The Blues: Where Love Ends Badly

In paris of the 1960s, Mae Mercer reigned at the Blues Bar—one of Maurice Girodias’s four restaurants, neighboring his notorious Olympia Press on rue Saint-Séverin. Her fans were legion. The Beatles often came to hear her. Her thump&throb delivery of the blues was like no other. It was the real thing. It was sometimes inaccurately described as “gutwrenching.” It probably soared, though, from her thighs to her Rubenesque hips, then syncopated there briefly before launching itself full-force to her at-the-ready larynx. The resulting sonorous growl, its rapturous profundity, cautioned as well as excited—and still does on CD and You-Tube. For most audiences, attending her performance was a transformative adventure. Danger excites. At the risk of losing all things morally dear, the trespassing listener felt compelled, nonetheless, to proceed—to remain in league with the inherent threat of Mercer’s spell until the song’s finish. The journey dared by some or many could be likened to a quest for truth—one that stuns while quelling recessive pain—an aural opioid whose effect on the affected might well have seemed everlasting.

She was beautiful. Broad-hipped and very broad-shouldered, back straight as a caryatid’s, she must have been nearly six feet. Her black hair—shiny, banged—was worn like a helmet: Louise Brooks, sort of. Her presence was undeniably commanding. It ordered you to watch and listen . . . and you did.

She died on October 29, 2008, in Northridge, California—a great distance from Battleboro, North Carolina, where she was born June 12, 1932, and ran away from at age fifteen. I met her in Paris when I was the editor at the Olympia Press. I’d been hired after translating The Bedside Odyssey from French. Maurice Girodias, my employer (and, later, a good friend for over thirty years), was dating Mae Mercer and, possibly at or around the same time, Marpessa Dawn, of the Cannes-winning film Black Orpheus. Mae and Marpessa probably knew of each other; expat Paris is a small town. Whether or not they knew that they were being two-timed is anyone’s guess.

I’d sometimes run into Mae when she stopped by the office. Something always clicks on some level when one black person meets another, maybe even more so in a foreign land. I was then in my twenties—an insecure eager beaver, desirous of making good because at that age it was the thing to do. She was nice to me. We small-talked. Athough her speaking voice was shylike, I could discern a husky, defensive undertone. I can’t say that I knew her well, but rather that I got to know of her through Girodias, her boss and suitor. The late basketball legend Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain, also vying for her affection, referred to his rival as Girodi-ASS, sometimes to his face.

Eventually Mae dropped The Stilt to become Girodias’s main squeeze. He was her boss, after all. Through him, she could do what she loved doing most: sing the blues. And with Mae filling the Blues Bar night after night, Girodias was able to segue from illiquidity (caused by Olympia Press debts and lawsuits) to bona fide solvency (for a while, anyway). Mae was good for Girodias sexually, and definitely good for business. (Payday for press staffers like me had finally ceased to be illusory.) He was good for her, too—at least where her career was concerned.

“While i was putting on my tuxedo, I kept telling Mae to hurry or we’d be late. She was still taking a bath,” Girodias to me, one night after work. “She mocked me, then when I went to the bathroom to further insist that she dry herself and get dressed, she grabbed my lapels and yanked me down into the tub. Her stamina is remarkable!” Girodias loved this sort of thing—a show of uncharacteristic behavior.

Perhaps not so much, though, on that night where La Mercer attempted to slaughter him with the spike heel of her shoe. They’d had a serious...