Shown in the photograph is Alderson, West Virginia native, Ada “Bricktop” Smith in front of her Paris nightclub, Monico. With help from composer and songwriter Cole Porter, Bricktop moved into the nightclub in 1931, and it became the highlight of the nascent Paris jazz scene. Among the performers in the club were Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Mabel Mercer, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington and Josephine Baker. Among her patrons were many American ex-pats including writers Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, John Steinbeck and Gertrude Stein.
Other celebrities were the Prince of Wales, King Farouk, and the Irish American gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond.
In 1937, Edward R. Murrow broadcast a performance by jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli on short wave radio to the United States.
World War II brought an end to Bricktop’s management of Monico when she left Europe in October 1939 on one of the last boats to sail to the United States after Hitler invaded Poland.
Bricktop was given her nickname on account of her red hair by Barron D. Wilkins while she was performing in his Harlem cabaret. She died in 1984 at age 89 and is buried at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
During interviews, she would say she was born in “west, by god, West Virginia.” At her funeral, Noel Coward said, “…the people who were lucky enough to know her in Paris and afterward won’t forget how she carried us along with laughter and joy.”
