Bluebell Girl! The two words have become shorthand for the eternal glamour of night-time Paris.

All the sexy chic in the world is packed into those shimmering lines of long-legged dancers, with their glittering costumes and what appear to be complete carnival floats that they carry on their heads. They are the sultry, glitzy dance cohort who with a few strokes of girl power turned the Paris Lido into one of the world’s top nightspots.

Carole Saunders-Magrath, from Thorpe Bay, can claim to be a Bluebell Girl’s Bluebell Girl, since she taught the routines to other would-be Bluebells, as well as being a performer in her own right. She danced the Paris nights away between 1957 and 1960, when the troupe was at the height of its fame.

 

Echo:

The world flocked to her shows at the Lido, 78, Champs Elysee, Paris. The audience included travellers from around the world, as well as a regular stream of immortals who visited backstage.

Carole met Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Maurice Chevalier, Sophia Loren, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

“The one thing we never did was ask for autographs,” says Carole.

“The reason was simple. We were Bluebell Girls. We were stars, too. One star does not ask another star for their autograph.”

Carole said goodbye to the Lido after three years, but not to the world of Bluebell, which despite being an icon of France was largelymade up of British girls. Back home in England, at the request of the Bluebell management, Carole trained waves of other girls to follow in Now in her eighth decade, she still teaches dancing, as well as regaling audiences at WI and other groups with reminiscences about the Bluebells. Her memories sound more golden than bluebell-coloured.

The adventure began when Carole, then living in Romford, was 17. She had trained intensively as a dancer after contracting rheumatic fever, which confined her to a wheelchair as a child. Long before Bluebell came along, dancing proved to be her white knight. She trained at the late lamented Bush Davies dance school in Romford.

By the age of 17, her professional career as a dancer was well under way, and she had appeared in a couple of pantos.

Nothing, though, could prepare her for the phone call she received one evening.

Theman on the other end of the line did not introduce himself, but went straight into a check-up routine about Carol’s vital statistics. Was it true that she was 35-22-34, and 5ft 9in?

Once this was confirmed, she was invited to Soho for a meeting.

“I was dubious, but I did keep the appointment, with my father as chaperone,” Carole says.

The man on the phone turned out to be Peter Baker, an agent for Bluebell.

Also, there was “a man in a wonderful suit and handmade”.

He was Leibo, the husband of the legendary Bluebell Girls’ founder Margaret Kelly.

After seeing Carole dance, their verdict was instantaneous.

“Right, I want you on the train to Paris.”

Carole was a Bluebell.

The tip-off had come from Carole’s aunt.

Without informing the rest of the family, she had written to the Bluebell management, recommending her tall niece as perfect Bluebell material. After watching Carole dance, they agreed with her.

In Paris, Carole got the chance to watch one show. Her first impression reflected that of many first-time audience members. “I was – though it’s a word I don’t much like to use – gobsmacked,” says Carole. “I’d never dreamed such a spectacle existed.” The next night, she became part of that spectacular floor show.

She also got the chance to meet the legendary Margaret Kelly Leibovici, known to all the girls as “Bluebell”, in person.

Bluebell had founded the Bluebell Girls in 1932, after working as a dancer in Paris herself. The name Bluebell came from Margaret’s striking blue eyes, which had been compared to bluebells when she was a little girl. Her stroke of genius was to recruit tall dancers.

“Before Bluebell, nobody wanted tall, long-legged dancers, but to be in the Bluebells you had to be tall,” says Carole.

That was just the starting point. Tall girls were turned into towering ones with the addition of those famous head-dresses on top, and 5ins heels at the other end. To provide a further element of uniformity, Bluebell Girls needed oval faces. “A squarefaced dancer wouldn’t get a job,” says Carole.

Bluebell created a whole new world of gaiety, but the woman herself came across largely as an iron disciplinarian. Carole found Bluebell to be “distant”, “businesslike”, and “lacking in warmth”. She ran the troupe with a strong controlling hand and she laid down stringent rules.

Being a Bluebell was a 24-hour affair as far as Madame was concerned. “She had spies everywhere,” says Carole. “She knewwhere youwere, what youwere doing, who you were going out with.”

The list of rules included a ban on dating waiters, and the insistence that jeans worn during leisure hours should have no holes in them. “Woe betide you if you broke any of the rules and found yourself hauled up in front of Bluebell,” says Carole.

The regime might have been authoritarian, but it kept the Bluebell Girl image untarnished and free from scandal, and often saved the girls from disaster.

“Now, asamother, I can understand why she did it that way,” says Carole.

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The girls still managed to live an enviable life. “After the show, someone would say there was a party somewhere, and you’d pile into a taxi and head off for it,” says Carole. A Bluebell had an automatic ticket to the high life.

In her first week, Carole got chatting with another dancer.

“It turned out she was dating Marlon Brando,” says Carole. At a party, Carole was pursued by one of Frank Sinatra’s aides.

She rebuffed him in no uncertain terms. “I didn’t sleep with people, I was British,”

Carole says. Sinatra himself was highly amused. “As I walked past him, he grinned and hummed a bit of a song – the One Who Got Away.”

Behind the sumptuous glamour lay very unglamorous bucketloads of sweat and graft.

The daily routine became positively gruelling when the troupe was rehearsing for a new annual show.

Carole recalls: “You’d finish the second show of the night at 1.15am, and at 3.15am we’d start rehearsing. That went on through the day, and then it would be time for the 11.15pm show. Then the whole process would start over again. Sleep?

You curled up on a couple of chairs and snatched a few minutes, if you were lucky.”

The training and the lifestyle evolved a special breed of womanhood. Essence of Bluebell clung to the girls at all times.

“A group of us would be walking along the Champs Elysee during the day, just in everyday clothes, and people’s heads would turn. ‘Look, Bluebell girls,’ you’d hear them say. We were always recognisable, even out of costume,” says Carole, basking in the recollection.

How were the Bluebells so readily identifiable? The girls’ height had something to do with the recognition factor, but so did a certain poise and confidence that stamped these girls apart from any other women on the face of the planet. “Bluebells gave the impression they breathed champagne,” as one observer remarked.

Echo:

But then, one day, out of the blue, this particular Bluebell decided that she had had enough.

“I remember suddenly thinking, this isn’t real life. I’m here asamale fantasy. It’s time to go.”

She already had an invitation to return to her old dance school, Bush Davies, as an instructor. So the world of Bluebell ceased to be a job, and entered the realm of rich memory – and family history.

Many years later, Carole took her daughter to see the Bluebells at the Lido.

“She was amazed. My gosh, mum, to think youwere one of those!’ she said.”

Looking back on her extraordinary three years as a Bluebell Girl, Carole can only conclude: “I was just so lucky.”

Yet in many respects she made her own luck. A hard-working performer, utterly devoted to dance in all its forms, she valued one quality above all else. It kept her grounded through those unbelievable Parisienne days, and it told her when it was time to walk away from it all. That quality was professionalism.

“We didn’t get over-excited about the life we were leading,” Carole says. “It was the simply the worldwe belonged to. Being a Bluebell demanded 100 per cent and we gave it 100 per cent.

Bluebell Girls or Frank Sinatra, at the end of the daywewere all just professionals in the same industry.”