Bricktop Author:Bricktop, James Haskins Bricktop is truly one of the most legendary and enduring figures of 20th-century American cultural history. Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Waugh wrote about her, T.S. Eliot put her in a poem, and Cole Porter wrote "Miss Otis Regrets" for her to sing. She gave Duke Ellington his first New York break and shepherded a young Josephine Baker. Ev... more »erybody who was anybody haunted Bricktop's club in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s and the Mexico City and Rome of the three decades following. And she was friend, entertainer, confidante, mother hen and sometimes banker to them all.
Here is the candid, high-spirited story of a scrappy redhead "colored girl" from West Virginia and Chicago who combined her unerring eye for talent and chic with a uniquely American brashness and an eminently European sophistication to become the toast of two continents. Her book is crammed with anecdotes about the rich, powerful and famous of several decades, from Jack Johnson, John Barrymore, Jelly Roll Morton and Legs Diamond to Edward G. Robinson, Tallulah Bankhead, Gloria Swanson, John Steinbeck, Django Reinhardt, Frank Sinatra and a dazzling array of kings and princes.« less