Sandra Myers
Regine: The Queen of the Nightclubs
Sandra Myers - Regine: The Queen of the Nightclubs
- The presentation today is, as you would see on the information, is about Regine who was actually born Regine Zylberberg. She was Jewish, and she dubbed herself the queen of the nightclubs. She had a very traumatic childhood, as I hope I will explain to you. But first of all, we’re going just to see a little bit of a clip and her singing something that I never actually really connected her with. So Lauren, if we could have the first video please. Thank, thank you, Lauren. Thank you. I’ve included this clip at the beginning of the presentation, just to give you some idea of the atmosphere in which Regine would’ve grown up. And as we are very much settled in France, the emotion that that song actually created. And it was totally to my mind, not connected with Regine, because those of you who would’ve been part of the scene, as I would’ve said in the 1970s and 1980s, would’ve connected her with something totally different. And the fact that she was able to sing a song like that to me was simply amazing. And one thing of course that she didn’t have was a Yiddish mama. She had a Jewish mother, but she didn’t know her mother. Her mother left the family when Regine was three. And I’ll tell you a little bit about that. I’m sure that those of you who lived in the big capital cities all around the world and were of a certain age, maybe my sort of age, which is like 23, would have known or certainly have heard of Regine’s nightclub, because they became quite the place to be, to be seen if you were aristocracy, if perhaps you were musicians, if you were artists, if you were the, any of the in people, so to speak. So let me go back a little bit to the beginning of her story.
She really had, this was a very nice photograph of her as a young child. She really had 1000 different lives. She was abandoned, as I said, by her mother, not really abandoned. Her parents were both Polish refugees. They came– Originally, they went to Argentina. And we are trying to sort of connect the dots that they may have gone to Argentina, either as Barron, part of Barron de Hershey’s experiment of resettling the Jews from Eastern Europe into the Golden Medina. Her parents weren’t married on any civil level. They were married on only in a religious ceremony. And her father subsequently, when the mother left, her father subsequently married two or three times again, and there’s no evidence of him divorcing. So, I don’t know if any of you heard any of my early lectures about the Jewish white slave trade, but that was something that the young girls were trafficked to South America, the young Jewish girls. But that’s another story. Her parents, her father, as I said, came from Poland and the mother as well. They both spent time in Argentina and then came back to Europe where Regine was born in Anderlecht in Belgium. Her name was Rachelle Zylberberg. She self-styled her as Regine later on when her whole career changed. She had little education as far as I could work out. She only had about six years of any sort of formal schooling, two years of which were in a convent when she was left there by her father. Her first love, who was the nephew of the Rabbi of Leon, was subsequently deported, Claude. So she was very much left alone then.
She was a sales girl. She became a fast loving and a fast living socialite, as I’m sure, I hope I will explain to you later on. She was married and divorced by the age of 20. She had a one son, Lionel, who sadly passed away in 2006 of cancer, which was the one thing that really she claimed in later life, she missed terribly. She worked as a barmaid. She became the nightclub owner. She was an astute businesswoman, absolutely astute businesswoman, because she didn’t ever put any of her own money into the nightclubs. But she, in every city that she opened an establishment, she looked around and she made a list of all the prominent people there, the wealthy people, the bankers who could become her financiers, and also who would be her clientele. She was a singer. She was a composer. She sang in Carnegie Hall in 1970. And the only other person who had actually, or French person who had actually done that with any success was Édith Piaf. And I know that my colleague, David, will be speaking about Édith Piaf on Saturday. She had a minor hit with one of Gloria Gaynor’s numbers called “I Will Survive,” which probably should have been her, her name, you know, her song because she certainly was a survivor. Could we have the next clip up, please? After Regine, so this is a photograph of her father. What can I say about her father? He was, she described him as a charming gambler. He was a very large man. As I said, he was a Polish emigre. He abandoned her, or placed her in various children’s homes over the time, or even in, in boarding houses where he may have paid for her upkeep. He may not have paid for her upkeep.
So, her parents married in 19– When did her parents marry? No, she was born in 1929. And by 1933, her mother had left them. She had a brother Morris, a younger brother, who was born a few years after her. And she subsequently had a stepsister Evelyn, that she was very close to. Her father, how could I describe her father? He was, as she said, he was a charming gambler. No one can quite establish anything about his background, except that he came from a family of nine children. As I said, he came from Poland. More than that, she didn’t have contact with his family, except at one time when one of his brothers appeared when she was getting married back in France, one brother had seemingly arrived in the United States and had come back. They must have had some sort of communication, but one wouldn’t know where. So, can we have the next photograph up, please? Sorry. Okay. So, from Regine’s childhood, in the film of Paris, the very emotive film of Paris sets the background probably to most of her upbringing. And obviously it did have an effect on her. She had a very tough childhood. She went, first of all, to Aix-en-Provence. Her father sent her to a convent in Aix-en-Provence where she stayed for two years, from the age of 12, oh, sorry, from the age of 10. When she was 12, the Germans had established themselves in the southern part of France, and she was in, obviously, the nuns didn’t want to keep her there any longer. So they sent her to Leon, where she was actually looked after by a family called the Haman’s, who were part of an organisation, Let me just tell you exactly, I don’t want to make that, I don’t want to make a mistake. The Haman’s were part of an organisation called the Union General Israeli de France. And if there are any of you who are French here listening would know a little bit more about it, obviously, than I did.
But it was an organisation that had been established by, with the agreement of the Germans to oversee, how can I put it, to oversee what they deemed to be the French ghetto that they were intending to establish at some point. But in actual fact, the union was established in November, 1941, and also it was used to fool the French, to use to fool the Swiss Red Cross, who used to make occasional forays into the area to make sure that, you know, the Jews were not being treated too badly and et cetera, et cetera. It also was used to quell the rumours of the concentration camps and the gas ovens quite clearly. At that time, Regine was in this old folk’s home. She wasn’t obviously an old folk at that time, but it was a care home for elderly people. She was kept hidden in this care home by the Haman family. And she was actually fell in love with their son, Claude, who was a few years older than her. It seems to be from her own autobiography, that she was rather promiscuous at the time, only with Claude. And at one point, he wanted to marry her. And what he did was he went along with his uncle, who was the rabbi of the community in Leon, to discuss the possibility of them getting married. Both of them were arrested in the offices that they went to; her boyfriend, Claude was 16 or 17 at the time, and she didn’t ever see him again. And what had happened, of course, in Leon at that time, was Klaus Barbie had arrived. I don’t know how many of you know or how much has been spoken about Klaus Barbie, but he became known as the butcher of Leon.
He was probably one of the cruellest of the German Nazi officers. He took great pleasure personally in interrogating his charges, and he was accused after the war of being responsible for the deaths of 7,000 people. He was accused of 177 war crimes. I’ll go on to talk a little bit about that later. Leon, at that time was actually the head of the resistance movement and the head of the resistance, the French resistance at that time was a young man called Jean Moulin, who wore scarves around his neck all the time. And he actually wore scarves around his neck, because he’d tried to kill himself by cutting his throat. That’s not the reason I am, but he tried to kill himself by cutting his throat when he was arrested. They’d taken him to hospital and they’d saved his life, saved his life for not much longer. Klaus Barbie interrogated him personally for three weeks, himself in the most absolutely utter, cruel way. And it’s extraordinary because Klaus Barbie, when his own father passed away, he was supposed to have gone to university to study theology. He was destined to become a priest. And I mean, I just can’t understand how somebody can go from that sort of experience to being so terribly, terribly cruel. But I digress. So in 1943, he arrested Jean Moulin, as I said, the three weeks he interrogated him to the point that Jean Moulin by the end of the time, wasn’t able to speak at all. His internal organs ruptured, he was totally, totally finished physically, mentally, obviously, in every way.
And at one time, they gave Moulin a pencil and paper to allow him to give away the information on his cons– You know, on his, on the underground movements that he had and what he actually did, Moulin, which I thought was unbelievable, he just wrote a caricature of the man who was interrogating him, but it didn’t do him any good. He was deported, he was taken by train to Metz, and he died on the way, on the train. Jean Moulin was quite an interesting person in actual fact, because he came very much from that area, from the Leon area of France, where he was obviously lauded as a hero of the resistance. But if anybody listened to William on Monday, oh, last week actually, or was it this week? Yes, maybe this week, talking about and the problems that he had when he came back to France trying to reestablish his authority. He actually had the body, the ashes of Jean Moulin moved from the Père Lachaise Cemetery where actually Regine was buried subsequently, and had them reentered at the Pantheon in Paris. This was all just after, of course, he’d lost control over Algiers or refused to take responsibility for Algiers.
And he had Andre Malraux, who was the culture minister at that time of France, gave the eulogy to Jean Moulin, which was when Jean Moulin’s fame spread much further. And he became the real hero of the resistance, because up until then, very little had been written about him, but it was actually de Gaulle and the fact that he moved his ashes to the Pantheon, and Malraux gave this wonderful, wonderful eulogy about him, that his legend became the hero of the resistance. We have the next photograph, please, sorry, I’ll go back to Regine, I’m sorry. So, this is the beginning of Regine’s night, nightclub empire. This was the one that she tried to establish in London. And of all the nightclubs that she actually established, London was a total disaster. She tried twice. And for anybody from England listening would know it was on the roof of Derry & Toms, which used to be this wonderful department store in London that had a beautiful roof garden, very chi-chi, very chic, and pardon me, she put the failure down to the fact that English had no taste and no class. Twice she tried, and twice it failed. She subsequently established nightclubs in, she had more than 23. So she created an empire of, oh, they’re not drilling, an empire of nightclubs. Starting in 1957 when her first nightclub was actually in the Montmartre area of Paris, she was accredited with being the disco queen, because up until that point, sorry, I’m just cutting out, okay. Up until that time, there hadn’t been disco music.
Most of the nightclubs had had live music, but Regine decided that it would be nice to have disco music, and all they had available were juke boxes, which didn’t really work, because between each music there was a gap, and then you could have a noise, and then people didn’t follow the music, and et cetera, et cetera. And what she did was she actually installed simultaneous turntables, if anyone understands what that is. So, there was no break in the music, and it went on completely. She was the barmaid, she was the door lady. My husband’s just giving me a little reminder. He wants to know, he said, I haven’t mentioned, how did she survive Leon? Well, it’s a very good question actually, because there doesn’t seem to be any information on that. She was told, oh, she went at one point when she was trying to find out what happened. I’m sorry, I’m going backwards. He’s quite right. When she tried to find out what had happened to her, to Claude, to her boyfriend, she was told that he’d been taken to the Montluc prison, which was like an army barracks and things like that, which she went to see. And the soldiers there, I think they must have been German soldiers, actually sent her away because she was quite a small child at that time. She was only 12, 13, 14. She was a young girl. They sent her away. She survived, she didn’t get, she wasn’t deported, she wasn’t arrested. She didn’t get caught up in the other one of Klaus Barbie’s raids on the children’s home. I just think that she was a survivor.
They kept her quiet, they kept her, the family that she was with took her in as their own daughter when they’d established the fact that their son wasn’t coming back. And I can, I think that her father eventually turned up in Leon after the Americans had liberated the city. So, she was a survivor. She wasn’t part, she wasn’t in a children’s home. And obviously once it was very late in the day before the Germans fled from the south of France, before the Americans had liberated France. And I guess that she was just very lucky at that point in time. I’ve lost the tread, where am I going to? So, we got back to establishing her nightclubs. The first one was in 1957, strangely, oh! After the war, she actually went to the south of France. She met up with some people who took a liking to her. She was clearly a very effervescent, very vivacious woman. From the few people that I’ve spoken to who actually had contact with her, she was very delightful. She was very gentle with people, but she was a really tough, hard businesswoman. And she said in her own words, she celebrated all the nightclubs that she opened, and all the parties that she had was probably in compensation for none of the birthday parties she had as a child, because clearly her childhood was very traumatic for her. Okay, let’s go onto the, can we go onto the next one? Can we go onto the, should we go? Let’s, so she also starred in movies.
The queen wouldn’t like it.
Dr. .
I see. It’s all right, Herman. Really gentleman, for this sort of amusement, you need not come to my establishment.
How did you get here before us?
By trying to think where they would hide . If as you positive, they would no longer use the original hiding place. Knowing something of was passed, it occurred to me that the safest place to hide the demi mundane might be amongst a bevvy of demi mundane.
Now you’re beginning to think like me.
We followed a trail of lilies.
Okay, I think we can stop, stop it there.
I take it however, that–
She actually starred in 13 movies altogether. And whilst most of us or myself perhaps would’ve associated her with the nightclubs, in France, she was much better known for being a composer, for writing songs, for charity work, for movies. Much less so than the nightclubs. But that’s, she was very obviously much better known in France for those things than we ever knew her here. Where am I go? Where am I up to now? Okay, sorry. Okay. This is a photograph of Regine with her son, Lionel, at his wedding. As I mentioned, she was married at 16. She’d already had a few abortions, because obviously she didn’t want to have children before she was married. She married a gentleman by the name of Leon Rothcage. She had Lionel in 1948, and sadly he passed away in 2006 from cancer as I mentioned. She had divorced her first husband by the time she was 20. She did marry again. She married again to a gentleman called Roger Choukroun in 1969, I think. And she divorced him. When did she divorce him? She divorced him in the early 2000, maybe 2003 or something like that. But her second husband very much looked after her properties and her business interests, and that sort of thing.
At the peak of her nightclubs, she probably presided over something like a $500 million empire. She didn’t ever put any of her money into the clubs. And as I said, the first one that she opened was very much in the basement of a nightclub in . Not very elegant with lino floors and, you know, but she progressed very quickly, and she started opening nightclubs all over the world, basically all over the world where there were rich people, where there were movie stars, where there were aristocracy. She had clubs in Geneva, Marbella, Quebec, Rio, San Tropez, Dusseldorf, Los Angeles, Cairo. She even had one in Kazakhstan, which actually was the last one that survived. I dunno what that says about Kazakhstan. But by the middle of the 1980s, her nightclub had started to wane. They started to become, and to feel old fashioned, much as there was the whole of the elite of the world who came. The Duke of Windsor she taught to do the twist. Sammy Davis, she danced with, John Wayne, came with his entourage from into America, from one of the movies that he was making. She had a nightclub in Sao Paolo. She was friends with the Saffra’s, who I’m sure that everybody knows who the Saffra’s are. And she didn’t ever open an establishment without carefully researching the elites and the financiers of the towns that she was going into. Her first nightclub apparently was financed by the Rothchild’s. She didn’t take money, she borrowed money from them, and she repaid it at whatever interest they wanted, which happened very quickly.
She had a very, very strict code of dress. Men had to wear black tie, women had to wear evening dress. She didn’t ever sell drinks by the glass. It was only sold by the bottle. And she sold 2000 memberships to her clubs worldwide, which were good for any club in any part of the world. They were 6– I think it was 600 US dollars at the time each, and it was good for any club in the world. She put up a sign outside all of her clubs that said, “Club Full.” So, she wouldn’t allow anybody in without, you know, having a look through the window. And she would be there if she was in town. She would be at her club until the early hours of the dawn. She was very fastidious about her appearance, because she had an inclination to become quite plump. And every time before she opened a new place, she would diet like mad. She would make sure her hair was done, she was made sure that she had the right publicity, she would have new clothes made, and she would put out all her feelers, and make it be known that there was a big fanfare coming. And the club was opening. The major club, I think that she opened was probably in the mid 70’s in New York, which she opened in Delmonico’s in the hotel of Delmonico’s, which was, I think between 5th– Was it 50 or 75th and Park? Oh, it was 59th and Park. And she actually moved into the penthouse in Delmonico’s. She lived there for a while. Where else she did she, where, what was I saying? Okay, the nightclub that she had in Paris, actually in 1968, I think William was talking about the riots there.
She actually got caught up in the riots. They threw teargas into her club at the time, because it was right in the central of town. And she had to evacuate all the revellers down through the kitchens. After, by this sort of middle of the 1980s, by towards the end of the 1980s, certainly the 1990s, her nightclubs had begun to lose their lustre. More than anything else, they was considered to be old-fashioned. And when Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager opened Studio 54 in New York, her establishment, particularly in New York, was seen to be very passe. They obviously, you know, if anyone knows about Studio 54 at the time, was quite debauche. They had nude bartenders, they had cocaine going, they had a lot of a different, it was a different feel, you know, the times had changed. It was a different feel. And her nightclubs began to feel very passe. One by one, of course, they closed down, and Regine concentrated a little bit more, by that time, by the 1990s, in her charity work, she spent a lot of time on French TV on reality programmes funnily enough, from the ones, I mean, my French isn’t good enough to go to translate them all, but she spent time on one called film, something or other, where she worked on a farm, and she did a lot of charity work for children. Can I bring up the next photograph, please? This is a very lovely photograph of her teaching the Duke of Windsor, who was Edward VII to do the twist. This was in her Miami nightclub. And there is another photograph of the next one, please, Lauren, at the opening in 1983 of the nightclub in Miami. There’s also a photograph, which I didn’t think I should show, of her dancing with our current king, King Charles, who was then a very young Prince Charles.
So, he also went to Regine’s. She certainly attracted the rich and the good and the great and the famous. And as I said, towards the end of the 1980s and certainly the 1990s, her lustre had faded. She sang, she was on stage quite a bit. She had her, she was very famous for wearing a boa. And I would actually say she also wore a live boa at one time, given to her by Frederick Fellini. She wore it on a stage show, and she was quite surprised, because obviously very nervous about it, but she thought it would be cold and clammy when she said it was actually warm and quite dry. But can we have the next picture, Lauren, please? Oh, this was the interior of one of her clubs. Can we go on from there? Okay, oh, this is a photograph of her with Sammy Davis. And can we go on again, please? Oh, this is just a photograph. Another of her as a young one, and again, please, this is her, one of her boas. This was taken for the opening of one of her clubs. And each photograph she had these beautiful red boas or grey or whatever it was. As she got older, I don’t know quite how to say this, she had a lot of cosmetic surgery, which is not a terrible thing, obviously. She spent a, she appeared a lot of times on chat shows on French TV, and she also appeared in a tribute to Edith Piaf. Can we go on, can we go on, Lauren? Have we got that clip? Oh, it’s another one with a boa. Oh, that’s with Andy Warhol. I mean, she, she was with, you know, everybody who was anybody, Sam Lauren, Sophia Loren, Prince Rainier. I could just name anybody who you could possibly think of came to her clubs. Can we go to the next one, please? And she was–
- Okay, Lauren, could you? And that’s another one, very late on with one of her famous boas. So, I think I’m going to take a few questions, if there are any, but before I do that, I will tell you just, Regine, as I said, born Rachelle Zylberberg, on the 26th of December, 1929, in Anderlecht, Belgium, she passed away on the 1st of May last year, 2022, age 92 in Paris. She was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery And we have a a clip of her funeral, if you could show that, please. Thank you. That’s my favourite photograph of her. I’m just going to read something to conclude. She was, the question, I didn’t know she was Jewish. It never even occurred to me that she might have been Jewish, let alone have any faith, faith in, in the sort of widest sense of the word, any belief in the religion. There was a very, she wrote her autobiography way back in 19– in the mid 1980s. And at a time she was in Sao Paolo, when Julio Iglesias was giving a tribute concert for her to raise money for one of her children’s charities. And it was the night before Yom Kippur. So she had arranged to go to the local synagogue with her second husband, Roger then, who actually wasn’t Jewish as far as I could understand. And she was going with the Saffra’s, with friends of theirs.
And she concludes in her book, which I just thought was so moving. She said, “We confess our sins only once a year in our religion.” Exactly. Exactly. And then it came, “Then as Roger her step forward to kiss the books of Moses, I suddenly saw through my tears, the rabbi from Leon, Benjamin Drefus,” who was the uncle of her first love, Claude. “It was wartime. Claude was sitting in the front row. It was his last Yom Kippur before the extermination. The Haman’s were there.” That was Claude’s parents, “Looking lovingly at their son. And I could see other faces too. Maurice,” her brother, “Evelyn,” her half sister, “and Lionel,” her son who’d passed away. “As I looked at Roger, his image fused with Claude’s, I think I’ve spent my whole life searching for the meaning in these ceremonies. And in that brief moment, I felt the sacred enter me. The little girl from Leon, who seemed so distant, had never been so close. I was all alone with my past, that deep wound that had made me so strong. And I cried. While a voice terrible, but gentle told me that my past had perhaps been the best thing that had ever happened to me. And tomorrow, when the fast is broken, this celebration will start up all over again. There’ll be profane, not sacred this time. The party, which I know will continue until such time as God decides it’s his turn to call me Regine.” Thank you very much.
[Lauren] Okay, we have a few questions.
Okay.
Q&A and Comments:
Q - [Lauren] The first is from Margaret, who’s asking if she had any formal singing lessons?
A - Honestly, Margaret, I don’t know. I think she had very few lessons of any sort. As I said, as far as I could establish, she only actually had about six years of any sort of education. I don’t, I don’t know. I mean, that could have been, but there’s no way. Her whole life was, seems to have been shrouded in, not a mystery, but clearly her early childhood was so traumatic that it, it just seemed to have taken over. And as I read in the last few words that she felt her past was the best thing that had ever happened to her. I dunno, but I I’d like to maybe I could see if somebody knows, maybe someone on the Zoom knows.
Q - [Lauren] Rhonda’s asking who were the Saffra’s?
A - Oh, the Saffra’s. The Saffras was, they were a very wealthy, he was, she died recently. It was Saffra, S A F F R A. Lily Saffra was actually born in Uruguay, interestingly enough. But her husband died under very strange circum– I think it was her fourth husband died under very strange circumstances, not so long ago when there was a fire in his apartment block in France, in Montecarlo. And apparently the, it was, it was Edmund Saffra was her husband. I think he was Lebanese. I wouldn’t actually be sure, but I think he was Lebanese, a lot older than her. And his bodyguard eventually admitted to starting the fire. Edmund Saffra died in the fire. I think he died of smoke inhalation, because they weren’t able to get him out of the building fast enough. Lily managed to get out through a window, and there’s been various speculations about how she managed to get out and how her husband didn’t, but more than that, I don’t know. But Edmund Saffra was a very important philanthropist, yeah.
Q: Did she know what happened to her mother and her father?
A: Oh, that’s a great question, Jill. Her mother, okay. Her mother went back, her mother went back to Argentina in 1933. Her mother left them. She went back to Argentina on her own. And as far as I could see, she came back to Paris once when Regine had opened one of her nightclubs, because she had one sister who actually lived in Paris and had lost her husband and child in the concentration camp. She came back to see her sister. Regine refused to see her. She never had any more contact with her, and her mother, as far as I could establish, went back to live in Argentina. And there was no more communication at all. As far as her father was concerned, he died in about 19– I think about 1967. He had diabetes. He’d suffered quite badly at one point during the war, when he was arrested by the Germans, he was tortured, but he, for some reason or other, they didn’t find out he was Jewish. He didn’t speak French. He only stuck to speaking Polish. He didn’t speak very much French anyway, apparently. And he was released towards the end when he reconnected with Regine. He was rather badly tortured. His legs were beaten, whether they were broken, but he walked with a stick after that. But she didn’t have an enormously great relationship with him because once he’d started putting her in the children’s and her brother in the children’s homes, he was off basically doing his own things. He married two or three times after the mother went back to Argentina. Not quite sure how you managed to do that, whether it was officially or whether it was unofficial. Some of the wives she got on with well, some she didn’t. I think she must have been a very feisty child, but she clearly was a survivor. Errol, her sister Evelyn.
Q: Did she run the club in Monte Carlo?
A: I don’t know, actually. Thank you for telling me that. That’s really, that’s interesting. My dad danced with her in Paris, thought she was a great dancer. I don’t think, I don’t think Roberta, your dad was on her, was on his own. I think she was a great dancer, and clearly she was quite a spectacular personality. She really was. She, you know, to survive through all she survived and to come out, she basically lived her life as one big party, but maybe as I said, that compensated.
Q: Was she buried in a Jewish cemetery?
A: Okay, good question. She was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery. She was actually cremated. I think there, I’ve not been to that cemetery. Maybe someone who lives in Paris might know a little bit more about it. But she had one grand– She has one granddaughter who survived her, who actually announced her passing. And it was nice that they said that the queen of the night has left the club, which I thought was really very nice. She, I think the Père– I think the Père Lachaise Cemetery must have a Jewish part to it, because I know that there are some quite prominent Jewish people as far as I’ve been researching who were buried there. But she was cremated, so I don’t suppose that that would count anyway.
Q: Would it, really?
A: Ron, you were a young lawyer working in Paris for three years in the 1970s. Our flat was two minutes from Regine’s. It was quite the rage at the time, but not all my thing. Oh, I’d love to have gone. I would’ve absolutely loved to have gone. I think I was too busy bringing up children, and I don’t know, being too stayed maybe. Isabel, but okay.
Sandra, I’m sure you wouldn’t know, but Tony, who was a good friend of ours, was involved with the opening of the London Regine’s. He was the solicitor for the landlord at the time. He met her on numerous occasions.
Q: Okay, Isabel, can you say it again? Why did, why did it completely fail?
A: I mean, she thought that the British were too stayed, but that’s a lovely touch. Thank you for letting me know. I didn’t know that.
Q: What was it that captivated your interest in Regine?
A: Thank you for a fact– Oh, , a few things, actually. First of all, I had no idea that she was Jewish. It never even occurred to me. And it was only when I read her obituary in the Times, if you want to go back to the London Times in May, 2022, that I actually found out that she was Jewish, that her parents were refugees, and what had happened to her, subsequently. I was introduced to a lady who was her PA in Montreal for a number of years, but unfortunately our schedules didn’t coincide, so I didn’t get a chance to hear much more about her. But from everybody that had contact with her, she was quite, she was very charitable. She did a lot of work for children’s charities after her nightclubs closed. She also had lines of clothing. I mean, she did all sorts. She was a real entrepreneur, you know, she was a total survivor of her era.
Roger Sucroom was– Oh, thank you.
I’m so sorry. I totally apologise. I didn’t, Marianne, I didn’t get that information at all. Thank you for putting me right. So, when he went to the temple with the Saffra’s on Yom Kippur, he knew what he was doing. Thank you.
Q: What did she call her book?
A: Her book was called, “Regine: Call Me by My First Name.” Okay.
Q: Okay, how did she escape deportation by the Germans?
A: She actually was never captured Klaus Barbie in Leon in 1933, 1944, 1943, 1944, I’m sorry, was very much at the end of the deportations. She was in this home with the Haman’s. They weren’t ratting out Jewish people, because the Haman’s were Jewish as well, part of the organisation. He raided, he deported a lot of the children from the Children’s Home. If anyone has heard of that, if anyone’s heard of the Children’s Home, he deported altogether, I think I’ve got the exact amount here. I don’t want to, I don’t want to give you the wrong information. Hold on. He captured 44 children ages between 4 and 17 in the Children’s Home in a secret farmhouse in the Rome Valley. He’d obviously been given some information that these children were being hidden there, because no one had actually said they were Jewish. They were just put there as refugees. He took the children and their, the seven adult carers went directly to the camps. One, just one survived, and the one person that did survive gave evidence at his original at Klaus Barbie’s original trial. But that’s another, that’s a whole nother lecture on its own, because I think that was one of the greatest travesties of the West, that they allowed Klaus Barbie to evade punishment for 40 years, because the Americans used him for information after the war, which I, well, I don’t know. I suppose you don’t know what you’d do at that time if you were in that situation. Reform and liberal synagogues, cremation is permitted, yeah. Okay.
Q: Is there a Jewish section of the Pierre?
A: There is a Jewish section in the Pierre. Oh, thank you very much. I thought there must have been, because I know that some prominent Jewish people were buried there, so I guess that there must have been, and it’s an enormous place anyway. I met Regine, my business partner and I went to Paris to ask her about opening a Regine in London in the former, in the roof garden. And that came to pass. But once the club opened, we were no longer, oh dear!
Who’s Thelma? Is that from Thelma, or it’s Norman’s iPad. It’s Thelma. Oh, perhaps you did, you had a lucky get out there, Thelma, because I understand it was a total disaster, much as the place was beautiful. I understand that the whole thing was just a disaster. Okay, where am I up to now? Okay.
Oh, the recording of her singing “My Yiddishe Momme” was something I actually never expected to hear. I didn’t stupidly maybe or naively equate her with having that sort of feeling, you know, because that was always associated with Sophie Tucker you know, even Charles recorded it, interestingly enough. Okay.
I think, thank you very much for your compliment, Arlene. Thank you for playing “My Yiddishe Momme.” I haven’t heard this moving ethro song in much too long. It was played on Sundays by my late parents Holocaust survivors. I did not know it was performed by Regine. Ironically, my brother who lives in Paris frequented Club 54 and Regine’s.
Oh, I’m very jealous now, Rita, thank you. It was very emotive and I just thought it just put the whole period that she would’ve grown up in, in a context, yeah. Yeah, I not sure that I could show, I don’t know whether it would be proper to show Regine dancing with our current King Charles. He was a, he was a quite young, he was a young man. Okay. My family came from Poland named Zilberberg. Some of my family settled.
Oh, Gloria, that’s interesting. Maybe you related, I don’t know. I don’t know if any of you heard Trudy’s lectures on Baron Hirsch and the establishment of the settlements for the Jews that he hoped to create in Argentina, but it was quite a popular, well, popular, it didn’t quite work out as well as he hoped it would, but it was a great idea.
Okay, lovely. Thank you very much everybody. I think, I think I’ve gone through the questions, but thank you for your attention, and it’s nice to be back. And I’m sorry if any of you are sitting in the pouring rain, because it’s beautiful here. But stay safe. Keep well everybody. Lovely, thank you very much. Take care.