Le Bœuf sur le toit (cabaret)

Maurice Sachs chronicled it in his 1939 book Au temps du Bœuf sur le toit (Paris: Nouvelle Revue critique, 1948).

The composer Darius Milhaud had been in Brazil where he had been impressed by the folklore and a popular song of the time, O Boi no Telhado (The ox on the roof).

This ballet farce became very popular and Milhaud, joined by Georges Auric, and Arthur Rubinstein could often be heard playing a six-handed version of it at La gaya, a bar at 17, rue Duphot owned by Louis Moysès.

[4][6] On opening night pianist Jean Wiéner, who Moysès had brought with him from the Gaya, played Gershwin tunes with Cocteau and Milhaud providing accompaniment on the drums.

[4] In 1938 Nazi propagandists reacted furiously to the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jewish man; and this was used as a pretext for Kristallnacht.

But according to historian Hans-Jürgen Döscher, the shooting was not politically motivated, as commonly believed, but the result of a homosexual love affair gone wrong.

[16] From the day it opened, Le Bœuf was the epicenter of the Paris of the Roaring Twenties and was always thronged by the beau monde and the cream of the avant-garde.