Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  Jazz seemed to be bursting out of every ventilation shaft in Paris. Even Janet Flanner had to start covering jazz concerts, and she had to do it “seriously,” the same way she reported on de Gaulle’s latest speech, Picasso’s exhibitions, and Sartre’s plays. She eventually broke the news to her readers: Paris had become the new world capital of jazz. It was impossible, though, to cover every concert and jazz-related event. She decided to stick to festivals, at least for the time being. “The Old Marigny Theatre has seen a week of frenzied jazz concerts, American Negroes like Coleman Hawkins, Slam Stewart and Howard McGhee.” She of course relayed the intense and warlike dispute between different schools, “a struggle between diehard New Orleans style, also known in France as ‘jazz hot,’ and ‘Bebop,’ mentioning the athletic clarinetist Claude Luter ‘on the French front.’”17 A few months later, however, Janet could no longer avoid going underground and visiting jazz clubs in caves.

  Claustrophilia is the Saint-Germain-des-Prés fashion, with the boîtes in basements—some of them authentic eighteenth-century cellars that are still unventilated. The best new club of the kind is in the basement of the Vieux Colombier Theatre, with Claude Luter’s “jazz hot,” and black French African natives singing home songs. The Club Saint Germain and le Tabou, the first of the troglodyte caverns called Existentialist are still feverishly popular.18

  Paris was being invaded by hordes of tourists and foreign students. Was it the unexpected pre-effect of the Marshall Plan? As Janet wrote at the end of May 1948: “the tourists are regarded as shiploads of precious material not specified in the Marshall Plan.”19

  Many of them were “intellectual” tourists. Beauvoir could spot them straightaway, as she told Algren: “Young existentialist boys now grow a beard; American intellectual tourists grow beards too. All these beards are awfully ugly! But the existentialist caves are a wonderful success. It is funny, just two blocks—that is all Saint-Germain-des-Prés—but within these two blocks you cannot find a place to sit down, neither in the bars, cafés, night clubs nor even on the pavement. Then all around it is just darkness and death.”20 In this square mile, different generations mingled. There were “the group of the first villagers in the 1930s, the Prévert band, the Sartrean family, the young birds of the night whom the newspapers called existentialists, and the Communist cell. Their common denominator was anti-Fascism, and Communism their reference: either they had been Communists, were presently Communists, would soon cease to be Communist or would become Communists.”21

  RESEARCHING THE SECOND SEX

  In the intellectual and artistic world of Paris in 1948, if your skin color, your religion, and your nationality were irrelevant to the way you lived and were seen, your gender had far-reaching repercussions for your happiness, ambitions, and health. To be a woman, even in liberated Paris, was a congenital predicament. The freest of women, Simone de Beauvoir, who was brought up as a woman but lived like a man, was still investigating the question. The more she researched the topic—delving into mythology and anthropology and starting to conduct interviews with women, both friends and strangers—the more fascinated she became with what had now become a massive endeavor. After the elation of traveling with Nelson Algren down the Mississippi and on to Mexico, the Yucatán peninsula, and Guatemala in May and June 1948, she returned to her book with immense eagerness.

  Just before leaving Paris she had published a few pages on “Woman and Myths” in Les Temps modernes as a cautious way to test the water. The first line read: “He is The Absolute, and she is The Other.” Simone de Beauvoir had at her disposal a plethora of cases she could analyze. She had only to look at her friends and acquaintances, ask them questions, and draw her own conclusions on the place of women in society. Sonia Brownell, for instance, was head over heels in love with Merleau-Ponty. When in Paris, the lovers spent their nights in jazz clubs, dancing until dawn, sometimes accompanied by another dervish of a philosopher and Sonia’s compatriot, A. J. Ayer, newly appointed chair of philosophy at University College London, and a frequent visitor to Paris. Both men, of great intellect, immense charm, and finesse, regarded their dalliances slightly differently. Merleau-Ponty, a married man with children, had no intention of (ever) divorcing, just like Albert Camus, while Ayer was happy to marry, divorce, remarry, and father children with passing partners. Sonia could easily have accepted Merleau-Ponty’s position, even embraced it. After all, she was a strong-willed individual, and—a crucial detail—she earned her living. She even acted as the unofficial editor of Horizon. With both its editors heading off to France for months at a time, she was often left in charge of running the office and commissioning contributions. “Do accept anything you think good,” Cyril Connolly wrote to Sonia in July 1948 from his summer residence at Somerset Maugham’s villa in the south of France.22 It would have been nice to be acknowledged as such, with a deputy editor title and the salary that went with it, but she did not ask. She convinced herself that she liked being une éminence grise. And anyway, matters of the heart seemed more important. As she confided to Simone, Sonia simply longed to live with Merleau-Ponty, “the love of her life.” She was turning thirty and wanted to settle down. Beauvoir knew Merleau-Ponty very well: they had been classmates, and her best friend Zaza had been in love with him. Until death did them part, as it happened. Beauvoir blamed Merleau-Ponty for Zaza’s sudden death at the age of twenty-two.23 And to her mind, Sonia’s love story with Merleau-Ponty would also end in tears and ill health—which it did.

  Mamaine was another perfect case study for Beauvoir. Mamaine, who had just taken Albert Camus and his wife, Francine, on a short trip to London in May and was staying at Sonia Brownell’s flat at 18 Percy Street, could claim to live with the man of her heart. However, she was very unhappy with Arthur Koestler. And she had great difficulty admitting it. Having forfeited a career of her own, despite a fine polyglot education, she had entered into a relationship with Koestler in which she was constantly bullied. She had agreed not to have any children in exchange for a hypothetical marriage that was a rather long time coming. It was now three years since he had promised to marry her (and it would be another couple of years before he finally did so). Meanwhile, she continued to work as his secretary, translator, copy editor, governess, and souffre-douleur (punching bag) while receiving no credit for her work and being completely dependent on him financially. Mamaine thought she had to endure Koestler’s moods and whims. She thought it was her moral duty and the lot of all life companions. She would soon develop “asthma attacks,” or so a succession of perplexed doctors told her. Was it asthma, or was she growing allergic to Koestler?

  When the British mandate for Palestine was officially terminated and the independent State of Israel proclaimed (and was at once invaded by the armies of five sovereign Arab states, strongly opposed by the Jewish defense force Haganah), Koestler left immediately to report for Le Figaro, the Manchester Guardian, and the International Herald Tribune. He did not forget to take Mamaine with him, however. He intended to make her work hard for him. The couple arrived in Haifa on June 4. While Koestler met and dined with the luminaries, “dealing with Haute Politique,”24 he cunningly sent Mamaine to do all the fieldwork in Jerusalem. Koestler even gave her a Leica, on their friend the world-renowned war photographer Robert Capa’s advice, in order to take pictures—pictures that would illustrate his articles, though her name would not appear alongside his. Mamaine thought it normal; she was just helping her partner, who was the brain, after all. In Jerusalem, Mamaine unfortunately failed to get hold of a copy of Les Temps modernes’ June 1948 issue. If she had, she might have been intrigued by Beauvoir’s second essay on “Woman and Myths.” “The woman is both Eve and Virgin Mary. She is an idol, a servant, the origin of Life, the power of darkness; she is the elementary silence of Truth, she is artifice, gossip and lies; she is the healer and the sorceress, she is man’s prey, she is his ruin, she is everything he is not and wants, his negation and his raison d’être. She is the Other, she is Evil throug
h which Good can exist.”

  Women had to be very strong in 1948 to be able to assert themselves, and, plainly, to exist. Beauvoir had undoubtedly offered a mirror into which young, ambitious women could peer. The image Beauvoir reflected was a powerful and scandalous one. She offered a new holy grail in the trinity of intellectual ambition, financial independence, and sexual freedom. Maria Casarès and Juliette Gréco, fifteen and twenty years her juniors, were following in her steps. On June 18, 1948, just after lunchtime, Albert Camus bumped into Maria Casarès on the boulevard Saint-Germain. The now twenty-six-year-old Casarès was accompanied by her current beau, the charismatic Jean Servais, like her a formidable actor. Camus and Casarès looked at each other, exchanged a few words, and parted but, as they walked away, they both turned and looked back at the same moment. This was it; they had missed each other too much. Maria left Jean, Albert did not leave Francine. From then on, Albert called Maria “L’unique.” Their relationship was public and their modus vivendi based on the absoluteness of their love. They shared their lives without living together. As Albert would sum it up later to Maria: “I may have cheated on you, but I have never betrayed you.” In other words, he was unfaithful but always loyal.25 Maria would embrace this unconventional arrangement until Albert’s untimely death twelve years later. But what about Francine? Albert might have been spending some of his nights with his wife and children, along with family holidays in the summer, but she knew, as well as everybody else, that Maria was his true love, or rather his equal in love, while she was the wife at home and mother of his children, a lesser love. She had once had ambitions to be a concert pianist, but that was now a fading memory. Her family had originally been very happy that she married a promising writer. Now, her mother and sister had to fly from Algiers and keep her company and help with the children as she felt less and less well. Like Mamaine, Francine would eventually develop chronic ailments of a severe nature. Albert’s behavior was, quite literally, a violent poison in Francine’s life; however, she consciously agreed to swallow it, sip by sip, day after day.

  EXISTENTIALIST CHANSON

  Juliette Gréco was not going to let anyone poison her life, and certainly not men. Merleau-Ponty (and already many others) had tried to woo her, and she had certainly found the phenomenologist “terribly charming,” as she freely admitted seventy years later. But the point for her was always to be her own woman. She had wanted to be a tragedian, like Maria Casarès, except she had twice failed the entrance exam for the national drama school. She would be a chanteuse. A new kind of chanteuse, her own kind. Her friend Anne-Marie Cazalis, the curly-red-haired poet turned self-publicist, had talked her into it. So had Sartre. “But I have never sung,” she told them. “Et alors?” they replied. Et alors, indeed. “Come and meet me at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” said Sartre on a spring day in 1948, “and I’ll have a song ready for you.” There was no arguing with fate.

  At nine o’clock sharp, Juliette walked up to the fourth floor of 42 rue Bonaparte and knocked on the door. Sartre had not forgotten about her and had prepared many different sheets of papers. “I have selected a few poems for you. And here is a song for you, I wrote it, it’s a gift. Go and see Joseph Kosma, he’ll write the music for you.” Sartre had written “La rue des blancs-Manteaux” [The street of white coats] in 1944 for his play No Exit but had not used it. Gréco started reading while walking down the stairs. It talked about an executioner who had had to wake up early for a long day of work; there was a scaffold, and army generals, beautifully attired ladies and bishops whose heads were about to roll, and all this was taking place in the rue des Blancs Manteaux, a quiet street in the 4th arrondissement at the time of the French Revolution. Not exactly cheerful, but an Existentialist song if there ever was such a thing. Gréco needed more songs to start a repertoire. She looked at the poems Sartre had suggested. There was one by Raymond Queneau she loved immediately: “Si tu t’imagines”26 (“If you imagine”). Here was another Existentialist song, this time on the brevity and naïveté of youth. Youngsters, don’t be fooled, wrote the poet, you may be in love today but love never lasts; you may look fresh and pretty today, but you won’t tomorrow. Just like love, youthful beauty always ends in tears. Gréco was overjoyed. She needed a third song, though. Jacques Prévert would do.

  She rushed to the Café de Flore and asked to use the phone to call Joseph Kosma: “Can I come later today? I need music for poems,” she said. Kosma, the celebrated film score composer, lived with his wife in a single attic room, or more precisely a chambre de bonne (a maid’s room), on the sixth floor of a sandstone building on the rue de l’Université. Kosma had managed to get a piano, a chair, a sofa bed, and a coffee table into his studio. He read the texts and sat at the piano while Juliette stood, her elbow resting on the piano. In two hours, he composed the music. Now Juliette needed to sing the poems turned songs, something she had never done before. She walked to her decrepit hotel, Le Montana, 3 rue de Bourgogne, went up to her room, locked herself in, stood in front of the mirror, and started reciting.

  Gréco was not convinced. She did not think she could pull it off, she confided to her friend Cazalis at the Méphisto bar in the evening. “You have four days to rehearse. We have a place. Le Boeuf sur le Toit has reopened and given us a slot. You’re on.” Juliette protested. She had nothing to wear. Cazalis lent her some money and told her to go to Pierre Balmain and get herself the cheapest garment in the couture shop. Juliette bought a little black dress. She then spent four days in her hotel room, standing in front of the mirror. She was experimenting with hand gestures, pronunciation, diction, phrasing. After all, she was singing poetry and reciting great texts by famous names. She was an interpreter, the prism through which words, ideas, and images would reach an audience. In four days she created a style, her style. Juliette was happy to try her luck in a cabaret on the Right Bank, in the 8th arrondissement, far from her world. She was hoping nobody would notice her debut. Le Boeuf sur le Toit had opened its doors in the early 1920s and had become a favorite lieu de rendez-vous for the young Cocteau, Picasso, Diaghilev, Satie, Stravinsky, Chanel, Braque, Dior, and many others. It was now being relaunched by the Left Bank kids.

  On the night Gréco started her career, there was a twenty-four-year-old American in the audience who had just starred on Broadway in a new play by Tennessee Williams called A Streetcar Named Desire. Cocteau, also in the audience, would adapt it for the French stage a year later. Cocteau was looking at Marlon Brando looking at Juliette Gréco. Marlon Brando was even more attracted by the act following Gréco, a black American singer named Eartha Kitt who sang “Chéri, je vous aime beaucoup, je ne sais pas what to do.”27 Gréco and Brando became friends, and he gave her a ride back to her hotel on a Solex-powered bicycle after the show. Brando was at a crossroads in his career. He had starred in plays on Broadway for five years now, among others the New York productions of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Cocteau’s L’aigle à deux têtes (The Two-Headed Eagle), and Hollywood was courting him both for his incredible beauty and for his acting talent. In Paris he did not reply to any of the cables sent by his agent and producers. He seemed to observe, with as much terror as pleasure, the effect he had on both men and women. In Hollywood, Fred Zinnemann was thinking about offering him the lead role in The Men, which would establish Brando as a movie star. Meanwhile, in Paris, unknown but not unremarked, the young Brando was trying to grapple with his existence. With Juliette Gréco and his French homosexual friends he spoke too much, drank very little, and did not smoke. “He was very charming, very voluble but he was suffering, it was obvious,” thought Juliette Gréco, “and it was of a sexual nature.”28

  Through his life, Marlon Brando would keep coming back to Paris, to visit friends, female and male lovers such as Christian Marquand, to tell Norman Mailer to stop dabbling in screenwriting and return to novels, to help out a penniless James Baldwin, and to go out on the town with the wunderkind of French literature Françoise Sagan. He would occasionally cross
paths with Juliette Gréco, who, like him, was to achieve world fame, in her case touring Latin and North America in her little black dress, singing Existentialist songs and fascinating Hollywood moguls, all too eager either to marry her, like Darryl Zanuck, or to offer her a seven-year contract, like David O. Selznick. Much courted and celebrated, both Brando and Gréco, of the generation “born in 1925,”29 would, however, always be mavericks. Paris had made them that way.

  PART IV

  SHARPENING THE SENSES

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “THEY OWNED ART WHILE WE WERE JUST FULL OF DOLLARS”

  BORN IN 1925

  “The vanguard of the biggest influx of American tourists since the great season of 1929 is now becoming visible and audible everywhere in Paris,” announced Janet Flanner at the end of June 1948. “They are as welcome as they are valuable. Saint-Germain-des-Prés has become a campus for the American collegiate set. The Café de Flore serves as a drugstore for pretty upstate girls in unbecoming blue denim pants and their Middle Western dates, most of whom are growing hasty Beaux-Arts beards.”1 Sartre enjoyed a real authority among foreign students. Existentialism had become an institution by now, an official article of export, on a par with Christian Dior gowns. “Members of the tourist intelligentsia patronize the Pont Royal Bar which used to be full of Existentialists and is now full only of themselves, often arguing about Existentialism.”2 June 1948 is exactly when, according to Anne-Marie Cazalis, the Left Bank youth lost their innocence. Le Tabou had withstood worldwide publicity for a year, but by that summer of 1948, when the tourists started to outnumber the indigenous Existentialists, it had lost its cachet. “Our youth lasted four years,”3 wrote Cazalis. “Adults stole our youth in 1948,” she continued. “When the first adult started dancing with a professional beauty, our reign ended.”