By Mary Blume
Published: SATURDAY, JUNE 12, 1999
PARIS: By the 1920s, Montparnasse was so famous that one could, it was said, buy a direct ticket from Des Moines, Iowa, to the Café du Dome. The quarters ample hub was Kiki, the artists model and good-time girl who was, Er Hemingway wrote, "about as close as people get nowadays to being a Queen but that, of course, is very different from being a lady."
Hemingways words e from his preface to Kikis memoirs, written in 1929 when she was just 28. There is clearly something to be said for writing memoirs when young: along with Kikis, the liveliest evocation of the period is John Glassemoirs of Montparnasse," pleted when he was 23 and thought, wrongly, that he was dying from tuberculosis. "The celebrated Kiki" was one of the first locals he met.
"Her maquillage was a work of art in itself … her mouth painted a deep scarlet that emphasized the sly erotic humor of its tours," Glassco wrote. "Her face was beautiful from every angle, but I liked it best in full profile, when it had the lineal purity of a stuffed salmon."
Kiki ainted by Soutine, Modigliani, Foujita and Kisling and most famously photographed by Man Ray, whose lover she was fht stormy years. She sang bawdy songs in nightclubs, showed her naive paintings at what the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune called "the most successful vernissage of the year," and in 1929 was named Queen of Montparnasse.
The memoirs she wrote that year were republished this spring in Paris by Hazan (an Ameri edition came out last year) in a richly illustrated edition piled by Billy Kluver, who was a student in Paris when Kiki died in 1953 and remembers the neer pictures of Foujita and other artists gathered at her deathbed. The New York Times printed an obituary and Life magazine gave Kiki three pages, ending with a memory from one of her chums, "We laughed, my God how we laughed."
Born Alice Erine Prin in Burgundy, Kiki had a wretched childhood that could only lead to laughter or despair, and being solid and brave she chose laughter. Her parents were unmarried, her mother, a linotypist, went to Paris a Kiki with her grandmother, whom she adored. She didnt learn mu school, she wrote, because her teacher disliked the poor and when, at 12, she was obliged to join her mother in Paris to find work, she boarded the train with a sausage and red wio show off and to hide my sorrow."
Harsh, degrading jobs followed, lightened by her lifelong joy in decorating herself. She would crumble a petal from her mothers fake geraniums to give color to her cheeks and was fired from a nasty job at a bakery because she darkened her eyebrows with burnt matchsticks.
With her large and splendid body she drifted into posing for artists, including Utrillo who, to her astonishment when she looked at his vas, had painted a landscape. She was also doing such menial jobs as dishwashing. "I was so filled with gaiety that I wasnt affected by my poverty and words like the blues were like Hebrew to me — I simply didnt uand them."
Large in spirit and, increasingly, in girth as Man Rays photos over the years show, Kiki was a natural for Montparnasse, but even naturals use help; she moved in with an amiable journalist named Henri Broca after breaking up with Man Ray in 1929.
Djuna Barnes had already described Kiki for an Ameri magazine, "Charm," in 1924, and local English-language neers regularly recorded her activities; Broca