Of all the "colored" chorus girls to have paraded their talents and bodies through the café-concerts and music halls of the City of Light, none ever achieved Josephine Baker's success at appearing to embody simultaneously Africa, America, and even Paris itself. Nevertheless, certain of these lesser-known performers also deserve our attention. I shall take a look at the careers of three such women: Aïcha Goblet, Julie Luce, and Simone Luce, or D'al-Al. Interestingly, all three happen to appear—alongside the profile of their friend, painter Jules Pascin—in a picture taken at a masked ball given by Montparnasse artists in the late 1920s.

Aïcha Goblet

Among the many models working in Montparnasse during the years between the first and second world wars, Aïcha attracted singular attention. As early as 1914, Marjorie Howard, reporting for Vanity Fair, described her encounter with Aïcha at the Bal Bullier dance hall as follows:

Ayesha wears a turban over her woolen pate. A coal black negress from Martinique, she sits for the artists, and stoutly maintains that she is an American. She carries an imitation gold card-case and all her cards are magnificently scalloped with gilt edges and painted with forget-me-nots. They are engraved with one word, "Ayesha."

The details about Aïcha's visiting card may be accurate, but she was neither Martiniquan nor coal black, and she never claimed to be American. She was born before the end of the century in Hazebrouck, in northern France, to a working-class family, the Goblets. Her father, a native of Martinique, was a juggler in a traveling circus. At the age of 6, she performed in the ring as a bareback horse rider, and at 16 left for Paris to model for Pascin. She appeared from time to time at La Rotonde, where customers would gaze at her admiringly. Writer and art critic André Salmon writes:

If Aïcha is often naked, she rarely undoes her head kerchief—now cabbage-green, now the color of silver—which suits her so well. Aïcha is too much a girl from Roubaix not to be perfectly civilized. She sits, she dances, she is pleasant. Long before Josephine Baker launched the fashion of banana belts, Aïcha wore, at wild parties in Montparnasse, her diminutive raffia skirt.

Salmon had known Aïcha since her débuts in Paris, and she appears in his 1920 novel La Nègresse du Sacré Cœur. Later he wrote a preface for her short memoirs, which were published in Mon Paris magazine. One of her memoirs begins:

There are not two Aïchas like me. What is extraordinary in my case, is that I am a blonde, although a Negro. As for my skin, it is fast dyed, and, whether blonde or black, my hair is fuzzy ... "But what is so extraordinary about her?" you'll say. Well, I am not African at all. Mind you, I am Flemish.

Upon her arrival in Paris, Aïcha lived at Villa Falguière, close to the artists Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Moise Kisling, and Tsuguharu Foujita. She would occasionally cook for them, and she would sometimes lend them money for food from her earnings as a model. Foujita drew an almost Cubist portrait of Aïcha, with a long cigarette holder in her hand, her hair a vaporous Afro, her lips those of an African mask. In their book Montparnasse (1925), G. Fuss-Amoré and M. Desormiaux write: "Some artists sometimes portray her with red hair, green breasts, or depict her in a variety of colored shapes. No auction of modern painting takes place at Hôtel Drouot without some representation of this Martiniquaise from the Batignolles." One could probably write a monograph about her various images, which are at times very close to those of Josephine Baker. Fuss-Amoré and Desormiaux also remark:

It is difficult to tell what kind of rejuvenating potion protects her from the signs of age. One finds her ever the same, unchanged, holding her position, graceful and slender. ... She has remained the wisest of models. She holds fast to the old principles ... Any coarse male who would come too close to her would face a wild cat.

In the early 1920s, Aïcha took to the stage and danced nearly naked with a troupe at the Olympia music hall. She also performed on the legitimate stage in dramatic parts. She appeared, for example, in L'hôtel des masques by Albert Jean, as well as in Le simoun and L'ombre du mal, both by Henri René Lenormand. This latter play was a 1924 rewrite of Terres chaudes, a work that Charles Dullin had created at the Grand Guignol in 1913. Steeped in barbarism and witchcraft, Lenormand added a section stressing the submissiveness of an African houseboy, Moussa. The goriest scenes were left out, for the benefit of psychological depth. The new version was quite a success when Gaston Baty staged it at his Studio des Champs Elysées the year before Josephine appeared there. In a stifling tropical ambiance, the visual effects were reinforced by African chants offstage during the performance. And as was usual in so-called "colonial" or "exotic" plays, there was a native dance episode. Reviewer Jean Fangeat thought that the new version, focusing as it did on "the debasement of colonizer and colonized," was more incisive than Terres chaudes, yet too sentimental. The famous African star Habib Benglia took the part of the all-powerful Féticheur, and Jean Fangeat noted that:

Madame Aicha in the part of the captive, and Suzanne Demar in the part of Fatimata, bring more exoticism to a stage on which Gaston Baty has set up a strange straw-house made of raffia and logs.

Aïcha also performed in La cavalière Elsa, a play by Charles Demasy adapted from the novel by Pierre Mac Orlan. In this play, Aïcha danced for the pleasure of "a Bolshevik costumed like a Prince Hamlet." About her performance, she wrote: "I was nearly naked... I was given a scanty belt, as if to pave the way for the coming to France of the famous Josephine, but nothing concealed my thighs. ... I nearly forgot to say that I also gave the replica to Charles Boyer; probably on another nearly naked occasion." A circus artist, then a popular model, then a self-trained, occasional music hall dancer and actress, Aïcha Goblet had already taken many of the career steps that Baker would herself later attempt, and evoked a very similar response from many critics. As Salmon remarked, in language that more than obliquely references Baker, "the voluptuous beauties at the Colonial Exhibition could not vie with those in Montparnasse ... The Miss Africa of Montparnasse is Aïcha." Nevertheless, Aïcha did not become nearly as celebrated as Baker and had to content herself with making a modest living and enjoying all the while an impeccable reputation.

Julie Luce

Born to a middle-class Martiniquan family, Julie Luce was educated by nuns. She went to Paris at age 12, a refugee from the city of Saint Pierre, which was destroyed by the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique. For several years she sat as a model for artists, notably for Jules Pascin. She then went on to perform on stage and begin a career best traced through the photographs autographed to her by various music hall associates. A handful of them were "colored" artists: There is a portrait of Daisy Tcharnes dated September 1916; one of "La petite Hélène," a Martiniquan girl who danced in the show La Joie de Paris, starring Josephine Baker, at the Casino de Paris in 1928. There is even a portrait signed by Baker herself. Other inscribed portraits inform us that Julie performed at the Théâtre des Variétés in March 1922. She met Ethyl W. Morris in July 1924. Five years later, she performed both in Nice and at the Palace Theatre in Paris, and then again at the Palace in 1931.

In Montparnasse in the 1930s one could often see Julie Luce, a mature but still beautiful woman who performed in one important part for several years as a legitimate actress. She acted as the Nègresse in Le Train de 8 h 47, a comedy by Georges Courteline that toured France. Julie also appeared in Femmes, an American play adapted by Jacques Duval. It was again André Salmon who asserted in 1931, "The best selection of Negro females at Vincennes (i.e., at the Colonial Exhibition) would grow pale indeed if Madame Julie came and joined their dances. At once time light-footed and statuesque, she would be a living Palace of Information about anything one can think of concerning the Black Venus."

Julie Luce was photographed together with black actors in African warrior costumes in the hall of the Comédie Française, where she probably performed in 1932. She then appeared at the Casino de Paris, where in 1933 she met Floyd Dupont, the American ballet master. She next joined with Nora and Jay, diseuses classiques et excentriques, as well as the dancer Gypsy Rounia, in August 1938. Julie was still dancing in May 1952 and running the Martiniquan rum booth at the Foire de Paris. She retired ten years later.

Simone Luce (a.k.a. D'al-Al)

Simone Luce, also known as D'al-Al, was born in Montmartre on July 10, 1910. Her mother, Julie Luce, had by then become a music hall dancer, and she took her daughter along with her everywhere to protect her from predatory men. Simone grew up with little Guy Krohg, son of Norwegian painter Per Krohg, as a playmate and charge. Whenever Guy's mother Lucy went out with her lover, Jules Pascin, Simone, at age 12, would baby-sit for the boy in his apartment. Pascin had come to Paris in 1910. He admired and liked "Negroes" and had sketched many black subjects in the U.S. and Cuba during the First World War, and he was largely responsible for bringing Aïcha to Paris. He had used Julie Luce as a model, and over time she had become very devoted to him. He called her Maman and she kept house for him to the end of his life. Soon Julie and her daughter, Simone, whom Aïcha also willingly consorted with, became his most supportive friends.

Simone recalled: "Pascin sometimes asked his models to put on his own silk shirts, which were very short, and his long black cotton stockings. His models usually sat for two hours and got paid 40 francs, more than the usual rate." Simone first sat for him when she was as young as age 13. According to her, "in his eyes, I was part of his family, just like my mother. He did not attempt to make love to me. He always tried to with his models. If they said yes, it was O.K., if not, too bad. There came a moment where you were attracted to him. He was the kind of man who attracted women, whether you liked it or not." Pascin loved to be surrounded by friends. Thanks to him, Simone vacationed on the Riviera, went to parties, and met artists of the newer generation like Marie Laurencin, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Utrillo, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, the Léger brothers, the photographer Man Ray, the sculptor Arno Breker, and the engraver Herbert Lespinasse. She became acquainted with Kiki de Montparnasse, conversed with Ernest Hemingway and André Gide, and met film director Marc Allègret at a ball given at the mansion of the Count de Beaumont.

Simone pursued regular studies before learning classical ballet. She might have become a première étoile, but her teacher at the Ecole de Ballet de l'Opéra had warned her at the end of the three-year course that there were few openings in classical choreography for colored girls. As a result, Simone decided to turn to the music hall. She was helped by her mother, who used her connections with Henri Varna, the owner of several music halls in Paris. André Salmon writes that, after 1925, at "Le Dôme and La Coupole one might only occasionally at midnight see the little mulatto made famous by the art of Kisling and Pascin ... Simone, whom Montparnasse remembered for her emerging dark flowering, had now become the beautiful D'al-Al, a star of our major music halls, whose image provides an attractive cover for the albums-souvenirs that tourists buy at the kiosks on the boulevards."

Simone probably began her music hall career by performing in March 1925 at the Palace with Maurice Chevalier. She is rumored to have been one of the chorus girls in the Revue Nègre when it was brought to the Folies Bergère in 1926, but this is not likely. That year she was hired by Concert Mayol music hall, and her contract was renewed in 1927 at the Palace, where she became a success. Dancer Gypsy Rounia performed with her at the Palace in August 1928, and D'al-Al would also perform for private parties. For example, she danced and rode horseback for the Action Française, a right-wing political group whose members included the intellectuals Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet.

When she decided to become an exotic dancer, she was able to pass as an Indian, a Tahitian vahiné, an Arab from the Maghreb, a Cuban, an Asian, and an Indonesian. Her stage name, D'al-Al (which means "coquette" in Arabic) was vague enough to suggest various ethnic origins. She did apply herself to studying the ethnic context of the dances she performed. Light-skinned, she did not insist on identifying her black ancestry. At the time, the best-known stage artist from the Antilles in Paris was Mathilde Darlin, nicknamed Baby Darling, who married into the powerful Légitimus family. Simone, however, did not consider herself Martiniquan, and her longtime friend Christine Sully took her to Fort de France only in 1987.

In 1930, Simone was offered a part in Le capitaine jaune, a film produced for Pathé by Danish director Anders Wilhelm Sandberg. Russian actor Valery Inkiginoff was featured, and Charles Vanel played the part of the captain. But the real star was D'al-Al. Its first sequences were shot in the Vieux Port in Marseilles, but the ambiance proved too crudely realistic, and the crew went back to work in the Billancourt studios. The film premièred on January 1, 1931 at the Gaumont Palace and ran for two weeks. A silent movie, it was later adapted for the talkies. In 1931, D'al-Al also appeared in the movie Diablette by Jaquelux. In 1943, she played Mahlia, la métisse in a "great movie of colonial action and adventures," but the film was never released. She was advertised as a fantastic, acrobatic exotic artist; a danzatrice orientale in Tripoli; a Cambodian dancer at the Petit Casino de Paris; a Javanese or an African dancer in Brussels; and eine internationale exotistische Tanzstar in Hamburg, where she appeared in the revue Paris qui ri with the Folies Bergère.

Man Ray took a few arresting pictures of her in Siamese robes, one with one foot with long artificial nails and another of her bending backwards, snakelike. She also appeared in photos dressed as a little girl with a thin crown on her head and wearing only long gloves and short panties; or with feathers on her behind like Josephine Baker; or wearing her dress wide open, revealing her thighs. There are also professional portraits by Studio Harcourt of D'al-Al and Mel-Tra, called "The Chinese Sisters," in which each of the "sisters" uncovers her breast while lifting her skirt and moving her arms like an Oriental dancer. Mel-Tra was a pseudonym, and I have not yet been able to establish her identity.

As a dancer, D'al-Al toured Europe and went from Riga, Latvia, in 1934 to Tripoli, Syria, in 1938. She performed mostly in Switzerland, Luxemburg, Belgium, Holland, and especially in Germany, where she finally settled after World War II. She never went to America. Her international career was patterned after that of Josephine Baker, a dancer who always moved fluidly between ethnic identities and artistic media. But Baker had other talents. She could also sing, which D'al-Al was unable to do.

D'al-Al had several love affairs, notably a ten-year relationship with Arnaldo Castello, her Count Abatino. But they did not marry and she has no descendants. She performed in Germany as an exotic dancer from 1947 until about 1958. She then ended her career in order to take care of her bed-ridden mother.

Research can be very difficult when it comes to minor artists, as one is obliged to rely on second-rate publications and/or the daily press. This sketchy evocation of the stories of these lesser-known artists is intended to invite exploration of the careers of the many other "minor" dancers and artists of the period—the array of "colored" girls who sought to emulate Josephine Baker's success in Paris. These girls often performed in cabarets and nightclubs like the black-owned La Canne à Sucre and La Boule Blanche, sometimes dancing on tables or grand pianos. In the 1930s, there was Messaouda, an Arab Senegalese from Oran who danced fandango and meneo. The managers of the Palace employed a young woman from the Antilles who, in 1928, danced under the name Ya ya Sapotille. Film director Léon Poirier would make her famous by giving her the main part in the movie Cain under a new name, Rama Tahé. And there was another dancer, Sadya, who performed in the nude at La Cabane Cubaine. And so on.

André Salmon was certainly thinking of Aïcha and D'al-Al when he wrote: "In Montparnasse, one can find Nègresses incertaines (not knowing whether they have come from Guadeloupe or from Roubaix). This felicitous doubt allows those beautiful women of color to be, in order to suit circumstances, all the women of color and women of all colors. The lighter-skinned among them can sit reclining like Indian dancers or replace, at the last minute, a missing Javanese in some Malaysian ballet." These non-white female performers made no headlines but were at times briefly mentioned in publications focusing on the erotic attractions of gay Paree and its colonies. Despite the limited attention they have garnered, however, these women shed light on an exotic night world from which Josephine Baker emerged to become and remain for decades the undisputed queen.