A Bucketful of Bricktop

Born of an August 14, the great Jazz Age figure known as Bricktop (Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith, 1894-1984).

Bricktop was a queer woman of color. Two colors, not just black but also red. Her rusty hair and freckles were commonly attributed to some Irish ancestry. At any rate, it gave her that memorable nickname and it’s a fortunate thing. A black singer named Ada Smith might well have gotten lost in the shuffle in a show biz environment which also had a Mamie Smith, a Bessie Smith, and a Queenie Smith. Born in West Virginia, Bricktop moved to Chicago with her family after the passing of her father. It was there that she began performing in nightclubs as a teenager, and performing on the TOBA and Pantages vaudeville circuits. At the eve of the First World War she was making her home in Harlem.

By her 30th birthday, Bricktop, like Josephine Baker and Mabel Mercer, was one of the performing American women of color to star in the cabarets of Paris, fed up with the racism of the U.S. She’d been invited over to perform at Le Grand Duc. By the end of the decade, she’d opened her own place, Chez Bricktop, and was an intime of such figures as Mercer (who headlined at her club), Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Langston Hughes. Chez Bricktop throve until the Second World War, when she fled the invading Nazis. It is telling that she didn’t return to the States at the time, but instead moved to Mexico City, where she opened another Chez Bricktop. She ran a third one in Rome from 1949 to 1961.

Bricktop’s last two decades were spent in New York, at which point, retired from running night clubs, she dined out on her legend. She did Les Crane’s and Gypsy Rose Lee’s tv talk shows in the ’60s. She appeared in some documentaries and cut a few records. And she played herself in two films: Honeybaby, Honeybaby (1974), and Woody Allen’sZelig (1983), which is likely the first time I learned about her. Also in 1983 she cowrote her memoir Bricktop by Bricktop with author James Haskins. She died a few months later at the age of 89.

For more on the history of vaudeville,where Bricktop got her start, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.