A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause

by Shawn Wen

  “I do not practice religion but when I do ‘Creation of the World,’ God enters in me.”

  Three diverse kings ride out to greet the Lord. One bearded, another boyish, and the last is an African king. His hands are brown, but his face is painted jet black, vividly setting off his gold crown.

  M. ON THE KING OF POP

  Marcel Marceau had sympathy for Michael Jackson. He saw in Michael Jackson something of himself.

  “Michael has the soul of a mime,” he said.

  What is this soul of a mime? What is shared by Marceau and Michael and all actors who stand onstage making various gestures?

  “The soul of a mime is a complex one: part child and part artist, part clown and part tragic figure.”

  “I’ve seen Michael on TV for years, and I think that he is a poet. But now he is in the tradition of French poets like Verlaine and Rimbaud because his subject is the lost childhood.”

  On December 4, 1995, Michael Jackson promoted an HBO special at the Beacon Theater. His career was at its pinnacle.

  More than a decade earlier, Jackson modeled the moonwalk after Marceau’s Walking Against the Wind. And ever since, he had been turning his focus, ever so slowly, away from the voice and toward the body. In a few days, he would collapse from exhaustion. But that night he faced the reporters.

  One yelled, “Are you still married?”

  Another, “Say hello!”

  All questions received the same response: silence.

  Instead, Jackson brought out a mime to speak for him.

  “For the first time, the King of Mime will work with the King of Pop.”

  Two men on stage with pancaked faces and liquid bodies. Held under a beam of bright light, Michael Jackson performed the invisible box routine. A metaphor for both their lives.

  The journalist Neil Strauss agreed that Michael Jackson was evolving. He wrote: “After Mr. Jackson’s collapse, a medical technician said there was so much makeup on his face that medics had to lift his shirt to check his complexion.”

  It was the winter of 1944–45, harsh, inclement and without heat. Marceau at the time was known only as the most brilliant of Decroux’s students. The spectacle of these two men solemnly at work, dripping with sweat in the frigid air, had something admirably crazy about it which spiced their work. The teacher was serious to the point of being comic; he demonstrated an impeccable technique, but was strained in the search for the original and the creative. But the budding mime burst forth with originality, with facility, spirit and charm which are the signs of the artist.

  —Marc Beigbeder, philosopher and journalist

  M. ON THERIESENSTADT

  “At Theriesenstadt, the concentration camp, the Nazis used to show outside visitors that the camps were humane. The Nazis asked the Jewish prisoners, many of whom were musicians, what they would like to perform for the Red Cross, which was going to visit.

  “They said the ‘Verdi Requiem.’ The Nazis laughed. But when they performed it, the Nazis were so moved they stood and applauded.

  “It didn’t change the fact that two weeks later, all the musicians were exterminated.”

  (1999)

  FROM MARCEL AND ME: A MEMOIR OF LOVE, LUST, AND ILLUSION

  by Paulette Frankl:

  “His dominant French nose gave me pause to fantasize the corresponding length of other body parts.”

  “I was startled by his short stature and knocked aback by his pungent bad breath.”

  “The open kimono and low cut of his costume revealed his pleasantly hairy chest.”

  “From a distance, I thought he was a woman!”

  “His flesh was as soft as a jellyfish.”

  “I was the object of his feeding frenzy.”

  “I was pleased to discover that not all parts of his body were equally subject to the aging process.”

  “He was all about control.”

  “He cherry-picked his women from an abundant pool of the young and beautiful.”

  “‘I’ll call you.’”

  COLLECTIONS: THE FURNITURE

  Hailed from Aquitaine, Venice, Basque Provinces. Dented, scratched, distressed, banged into, worn, restored. Reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast, those curvy wooden bodies balanced on tiny feet, about to burst into song. Dating to the Regency period, Restoration era.

  Louis XIII—Pair of armchairs, walnut painted dark, twisted along the stretcher and arms. High back, moulded walnut, acanthus leaves cut into the arms. Sheep-bone reproduction with broken feet and upholstered wings.

  Louis XIV—Bracket clock with brass inlaid red tortoiseshell.

  Louis XV—Silver candelabra, four branches reaching out. Chair made of walnut with a violone back. Triangular cabinet that tucks neatly into a corner, its curved front panel restrained by a natural cherry beaded belt.

  Louis XVI—Armoire of walnut wood, grooved and lacquered gray. Armchair balanced on tapered beechwood feet. Trumeau mirror carved and gilded with a gold trophy. Pair of bronze candle vases adorned with laurel wreaths, ribbons, and fluted columns.

  Louis Vuitton—Two small briefcases, damaged.

  COLLECTIONS: THE BOXES

  Forged from silver

  Rectangular. Hinged, lined with purple cloth

  Square. Hammered flourishes and a wooden core

  Round. Engraved with scenes from Japan

  Engraved snuffbox. Vermilion fabric inside

  Flown in from Asia

  Japanese painted wooden box

  Bronze vault from India

  Tea box from Guangzhou

  Four Chinese porcelain miniatures

  Elm jewelry box from China, missing a mirror

  Other

  Twenty-one in Russian lacquer

  Safe of moulded oak, sealed shut with a wrought iron lock

  Oval brass, engraved with a character in a frock coat

  Safe with studded leather, brass handle, and wrought iron pull rings

  Disc-playing music box, glossy black with gold frills, bearing the inscription “symphonio brevete patante”

  Pirate’s chest

  CRITICS ON AGING

  “There is always something rather sad about any performing artist who fails to realise that his career is over, but Marcel Marceau is riding on his name and past achievements to such a degree that one’s patience and pity is beginning to run out.” (Emma Manning, Stage and Television Today, 1998)

  Does aging give us wisdom? Does it make us stubborn?

  A telegram from the brain: Its signals are lost in a neuron forest. Water floods into the organ’s grooves. But the mime continues to perform.

  “For me two hours of Marceau is like being trapped in a bar with an accomplished raconteur who insists on telling endless shaggy-dog stories.” (Edward Thorpe, The London Evening Standard, 1984)

  Brain cells bloom. Run wild. A fistful scatter in the wind.

  “Every action is grossly overplayed, every facial expression exaggerated and the humor is at least fifty years out of date. The characters cannot even read a newspaper without looking like rabbits chomping grass.” (Manning)

  SCENE 17: BIP HUNTING BUTTERFLIES

  Bip is a child. He joyfully runs from one end of the stage to another with an imaginary net, chasing after a bug.

  Bip is an old man hunting butterflies. His exaggerated movements are heavy with sentiment. He tries to capture the butterfly in his hands, but he misses, dismay plain on his face.

  The body of an animal is a heat engine. The heart’s a force pump, growing bigger and slower as we age.

  Cat and mouse is a game with consequences. Finally, Bip catches the butterfly. It dies in his hands as he tries to hold it. He brings it to his ears to listen for a heartbeat.

  Marceau came up with the butterfly routine in a movie theater when he was fourteen. At the end of All Quiet on the Western Front, a butterfly flutters over the barrel of a soldier’s gun. As the young man reaches over the trench to touch the butterfly, he gives away his position to an enemy sniper.r />
  BIP GETS LEFT BEHIND

  Bip bobs along the skyline, suspended by a red balloon.

  His knuckles are pale.

  The string is looped twice around his wrist and tied in a sailor’s knot.

  His right hand lost sensation hours ago, but he doesn’t notice.

  He wonders, if he falls, how hard will he hit the ground?

  M. ON AGING

  “Death intervenes.”

  The inelegance of it

  No comedy nose

  Goodbye false eyelashes

  Farewell large ears

  The corners of his lips turn south

  “To be sure, he has a voice like someone’s grandmother.” (Maralyn Lois Polak, columnist)

  marcel marceau

  pere lachaisemimecharlie chaplin

  buster keatonauschwitzcoffin

  Death is always nearby for mimes who drink a glass of wine with an empty hand, waltz with no partner, who laugh and cry and not a soul can hear.

  The ascetic avoided liquor, tobacco, red meat, and yet a perforated ulcer at sixty-three in Moscow. Emergency surgery, flew to Paris for a subsequent operation.

  In a photograph taken at the University of Massachusetts, sorority girls screamed in pleasure. They stood next to a snow sculpture carved for their winter carnival. Marcel Marceau wearing a sheepskin. A luxurious white fluffy hat. A discreet red band signifying France’s Legion of Honor on his lapel.

  Some critics were convinced he was improving.

  Andrew Risik wrote, “He is very good at the preposterous dignity with which people try to redeem their worst accidents.”

  Marceau: “I’m the Picasso of mime. At eighty, Picasso was young. If I keep my fitness, I have at least another ten years. It’s an encouragement for all men in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. I don’t think of age. I think of life force and creation.”

  By 1993, Marceau had racked up some fifteen thousand performances in more than one hundred countries.

  On tour, Marceau caught the flu but didn’t miss an engagement. He said, “Theater people, if we are not seen, we don’t exist, we are nothing.”

  Mayor Rudy Giuliani proclaimed March 19, 1999, “Marcel Marceau Day.” Marceau celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday onstage at the Kaye Playhouse in New York City.

  You go on. You go on. And there is no fault to it. A man who is doing what he has always done. Chaplin in film, Marceau in theater.

  Fans jump up and shout, “You should never be allowed to die.”

  The mind goes first, then the body. The lightning storm fades to black. Neurons and synapses lose their charge. Proteins shatter, a pile of shards in a dustpan, loose pebbles in a kaleidoscope. This is the brain as it angles and plaques over.

  Marceau died on a Saturday in Paris. Emmanuel Vacca, his former assistant, announced it on France Info radio. But he withheld the cause of death.

  When the brain shrinks, the sufferer has trouble with language.

  Why worry about a mime who has trouble with language?

  PÈRE LACHAISE CEMETERY

  Three hundred mourners gathered on a chilly autumn day. Some held roses and carnations, which they threw onto the coffin. Others placed stones beside the gravesite. They weathered the light rain without umbrellas.

  Mozart by request. “When I do ‘The Creation of the World,’ I play the second movement of the Piano Concerto no. 21. I have the impression Mozart wrote it for me,” Marceau once said.

  From underneath a white tent the Rabbi René-Samuel Sirat led the ceremony: three psalms in Hebrew translated into French. He spoke about Marceau’s “silence” and “equanimity.” He read the Mourner’s Kaddish and reminded the crowd that Marceau died on Yom Kippur.

  The coffin was cloaked with the French tricolor. A maroon velvet cushion displayed Marceau’s medals from France: the Legion of Honor and the National Order of Merit.

  Bip’s hat was positioned on a pedestal, the same hat that would fetch 3,201 Euros at auction. But that day it stood between Marceau’s relatives and body. A towheaded boy carried purple flowers. A teenager’s tear fell to the bottom of her chin.

  The mourners gathered in division 21, near the very center of the cemetery where the footing is loose, gray gravel. It took many months for a proper headstone to be installed. His family chose a creamy white marker carved with the Star of David. Until then, the gravesite was covered in artificial grass, a combination of real and artificial flowers, leaves that fell from the towering trees, and a plastic sign that read Marcel Marceau 1923–2007.

  COLLECTIONS: PLEASURE READING

  The Divine Comedy. (Dante Alighieri)

  The Devil in Paris. (Gavarni)

  The Courtiers Manual Oracle; or, The Art of Prudence. (Baltasar Gracián)

  Dombey and Son. (Charles Dickens)

  The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One. (Louis-Sébastien Mercier)

  Julie; or, The New Heloise. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

  Marilou. (Serge Gainsbourg and Alain Bonnefoit)

  Canto General. (Pablo Neruda)

  100 Love Sonnets. (Pablo Neruda)

  Art of Birds. (Pablo Neruda)

  Total: 2,970 Euros

  COLLECTIONS: SILVERWARE

  He owned more than 585 kilograms of silver. A pile of ladles, saltshakers, and candlesticks. Five sets of Peruvian stirrups: small silver shoes with pointy toes, engraved with flowers. He had two sets of spurs, radiating little daggers to poke into horseflesh. An empty gun holster decorated with leaves.

  Total: 10,610 Euros

  COLLECTIONS: ROMAN TABLEWARE FROM THE SECOND CENTURY

  blue and green iridescent goblets

  bottle that flares out white and pink

  paunchy green jar

  shallow cup, ultramarine shine clings on

  vial’s neck tapers into a sharp cylinder

  vase’s belly adorned with stripes

  oil lamp in bronze patina

  Total: 2,700 Euros

  AFTER M.

  Nine hundred of his belongings were auctioned off: paintings, religious icons, clocks, books, knives, wooden dolls, masks, five sailor suits—in gray, navy, white, cream, and black and white—the battered top hat with a single red rose, and a black chair painted with the words “Bip’s dreams.”

  The auction was held over two sunny summer days at Hôtel Drouot, a large auction house in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, the atmosphere described by one reporter as “bazaar-like.” Fans, private collectors, and art merchants huddled together. They flipped through piles of photographs. They left their fingerprints on display cases. They picked over Marceau’s correspondence, his silverware, his large collection of curios. Nineteenth-century wind-up fortune-teller doll, anyone?

  A twenty-eight-year-old art apprentice who couldn’t afford any of the objects furiously recorded the starting and final sale prices of as many of Marceau’s possessions as she could. “I guess coming here sort of let me feel like I could get inside le mime Marceau’s world for the last time before it gets split up,” she told a reporter.

  The walls were crowded with salon-style picture frames: Marceau’s own artwork, the paintings he collected, and paintings depicting him. Photographs with Bill Clinton, Cary Grant, Yul Brynner, Ginger Rogers, Maurice Chevalier, Michael Jackson. Masks were mounted on the walls, including multiple reproductions of his own disembodied face.

  A mannequin displayed Marceau’s gray and white sailor suit. Bip’s top hat rested in a glass case at the center of the room. Up close, the fabric was a pale version of black and the rose just some bunched up red lace, fastened to a piece of wire.

  “For those of us who knew Marcel and how he lived his life and art as one, this random dispersal of his possessions is very painful,” Marceau’s musical director Stephan Martell said. He and Marceau’s assistant, Valérie Bochenek, attempted to purchase as many items as they could. They hoped to put together what they called “A Museum for Bip.” They fell short of the $135,000 they hoped to raise. Still, during the
first day, Bochenek made ten successful bids totaling nearly $7,560.

  In fact, no one wanted the auction, which was brought about by court order. Even the auctioneer, Rodolphe Tessier, called the event “unfortunate and exceptionally rare.” He priced the items low, to all but guarantee that everything would go.

  This was Marceau’s family’s only way to pay back almost half a million Euros in loans. “We tried everything not to have to resort to this, in vain,” his daughter Camille said. She added that her father was “humiliated” by his debts. He once said to her in tears, “I’ve worked like a horse and I’ve failed in my life.”

  M. ON TRUTH

  “Who in the twentieth century has been world famous as a soloist in mime?” Marcel Marceau asked the journalist Robert Butler in an interview with The Independent in 1995.

  “Who?”

  “I ask you the question. Who?”

  “You?”

  “Absolutely. It is the truth. You spoke the truth. What I did as a one-man show throughout the world, no one can do again in the twentieth century. Maybe in the twenty-first. I don’t know.”

  Marceau seemed to dismiss the two hundred students who were currently enrolled in his school and the nine performers in his mime company. He taught them the grammar he used to carry out his illusions. They learned to reproduce his gestures faithfully. And when they succeeded in mirroring the master, they began to unravel the art.

  “Marceau’s success has inspired imitators far and wide, few worth looking at. Mime’s gotten a bum rap. Watching Marcel Marceau has a marvelous restorative effect. He can say more with one eyebrow or one ripple of the fingers than would-be clones can do with their entire bodies,” Janice Berman wrote in Newsday in 1995.