlike dimples on her cheeks—buried her resentment and resolved to continue with auditions. Eventually, she’d thought, exiting a theater stage, I’ll earn a role based on my singing, not the size of my cleavage.
Although her aunt and uncle didn’t charge for room and board, Ruth didn’t feel right about accepting charity, so she waited tables at a brasserie to earn money to contribute toward rent and groceries. She auditioned, anywhere there were openings, and last autumn she landed a job as a cabaret singer at Bal Tabarin. She was elated, despite that the role paid little and would be limited to singing short pieces during dance intermissions. Things were looking up, Ruth believed. But soon after she began performing at Bal Tabarin, Hitler’s drums of war began to beat.
Early in the year, the Nazi leader proclaimed in his Reichstag speech that European Jews would be exterminated if war erupted, sending a wave of fear and outrage through France. Soon after, the German military invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, and thousands of young Parisian men, including her cousin Marceau, enlisted in the French Army. The city of Paris issued gas masks to civilians. Ruth’s parents urged her to return home, but she declined, reassuring them through letters that she would be safe in Paris, like it was during the Great War.
