Jean Cocteau wrote a dazzling textual portrait of the city that never sleeps for the newspaper L'Aurore, after a twenty-day stay in New York. The writer would later extend this account with his 'Lettre aux Américains' (Grasset, 1949), which takes up some of the words and expressions written on the spot in this charming manuscript.
According to legend, Cocteau began writing his Lettre aux Américains on the flight home. One can imagine the writer, eyes still shining with the lights of the city, jotting down his first impressions on this page:

"It's very difficult to speak in a few lines about a city like New York. Did my trip last twenty days or twenty years? I wonder [...] Nothing is lighter than the air of New York. Too light. Everything swirls. What rests and settles is very rare. The skyscrapers themselves sway slightly at the top, and the light shines through them like tulle. At night, Broadway is plagued by frightful electrical tics. And luminous Christmas trees six stories high adorn Park Avenue."

Cocteau had flown to New York in the last days of December 1948 for the premiere of The Eagle with Two Heads, starring Edwige Feuillère as the Queen, and his great love Jean Marais as the young anarchist poet. He hoped to convince the great actress Greta Garbo to play a role in one of his next films:

"It was the first time I'd spent New Year's Eve away from my city, and I'm lucky, when the clock struck midnight, to be kissing Greta Garbo, whose face is more and more admirable."

The writer ends the manuscript with a masterful ode to the New York way of life:

"There are sitting cities. There are cities that lie down. New York likes neither to sit nor to lie down. It's a city that sleeps standing."

In New York, Cocteau found the perfect match for his own creative energy. During this short stay, he posed for Philippe Halsman as part of an article commissioned by LIFE magazine whose idea was to "capture on camera what goes on inside a poet's mind". Halsman's emblematic portraits - a janiform double profile, or as a monster-magician with three pairs of hands, smoking, drawing and reading - caught the likeness of the surprisingly varied artist with incomparable accuracy.
Precious impressions of a dandy and protean Cocteau, irresistibly drawn to New York's bustling energy.