Word: kiki
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...began to think of doing something about the British rule on Cyprus, the island where he was born. For months he ate nothing but fruit, trained himself for what was to follow. On the afternoon of Oct. 6, 1954, he walked out of his Athens home, telling his wife Kiki: "Don't worry. I'll be back soon." But he also instructed her to burn his old clothes, so that no dog could pick up a scent from his clothing (the British once offered $1,400 for an old suit of Grivas...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...