 Bricktop
by Bricktop (Editor), James Haskins, (Contributor)
"My greatest
claim to fame is that I discovered Bricktop before Cole Porter."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bricktop was
a legend among legends, the genuine article. Fitzgerald, Hemingway,
and Waugh wrote about her, T.S. Eliot put her in a poem, and Cole
Porter wrote "Miss Otis Regrets" for her to sing. She
gave Duke Ellington his first New York break and shepherded a
young Josephine Baker. Everybody who was anybody haunted Bricktop's
club in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s and the Mexico City and
Rome of the three decades following. And she was friend, entertainer,
confidante, mother hen, and sometimes banker to them all.
Hers is the
candid, high-spirited story of a scrappy redhead "colored
girl" from West Virginia and Chicago who combined her unerring
eye for talent and chic with a uniquely American brashness and
an eminently European sophistication to become the toast of two
continents. Her book is crammed with anecdotes about the rich,
powerful, and famous of several decades, from Jack Johnson, John
Barrymore, Jelly Roll Morton, and Legs Diamond to Edward G. Robinson,
Tallulah Bankhead, Gloria Swanson, John Steinbeck, Django Reinhardt,
Frank Sinatra, and a dazzling array of kings and princes.
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