Jaeger’s Dance Hall took off like a rocket, people jazzing and foxtrotting to a ragtime band until they dropped. It seemed that people wanted nothing more than to enjoy themselves during the convulsion of war. It was the spring of 1918 and people everywhere were sick of attrition.
It was an eye-opener for Nellie. She couldn’t fail to notice that many of the men went home at the end of the night with a dance hostess who had been a complete stranger to them a handful of hours earlier. “The young ladies get very good tips for that,” Jaeger said phlegmatically. “Can’t blame ’em, can you?”
On Armistice night there had been couples—again strangers to each other—actually fornicating in the shadows in the dance hall. Outside in the streets an orgy was taking place. “Copulation,” Jaeger said, even more phlegmatically. “Makes the world go round, don’t it? And better than killing each other. Fucking’s natural, innit?”
Nellie recoiled from the word, but she had to agree, if reluctantly. So many had been lost in the war, she wondered—attempting to put a veneer of refinement on the base vulgarity of the proceedings—if they weren’t following some instinctive compulsion to restock the human race. Like frogs.
She supposed she should come to terms with the concept of “fun.” She didn’t want any for herself but she was more than happy to provide it for others, for a sum. There was nothing wrong with having a good time as long as she didn’t have to have one herself.
One of the dance hostesses—Maud, an Irish girl—had died that night of an opium overdose. It was Nellie who had found her, slumped behind the bar in the hour before dawn.
Jaeger was nowhere to be seen, so Nellie mobilized a couple of rough Army privates on furlough to carry the girl out, paying them with a bottle of whisky each to get rid of her. “Where?” one of them asked. “I don’t know,” Nellie said. “Use your brain. Try the river.” With any luck, the girl would meander through the Essex marshes and eventually be washed out to sea. Nellie never saw the soldiers again and had no idea if they followed her suggestion. “Out of sight, out of mind” was one of the useful epithets that had guided her life.
Jaeger was merely a stepping-stone to Nellie’s future, an apprenticeship. She was hatching a grander plan. After the Armistice, she sold her share in the dance hall to him for five hundred pounds. Afterwards, he was raided on several occasions, found guilty of “selling intoxicating liquors” and allowing the dance hall to be the “habitual resort of women of ill-repute,” with a three-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound fine on each occasion. After the fourth raid in a row, he admitted defeat and left the nightclub business.
* * *
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With her profits from Jaeger’s Dance Hall, Nellie started a cabaret club (“Cabaret intime,” as she referred to it) called “the Moulin Vert” (or “the Moolinvurt,” as those with no French called it), inspired by nostalgia for the Paris of her younger years.
Taking the lease on a filthy cellar in Brewer Street, Nellie transformed it into a palace—gilded fittings and a sprung dance floor, little café tables à la Montparnasse around the edge of the room. A vision—“A mise en scène,” she said to the veteran of the Artists Rifles she engaged to paint the place. He obliged with murals in the style of Renoir. You could imagine you were on a Parisian street, Nellie said, and in an out-of-character gesture she gave him an extra five pounds in gratitude.
The Twenties roared in and the Moulin Vert opened with a bang. There was dancing between the cabaret acts—culled from all the West End theatres—and nearly the entire chorus from the Gaiety pitched up after midnight. Nellie hired a Tzigane orchestra—not French, it was true, but foreign enough for the crowd that inhabited the “Moolinvurt.” Liquor flowed freely and so did the money. They were rarely raided; Sergeant Maddox had continued to work for Nellie.
A few months after they opened, Nellie heard that the artist who had painted her murals had shot himself. He wasn’t the first soldier unable to cope with the peace. Nellie and Edith raised a glass to his memory after hours.
After a couple of years, Nellie had an offer that was too good to refuse and she sold the club. She marked the occasion by buying each of the girls a single strand of the new Ciro pearls with little diamanté clasps.
With the money from the Moulin Vert, Nellie bought the premises for her new club. Looking for a name, she thought of the hoard of glittering jewels that she had taken from Great Percy Street. She considered “the Diamond.” “The Sapphire”? Or perhaps “the Ruby”? And then she thought of the necklace that had given her a start in London. And, like Goldilocks, she found the name that was just right. The Amethyst.
Currently, Nellie’s empire comprised five nightclubs—the Pixie, the Foxhole, the Sphinx, and the Crystal Cup were the others. But the jewel in the crown had always been and always would be the Amethyst.
Before Holloway, Nellie could be found most nights in the little draught-proof cashier’s box at the entrance to the club. She ruled her kingdom from there—settling bills and accounts at the end of the evening, handing change to the waiters, taking entrance fees. One-pound entry. Members only. Paying the pound made you a member. The club took in a thousand pounds a week. It was better than a gold mine.
No one got in for free, not even the Prince of Wales. Last week, Rudolph Valentino had been here, the week before it was the young Prince George. He had no money on him, of course—these people never had cash and his companions had to scrabble in their own pockets for the fee. Nellie had a way of making people feel she was doing them a favour by giving them entry to the Amethyst. That was just the beginning of the fleecing. You couldn’t even leave without handing over a shilling to the cloakroom girl if you wanted to retrieve your coat at the end of the night. Plus a tip, of course. The Amethyst ran on tips. The dance hostesses were paid three pounds a week, but on a good Saturday—the Boat Race or the Derby—they could go home with as much as eighty pounds in their purses. No one ever asked for a raise. No one dared.
The Amethyst did not have pretensions to the haut monde like the Embassy club, nor was it scraping the gutter for custom like some of the flea-ridden dives of Curzon Street.
The London gangs who all streamed into the club from time to time treated it like a battlefield. The Elephant and Castle mob, Derby Sabini’s roughs, Monty Abrahams and his followers, the Hoxton gang, the Hackney Huns, the Frazzinis. Luca Frazzini, the Frazzinis’ chieftain, was a neat, dapper man who was often to be found sitting quietly at a table in the corner of the Amethyst, a glass of (free) champagne sitting on the table in front of him, barely touched. He could have passed for a stockbroker. There was an entente cordiale between himself and Nellie. They went back a long way, to the days of Jaeger’s Dance Hall. They trusted each other. Almost.