Word: kiki
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Ernest Hemingway said she was the only woman who, "as far as I know, never had a Room of Her Own." Her real name was Alice Prin, but she was known in Montparnasse as Kiki. She came from the province of Burgundy, where she had been, as she said, "one of six little love children." She arrived in Paris at the age of twelve, on the eve of World War I, and the Paris underworld drew her in. At 13: "My mother has some artificial geraniums on the mantelpiece; I swipe a petal every day to rouge my cheeks...
Hungry and cold in the streets, she was befriended by a streetwalker, and by a drug addict who introduced Kiki (aged 16) to cocaine. A pimp seduced her, beat her arid threw her out because she "wasn't good for anything." One night a girl friend told her that there were "nice suet cakes and tea to drink" at the house of a Russian living in the Cite Falguiére. The girls stood shivering on the doorstep, afraid to knock. A neighboring painter, as poor and as cold as themselves, but a man of talent, took them...
...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...