Memories of Paris

In 1958, I found that my grandfather had left money in his will for my higher education at a European university. At the time, I was living in Athens, Greece with my family, finishing high school and preparing for a future life of adventure.

My father insisted that I should attend law or medical school in either a French or British university. At the time, I was fully tri-lingual (Greek-French-English), and university studies in those languages didn’t faze me. But the problem was … I didn’t wish to be either a doctor or a lawyer.

What I really wanted to do was to be an artist – a painter – and Paris was my target.

So I agreed that France would be where I would go for higher studies, and since one of my father’s younger brothers had graduated from Grenoble University as a tropical diseases epidemiologist, I would go to Grenoble, too. I spent almost three months there.

At the time, after the first couple months of theoretical studies, a dissection with a full corpse was scheduled at the main auditorium. We were cautioned that if any of the students passed out, they would be advised that medicine was not a field to pursue.

I passed out!

So I was refunded the balance of my tuition. To attend the university, a full year’s tuition had to be prepaid. So money in hand, I headed for Paris.

I enrolled at the École des Arts Décoratifs as a full-time art student to study composition and painting. Paris might be called “the City of Lights,” but to me, Paris was “the City of Hope and Great Expectations.” When I was younger, Paris was a dream for such a long time that when I was finally living there, it didn’t feel real.

For a couple of months, I stayed at the Hôtel America on Rue Geoffroy Marie, the street that leads to the entrance of the Folies Bergère. It was a cheap 2-star hotel, and the room next to mine on the fourth floor was occupied by the “hooker on duty.” This led to many sleepless nights as the iron bed’s headboard in her room banged on the wall between us. And she was a very active prostitute with many customers!

I would get up early in the morning, have a chocolate croissant and café au lait for breakfast in a little coffee shop around the corner, and then take the metro to the school.

After lunch at a nearby Rive Gauche bistro, I would return to the last class and then scoot to Le Mistral bookstore on the Left Bank across from the Notre Dame Cathedral. It was a famous and favorite meeting place for American and British writers, poets, agents, publishers, journalists, and everyone who was anyone in the English-speaking literary community. It had the largest English language collection of titles of any Parisian bookstore.

You could spend unrestricted time among the bookshelves reading books without having to buy them. There were also couches and deep armchairs where you could sit and read or take a snooze if you needed it. I was hoping to meet Henry Miller there, whose Tropic of Cancer had greatly influenced me, or perhaps Anaïs Nin, whose work I also enjoyed.

I met neither, but as luck would have it, I did meet Maurice Girodias, publisher and grand guru of Olympia Press. He was a curious blend of ultra-sophisticated avant-garde literary entrepreneur and pornographer and an alleged miser. Through him, I was introduced to such American luminaries as Greg Corso, Peter Orlovsky, and Allen Ginsberg, who I disliked from the first moment I met him.

But Greg was closer to my age than the others, was kind, and was instrumental in helping me get an even less expensive room at the rundown rooming house of Mme. Rachou, where they all lived. Hot water was available Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

The hotel had a single bathtub on the ground floor that was used by every resident, providing we reserved the time beforehand and paid the surcharge for hot water. There were communal toilets at the end of each corridor and sinks in every room. The linen was supposedly changed every month.

Most of the denizens of “The Beat Hotel,” as the Parisian home of the Beatnik writers and poets was christened, were an extremely interesting group that eventually became icons of American literature. But no one believed it could possibly happen at the time except for themselves.

Most of the “hotel” residents were American expats fleeing the conformity and censorship of America, but there were also a few Brits, two or three of Russian descent, an Italian composer, and a variety of friends, lovers, and hangers-on living in exquisite squalor. Yet, they were producing literary and artistic masterpieces fueled by sex, Pastis, cheap Beaujolais, Benzedrine, and other legal and illegal stimulants and narcotics.

Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” and “To Aunt Rose,” Greg’s “The Happy Birthday of Death,” and Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” later fleshed out in Tangier, were all birthed at Chez Rachou’s.

There was a bistro on the ground floor, and when we were flush, we would sit and swap tales at the bar, sipping the least expensive Cognac or Pastis. If someone got an advance for a book or a payment for newspaper or magazine articles in London or the States, we all celebrated by ordering salty peanuts or almonds with our drinks – paid for by the lucky recipient.

Some had smuggled hot plates into their rooms. Mme Rachou frowned on such devises using “her” electricity that she had to pay for. But she was a very kind, motherly woman with blue hair who believed her residents were all undiscovered literary or art giants. She was sure all of us would eventually be known as the artistic geniuses she knew we were. 

I was the youngest resident and still going to art school.

While almost everyone else slept until later in the morning, I had to get up and prepare for my daily routine of art history, sketching class, live-model painting, a visit to the Louvre or another art museum or well-established painter’s studio, more sketching, followed by more live-model painting or perhaps a visit to the Bois de Boulogne for landscape painting.

Later in the afternoon – after the end of classes – I would go back to Le Mistral or Chez Popov at Rue de la Huchette. Chez Popov was a notorious café that was a hangout for artistic types and sold a slightly better Beaujolais than many other Left Bank joints. The café generally closed its doors at about 7:00 p.m.

However, if you were friendly with le patron and his wife, who was in charge of the kitchen, you would be allowed to stay until much later in the back room that was used to serve food to the café’s patrons during the day. In the evening after closing, it became the Popov’s living room.

I frequented that place because a couple of Russian women writers would hang out there drinking Pastis or Vodka. I was after the youngest of them in the hope she would give me a tumble, since they were well-known for one-night-stands.

I prowled around Paris, aimlessly wandering about from arrondissement to arrondissement, exploring the city. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Perhaps I was hoping that the gargoyles of Notre Dame would actually come to life and devour the imbeciles that dominated the town. I love Paris, and I hate it all at the same time … but I mostly love it.

When my funds got low, one of the other residents introduced me to night work at Les Halles, the Parisian Central Food Market, where I unloaded frozen lamb and beef carcasses between midnight and 3:00 a.m.

I then sometimes ate at Chez la Vieille, a bistro nearby where locals ate from l’ardoise, i.e. the blackboard menu that showed all the dishes cooked for the day. That’s where I became addicted to cuisine bourgeois. Since then, I’ve loved the Parisian bistro classics.

But it was also at that time that I decided to try my hand at my own cooking. Tati (Tatiana), one of the Russian girls who lived in the “hotel,” gave me her hot plate, a saucepan, and a tea kettle, as she was moving in with her latest lover and wouldn’t need them. This is where I made my infamous Frankfurter Soup for the first time.

It included sautéed garlic and onion slices, chopped celery, cubed tomatoes, cilantro, and wieners cut up in two-inch lengths. After these ingredients started to brown, I added elbow macaroni and water plus salt, pepper, and sweet paprika. The “soup” would boil for 12-15 minutes, until the pasta was cooked. It was served in inexpensive but very decorative Chinese bowls sporting a blue dragon. In Paris, every meal seems to start with a soup. It might be onion, tomato, asparagus, or vichyssoise.

Tati was a young aspiring actress “temporarily” living in the rooming house while waiting for the break that would propel her to the next level, from walk-through roles to ingénue. She was tall and athletic, with small breasts, exquisite long legs, and a long blond braid. She spoke fluent French, Russian, and English, and she could recite Shakespeare’s Hamlet soliloquy by heart.

She had lovers who kept her occupied in the evenings, while she made the rounds in the mornings of casting agencies and event producers that hired runway models. She was beautiful enough to be a successful runway model but lacked the drive. For her, modeling was just a sideline that paid for her room and some cosmetics.  

Life at Mme Rachou’s was sometimes a bowl of cherries and other times full of broken illusions. But I was learning. I guess at that time … in that place … I was growing up and learning how to handle both elation and heartache in that crucible of a city where saints and sinners live cheek-to-jowl and life might be trying but never boring.

While I was still living on Rue Geoffroy Marie, one morning while having my café au lait, a lovely statuesque brunette walked into the café. Since my table was the only one with an extra empty seat, she asked if she could sit there to have her coffee.

Turned out she was a topless dancer at the Folies Bergère. Her name was Maxine, but everyone called her Max. I told her I was an art student, studying painting and hoping to become another Gauguin or Toulouse Lautrec. She smiled and commented that I wasn’t short enough to be Lautrec. We agreed to meet again the following week.

For a short time it became a kind of friendship where we would meet at the café once or twice a week for a cup of coffee. Then, one morning, almost a couple of months after I had moved to the Beat Hotel, she asked me if I would like to come the next evening to a party at her garret on Rue Blanche. She said there would be many people from the club, and she thought a “budding painter” would be of interest, as this was Paris after all.

When I arrived, the garret was already full of people, including many beautiful women. A record player had 45s stacked with mostly American and British hits, plus a few Aznavour and Edith Piaf songs. Some exceptional red wine bottles were being passed around.

It was the first time I tasted a La Tâche, and frankly, I was instantly hooked. I then saw a bottle of Château Margaux nearby, so I refilled my glass many times. It was in Paris where I learned to appreciate great wines!

Max came over and said there was a fellow Greek she would like me to meet. I was introduced to Mikis Theodorakis, a songwriter of note, who had already started an illustrious composing, songwriting, and counterculture career. We started a conversation that turned into a harangue from Mikis about Greek politics and politicians.

The Marxist firebrand didn’t mince words about his feelings regarding the state of Greek politics. I didn’t mind. I always considered the majority of politicos corrupt and self-serving, whether Greek, American, French, or other. That conversation became the beginning of a friendship.

By that time I realized I wouldn’t become a great painter, I had a good design sense, as one of my instructors asserted, but my colors were too garish, he said. So instead of becoming a painter, he thought I could be a very good professional photographer since most photography at the time was in black and white.

He suggested I start working as a studio assistant to learn the technical and compositional secrets of photography, as well as looking at photography books to see how well-known photographers such as Cartier Bresson, Marc Riboud, or Guy Bourdin handled a scene. It was a vocation I had never envisioned.

But Mme Claude Lalanne, another of my art instructors, offered to introduce me to one of the best-known British advertising photographers of the period – David Bailey.

I was having too much fun in the Left Bank’s mercurial art scene, living among the Rachou residents, rubbing elbows with other artists, meeting Max for dinner, and passionately pursuing the female writer I had met at Chez Popov. So I declined her offer, as it would have meant moving to London, where I knew no one.

Eventually, I did move out of Chez Rachou’s and into Max’s garret to be with Max. Those were weekends of excessive drinking and partying until the sun shone over the Parisian rooftops. I also stopped attending art school, as an intense and continuous hangover was counterproductive to a successful artistic career. I continued working at Les Halles a night or two a week for pocket money.  

In 1967, I moved to New York City to work first as an assistant and learn the craft from a number of top NYC advertising and fashion photographers before opening my own studio. I didn’t travel much until I was established as a travel photographer in the early 1980s.

By the time I returned to Paris, Le Mistral was still an English language bookstore but renamed “Shakespeare and Company.” Chez Popov’s had become a Greek souvlaki and gyro joint called “Les Argonauts.” Madame Rachou had retired, and her fleabag rooming house was sold, renovated, and turned into a 4-star hotel called “Le Relais Hotel du Vieux Paris” with a plaque commemorating the famous American residents affixed at the front.

The Beat Poets had all returned to the U.S,, most in the mid-1960s, and Max’s garret was occupied by a dour-faced Frenchman who claimed to be a minister of a very obscure Christian sect.

As they say in Paris … c’est la vie!