C8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022
obituariesBY HARRISON SMITHManaging a small Parisian
nightclub in 1953, the indomita-
ble, crimson-haired woman
known as Régine installed a lino-
leum dance floor and colored
lights, standing on a chair and
waving her hand at times to
create a strobe-light effect for her
clientele. To eliminate the awk-
ward gap between songs — a
silence that was filled by the
sound of couples making out in
the corner — she replaced the
jukebox with two turntables and
started spinning records herself.
“I was barmaid, doorman,
bathroom attendant, hostess —
and I also put on the records. It
was the first ever discothèque,”
she claimed decades later, “and I
was the first ever club disc jock-
ey.”
While nightclubs had existed
for at least a century, Régine
helped create a hip new template
for dancing after dark, paving the
way for the disco era and her own
empire of champagne-fueled ex-
cess. Within four years, she had
opened a Latin Quarter club
called Chez Régine, where she
served spaghetti at 3 a.m., did the
tango with Charlie Chaplin and
taught the twist to the Duke of
Windsor.
“If you can’t dance,” she pro-
claimed, “you can’t make love.”
Régine, who opened nearly two
dozen dance clubs around the
world, catering to actors, aristo-
crats and other privileged clients
while acquiring a reputation as
the “Queen of the Night,” died
May 1 at 92. Her granddaughter
Daphne Rotcajg confirmed her
death to the Agence France-
Presse news agency but did not
share additional details.
The Belgian-born daughter of
Polish Jews, Régine grew up in
France, hiding in a convent dur-
ing the Nazi occupation, before
launching her nightclub career as
a hatcheck girl at the Whisky à
Gogo in Paris. It was there, she
later wrote in a memoir, that she
realized she wanted “to make the
night sparkle and to become, as
far as I could, a sort of high
priestess of the here and now.”
At Chez Régine, she served
bottles of liquor instead of just
cocktails and played a then-exotic
mix of rumbas, tangos, meren-
gues and rock songs. Her clients
included Françoise Sagan, Yves
Saint Laurent, Brigitte Bardot,
Rudolf Nureyev, Georges Pompi-
dou and a host of visiting Ameri-
cans, including actors who had
arrived in France to film the 1962
war movie “The Longest Day.”
“John Wayne looked at me with
a smile and said, ‘So, you’re Ré-
gine,’ ” she recalled in an inter-
view with BBC News. “He knew
I’d had a thing with Robert
Mitchum and a couple of other
stars.” That group grew to include
actor Gene Kelly, with whom she
danced through the night and
accompanied for two weeks.
“Yes,” she confirmed to Elle maga-
zine, “we had private relations.”
To Spanish actor and noble-
man José Luis de Vilallonga, Chez
Régine was “a leper colony for the
overprivileged.” To tabloid jour-
nalist Robin Leach, the club was a
godsend: “Working as a journalist
covering the jet set in Paris at that
time was extremely easy,” he told
New York magazine in 1999.
“You’d just go to Régine’s every
night and wait for the princesses
to file in.”Even as she opened nightclubs
in France and overseas, Régine
launched parallel careers as an
actress and singer, performing at
the Olympia in Paris and Carne-
gie Hall in New York. She record-
ed a French version of Gloria
Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and
appeared in nearly a dozen TV
shows and movies, including
“The Seven-Per-Cent Solution”
(1976), a Sherlock Holmes mys-
tery starring Nicol Williamson
and Robert Duvall.
Leveraging the success of her
discothèques, she also started ca-
fes, apparel and perfume lines,
dancercise classes and a maga-
zine. For a time, her clubs report-
edly grossed nearly $500 million
a year. Some 20,000 people car-ried gold membership cards in-
side Cartier cases, enabling them
to access all of her venues, wheth-
er in Kuala Lumpur, London,
Cairo or New York, where in 1976
she opened the Manhattan res-
taurant and dance club Régine’s
at the Delmonico Hotel.
As New York magazine later
reported, her expansion into New
York was not exactly smooth.
After she was cited for plumbing
violations in her first week, she
filled three limousines with the
club’s dirty dishes and drove a fewblocks to the French restaurant
Le Cirque. “Suddenly, there she
was, this little lady at the door
with all these dishes,” said the
restaurant’s owner, Sirio Maccio-
ni. “Of course, we opened the
kitchen. For Régine, you did any-
thing.”
Serving caviar-topped egg
dishes by the acclaimed chef Mi-
chel Guérard and charging yearly
membership dues of $600, Ré-
gine’s was considered one of Man-
hattan’s priciest nightlife destina-
tions. “Order a drink and beprepared to close out your bank
account,” a 1982 guidebook de-
clared. But it remained a glitzy
haven for celebrities including
Andy Warhol, Jack Nicholson and
Diana Vreeland. A strict dress
code was maintained — dark
suits and ties for men, “evening
elegance” for women — although
exceptions were made for regu-
lars including Mick Jagger.
By the early 1980s, some of her
longtime clients had started drift-
ing away, drawn by more adven-
turous clubs such as Studio 54,which became known as an adult
amusement park for public sex
and drug use. Her Park Avenue
club closed in 1991, and over the
next decade she shuttered many
of her other venues, including a
Chilean nightclub in Santiago
that was reportedly damaged by a
bomb that one of her business
partners detonated in an insur-
ance scam.
Still, Régine kept dancing,
singing and hustling, opening an-
other Manhattan restaurant and
club called Rage (she was dis-
mayed when guests stole some of
the club’s glittering art-deco toilet
seats) and perpetually looking for
the next business venture. “Peo-
ple at my age are ready to die,” she
told New York magazine at 69,
“but I am like a night flower. I
bloom only after midnight.”
By most accounts, she was
born Regina Zylberberg just out-
side Brussels on Dec. 26, 1929. As
she told it, her mother moved to
Argentina when Régine was an
infant, and her father was a some-
times-violent alcoholic who ran a
cafe in the Paris neighborhood of
Belleville.
“That was where my ambition
began,” she told the BBC. “It was a
working-class Jewish cafe with all
sorts of people passing through. I
said to myself: I want a place
where I get to choose who comes
in. I wanted counts and dukes —
people with titles.”
After joining the Whisky à
Gogo in the early 1950s, she be-
friended guests including Jean-
Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon and
members of the Rothschild fam-
ily, who helped finance her first
club.
She later became more famous
than many of her patrons, mak-
ing headlines in 1996 when she
and her son were arrested, re-
portedly after he started smoking
on an airplane and she began
cursing out the captain. “You
can’t tell me what to do,” she said,
according to an FBI affidavit.
“The last time someone told me
what to do was when the Nazis
invaded P aris.”
A brief early marriage ended in
divorce. Her second marriage, to
businessman Roger Choukroun,
lasted more than three decades
before they divorced in 2004. “My
work is my passion above all,” she
told New York magazine a few
years after they married. “I never
loved a man that way.”
Her son from her first mar-
riage, Lionel Rotcage, died in- Information on survivors
was not immediately available.
In 2008, French President Ni-
colas Sarkozy awarded her the
Legion of Honor. Three years
later, at 81, she played the flirta-
tious Solange La Fitte in a Ken-
nedy Center production of Ste-
phen Sondheim’s “Follies.” By
then she was increasingly nostal-
gic for the more private, exclusive
club scene that she had helped
foster, although she said she still
liked to go out and dance.
“Nowadays society demands
vast halls for thousands of peo-
ple,” she told the BBC. “But I don’t
like anonymity. The perfect
nightclub takes 400 people — no
more.”
RÉGINE, 92
From Paris club, she created jet-set discothèque empire
ASTRID RIECKEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
In 2011, Régine played Solange La Fitte in a Kennedy Center production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies.” The Belgian-born daughter of
Polish Jews, she grew up in France, hiding in a convent during the Nazi occupation before launching her club career as a hatcheck girl.PIERRE GUILLAUD/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Régine in 1984 with French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg in Paris. Even as she opened clubs in France
and overseas, she sang at New York’s Carnegie Hall and appeared in multiple TV shows and movies.“People at myage are ready to die,but I am like anight flower.I bloom only aftermidnight.”
Régine, in an interview with
New York magazine at age 69BY DANA HEDGPETHMore than a week after a fox
broke into an enclosure in the
National Zoo in Northwest
Washington and killed 25 flamin-
gos, a fox has been caught and
euthanized, officials said, but
they said they cannot confirm
that it is the fox that killed the
birds.
Pamela Baker-Masson, a
spokeswoman for the zoo, said
Friday that a red fox had been
caught in a trap either Thursday
night or early Friday morning.
She said she could not confirm
that this fox was involved in
killing the flamingos at the zoo’s
outdoor enclosure of the bird
house earlier this month. She
said that she did not know
whether the captured fox was
male or female and that it was
“humanely euthanized.”
Baker-Masson also did not
know whether the fox had been
tested for rabies and said that
because “birds don’t contract
rabies ... that wasn’t a primary
issue.”
The zoo’s fox troubles started
May 2 when a fox got into the
flamingo enclosure overnight
from nearby Rock Creek Park.
Officials at the zoo said a
staffer who helps run the bird
house, where the zoo’s flock of 74
flamingos live, saw the fox in
their yard area and found thedead birds. The fox got away, and
the zoo set a trap to try to catch it.
The zoo’s director, Brandie
Smith, had called the scene that
the staffer found “awful” but said
it was also “normal fox behavior,”
noting that foxes are predators.
The fox probably got through a
hole, zoo officials said, about the
size of a baseball, in the heavy
mesh fencing around the flamin-
go’s habitat. A Northern pintail
duck was also killed by the fox,
and three other flamingos were
hurt and were treated at the zoo’s
veterinary hospital.
The remaining flamingos were
moved indoors to their barn and
the ducks to a covered, secure
outdoor space.Smith said in a statement that
the flamingos’ deaths were “a
heartbreaking loss for us and
everyone who cares about our
animals.”
In the wild, flamingos can fly
away from danger, but the zoo’s
flamingos had their wings
clipped and were probably un-
able to defend themselves, zoo
officials said.
The city’s wildlife biologist,
Dan Rauch, had said a flamingo
to a fox is “like a chicken with
longer legs and a different color.”
The fox, he said, was probably
just attracted to the flamingos
because they’re “just a taller bird
for them, and they’re an enclosed
food source.”THE DISTRICT
Fox is euthanized after 25 flamingos at zoo were killed
SMITHSONIAN’S NATIONAL ZOO & CONSERVATION BIOLOGY INSTITUTE
Flamingos are seen at the National Zoo in this undated image. The
birds that survived the attack have been moved indoors to a barn.S0129-6x2
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