Paulette Duval — La Belle Duval (1924) 🇺🇸

“La Belle Duval” they called her in Paris, where nightly her chansonettes filled a tiny theater on the boulevards with her admirers.

“She has no technique,” complained musicians. “She is so young,” answered her devotees. “She does not know life,” said cynical Paris. “When has one heard of her affaires de cœur?” “She is an artist,” retorted her friends. “She does not have to be besmirched by disillusionment in order to sing of the heart. She is aloof and so beautiful.”

One night in the audience was Flo Ziegfeld, drawn to hear this Paulette Duval who had charmed so many. And the next day it had been decided that “La Belle Duval” would come to America and appear in the “Follies.” That was characteristic of Ziegfeld. He would have her “appear,” not sing, necessarily. For he realized as the others had not, that people went not so much to hear “La Belle Duval” as to see her.

The first time I saw her was during the rehearsals of the Ziegfeld “Follies” last summer. She had just learned a dance from one of Ned Wayburn’s assistants — a dance that consisted chiefly of undulating across the stage, tossing the long ruffled train of her Spanish costume in spirals and stamping her tiny feet. There was a weird, arresting fascination about her gyrations. She was like a peacock quickening its pace to jazz.

Fanny Brice sat in the front row conferring with a composer in the orchestra over a comic last line for her song. “With a figure like that in this show,” she announced to the audience at large, looking up at Paulette Duval, “what chance has a working girl got?”

The next time that I saw her she was at work in Monsieur Beaucaire, playing Mme. Pompadour, the most famous of the mistresses of Louis XV. of France.

She was beautiful as ever, and she was stately, cold and calculating, as befitted the woman who, for years, grasped the reins of government in her tiny hands.

“No, we never saw her dance before we engaged her,” Rudolph Valentino told me. “We needed only to see her.”

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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, July 1924