Music: Caf

The De Gaullist movement has found its loveliest voice. She sang last week at a new Manhattan cabaret, the Blue Angel, opened by balding, long-nosed, toothy Herbert Jacoby, ex-secretary to France’s imprisoned ex-Premier Leon Blum. Chic as a Paris bandbox, its jet-black walls garnished with white lilies and orchids, the Blue Angel gave off more than a suggestion of the smarter mortuaries. But it ceased to be funereal when a swarm of De Gaullist refugees and friends produced an opening-night crush of such confusion that New York Daily News Columnist Danton Walker (see p. 54), for one of the few times in his professional life, was presented with his own check.

Many of the throng went especially to hear Claude Alphand sing. She is a beautiful, blonde, rather waxwork-like Frenchwoman who accompanies her balladry on the guitar. Rated by many as the best French chanteuse since Yvette Guilbert and Lucienne Boyer, she sings with a feline throatiness and great stylistic elegance. Her favorite song is:

Prenez le temps d’aimer.

De vivre et de chanter;

Prenez le bonheur quand il passe—Alphand’s delivery of such sentiments makes her worth $750 a week to the Blue Angel’s Jacoby.

Mme. Alphand has only recently turned professional. Before the war she was prominent in Paris society; she is the wife of Herve Alphand, former Treasury attaché of the Vichy Government in Washington. Her father, Rober-Raynaud, founded La Dépêche Marocaine, the first French daily newspaper in Morocco. When the Alphands arrived in the U.S. three years ago, Herve Alphand said: “In France now there are only two things to do: to work and to be silent. I have come here to work and to be silent.” But he did not stay silent long. Less than a year after his arrival, he announced his disagreement with Vichy policy, resigned, went to England where he joined the De Gaullist fighting forces.

Mme. Alphand had to find a way to earn her living. Her friends had long admired her repertory of some 200 salty popular songs. Helped by a group of them (Lady Mendl, Henry Bernstein, Elsa Maxwell), she began appearing at a French hangout called Le Petit Palais. Among Manhattan’s Francophile intelligentsia, her nostalgic music was sensational. Man hattan’s Liberty Music Shop issued an album of Alphand recordings, quickly sold 1,000 copies.

Today, though Manhattan’s swankest pub-crawlers flock to hear her, Mme. Alphand is already tired of professional life. Says she, with a Gallic shrug: “If I am not to sing, then I must sew, I must make hats or something.” But she admits that she is not doing badly in the new world, says: “Heaven was very charming to me.”