The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (23 page)

Christian (a.k.a. Marie-Pierre), a waiter who has worked here for twenty-eight years, knows he is beautiful, with extraordinary eyes. So he adorns himself with false eyelashes, layers of shadow, eyeliner, and mascara. He moves the lashes up and down, slowly, to undress others with his gaze. He colors his lips in a dark shade of honey to avoid detracting from his eyes. Then he transforms himself into Cher in a fur-trimmed, gem-encrusted headdress and a robe that he removes to reveal much more.

An elegant blonde in a black wrap cocktail dress comes close to me. It jolts me to realize that it’s my friend Oscar again. He mounts the stage to do a skit about Chantal Ladesou, a fast-talking, plainspoken French humorist. When Oscar finishes, he steps down into the audience, where he singles out a male client. He flirts. He kisses him on the cheek. The man is not amused, but everyone at his table howls with laughter.

There’s more: Tina Turner, Marilyn Monroe, Whitney Houston, Lady Gaga. When the show ends, at one a.m., the crowd is on its feet, cheering, smiling, asking to take photographs. Everyone leaves happy, very happy.
Youpi!

BEFORE I WENT
to Michou’s cabaret, I had never seen transvestite performances. Only their broad shoulders give these performers away as men—that, and their lack of cellulite.

I was surprised that in many of their costumes, the performers appear flat-chested, with a lean, androgynous look. The few who are given breasts (like Maria Callas in her red ball gown) are not voluptuous. And there is zero cleavage.

Then there is the testicle issue. I look hard with my journalist’s trained eye and detect no telltale bulges on the bodies of performers in leotards. Not even on Cher, wearing a studded leather leotard-like costume so skimpy that her backside is covered in nothing but fishnet. The front V between her legs is so narrow I am certain something will spill out. These guys have been doing this for a long time, and just as Julie Andrews taped down her breasts while pretending to be a male transvestite nightclub star in the 1982 film
Victor Victoria,
I assume there must be a lot of creative work backstage with duct tape.

Afterward, Oscar explained how illusion is at work. “It’s all in the
mousse
,” he said.

“
Mousse
?” I asked.

“Yeah, like the filling of a couch.”

“Ah, foam rubber!”

“Cher’s torso, her butt, all of it is done in foam rubber,” said Oscar. “You don’t see a penis. You see nothing. When I play Chantal Ladesou, my waist, my hips, my breasts—all foam rubber!”

Michou holds forth almost every night at his table, the one closest to the bar, where he invites special guests to join him. Politics have no meaning for him. One evening, a leader of the ultra-right National Front and his much younger male companion came to sit with Michou. “I’m very, very shocked,” Michou deadpanned. “I’ve just been told you’re homos!”

He also invites guests to stop by before they sit down. He poses for pictures. He giggles a lot and likes to give the impression that he is a bit of a roué. “Don’t ask me about my lovers,” he told me one evening as the show was about to start. “It would fill three volumes.” He loves women, he insists, from afar. “They are like flowers, very fragile,” he said. “I’ve never touched one.”

He eyed the young French male friend who had come with me. My friend is tall and lean, with smooth, fair skin, high cheekbones, and a beautiful face. “Not bad, this guy,” Michou said. Just the right touch of naughtiness.

NOW ONE OF THE LAST
vestiges of old Montmartre, Michou arrived here by accident. He was born to a single mother in the northern French town of Amiens in an era when premarital sex and single motherhood meant ostracism. His mother worked, so he was raised by his maternal grandmother, who couldn’t read or write. Michou quit school at fourteen to do odd jobs: messenger boy, newspaper seller, stock boy, shop assistant. In 1948, at seventeen, he moved to Paris, penniless. He got a job doing chores at a restaurant before being drafted into the army; he worked in postwar Germany as a bartender in the French officers’ mess. After his discharge, with financial help from an older male lover he referred to as his uncle, he became the manager of a broken-down club on the rue des Martyrs. Michou thought it resembled the waiting room in a train station. In four years, he bought the business.

His transvestite show happened by accident. For Mardi Gras in 1956, Michou, on a dare, dressed up as French sex goddess Brigitte Bardot and joined a friend onstage. “We were two
belles laides
!” he said. (The expression refers to a woman who is not beautiful—
laid
means “ugly”—but whose mystery, exoticism, or enthusiasm renders her gorgeous.) A third friend performed with them. Soon, they were joined by other “Michettes”—waiters and barmen who serve drinks and dinner before shedding their aprons and dressing up as women for the show.

“Brigitte Bardot once told me that we have the same derrière,” he announced with pleasure. He pointed to a black-and-white photo of a long-legged, long-haired, barefoot blonde in a tutu and straw hat. The woman is looking into the camera over her shoulder. But it is not a woman. It is Michou, about fifty years ago, posing as Brigitte Bardot.

“I still wear the same sunglasses—but I’ve lost that derrière!”

In those early days, he was a pariah. “My place was considered a house of perdition,” he said. “The men were prejudiced against me. But the women came and made my reputation.” When Michou’s grandmother died, he vowed that if he ever made it big, he would honor her by helping old people. So once a month he hosts a free lunch in his club—with wine and entertainment—for more than eighty elderly neighborhood residents. Guest singers lead them in familiar French songs.

“In my entire life, I only loved one woman—my grandmother,” he said. “I adored her. So the grandmothers and grandfathers of Montmartre are welcome here!” He slapped the table to make his point.

For years, Michou has been a trailblazer for gay rights, a promoter of Montmartre’s contemporary art scene, and a supporter of neighborhood causes. The Republic of Montmartre, a charitable and cultural organization founded in 1921, has named him its “minister of the night.”

When he gave a party for Régine, the veteran Paris nightclub and discotheque queen, at the cabaret a few years back, Bertrand Delanoë, then the mayor of Paris, attended. When, recently, some residents wanted to remove the children’s carousel on the place des Abbesses (too noisy, too intrusive, too tacky, they said), he lobbied successfully to keep it there. He called it a symbol
of the chaos and whimsy of the street. “The kids in the neighborhood—they don’t have the money to go to Disneyland Paris. So let them have Montmartre!”

In 2005, President Chirac decorated Michou as a
chevalier
of the Legion of Honor. “You are being decorated as the artist but also as the man with a big heart who discreetly brings such active support to great humanitarian causes,” Chirac wrote in a letter that hangs on a wall of Michou’s grand eighth-floor apartment in Montmartre.

“I didn’t want to accept it, but everyone said, ‘You must!’” he told me. Now he’s so proud that every day he pins the red ribbon on the left lapel of his blue satin dinner jacket.

He calls Bernadette Chirac, the former First Lady and a fellow humanitarian, a friend. “I like her very much,” he said. “She sometimes criticizes me for drinking too much champagne. One day I said to her, ‘Madame, I don’t touch girls; I don’t touch cocaine. I don’t touch hashish. Champagne keeps me young!’”

THERE WAS A TIME
when the neighborhood was filled with clubs like Cabaret Michou. In the late 1800s, entertainment, alcohol, and sex mingled in Montmartre to produce a volatile brew of seediness; the lowlife included Corsican gangsters, pimps, prostitutes, vagabonds, sexual outsiders, and cardsharps. Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and, later, Picasso and Dalí all painted scenes here. Catty-corner across the street from Cabaret Michou is the 490-seat Le Divan du Monde. When it opened as a music hall, in 1873, it was called Divan Japonais and was decorated like a Japanese brothel: silk panels on the walls, poles of bamboo, bil
liard tables, lacquered furniture in red and black, hostesses in kimonos. One of Toulouse-Lautrec’s most famous posters shows the cancan dancer Jane Avril in profile at Divan Japonais wearing a fitted, high-necked black dress and a black bonnet that partially covers her flaming red hair.

But Le Divan du Monde has a
much more important claim to fame. In the 1890s—under different ownership and name—the modern striptease is said to have been created on its stage. It featured a woman named Blanche Cavelli playing the famous cabaret artist Yvette Guilbert as she readied herself for bed. “Yvette’s Going to Bed” was the name of the skit.

“When the curtain rose, a chair and a bed were onstage to represent an ordinary room,” wrote Rachel Shteir in a scholarly work on the history of the striptease. “Piano music began to play, and Cavelli entered, wearing everyday clothes. She took off her gloves, her hat, and a corsage and threw them on the chair. She took off her skirt and then she removed her petticoat, her corset, her stockings, and finally her chemise, leaving her in some sort of nightgown. Finally, she climbed into bed and the lights went out.” “Yvette’s” undressing was so popular it inspired at least thirty similar skits in Paris.

The cabaret lived many lives, including as a comedy theater and a movie theater showing porn films. Later it was renovated—to look old and distressed—with red Chinese lanterns, a curved wrought-iron balcony, purple leopard-print drapery, and bare red light bulbs. Now it is rented out to private theater and concert organizers. There is no place to sit, so spectators stand to watch the show. I once went to hear the young American singer Ambrosia Parsley, who drank beer as she performed with a
blend of enthusiasm and ennui. “I’m wearing a pretty dress on a stage in Paris,” she told the crowd. “What do I have to complain about?”

Next door to Le Divan du Monde was a cabaret, now closed down, called Madame Arthur. It opened in 1948 and took its name from the song made famous by the real-life Yvette Guilbert. For a while it was more famous than Cabaret Michou. In his column in the
New York Herald Tribune
, humorist Art Buchwald once said of Madame Arthur, “It’s the sort of place that makes you glad you’re normal.”

SPEND ENOUGH TIME
with Michou, and the outer layers of frivolity peel away. He has suffered from cancer and has heart problems. He can no longer walk the hills of Montmartre on his own. He moves slowly, on the arms of others. Onstage, he occasionally forgets his lines and mangles his jokes. He no longer sings “Michou’s Song,” which was written in his honor, as he did every night for so many years. The only things that keep him going, he says, are champagne and his cabaret.

More and more often, when it’s time for the show, the drink turns him angry. “Why are you doing this? This is all wrong!” he shouts to no one in particular. Sometimes the arguments spill out onto the street, which he knows is bad for his image.

“I’m a sad old man,” Michou said one evening. He laments that Montmartre is not the same. “I knew the great moments. The fifties. There was really a soul here. There was this famous Corsican Mafia. That made the neighborhood safe. There were fruits and vegetables for every season. Small
triperies.
Now
they’re closed. There are all these clothing boutiques. Who needs so many clothes? Where is this neighborhood that was so lively? Where are all the artisans? The artists?

“I have the feeling that if I’m not in blue, no one will recognize me.”

THE DIVE

. . .

In the room of the
bar-tabac
on the rue des Martyrs, You can buy everything, sell everything, the best and the worst.

—
2003 SONG BY THE BAND
P
IGALLE ABOUT THE RUE DES
M
ARTYRS

O
NE FRIDAY CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT I FOUND MYSELF
trying to fit in at Bistrot 82. I knew I didn’t. I was much older than everyone except a lecherous drunk who looked as if he had been glued to the same bar stool for years. But the place was so dark I figured no one would notice me.