Word: bricktop
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After an hour he left and strolled toward Montmartre, up the Rue Pigalle into the Place Blanche . . . He passed a lighted door from which issued music, and stopped with the sense of familiarity; it was Bricktop's, where he had parted with so many hours and so much money . . . -Babylon Revisited
...Scott Fitzgerald was not the only American to part with "so many hours and so much money" in Bricktop's. From 1924 to 1939, until war drove her home to the U.S. for a while, Bricktop (real name: Ada Smith du Congé), a West Virginia-born Negro woman with a mop of rusty orange hair, played hostess to a whole generation of footloose Americans in her Montmartre nightclub...
Last week the old cry of "let's go to Bricktop's" was being heard again-but in Rome. And Romans, weary of overlush Neapolitan songs, were going for her with a rush...
Moving from table to table in her new cabaret, Bricktop gave them just what they wanted-notably, such old Gershwin songs as Lady Be Good and The Man I Love-in a contralto warm and caressing, for all her 56 years. For energetic youngsters, kicking up their heels in Rome's current Charleston fad (TIME, Dec. 18), Bricktop was at her best with Yes Sir, That's My Baby, backed by some solid rhythm from her band...
...coffin"). Then Characteristic Comments from: the nursery clock, the shoes, the fire, Shakespeare, Vivien, the desk, the prostitute, the heart. You hear Remarks on the Person of Mr. Jones from: the trained nurse ("it's a fine boy, not a blemish, God bless him"); other boys ("hey bricktop! hey carrots"); the snow ("centuries hence, it will be long ago''). You follow his career by reading a list of Inscriptions in Sundry Places, from which you learn that he spent his boyhood in the South at the end of the last century, that his father was a doctor...