Moved from Montmartre

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

F. 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 Conge), 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.

Bricktop, who has black hair now, admits that "in America I didn't catch on. Let's face it. Americans are used to Negro entertainers who run places to go slumming in--not at all the sort of place I had for so long in Paris and which I tried to have in New York. I just find it easier to pursue happiness in Europe. That doesn't mean that I don't feel intensely American." She reopened her place in Paris after the war. But on the way there, she fell in love with Rome. Nine years ago she became a Roman Catholic, likes Rome because "I like to be near the Holy Father."

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