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.
