One evening in Paris in the mid-1920s, a red-haired American woman named Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith stood in a crowded club, a cigarette in hand, watching the writers and artists of the era drink and dance around her. Known to everyone as Bricktop, she had arrived in France only a few years earlier, fleeing the limited opportunities for Black performers in America. In Paris she found something she had never known in her homeland: a place where she could eat, drink, and socialize wherever and with whomever she chose. By the time she opened her own club in 1926, she had become one of the most famous Black entertainers in Europe, a woman whose name appeared in novels by F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and who taught the future King Edward VIII how to dance the Charleston. Bricktop was born in Alderson, West Virginia, on August 14, 1894. Her parents were both descended from enslaved people in the American South, and she had Irish ancestry on her mother’s side, which accounted for the reddish hair that later gave her her nickname. When she was still young, her father died, and the family joined the Great Migration of African Americans heading north to the industrial cities.
In Chicago she began working in saloons and bars, and soon appeared on stage for the first time in a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Haymarket Theater. She adopted the name Bricktop in reference to her hair. At sixteen she left home to tour the Midwest with a vaudeville troop, and eventually drifted to Harlem, where she spent the 1910s and early 1920s honing her skills as a jazz singer, dancer, and entertainer. Despite her moderate success, jobs for Black performers in America were scarce and highly competitive.
Encouraged by reports that living was easier in Paris and that the city was free of the race prejudice she faced at home, she set off for France in late 1923 or early 1924. Paris at the time was the cultural capital of the world, home to writers and artists like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, and the city was booming with an enormous economic expansion that fueled a vibrant nightlife. There was intense demand for jazz singers and dancers, and Bricktop quickly emerged onto the scene. She became a close acquaintance of F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and was frequently hired by Cole Porter to entertain at his parties, where she taught guests the latest dance crazes. In 1926 she finally opened her own establishment, which she called Chez Bricktop. It was an immediate success and became an important cultural spot in Paris in the second half of the Roaring Twenties. Legendary tales emerged from the club: the writer John Steinbeck was once thrown out drunkenly, only to apologize by sending a taxi full of roses across the city.
Fred Astaire visited and performed there. The club was even referenced in numerous published works of the time by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others, cementing its place in the literary and cultural history of the era. But the success was short-lived. In the autumn of 1929, the Wall Street crash triggered the Great Depression, and the boom that had supported Parisian nightlife collapsed.
Clubs like Chez Bricktop struggled, and eventually the lights went out. Bricktop returned to the United States for a time, where she found sporadic work. The precarious nature of this, combined with the death of her mother in 1938 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, left her suffering from severe anxiety. In 1942 she relocated to Mexico City, one of the few parts of the world relatively unaffected by the war, and ran a successful club there for several years.
When she returned to Paris in 1949, the city was no longer as she remembered it. Paris had lost its place as the cultural capital of the world in the 1930s, with the title shifting to New York. Aware that her style of entertainment was not in high demand there, she headed to Rome instead, where she experienced something of an Indian summer throughout the 1950s, running a successful club that entertained famous guests including Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also developed a close friendship with the deposed King Farouk of Egypt, who brought her gifts from his travels like bottles of perfume and cigars.
Bricktop’s personal life has drawn attention in recent years. In 1927 she met a saxophone player named Peter Ducongé, whom she married in 1929, though the marriage soon ran into trouble due to his affairs. They effectively split up in the 1930s but remained legally married until he died in 1967. It seems likely, however, that she was also bisexual.
Many years later, she told one of Josephine Baker’s children that she and Baker, one of the most celebrated performers at Chez Bricktop and the first African-American woman to star in a major motion picture, had been in a sexual relationship in the 1920s. Bricktop closed her final club in Rome in 1961 at the age of sixty-seven. When interviewed about the closure, she said simply, “I’m tired, honey, tired of staying up till dawn every day. ” She returned to America, occasionally coming out of retirement to open clubs for brief periods in New York, but her later years were largely devoted to charitable work, and she became a devout Roman Catholic.
She died in her sleep at her apartment in Manhattan on February 1, 1984, at the age of eighty-nine. Although she had been out of the public eye for many years, her death was widely reported in the New York Times and other prominent publications. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, the last chapter of a life that had taken her from the saloons of Chicago to the most glamorous clubs of Europe, from a place of exclusion to a stage where she was celebrated by the finest artists and writers of her time.