Similarly, there was no shortage of young female dancers to perform at the cabarets and nightclubs that were flourishing as never before. Early in 1939, having been in Paris less than a year, a young South African girl auditioned as a dancer at a Montmartre cabaret. The twenty-one-year-old Sadie Rigal had left her father and five siblings behind in a Johannesburg boarding house, determined to make it on her own in Europe where she dreamed of joining the Ballets Russes. Sadie’s father David had taken responsibility for bringing up the family when her mother, two years after Sadie’s birth in 1917, was confined to a mental institution following the death of her youngest son in the flu pandemic. Life was tough for the Rigal family, but Sadie clearly had talent and, in exchange for generally ‘helping out’, a cousin who ran a small dance school agreed to give her free lessons. She started to win competitions, graduated to a more advanced teacher and, after performing one last solo in Cape Town, departed for Paris in 1938. Here she studied with Russian teachers, of whom there were many in Paris at the time, prior to the big interview that was her life’s ambition.
Meanwhile, to make ends meet, she auditioned for the famous Bal Tabarin music hall at 36 Rue Victor Massé, just behind the Place Pigalle, which had opened in 1904 and become hugely successful. The Bal Tabarin floor show was one of the best known in Paris, with semi-naked girls cavorting in unusual positions, gracefully performing acrobatics and spinning around a cage, some hanging on with their teeth as others bent backwards. Man Ray, the surrealist photographer, made a famous series of images of the cabaret in 1936 in which the girls look like a fantastic human tree. When Pierre Sandrini became Artistic Director as well as co-owner in 1928 he introduced ballet to the floor shows, with costumes designed by Erté, which transformed the performances into spectacular tableaux. There was a new show every year, each with a theme, such as The Planets or The Symphony, some of them inspired by historical figures such as Cleopatra and Mme de Pompadour.
In the summer of 1939 Sandrini, who was to be Sadie’s saviour in the precarious years to come, encouraged her and a friend to go to London to audition for the Ballets Russes. Both were accepted but were then told to wait in Paris because the company was due to travel there in December. So they returned to the French capital but, once war broke out, found themselves stranded as the Ballets Russes never came. David Rigal scraped together enough money to offer his daughter a ticket home to South Africa, but she refused, embracing uncertainty and deciding to chance her luck in Paris.
The Bal Tabarin was never quite as famous as the Folies Bergère, which after 1918 became enshrined as something of a national monument. There were even wild claims that the magnificent breasts of the dancers were somehow symbolic of the best of France that had been fought for in the recent war. It was where thousands of men, seduced by the legend of ‘Gay Paree’ and Parisian debauchery, paid to watch increasing amounts of naked flesh revealed on stage amid increasingly sumptuous costumes and sets. Yet the Folies Bergère launched the careers not just of scantily clad dancers but of many stars including Maurice Chevalier, the singer and actress Mistinguett and the black jazz singer and dancer Josephine Baker. It was also where another talented young girl, born in Dublin with neither money nor parents that she knew of, learned how to dance and entertain.