A great profile of former Hotel Chelsea Resident and painter Herbert Gentry (1919 - 2003) iappears in this week's issue of the Hartford Courant. Mr. Gentry lived in Paris for many years, as well as at the Hotel Chelsea. The profile focuses mainly on Mr. Gentry's year's in Paris.
"If Gentry's art, which was far-better known in Europe than in his native land, is a revelation to Americans, his equally surprising, colorful, cosmopolitan life has the makings of a Hollywood bio-pic.
Gentry was quite literally born into the world of art and entertainment, according to his widow, Mary Anne Rose.
His mother, Theresa, was a smart, gorgeous, gregarious showgirl, Rose says. A well-known Ziegfeld Follies chorine, she danced at the glitziest theaters on Broadway and had plenty of friends in the art and showbiz worlds. One of her close buddies and fellow dancers was Josephine Baker, who was later to become the toast of pre-war Paris when African American entertainers were the pop rage of all France.
Because of his mother's semi-celebrity status as a stylish hoofer, he grew up in Harlem's Sugar Hill in a home frequented by dancers, musicians, composers, writers and artists. Duke Ellington and the famous white orchestra leader Paul Whiteman visited the Gentry home, where the buzz among globetrotting entertainers was often about Paris as a magical city of light and enlightenment.
Going regularly to the theater with his beautiful, popular mother, Gentry got a vivid backstage view of the entertainment business. His loving, attentive mother made sure young Gentry took piano lessons to insure that her son was cultured. And the Big Apple's then robust jazz scene of the 1930s and 1940s nourished his burgeoning love for jazz.
Drafted in 1942, he served in the Army, a life-changing, eye-opening experience that took him to Corsica, Algeria, Marseilles, Morocco, Strasburg, Salzburg and, most important, to Paris.
Discharged in 1945, he returned to New York and, pushed by family pressures, resumed his business administration studies at New York University, which had been interrupted by the war. All the while, he longed to return to Paris, then an exciting center of post-war intellectual and artistic ferment, an almost mythical symbol of self-liberation and the bohemian life.
Thanks to the GI Bill, Gentry could afford to make the giant existential leap from boring accounting classes at New York University to the stimulating cabaret scene and academic life in Paris where he studied at L'Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and Ecole des Hautes Etudes from 1946 to 1949.
Gentry went to Paris not just to escape the racism that was then endemic in America, Rose says, but because Paris had always had a magical, romantic hold on his mind since childhood. Besides, Paris was the home of modernism and artistic freedom, even an escape from his bourgeois relatives who wanted him to go into business, not throw his life away on anything as frivolous as art.
``All his mother's dancer friends had gone to Paris, but she stayed home to take care of Herb. His dream had always been to go to Paris,'' Rose says.
While in Paris, Gentry and the first of his three wives, the singer and painter Honey Johnson, established a bustling cabaret in Montparnasse, which was an art gallery and salon by day and a popular jazz club and saloon by night.
Chez Honey, as the Left Bank nightclub was called, became a gathering place for intellectuals, painters and musicians of every color and nationality. The club's principle rule was that racism would never be tolerated in this polyglot, multiracial melting pot of a cabaret. Gentry's only other rule was that ``you had to be hip and sensitive.''
Among Chez Honey's celebrated clientele were France's intellectual power couple, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Other luminaries at the swinging salon included such famous expatriate African American writers as James Baldwin and Richard Wright; such painters as Romare Bearden (one of Gentry's closest friends), Beauford Delaney and the jazz-obsessed Larry Rivers; and such entertainers as Eartha Kitt, Orson Welles and Marcel Marceau. The club's nightly jam sessions also drew a legion of jazz greats including Ellington; Lena Horne; Louis Armstrong; Sidney Bechet; Dizzy Gillespie; Benny Goodman; the saxophonists Don Byas, James Moody and Zoot Sims; drummer Kenny Clarke; and pianist John Lewis.
A charming, eminently likable bon vivant, Gentry was pal and gracious host to virtually all the cultural celebrities who were then making Paris an alluring, international cultural beacon, Rose recalls.
``Herb said he only missed out on Picasso, and that modern jazz in Europe began in his club,'' she adds."
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