ELAINE SCIOLINO

From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

For 57 years, Michel Georges Alfred Catty, known to all as Michou, has run the transvestite Cabaret Michou on the Rue des Martyrs at the base of Montmartre in Paris. With his white demi-bouffant, oversize sunglasses and eccentric ways (he dresses only in blue), he is so recognizable that passers-by stop him on the street — to chat, perhaps, or to ask to take his photo.

“I sit on the terrace and 20 people come up to me to take pictures,” he said over a glass of Champagne at La Mascotte, the bar-restaurant on the Rue des Abbesses where he holds court at 6 p.m. nearly every day. “And I love that! How I love to be recognized! ‘You are Michou? The real Michou?’ Ah, I adore it. To your health! I am the last muse.”

But Michou, 81, is not a caricature of seedy old Pigalle or Bohemian Paris. He is a showman; a successful, self-made businessman; and a beloved member of the community. Long before the term “drag queen” was used, he created the first song-and-dance show after World War II in which male performers impersonated female stars of the era. The cabaret is said by some French cultural critics to have inspired Edouard Molinaro’s 1978 film, “La Cage aux Folles.”
Continue reading “The King of Gay Paree” »

From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.

ALawton/PhotoCuisine, via Corbis
A horse fillet, cooked with morels, peas and parsley.

Last October, the super-starred French chef Alain Ducasse invited Dan Barber, of the Blue Hill restaurants in New York, to the Plaza Athenée to cook for some special guests. American Ambassador Charles H. Rivkin and his wife, Susan Tolson, showed up, as did dozens of Paris luminaries. The Americans were wowed by Barber’s inventiveness, including his use of charcoal made from pig bones to roast a whole pig. The French, by contrast, were horrified.

One food critic called it a “sacrilege.” Another said that for Europeans, charred bones evoke the ovens of Auschwitz. Barber, meanwhile, was clueless that his gastronomic masterpiece had caused such commotion.

When it comes to food, the French and the Anglo-Saxons can find themselves caught in a clash of culinary cultures. “Horsegate,” the widening food scandal in which horse meat labeled as beef has been discovered in prepared foods in Europe, proves it. In Britain, where horses are beloved as intelligent, social creatures and heroes of war, there has been outrage. In France, the reaction has been more complicated.
Continue reading “They Eat Horses, Don’t They?” »

From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.

Agathe Poupeney/Opéra national de Paris
Members of the Paris Opera Ballet and students of the Paris Opera Ballet School pose inside the Opera Garnier.

The Paris Opera Ballet, the oldest national ballet company in the world, dating to the 17th-century court of Louis XIV, has dared to break with tradition: for the first time in its history it is asking ordinary citizens for money.

At a news conference on Feb. 5, a handful of Paris Opera officials made the case for a one million euro fund-raising project to renovate the decorative pillars, lampposts, columns and statues that hold up the 60 outdoor light fixtures of the Palais Garnier, the ballet’s jewel of a theater made famous by the Gaston Leroux novel and the Broadway musical “The Phantom of the Opera.” The pitch was direct: the Louvre and Versailles solicit individuals as well as corporations for financing their projects. Why not the Palais Garnier?

As Christophe Tardieu, deputy director of the Paris Opera, announced that anyone could make a donation — “no matter what the amount” and “by check, by credit card!” — it was clear that the Paris Opera Ballet, without exactly admitting it, is trying to redefine itself.
Continue reading “Dance Fever” »

From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.

Paola Kudacki/Trunk Archive

When it comes to erotica and pornography, whether hard, soft, sadomasochistic or merely steamy, the French believe they have done it first, done it better and done it all. So the French version of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy should have flopped.

After all, the author E.L. James has none of the poetry of Anaïs Nin, the muse of Henry Miller whose journals made her the 20th century’s pioneer of female erotica. James is not profound like Georges Bataille, the 20th-century French intellectual whose philosophical works explore the dark side of sex. She is not wanton like Catherine Millet, the French art critic and editor whose 2001 memoir graphically catalogs her never-ending anonymous sexual encounters — in swingers clubs, offices, parking lots, cemeteries and trucks in the Bois de Boulogne. And James is certainly no Marquis de Sade, the 18th-century French aristocrat whose fictional fantasies about sexual abuse, torture and murder created the word “sadism.”

But the French version of the first volume of “Fifty Shades” has defied the naysayers, selling an estimated 900,000 print copies and 40,000 e-books since last October, according to its publisher, and rocketing to the top of best-seller lists. A half million copies of Volume 2, which arrived after the New Year, have already been shipped to bookstores in France.
Continue reading “The French Fifty Shades” »

From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.

Adrian Gaut

Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France and one of the richest men in the world, is a master of emotional concealment. But there he was, in a television interview in 2007, pouring his heart out about feeling unappreciated in his own country. He boasted that his company, LVMH, is a “beautiful” enterprise dedicated to producing made-in-France luxury goods and to spreading French creativity and culture throughout the world. In other countries, he said, corporate heads are highly respected; in France, they are not. “France has a problem with a market economy,” he said. “The influence of Marxism still exists.”

After François Hollande, a Socialist, was elected president last May, Arnault quietly rented an apartment in the leafy Brussels suburb of Uccles and applied for Belgian citizenship. When the story broke in a Belgian newspaper in September, Arnault was condemned as an ingrate and a traitor. How could the “Napoleon of luxury” whose brands — Dior, Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, to name a few — symbolize French savoir-faire, become a citizen of the country that gave the world thick waffles, fried potatoes, Tintin comics and 500 brands of beer? Was he abandoning his homeland to avoid Hollande’s plan to impose an emergency tax of 75 percent on personal income of more than a million euros a year?

Continue reading “France’s Trouble With Money” »

From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.
Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in the 1963 Billy Wilder film “Irma la Douce.”

Not all that we see on-screen of Paris is Paris.

The square where Gene Kelly sells his paintings to a wealthy American woman in “An American in Paris” is a soundstage in Hollywood. So is the rue St. Denis in the old Les Halles market where Shirley Maclaine streetwalks in Billy Wilder’s “Irma la Douce.” And the outdoor cafe in “April in Paris.” And Notre Dame Cathedral in the 1939 version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

But it hardly matters. So much of Hollywood’s version of Paris is fantasy, a place where the line between the real and the imagined is delightfully blurred, where adventure, mystery, beauty and even love lurk just around the corner. (The filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch, who made a dozen films in the 1920s and 1930s using fake Paris, even preferred it to the real. “I’ve been to Paris, France, and I’ve been to Paris Paramount,” he said. “Paris Paramount is better.”)

Continue reading “Paris à la Hollywood” »

From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.

Everett Collection
A scene from François Truffaut’s 1970 film “Bed & Board.”

Summer this year came with special radio programs about a subject the French take very seriously: sex. On Saturday nights, Europe 1 focused on desire. In “Chaude Est la Nuit” (“Hot Is the Night”), famous actors with voices of velour read erotic literary texts about female pleasure. RTL, a competitor, took a more clinical approach. In a daily two-hour series throughout July, sexologists, psychiatrists and gynecologists explored such subjects as “the trouble with the erection,” “sex for seniors” and “perversions.”

These are not the sort of shows you would find on NPR. But talking about sex is a national pastime here, finely honed over the centuries. In the Middle Ages, France was the first European country to create a culture of love. Lust was sublimated to romance and complex rituals, ceremonies and verbal entreaties were used even in pursuing an outcome as modest as the touching of a woman’s hand. That gamesmanship has endured, helping the French when it comes to mastering the heady language of desire and seduction. But when it comes down to actual carnal mechanics, the French can seem as clueless anyone else.

Continue reading “Sex and Savoir-Faire” »

From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.

Courtesy of Plaza Athénée/Dorchester Group
The entire Club des Chefs des Chefs outside the Plaza Athénée.

It’s good to be a chef, particularly if your boss is a president, a prime minister or a prince. So when the “Club des Chefs des Chefs,” a group of chefs to world leaders, visited Paris this week, they were welcomed as if they were chefs d’état — heads of state.

In French diplomacy, the meal is a means of loosening the lips and softening the resolve of the adversary by giving pleasure. As the 17th-century writer and envoy François de Callières put it his classic book, “The Art of Diplomacy,” “The natural effect of good eating and drinking is the inauguration of friendships and the creation of familiarity, and when people are a trifle warmed by wine they often disclose secrets of importance.”

So every year, the club members don their custom-made, double-breasted white jackets embroidered with their names and their countries’ flags and gather in one or more of their capitals to swap recipes, make new friends and refine their culinary diplomacy. This year, twenty of them (most of them from Europe and North America, but others from South Africa, China, Sri Lanka and Israel) started their food and drink fest with a low-key visit to Berlin followed by four red-carpet days in Paris.

Continue reading “Le Club des Chefs des Chefs” »

From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.

Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images
At left, President Hollande’s companion Valérie Trierweiler wears Apostrophe at Elysee Palace in Paris. At right, former President Sarkozy’s wife Carla Bruni wears Dior at Zarzuela Palace in Madrid.

The French like their leaders to be regal, so François Hollande’s pledge to be a “normal” president will take some getting used to. Not that Hollande seems ready to surrender any of the powers of his office or abandon Charles de Gaulle’s “certain idea of France” as an exceptional nation. For now, the changes are a matter of style. Less spending, less glamour, less Versailles. More caution, more prudence, more modest living. So what is the new “normal” in Hollande’s France?

Le Central is the new Fouquet’s
Nicolas Sarkozy was never forgiven for celebrating his election night victory with dinner at Fouquet’s, that touristy, chichi Champs-Élyseés restaurant owned by a business group better known for its casinos. (Never mind that Sarkozy has no interest in fine dining and doesn’t drink.) His successor eats with gusto and likes to cook — especially red meat. For lunch on election day, “Monsieur Normal” scoffed down duck terrine with asparagus, beef filet with potatoes and a strawberry tart at Le Central, a favorite brasserie for local politicians in Tulle, the small, working-class town in central France that Hollande represented in parliament. In Paris, he goes a bit more upscale, frequenting Les Cocottes, Christian Constant’s trendy restaurant in the Seventh Arrondissement, for a good steak.

  Continue reading “The New Normal Chic” »

From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.

From left: PiL; Didier Truffaut/Armor LuxLocal politicians are pushing to keep brands in France, such as J.M. Weston moccasins, Armor Lux shirts and Repetto flats.

When Lejaby Lingerie, the 82-year-old French bra-and-corset maker, announced last year that it was shuttering its fourth and only remaining factory in France and heading to Tunisia, it represented more than just another blow for French industry. It also provided one of the most unexpected symbols of the French presidential campaign: the bra.

Lingerie has a special place in French society. The Ipsos polling agency found in a survey several years ago that 91 percent of French women and 83 percent of French men believe that lingerie is important in life.

And the Lejaby brand is so embedded in the French psyche that François Truffaut evoked the bra maker in his 1977 film, “The Man Who Loved Women.” Bertrand, the film’s Casanova, was able to describe to a telephone operator he had never met the exact model of bra she was wearing that day: “Ah yes, I know it,” he told her. “Lejaby. It fastens in the back, with adjustable straps and a plastic hook in the shape of a double S.”
Continue reading “Made in France” »