Ada Smith, who would become famous as Bricktop, was born Ada Beatrice Smith in Alderson, West Virginia, on August 14, 1894. Her parents came from families of enslaved people in the American South, and her mother had been born during the Civil War, technically enslaved for her first two years before the Union victory and the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery. Smith was partly Irish through her mother, a heritage that would later explain her nickname. After her father died, the family joined the Great Migration north to Chicago, where millions of African Americans were leaving the South for industrial cities.
Smith began working in Chicago bars and taverns as a teenager and soon moved into theatrical work, making her first stage appearance in a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was during this period that she acquired the name Bricktop, a reference to her reddish hair. At just sixteen, she joined a traveling troupe performing a variety show across the Midwest with other African Americans. When that work ended, she moved to New York and worked at Barron’s cabaret in Harlem, which was then transforming into the center of an emerging African American cultural renaissance.
Over the next decade, she toured the country, returning to Chicago and traveling as far west as California, honing her skills as a jazz singer, vaudeville performer, and dancer. Despite moderate success in America, Smith decided in the early 1920s to leave for Europe. According to her own writings, a telegram from a promoter named Jean Pollard arrived in Harlem asking for a girl to come sing in Paris at Le Grand Duc. As she later explained, she was looking for a change.
Jobs were becoming scarcer for singers and dancers, and word from jazz musicians traveling back and forth across the Atlantic was that life was easier in Paris, free of racial prejudice. She dreamed of eating, drinking, and mixing wherever and with whomever she wanted. So she set off for France in late 1923 or early 1924. Paris at that time was the cultural capital of the world.
In the aftermath of World War I, the Spanish flu pandemic, and the revolutions that had swept through Germany, Turkey, and Russia, a new generation of writers, poets, painters, and dancers had flocked to the city. Figures like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound were part of a scene fueled by a massive economic boom that began in 1923. With money flowing into Paris, there was growing demand for jazz singers, dancers, and the vibrant nightlife they represented. Bricktop quickly rose through this scene, becoming close friends with F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway during their time in the French capital. Cole Porter frequently hired her to entertain at his parties, where she taught guests the latest dances, including the Charleston and the Black Bottom. She was even said to have taught the future King Edward VIII how to perform them. Smith was already thinking of opening her own place, frustrated by the small size of Parisian dance clubs compared to those in America.
Her first attempt failed due to licensing problems. But in 1926, she finally opened her own establishment, calling it Chez Bricktop. It was an immediate success and became an important cultural center in Paris during the second half of the roaring twenties. The club produced many legendary stories.
On one occasion, Smith threw the great American writer John Steinbeck out of the club while he was drunk. Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, apologized by sending a taxi full of roses across Paris to the club, and Bricktop welcomed him back. Fred Astaire visited and performed there. The club was referenced in contemporary works by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, and others.
But the success was short-lived. In the fall of 1929, the Wall Street crash was followed by the Great Depression. The jazz age atmosphere of wild parties faded into memory, and clubs like Chez Bricktop suffered. The club was popular enough to survive for a while, but eventually the lights went out.
Smith returned to the United States for a period and found sporadic work. The unstable nature of that work, combined with her mother’s death in 1938, caused her severe anxiety. World War II in 1939 damaged the entertainment industry just as it was beginning to recover from the Depression. However, she had made her mark in Europe during the 1920s and would soon return.
In 1942, Smith moved to Mexico, one of the few parts of the world relatively unaffected by the war. There she founded a successful club in Mexico City and ran it for several years. Then, as Europe was being rebuilt and economies recovered after the devastation of World War II, she returned to Paris in 1949. Unfortunately, the city was not as she remembered it.
Paris had lost its status as the world’s cultural capital during the 1930s and had never truly regained it. That title had moved to New York, a place where Smith knew vaudeville and dancing were not much in demand. So, after a brief attempt to achieve new success in Paris, she turned to Rome instead. In the Italian capital, she experienced a late period of prosperity, running a successful club throughout the 1950s.
She hosted many famous guests, including Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Martin Luther King Jr. , and others. She even formed a close friendship with the deposed King Farouk I of Egypt, who brought her gifts from his travels, such as bottles of perfume and cigars. One aspect of Smith’s life that has drawn considerable comment in recent years is her sexuality.
In 1927 in Paris, she met and began a relationship with a saxophonist named Peter DuCongé. They married in 1929, but the marriage soon faced problems when Smith learned of his infidelities. They effectively separated in the 1930s but never officially divorced, remaining legally married until DuCongé’s death in 1967. It also seems highly likely that Smith was bisexual.
In the second half of the 1920s, one of the most prominent performers at Bricktop’s was Josephine Baker, the American jazz singer who became the first African American woman to star in a major film with her 1927 appearance in Siren of the Tropics. Bricktop told one of Baker’s sons many years later that the two had been in a romantic relationship in the 1920s when Baker was a regular performer at the club. Smith closed her last club on the Via Veneto in Rome in 1961. She was sixty-seven years old, and when asked why she was closing it, she said she was tired of staying up until dawn every day.
She returned to America, where she would occasionally come out of retirement to open clubs for brief periods in New York, though these were not sustained efforts. Instead, she devoted her later years largely to charity work and became a devout Catholic. She died in her sleep in her Manhattan apartment on February 1, 1984, at the age of eighty-nine. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
Although she had been away from the spotlight for years and the jazz scene had faded, news of her death received extensive coverage in the New York Times and other prominent publications.