We called him the madonna of the sailors, for her sea shanties, androgynous, lesbian, bi, boyish, anar, friend of intellectuals, model for painters, Kisling, Picabia Fugita, Bacon, painters and intellectuals of the interwar period. Suzy Solidor, a name that slaps like a whip on the most beautiful asses in Paris.
All Paris of the Roaring Twenties who only think of celebrating, turning the page on the Great War, breaking and rejecting social conventions. Suzy Solidor in his cabaret “La vie parisienne”quai Voltaire is one of the muses of the Paris Scandal.
“The nightclub” was the great social novelty of Paris in the 1920s. Suzy Solidor settled in several places in the capital, rue de Montpensier, rue Balzac, rue Saint Anne. She launched Charles Trénet, and never surrounded herself than homosexual singers.
In her show, like a mermaid wrapped in a fishing net, Solidor connects songs and poems, those of his friend Jean Cocteau who will say of Suzy’s voice that it comes from the depth of her sex. The legendary figure of the airmail, Jean Mermoz, falls madly in love with the icon of Parisian nights. “Mermoz came into my life like an airplane” she will say.
The Roaring Twenties Crash in the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Paris will never be Paris again, but the capital has not yet experienced the worst, the occupation since 1940. There are those who flee, there are the resistance fighters, the collaborators and then there are the in-betweens, the libertarians like Arletty and Suzy Solidor who welcome the German officers with sympathy, even adding the French version of Lily Marleen in her turn, which will earn her a blame from the purification committee and a ban on singing in her cabaret after the liberation during 5 years.
1983, Suzy Solidor dies at the age of 83 in Cagnes sur Mer, far, very far from the Parisian chic of the Roaring Twenties.