Club Classics

Le Boeuf sur le Toit and what it has to do with today's subculture. "I'm everywhere, I'm so Jean Cocteau" could have been the lyric...

The program for the original ballet-farce Le Boeuf sur le Toit, illustrated by Raoul Dufy.

Like many legendary creatives, Jean Cocteau was a club kid.

Nightlife has always been an incubator of the arts, a petri dish growing the culture that will dominate society in the next decade. Subculture thrives at night, in the margins of polite society, in spaces where people can feel free to fly their freak flags high and explore what it means to be their most authentic selves.

This was no different for Jean Cocteau and his now-legendary group of contemporaries in 1920s Paris, in particular, at a bar/cabaret/club which remains in operation today: Le Boeuf sur le Toit.

Clubs have long been the starting point for a personality to emerge – just ask the late Pope Francis, who was a bouncer in Buenos Aires in his young adulthood, and who cited the lost souls he rejected as a reason why he turned to the Church.

Like all great clubs, Le Boeuf made its early reputation for being the spot frequented by the hottest ‘band’ of the time: a group of composers which called themselves Les Six, and were arranged, marketed and cultivated by their unofficial seventh member, Cocteau.

In 1921, with Cocteau and Les Six’s encouragement and support, Le Boeuf sur le toit opened – inspired by one of the group’s avant-garde performance pieces. Jean Cocteau had choreographed a ballet-farce, played on piano by three players, which parodied American ragtime and jazz compositions. It was fun, and very popular. The bar where they had been gathering to riff was undergoing a transformation and move, and so when owner Louis Moysès reopened his cabaret in the 8eme arrondissement, he christened it Le Boeuf sur le Toit.

It was an immediate success. Everyone from Marcel Duchamp to Pablo Picasso, Josephine Baker and even sickly Marcel Proust were regulars. Proust was not long for the world, and famously declined to leave his bed on account of his asthma, yet still, Le Boeuf called to him (he complained that the bar was ‘deadly’ for his lungs, and compared it to a roadhouse – the elder statesman of gay Paris gave his version of a blessing. He passed away a few months after it opened).

Le Boeuf was where one could find Prince Yusupov recounting the tale of how he conspired to kill (ra-ra) Rasputin before fleeing Russia. Jean Hugo, the Surrealist painter and great-grandson of Victor (nepo baby alert!) called it “the crossroads of destinies, the cradle of love affairs, the heath of discords, the navel of Paris.”