Sive Norden
Folies
Bergere first-class nude model
Interview
with a nude… by John Kobler
Cosmopolitan
magazine April 1953
Καλλονές
Θεάματα
Sive Norden
BEFORE GOING BACKSTAGE, Sive Norden, like any show
girl, skims show-business trade paper.
AN EXPERIENCED HAND with the frowzy, feathered
habiliments of her calling,
Sive helps a colleague with her costume.
Sive Norden
IN
“FOLIES” HIERARCHY,
Sive's
title is “first-class nude model.”
An ambitious
girl, she hopes that someday a producer will give her a chance to act or,
perhaps, sing.
Interview
with a Nude
A
Swedish girl of Paris’ "Folies Bergere”
has
won stardom by doing nothing—naked
By
JOHN KOBLER
Among the
allurements of the current revew at Paris’ “Folies Bergére,” one of the richest
properties in all show business, is a big, handsome brunette with the odd name
of Sive Norden.
Here, seven
nights a week and Sunday ‘matinee, Sive sashays out upon the well-worn boards
wearing a snow-white evening gown. She swiftly divests herself of this, and
caparisoned in a rhinestone fig leaf, capers through a mildly erotic aquatic
number entitled “Fairy Scene Under Water." The net effect invariably draws
lusty applause from the 2,600 spectators —Americans predominating — who fill
the seats and standing room at every summer performance.
During the
course of the long, noisy, gaudy show, scarcely distinguishable in style or
content from the fifty-odd others produced at the “Folies” since 1886, Sive
appears thirteen times in various degrees of undress. She will probably be so
employed for quite a while to come. A “Folies” revue normally runs two years
before Paul Derval, the frosty, humorless multimillionaire who has owned the
gold mine for thirty-five years, decides to mount a new one.
In the
somewhat rigid echelon of Derval’s command, Sive bears the rank of mannequin nu de premiére classe (first class
nude model). It is a rank slightly above the ordinary mannequins
nus of the chorus line, but below the mannequins
habillés (dressed), mannequins
parlants (speaking), and the danseuses.
At the top of the ladder, an eminence at which Sive can only gaze wistfully,
stand the featured performers, among whom have been Mistinguette,
Maurice Chevalier, Josephine
Baker. Derval has paid them as much as $2,000 a week.
The nudes, to
be sure, have no very exacting duties, not being required to act, sing, dance,
or even look intelligent. Yet they are the trade-marks, the most characteristic
ingredients of the whole “Folies” fruitcake.
Derval,
however, does not consider even a first-class nude to be worth more than 55,000
francs (about $157) a month, which is what he pays Sive. Ordinary nudes get
only ninety dollars. When they complain that this is insufficient to keep a
beautiful body and soul together in inflationary Paris, Derval has a stock
rejoinder. “What,” he says, “no boyfriends?”
While
visiting backstage at the “Folies” not long ago, I was introduced to Sive, and
being incorrigibly curious about the occupational problems of other people, I
pursued the acquaintance. She agreed to receive me in her lodgings the
following afternoon.
She
Lives Alone in a Walk-up
She lives
alone on the sixth and top floor of a shabby little family hotel directly
behind one of the city’s best-known churches —the Madeleine. There is an
elevator, but it has not functioned for many years. I climbed the five flights
and rapped on a door to which was affixed a card saying: “Mme Sive Norden, artiste théâtrale.” A fluty voice called
out in English marked with an accent I could not place, “A moment please. I
dress."
I counted the
holes in the hall carpet. There were forty-seven. Presently the door flew open.
The “Folies” first-class nude gave my
hand the kind of sensible, vigorous shake one might expect from a Scout
mistress. She seemed even taller than onstage, at least five feet ten in her
stocking feet, and I guessed her weight to be around a hundred and thirty.
She is
thirty-one, the average age of “Folies” nudes. She has wide, sky-blue eyes and
freckles. Viewed thus at close range, with clothes on — she was wearing a
nondescript brown cotton dress — she could not have looked less gay Paree nor
more domestic. I was not altogether surprised, therefore, to learn later that
she had previously been employed as a baby’s nurse.
She led me
into a sparsely furnished room the size of a piano box and waved me toward a
badly sprung sofa. A narrow window overlooked the roof of the Madeleine. “The
view is nice,” my hostess commented, “if you like churches. You drink a little
cognac with me?”
I finally
recognized the accent. “You're Swedish," I said.
“So.
From Stockholm."
"Isn't that sort of unusual, a foreigner in the
Folies?" T asked.
“Mais non,” she insisted. “Is more foreign girls maybe
than French. Many Poles, Germans, English, Americans, everybody. Girls from
every country.”
I said I
would love to join her in a cognac, and she stepped into an adjoining room to
fetch it. Through the open door. I could see that it was small, too, and
contained only a bed, a wardrobe, and a dressing table. There was no sign of a
bathroom. Later, when I wanted to wash up, Sive directed me to a bathroom two
floors below that she shares with fourteen other tenants.
She came back
carrying two pony glasses of cognac. As we sipped them, I questioned’ her about
her background. Nothing whatever in it, I gathered, had foreshadowed her present
activities.
Her real name
is Nordenstedt. “Sive” is a feminization of Siva, the Hindu deity. “My mother
is reading a book about India when I am born," Sive explained.
There are few
more solidly, ultrarespectably middle-class families in Stockholm than Sive's.
For decades, her father. now retired on a snug income, managed the local branch
of an international cable company. She has two older sisters, both well married
and with several children apiece.
Until she was
nineteen, Sive attended private school. Her father. an austere man, believed
that at that age a girl should either marry or work instead of looking to her
parents for support. Accordingly, Sive learned stenography and landed a job in
the foreign ministry. Secretly, she longed to go on the stage, but for a
Nordenstedt such a career was unthinkable.
She Married a Vegetarian
What finally
drove her to defy convention was an unfortunate experience with vegetarianism.
She married a Stockholm businessman who not only touched no meat himself but
would allow none in the house. He was equally rabid about tobacco and alcohol.
After five years of this abstention, Sive fell in love with another man, a meat
eater, smoker, and aquavit drinker. She didn't disgrace her family by actually
running away with him, but she didn't remain under her husband's roof, either.
She took off for England.
Eager to live
with an English family in order to learn the language, she offered to take care
of small children. Her first employer, a rich widower with four of them, turned
out to be a vegetarian. He was also a skinflint who would pay Sive no more than
two pounds a week, less than ten dollars. He promised to teach her English,
though, and she stuck it out until she was reasonably fluent.
She then
crossed the Channel, became nurse to some French children at no wages at all —just
room and board— and gradually acquired a working knowledge of another language.
Back in Stockholm, meanwhile, her vegetarian husband won a divorce from her.
“Children I
like," Sive told me, “and living in nice houses I like. (My family’s house
in Stockholm is very nice.) But the papa he is always making—how you say?”
“Passes?” I
ventured.
“Yah. So I go.”
Idling around
Paris, wondering what to do next, Sive ran into an attractive but indolent
Ohioan of wealthy family, several years her junior. They fell in love and went
off together on a prolonged tour of Europe, at the end of which he proposed.
When his parents were apprised of his intention, they threatened to disown him.
“I do not care about the money," Sive recalled, “but I know Jimmy never
like to work. He will not mind if I work, but he, he will never work. This is
not good. So I tell him go away. I see him no more."
She
Was Stranded in Cannes
The rift left
her stranded in Cannes. At this melancholy juncture, a sedate and
fatherly-looking gentleman on vacation there introduced himself to her. In
Paris, said he, he ran a chic boite
called “The New Eve." Having observed Sive in a Bikini, he was prepared to
offer her a contract —35,000 francs ($100) a month — as a featured showgirl.
And he would, furthermore, pay her fare back to Paris. Sive’s long-dormant
passion for the theatre was reawakened, and she accepted the offer eagerly.
Disillusion swiftly followed.
The
fatherly-looking gentleman owned “The New Eve,” all right, but, Sive discovered
upon returning to the City of Light, it was about as chic as a penny arcade,
and the show girls were not expected to wear even Bikinis, a prospect that, at
that time, horrified her. With the aid of a lawyer friend, she got out of the
contract.
She went to
work instead as a model for Schiaparelli. The salary was the highest she had
ever earned — 25,000 francs ($72) a month. But modeling clothes, she found,
bored her stiff, and she could not stay with it.
“T have to
keep serious face always,” she told me, “when I like maybe to smile and talk
and make joke.”
She
Was Hired for a Clad Role
While in this
frame of mind, she chanced upon a newspaper ad signed by Derval, calling for mannequins nus, habillés,
and parlants. Sive applied
for mannequin parlant and was
hired at 30,000 francs ($85) a month. “At last I am in the theatre,” she was
able to inform her friends.
But
rehearsals had barely begun when Derval drew her aside to describe a
supercolossal production number he was planning — tons of drapes, rhinestones,
feathers, a lake on the stage, living male statues. Amid all this effulgence
would be Sive—nude. She recoiled.
“I wanted to
sing, to dance, to act a little, maybe," Sive told me sadly, “but always
they want I should take off my clothes.”
Visions of
her puritanical family, her proper friends in Stockholm, flashed before her
eyes. “No,” she replied to Derval as she cast about for the exit, “a thousand
times no!”
He offered to
raise her salary by 25,000 francs. Her name, he promised, would fairly leap
from the program in boldface, 12-point type. The critics could not fail to
notice her. The tempter exerted all his guile, and Sive succumbed. She signed
up for one year with options.
“And was it
as bad as you had feared?” I put in.
“Not as bad,”
she confessed, her blue eyes widening in surprise at herself. “In the
beginning, when we rehearse, I wear bathing suit. Then I rehearse every day
with a little less. It is the same with all the nues, who begin, little by little, to get used. When the
performance comes, I am thinking so hard about where I stand, how I move, the
music, that I forget I am nue. Now I
am used. It is nothing. What is bad is the jealousy of the other girls. Oh, so
jealous, so méchantes! For five, ten
years they have to wait to be number-one nue,
but I come, and right away it is me.”
“Do your
parents know?”
Her Parents Saw Her Perform
She wrote to
them at once, she said. They answered a trifle stiffly, but to her astonishment
made no direct reference to her new job. Recently they came to Paris to see
their wandering daughter onstage. In fear and trembling, Sive handed them tickets
for the first row. At supper afterward, stern, Father Nordenstedt’s only remark
.about the show was, “Very beautiful, very artistic.” Mrs. Nordenstedt said
nothing. And though the parents continued to correspond regularly with their
daughter, they never mentioned the matter again.
Sive hastened
to assure me that the days and nights of the average “Folies” nude are a good
deal less flamboyant than people imagine.
As examples,
she cited the six other nudes with whom she shares a dressing room — a fairly
cross-sectional group, she maintained. Two are wives and mothers in their early
forties. One is engaged to an electrician who hopes to marry her as soon as
they have saved enough money between them to furnish a flat. A fourth lives
with a vaudeville juggler; the relationship is so long established as to
constitute a common-law marriage. A fifth is a teen-ager who lives quietly at
home and is called for every night by her mother. The sixth is admittedly a
girl on the town.
“And me makes
seven,” Sive said. “You pick seven girls in any place. It would be the
same—some good, some bad, some so-so. No?”
One deterrent
to any very wild behavior is fatigue. Most of the nudes are obliged to augment
their meager salary by working between performances as salesgirls,
stenographers, models. Sive is no exception. The monthly rental on her two
miniature rooms is 24,000 francs, almost half her salary; she has a large,
healthy body, expensive to nourish; and she takes singing lessons. To pay for
all this, she often poses for photographers.
During
rehearsals, the pinch is tighter still. Under a system that, if even suggested
by a Broadway producer would probably send Actors Equity rushing: en masse to
the barricades, salaries at the mannequin nu
level hover around 12,000 francs ($34) a month, and rehearsals customarily last
three to four months.
Girls
Must Be Wary of Blames
Girls who
want to keep their jobs must beware of blames.
A blâme is a black mark which may be
scored against her for any one of a wide variety of lapses, among them tardiness,
lack of vim, insufficient body make-up, talking onstage. After three blámes, the offender gets a tongue
lashing. Three more and she may be suspended. With the ninth blame, she’s
fired.
To date, Sive
has incurred only one bláme. A
combination of love and money troubles once so depressed her that she could not
leave her dressing room at all, just sat there weeping.
“The
American?” I asked.
“No, somebody
else. He does not even know I love him.”
By the time
the curtain falls, Sive is usually ready to retire, and with the exception of
an occasional weekend night when friends may invite her to late supper in some boite, she heads for the Place de la
Madeleine. No Stage Door Johnny awaits her with a sleek convertible. She rides
the Métro alone.
She rises mornings
around ten, squeezes a lemon into a glass of water, brews coffee, butters a
bun, and, weather permitting, breakfasts at an open window, or, like many
another Scandinavian, she's a fresh-air and sunlight fiend. Being in i
profession —and at an age— where every ounce of flesh must be continually
disciplined, she then performs violent calisthenics. No modeling date
intervening, she may spend the rest of the morning swimming in a public pool.
She takes most of her meals in the same neighborhood bistro, because she drinks a lot of milk and the proprietor, a
kindly soul, orders some fresh especially for her every morning.
After lunch,
she has her singing lesson. “I want someday to be a music-hall artist, like
Edith Piaf," she told me.
She
Has Many Avid Admirers
Before
leaving for the theatre, she reclines briefly, does some more calisthenics, and
eats a light supper. To avoid a blâme,
she must be in her dressing room no later than eight. Usually a pile of fan
letters from palpitant males await her. Many wish to marry her. “I have all my
hair and teeth," one of them informed her by way of inducement. Others
suggest less formal arrangements. A few are content simply to express
admiration. A Spaniard wrote that he'd attended the “Folies” six nights in a row
just to gaze at Sive. “The most beautiful memory of my visit to Paris, O
Admirable One,” he rhapsodized.
About her
future, Sive is of several minds. When the singing lesson goes well, she
entertains dreams of glittering stardom. In less optimistic moods, she
contemplates marrying for money. “Yes, I am tempted sometimes,” she admitted,
“but then I think what life is like when you do not love the man, and I say,
‘better stay poor.’ ”
There are
even moments when Sive seriously wonders whether she would not be happier
taking care of children again.
So if you
know of a family who could use a former first-class nude model in the nursery
...
THE END
Sive Norden
WHEN NOT WORKING, Sive spends most of her free time
alone, often walks along the Seine and daydreams about the future.
Sive Norden
PROPRIETOR OF A SMALL CAFE on the Rue Vignon stocks
fresh milk daily for Sive.
Sive Norden
HER SALARY, about $157 a month, doesn't go far in
Paris, so Sive does her shopping for food at the inexpensive stalls.
Sive Norden
IN HER SMALL FLAT
near Madeleine Church,
Sive relaxes with cup of hot coffee before going off
to work.
Sive Norden
SHE HAS FEW DATES,
but when invited out, she asks to go to such typically
tourist spots as this little bistro on a quay of the Seine facing the Eiffel Tower.
Sive Norden
AFTER THE LAST SHOW,
she waits in the tiled Montmartre Métro station for the last train — alone and very tired.
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περιεχομένων του τεύχους Απριλίου 1953
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εικόνα για το εξώφυλλο του τεύχους Απριλίου 1953.
Cosmopolitan magazine cover, April 1953
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[ ανάρτηση 7 Φεβρουαρίου 2024 :
Sive Norden
Folies Bergere first-class nude model
Interview with a nude…
by John Kobler
Cosmopolitan magazine April 1953
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