“What motivated me to attend an early afternoon screening of the film at a San Francisco movie theater was the hope of seeing Bricktop. She was a Jazz Age figure with remarkable flair: a sassy, red-haired, freckle-faced African American saloon-keeper who was besties with Cole Porter and F. Scott Fitzgerald, was always elegantly attired in Elsa Schiaparelli or Lanvin, consorted with royalty, faced down gangsters in Chicago, New York and Paris, and eventually owned (and lost) a home in the upscale Paris suburb of Bougival.”
Author: T Denean Sharpley-Whiting
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and French at Vanderbilt University. Her latest book is the collection, The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” (Bloomsbury, 2009).