The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (22 page)

Gillery waited for her to leave before launching into a tirade.

“People want to sell and not restore their objects,” she said. “That woman used to have antique furniture, and she’s thrown it all away for the modern. I’m in a precarious profession. It’s not easy. I have small mirrors for three hundred, four hundred euros. How many people spend that much money on shoes, or clothes? They live for the present. They pass on nothing to their children.”

Gillery knows that her time is running out, not because of illness or age but because the materials essential to her work are disappearing. She held up a small weight, a part for a barometer, shaped like a teardrop. “A watchmaker made this,” she said. “It has to be precise and perfectly balanced so that it moves properly. It is precious.”

Her father bought two hundred weights like this one forty years ago. She has only a dozen or so left. No watchmaker wants to fabricate something so complicated. And the needlemaker has retired, so no one produces fine barometer needles anymore.

“Maybe I have five more years,” she said. “I’ll use my weights and my needles and then I will no longer be able to bring barometers back to life. A world of dead barometers. It’s a loss, no?”

MINISTER OF THE NIGHT

. . .

Half good, half bad, half girl, half boy, half cod, half penguin Me, I am Michou!

—“M
ICHOU
’
S
S
ONG
”

I
NEVER THOUGHT I’D BECOME A MICHOU GROUPIE; HE
didn’t seem my type. Who knew he would be irresistible?

Michou is well into his eighties. He styles his white hair into a puffy bouffant and hides his eyes behind giant glasses. He dresses in a dozen shades of blue—custom-made, electric-blue satin jackets; cornflower-blue cashmere topcoats; blue patent leather loafers; blue ties; blue shirts; blue-tinted lenses in blue glasses. He radiates eccentricity.

To meet Michou, you head north on the rue des Martyrs and cross the broad thoroughfare where boulevard de Clichy and boulevard de Rochechouart meet. You have now entered his world, the world of Montmartre.

Michel Georges Alfred Catty, known to all as Michou,
created the transvestite cabaret at No. 80 rue des Martyrs close to sixty years ago, long before the term “drag queen” was much used. He is not a caricature of seedy old Pigalle or bohemian Paris. He is a showman, a successful self-made businessman, a philanthropist, and a beloved pillar of the community.

The story on the street says Michou’s cabaret was the inspiration for Jean Poiret’s wildly successful 1973 play,
La cage aux folles
. The play is about a gay cabaret owner and his drag queen companion who put up a straight front for the conservative parents of their son’s fiancée. More than one million theatergoers saw it in France; five years later, the play became a popular French-Italian film adaptation, using the same name. In 1983, the American team of Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman adapted it as a Broadway musical; in 1996, Mike Nichols turned it into a film called
The Birdcage,
starring Robin Williams as Armand, the cabaret owner, and Nathan Lane as Albert, his partner.

I have no proof that Michou was the model for Poiret’s cabaret owner. When I asked him about it late on a champagne-sipping afternoon, he gave me a Mona Lisa smile. Burnishing his reputation is part of his shtick. “I am the last muse of Paris,” he likes to say. “I am the best-known, the most-beloved homosexual of France.” He craves attention, and when he saunters up and down the streets of Montmartre, people stop—to stare, to chat, to take a photo. Those who don’t know him might laugh; those who do treat him like family.

Michou claims never to drink water, juice, or spirits, only champagne, lots of it. Mother’s milk, he calls it. By six p.m. every
day he is holding forth with friends and hangers-on at La Mascotte, an old-fashioned bar and bistro on the nearby rue des Abbesses. “I sit out on the terrace and twenty people ask to take a picture with me,” he said. “How I love that! How I love to be recognized! ‘You are Michou? The real Michou?’ they ask. Ah, I adore it.”

He is so much a part of Montmartre that in 2014 the neighborhood declared April 19 “Michou Day.” A Paris website invited “friends of Paris” to gather at the place des Abbesses to create a Michou flash mob. It instructed participants to wear freshly ironed blue shirts and impeccably coiffed hair. “It’s time to cry out your love for one of the most adorable representatives of our beautiful capital, the eternal Michou!” said the website. On the designated day, Michou made his way through the crowd to the stage. “Montmartre! Well, this is my life and this is my heart!” he exclaimed. “For me this is a great moment, a great moment of friendship. . . . What a beautiful day.
Youpi!
” (That’s French for
Yippee!
)

FROM THE OUTSIDE, CABARET MICHOU
looks like a Montmartre tourist trap from a bygone era. The entrance screams cheap. A poster-sized illustration of a big-lipped, big-haired, long-lashed, blond floozy hangs above a glass case of photographs of transvestite entertainers. Fake flowers and fake ivy sit in pots on slim balconies on the floor above. I used to walk quickly when I approached, nervous that at any time of the day or night a customer full of liquor and lust might tumble out onto the sidewalk—or onto me.

But the more I passed the cabaret, the more I was tempted to
go in. Finally I called, and Michou invited me over. “Meet me now!” he said.

The windowless front door, in shiny midnight blue, is always locked. You ring, and if you don’t look like a criminal, a hostess lets you in. The decor is low-tech. Dozens of gilt-framed mirrors hang on the walls, pieced together like a puzzle. Mismatched chandeliers and touches of neon here, Art Nouveau there, give the place a cozy, dated look. The stage is small, with an image of the blond floozy on the front curtain and a sparkly black backdrop behind. The sign above the stage, announcing, “Michou’s Folies,” looks as if it was painted by an amateur.

Framed photos on the walls bear witness to Michou’s celebrity at his peak, long ago: Michou with Josephine Baker, Michou with Lauren Bacall, Michou with Jean-Paul Belmondo. And with Peter Sellers, Jacques Brel, Romy Schneider, Liza Minnelli, Gérard Depardieu, Sophia Loren, Jeanne Moreau, Serge Gainsbourg, Joan Collins, Jean Paul Gaultier, Alain Delon, Claude Lelouch, Johnny Hallyday, Paul Bocuse. There are several photos with the Chiracs, including one with then president Jacques Chirac in the Élysée Palace.

“Liza Minnelli—she comes here often,” Michou said. “She sits on the bar,
on
the bar! Not on the stool. Diana Ross came twice. Joan Collins. Lauren Bacall. Claudette Colbert. Peter Sellers.”

A wave of sadness washed over Michou, reminding him that this is the past. “It’s my small museum now,” he said of the photos.

The tables are covered with disposable paper over white linen tablecloths, to reduce laundry costs. The chairs are of the bentwood bistro variety, not plush velvet and gilt. The strobe lights resemble those in a 1960s American basement family room. Duval-Leroy champagne, a respectable brand, is served
in strong, squat-stemmed flutes that are hard to break and easy to wash.

The doors open at eight-fifteen. Michou offers two fixed-price dinner menus, the “Menu Paris,” with wine, for 110 euros, and the deluxe “Menu Michou,” with champagne, for 140. Both come with familiar three-course fare like country pâté, rump steak with green pepper sauce and mashed potatoes, Brie cheese, and the tart of the day. The “emblematic
flamiche,
” a puff pastry tart made with leeks and cream from Michou’s native Picardy, is always on the menu. The price also includes a cocktail and coffee. The food is passable, not gourmet. The rump steak is a bit tough, the salad greens a bit wilted, the tart crust a bit mushy. The crowd doesn’t come for the food.

Most nights, the cabaret sells out to a respectable-looking, down-to-earth, very French audience. They are hard-working, fun-loving people, many from smaller cities, mostly over fifty and untouched by the ennui that comes from too many years in Paris. The after-dinner entertainment is more PG-13 than R. “No vulgarity,” Michou said with pride.

“No prostitution, no drugs, no sex acts,” added Oscar Boffy, his artistic director. “This is a wholesome house.” Indeed, I once saw a couple here with their six-year-old son; he posed onstage with some of the performers.

“I will never, ever call you clients,” Michou says each night before dinner and the show. “You are friends! And you are about to experience a very beautiful show! Do you know that I’ve been here for almost sixty years!”

Michou eases the crowd into the “daring” show. Grégory, a male singer in a sheer, low-cut white T-shirt that shows off his shaved chest; tight jeans; and a patterned black leather jacket, is
the opening act. No cross-dressing yet, just a lot of clapping and hip swiveling.

Grégory (he only uses his first name) leads the crowd in the
cri de guerre
of the evening:
Youpi!
The crowd shouts
Youpi!
and bursts into applause. Grégory claps long and hard, slapping his microphone from one hand to the other to make the sound louder. The crowd has no choice but to clap along.

After Grégory has won over the audience, he trains his gaze on one woman and sings to her, only her. He plunges into the crowd, prancing and revving up the reticent. He sings songs that Michou sang forty years ago. On the nights when he hasn’t had too much to drink, Michou jumps out of his seat and waves his arms high in the air.

Then the show gets more daring. A bellboy (Oscar, his bright-red lips lined in black) and two hotel maids in red pageboys wear midnight-blue satin and sequins. The maids’ fishnet hose complement their skimpy uniforms.

Next comes a star straight from Canada: Céline Dion in a white gown and a long blond wig. She drops the gown to reveal an impossibly slim body in a short sequined minidress. “I am so, so happy to be here in Montmartre tonight! Vegas is nothing compared to Montmartre, Montmartre and . . . Michou!” she exclaims.

Depending on the night, Jeanne Moreau might follow, in a shiny sequined coat and cream-colored scarf. Or it could be Sylvie Vartan, in a red sequined leotard under a white tuxedo suit.

Oscar becomes a campy Amy Winehouse with big hair, swilling from a bottle of J&B scotch between snorts of coke. Then he’s Maria Callas as Violetta, singing “Sempre libera” from
La Traviata,
dressed in an impossibly large red ball gown, with a
beehive hairdo, diamond necklace, and bright red lips. The audience loves him.