Dear Friends,
In last month's newsletter regarding my mother's exhibitions in galleries, I mentioned the Salle de Champagne (Champagne Room), the nightclub in Greenwich Village NY that my parents bought shortly after they got married in 1946.
While pursuing an art career, my mother and father actually owned three nightclubs. The Salle de Champagne in NYC 1946-51, the Gallery in South Florida, 1954-1963, The Champagne Gallery in NYC 1963-1971. Along the way my mother had three children and an extraordinary life as a painter, sculptor, environmental artist, installation artist, feminist, activist, mentor, writer, educator, lecturer and filmmaker.
After my mother passed away in 2012, I found newspaper clippings, photos, cards, etc. and learned a lot more about the Salle de Champagne. Not only was it a combination art gallery where young artists exhibited and sold their works without commission to the gallery, but it was also a cocktail lounge where young actors and actresses worked as bartenders and waitresses at night and a nightclub where talented guests and employees used club patrons as a sounding board for fresh new musical skits, sketches and songs.
In my research I discovered that many celebrities patronized the Salle de Champagne (the Champagne Room). Cary Grant, Shelley Winters, Charlie Chaplin Jr., Ed Sullivan, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Judy Holiday, Tony Bennett, Jerome Robbins, Zero Mostel, Montgomery Clift, Lucille Ball, Oscar Hammerstein II, John Carradine. Leonard Bernstein and many others. See below Guests of Salle de Champagne.
"Aaron Payne, a music student and aspiring performer from Trenton, New Jersey, got his big break near the end of 1947, when he was 23. The Salle de Champagne, a Greenwich Village cabaret, which stood on Macdougal Street next door to the Provincetown Playhouse and was popular among the sophisticated theater crowd, offered him a steady job that he very much wanted."