Paris

EVER SINCE I HAD ARRIVED in Paris all I knew was that I wanted to stay, to live, to work in that wonderful city. To experience the changing of the seasons, their celebrations on Bastille Day, their customs and food planned for Christmas and other feast days, to discover the charm of little known museums, historic places and above all, the theatre and restaurants. But my French was not good, and I needed practice, so where on earth would I find a job?

My lucky break came one morning while I was walking around the Champ de Mars, "Field of Mars," the vast public stretch of parkland in the 7th arrondissement between the Eiffel Tower to the northwest and the École Militaire (Military School) to the southeast, one of the most charming residential areas in Paris. The area was named after Mars, the Roman god of war, and its initial purpose was to serve as a training ground for military maneuvers. Today, lakes, ornamental ponds, winding walks and grottoes adorn the area, which is home to many birds and one of the rare places in Paris where the song of the tawny owl can be heard at night.

I decided to venture onto a side street, chancing upon a building called the American Library. My curiosity aroused, I found the door open and walked right in. I found it a fascinating place, and after listening to various conversations among the staff at the front desk, I soon learned they were shorthanded, it seemed, so I started talking with them and ended up asking for a job. This seemed to be the perfect place -- the timing was right, and I ended up working there for two years. Every day I walked to work from the little hotel we were staying at, and the beauty of the Paris knocked me out. Each morning I would walk across the bridge beside the Louvre, along the quays, and passed the bridges, the open markets, the fabulous buildings, the fruit shops and the cafés.

The job at the Library proved fascinating. I immediately met all the subscribers, all the newcomers at the Front Desk. Most Americans living in Paris came in to borrow books or read magazines and newspapers from the States. If we were not busy I would talk with them, ask why they were here, how long they had been here and found out about their work and lives in France. There was a two-hour lunch break and a half-day off. It was heaven to go back into the stacks and delve among books that made your mouth water. Signed editions of Gertrude Stein and Hemingway, plus all the French writers, many translated into English.

After a few months of this, an idea began to form in my mind as to how I could combine living in Paris, working in the theatre and keep acting as well. There were many French students coming into the Library to read American and English playwrights. They waited, sometimes for weeks, on a request list for the one-act plays of Pinter, Albee, Tennessee Williams and any new plays that had been written. There was no possibility any of these students seeing these plays on stage in English. They had to go home and try to sit and read them with the aid of an English or American dictionary.

I thought: why not present these plays to them in English? These plays were set for their University exams: they had papers to write on them. Wouldn't it be a lot easier for them if they could actually see the play?

There were other reasons too -- it would give French students the opportunity of seeing well-known plays in English, it would provide entertainment for English-speaking tourists and residents who didn't know enough French to go to a French play, and also function as a showcase for new plays and performers from the United States and England. It would fulfill a need, as far as the students were concerned and also give new playwrights who were writing in Paris a chance to present their plays too.

Sounded great. Paris. My own theatre. The toast of the Ritz. Discovering new playwrights hidden in garrets in Paris, saving them from suicide. Seriously though, I thought there might be people working in Paris who would be interested. I used to pass Sylvia Beach's old shop every week and remember James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and all the other writers who had a tough time of it in Paris. Maybe there were a few now, in our generation, writing and not hearing from New York for months on end.

Then I met Roland and Jennie. They were there for the same reason that I was, to experience the city, to learn French and to create and express something of themselves in some way -- any way -- if they could just get it out from being all bottled up inside. They had brought their three-year-old with them from Ohio, so they were more restricted in their activities than I was. Nevertheless they had managed to find a place to live, and the fact that they had both started to write impressed me immensely. Both of them had worked in the theatre back in the States, and they were enthusiastic about my idea of forming a theatre company in Paris. Roland became our first Director.

So now I had found a structured life at last. I found an apartment. I could speak French well enough to get along at dinner parties -- the ultimate test I think -- and I had found something I really wanted to do and could see more point to doing it than anything else at that time. There is a time and place for everything and this was it, as far as I was concerned.

We started advertising for authors and scripts. From ads placed in the Paris papers we received replies from all over France. It seemed as if there were American writers hidden away all over the country -- from the Loire, the Indre, the Basque country down to, or rather up to, Normandy.

Some of the plays were in verse, some were all four-letter words, some were pages of revue skits, some were long one-act monologues from freaky people. We read them all and were amazed that these people had actually found places to live in the French countryside and that they had organized themselves to such a degree, had the tenacity and money to stick it out then sit down and write. It was difficult enough to do it in Paris, but deep in the country somewhere, where the heating probably never worked, where the isolation, the plumbing, the physical discomforts must have been even worse to put up with than in Paris.

Auditions were held, and we chose a company of actresses and actors, some of whom were from the States, others from England and Canada. Rehearsals started on a verse play by a chap from Sussex who was now living in Normandy. He wrote a cooking column for Vogue" magazine every so often, so we knew what he did for fulfillment if his writing wasn't going very well.

That was one great advantage of living in France -- when things got really rough or really rotten, you could eat. And eat the most heavenly food you can imagine. There was always that perfect piece of Brie and fresh bread, with a carafe of wine or some glorious pastry, or delicious pate, waiting at practically every corner in every village or at your local market.

It seemed to make it all worthwhile. The frustrations, the rages, the confusion of just-where-do-think-you-are-going-with-your-life, can be countered by the complete sensual enjoyment of the country in the spring and summer and sometimes autumn, after a delicate lunch in the country -- three or four courses perhaps, tiny courses of perfect food with a good wine. These were the saving graces that could carry one through the toughest of times.

Anyway, to get back to Paris. We started rehearsing the play. The actors were good. We were all working for practically no money but we felt we were doing something worthwhile. The rehearsals were very long, held in cold rehearsal halls -- we worked hard and often in places where we were freezing to death.

The French staff at the various rehearsal rooms thought we were stark crazy, and said so. An English-language theatre in Paris? Who would go? We were presenting plays that had never been done before, anywhere, and in English. Perhaps when we did Tennessee Williams or Albee or Pinter, someone might come. Maybe those enthusiastic students from the Sorbonne who could digest anything, but always seemed to have an intense fascination with the American Red Indian, would come. I can't tell you how many French students I met in the Library who would read anything they could get their hands on about the "Peaux Rouges." We met one guy who was leaving his wife, child and a newborn baby to go off to some Mid-Western university to take a course about the Red Indian.

There was no time left to sit around and discuss the policy of the theatre, the use of drama, the "meaning of theatre." We had to get on with it. I met at least two people who had tried running a theatre there before, and they said we were mad and that we would never survive, no one would come, and that if we had any success -- financial success, that is -- we would be closed down by the French authorities on some cute pretext, such as that we might be putting French actors out of work.

Next, the search for a theatre began. We wanted a small place with an intimate atmosphere. I criss-crossed Paris day after day looking in all kinds of places. Some were absolute gems -- an old theatre in a private "hotel" or an ornately carved assembly hall with minstrel gallery still intact. But they were always too big, or too small, or the rent was too high.

It took three weeks before I found "Le Poteau" on the Right Bank. Le Poteau means "the post" and we soon found out why. There was a post just right of centre stage holding up the ceiling. But oddly enough it didn't look too bad.

I knew as soon as I walked in the door that I had found our place.

The theatre itself was tiny with banquettes around the walls and a bar at the back -- the "ambience" was terrific. As for the post on stage, well, it just made the stage directions all the more challenging. The actors had to be on their toes if they didn't want to crash into it every so often -- and bring the house down in more ways than one.

We moved in with our props, wardrobe and gear and started final rehearsals for the first night, a first night that seemed headed for disaster. The leading lady had caught the flu and had lost her voice, the leading man refused to follow the stage director's directions and had resigned a week before the opening night. He said his contract wasn't binding (it wasn't) -- so we were left with their two understudies! For our opening night!

One understudy was a theatre student, not really experienced enough to play a lead, and the other male understudy was a part-time ballet dancer, who was not really suitable for the heavy male lead required in the play.

To say that I didn't sleep very well that week would be a ridiculous understatement. I wanted to phone all my friends and beg them not to come on the opening night. The publicity was already out. Ads in the Pariscope and the Paris What's On etc. Everything was just too late to stop or to do anything about.

Only one week earlier I had received the theatre posters and was terribly impressed with them. I suppose only someone with an ego as large as mine would appreciate what it is like driving around Paris and sticking up posters of "our theatre" -- I posted a lot of them myself for the pure pleasure. It felt great sticking on one at "Le Dome," "Aux Deux Magots," "La Rotonde" -- all the cafés where Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the "lost generation" hung out. It didn't matter to me really that I was about 30 years too late to impress them or entice them to my theatre.

It was a mad afternoon going around the Left Bank dropping off these purple posters, then driving home again along the Boulevard St. Germain and seeing them all staring out at me. But that was last week. This week was different.

I felt like disappearing and letting the stage-manager take over till after the first night. But as founder and producer what could I do?

The night before opening night my next-door neighbor, a violinist with the Paris Symphony Orchestra, decided to practice his violin. So with the violin and the tension of opening night, my sleep was racked with more than the usual nightmares most performers go through before an opening night; except I wasn't performing---just sitting in a (perhaps) empty theatre: me, and the drama critic from the International Herald Tribune, both of us watching a disaster take place up there on the stage. Why is it that our dreams are often far worse than anything that happens in real life? Terrible nightmares, open graves, that sort of thing, we never experience in real life. Why do our bodies create such awful things that we cannot control?

But as we all know, some of our worst fears never come true. Some, mind you, but not this one.

The opening night was a success, and it was some kind of miracle to see people coming in the door and not turning away. It was a miracle! People kept coming in: we had no place to seat all of them. There was standing room only for our first night! Tom Quinn Curtis from the Herald Tribune came and was kind enough to give us a good review and say nice things about us.

We had begun.

Our second production was a crazy comedy by the English playwright N.F. Simpson, A Resounding Tinkle. This play is filled with funny non-sequiturs and silly things about unusual people. It was a risk to do it because we didn't know whether our French audience would understand any of it. But we wanted to do it and hoped that at least the French students would catch some of the funny lines. Lines like:

BRO: "Oh hullo, Uncle Ted, where did you park your motorcycle?"

UNCLE TED: "On the spare lot, behind Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto."

It was a bit difficult for an English-born playgoer to follow, let alone a Frenchman.

One evening we had a Frenchman sitting alone in the third row listening intently to everything that was said. He seemed to understand English very well. Suddenly he went into absolute hysterics, doubling over and then falling backwards in his seat. This happened approximately every five minutes or so, especially when any actor made his entrance. I couldn't figure out if he really could understand all the dialogue -- as I said, it was pretty funny -- or whether he was laughing hysterically at the acting, the costumes or what. I only knew that he was a great lift to the audience and loved by the cast.

We kept seeing new people and talking with writers. Every day I met people who were either screaming with rage over life in Paris, or in fits of depression, or in raptures of delight, or bored out of their minds, or inspired and stimulated beyond their wildest dreams. It happens this way, you can experience all these things within the course of, say, one week. Especially if you are trying to write, or paint or follow some creative endeavor, all the time. The actual "feeling" and nervous energy, if you can call it that, is what Paris is all about, as far as I'm concerned.

The theatre was a great release. We rehearsed, we talked, we sat in cafés after work, in marvellous art deco-cafés with great faces of interesting characters surrounding us -- stimulus for playwrights searching for characters -- and all of us in the group felt we were achieving something, though we weren't sure what. Admittedly we weren't writing the plays ourselves, but we were in contact with the people who were, and with people who had the same nervous energy we had.

Is it just student "neurosis," this nervous energy to create? Sometimes I think it is, but then, how come we still have middle-aged writers? They must have screaming fits of rage, despair, hope, depression, suffering, just as young people have. I would like to hear from writers who don't suffer any more.

Sometimes after the performance at the theatre I would stay behind in the bar and talk to any patrons who had stayed on to have an after-play drink. I talked to a lot of tourists too -- couples from the Mid-West or Canada or the English provinces, people who didn't understand French well enough to go to a French theatre, or didn't want to go to another strip-show or a movie with sub-titles, and so would come to us. I used to talk to the women if they stayed -- mostly housewives on a one-week holiday in Paris, or perhaps a school-teacher or nurse who had read our ad. I'd search their faces for signs of what kind of lives they lived; it fascinated me.

Having our own theatre in Paris we were on our way. We were reading scripts from writers living all over Europe. The mail was a delight. That was one of the great pleasures about the whole venture. Now at last, after years of just receiving bills, handouts, local folders, church newsletters, auction sale announcements, more bills, traffic tickets, overdue notices, I was receiving fascinating letters, plays, resumes, life-stories of people I could identify with, ideas, scripts for revues -- all of which was more broadening than any cocktail party introductions or dinner party friends, which I had had a steady diet of for years.

There were some days when I felt we were achieving a great deal, and other days when it seemed that we were all just working very hard, being very idealistic and not achieving very much at all.

We still met in cafés after the show and discussed our aims and future plans -- hour after hour. I felt the aim of the theatre was to promote new ideas and most of all to promote "thought." I didn't want to present plays which didn't do that. To make people stop and think about our play was what mattered to me most.

But some of those early days were hell. First of all, there were the terrific mood swings of everybody concerned. It is not unusual, I'm sure, in any troupe who are working together, but it seemed harder starting a new venture and a new company, then trying hard to be as idealistic as possible. My own mood swings were very hard to cope with, especially as I was living on my own with no one to discuss the finer details with, the decisions, the overall plans that had to be made. The company was pulling its weight, working hard, but I was the one who had to make the decisions.

The company would change and casts would change too. We couldn't pay our actors very much so they usually had to move on -- back to the States or England.

We had a nucleus of about ten people who stayed, however, and most of them had part-time jobs in the daytime, teaching English part-time or working in offices, or studying at the University with a grant from home. Fortunately all of them had worked professionally in the theatre, so we had a well-trained group who were, in general, as enthusiastic as I was.

The cold weather seemed to keep people away from the theatre. Our theatre, anyway. We worried about insufficient heat in the theatre, and whether people would return if they thought much about how cold they were; we prayed for an early Spring.

The theatre was full of people with colds, coughs, sinus trouble. My God! I was beginning to feel the whole of Paris was full of people with colds, sniffers, coughers, spitters and more and more coughers. One night standing behind the bar, I nearly went out of my mind listening to them and could easily have wrung the necks of everybody sitting in the audience. Shut up! For Christ's sake! Or Get out! I had to get out.

I walked across the street to the corner bistro and ordered a brandy at the zinc counter, where even the barman coughed. When would Spring come? This was getting impossible. We couldn't go on much longer this way. All of us were getting very frayed and most of the troupe had to go home to freezing rooms after walking along freezing streets after being in a freezing theatre all evening.

Needless to say, the theatre owner would do nothing about improving the heat -- it was "on" after all, he would say; "What more can I do?" He would say this every week with a typical shrug of the shoulders and out-stretched palms.

We decided to close for a week and those of us who could get out of Paris would go down south for a while to start making plans.

It was on one of my "up" days, or rather "up" evenings, when I arrived at the train station to catch the train to Cannes; otherwise the whole thing would have been a disaster.

I had thought of flying down, but to miss all that glorious French country between the Loire Valley and the south coast seemed sinful. So I thought I'd try seeing some of it just once, then after that one could fly, guiltlessly over it forever after.

You are asked when you buy your ticket if you want to go first or second class, and do you want a couchette? I said "second class" and "yes," I did want a couchette, a small bed, usually bunk type, three each side of the cabin, one of top of the other. Better than sitting up all night, as the train journey took 12 hours, starting at 6 pm.

I found the platform and the train, the guard showed me onto the carriage and then to my compartment. He took me straight to the cubicle with the six couchettes, pointed to the middle one, said "Voila" and then disappeared.

Maybe we all have countries waiting for us which will show us what we really should be doing. What you are doing now might only be a shadow of what you really could be doing in Australia or Spain, or wherever.

I certainly wouldn't have been running a theatre back home, for example. The idea never occurred to me.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons why France means so much to so many people. It provokes so much emotion, either rage or pleasure, that one is constantly seeking expression and release---the stimulus and frustrations of one's own goals---seeing new horizons, new work, and generally growing by having to pull oneself up by the hair roots, or whatever the expression is.

Back in Paris again and back to work, the weather was warm, the company rested. Enthusiasm had returned and once again we felt that what we were doing was still as worthwhile and as fresh as when we first thought of the idea.

We were rehearsing a new play by a playwright from Tennessee and we were sure it would be our best production to date. It was a comedy and the parts were well written. The critic from the Tribune thought so too, and we had a good run and good audiences for the play. If this sounds as if things were running smoothly and we were all sitting around congratulating ourselves, then I am giving a false impression. I don't think anything, or anybody in any relationship can run "smoothly" in Paris for more than, say, two days at a time.

It's just something about the city that does it

During these years I followed the theatre in Paris as well as my knowledge of French would allow. In the first year I would take an English or dual script of the play with me to the Comédie-Française. I discovered the seats where the bright overhead safety lights were left on. They were like EXIT signs but without lettering. However there was enough light to be able to read the English script at the same time as watching the play on stage. Also, listening to the play on tape in French at home and following it in English was very helpful.

If other theatres had plays I wanted to see, I would try to read the play first even in French, as then I could at least understand most of the action. Modern plays were more difficult because the language contained more slang and colloquial idioms, like, for instance "I've got other cats to whip."

Often there were interesting lectures on Sunday nights at the Palais Royal which were difficult to follow at times, or dramatizations of the life of Oscar Wilde or Alfred de Musset or George Sand, usually made up of dramatic scenes, with music when appropriate. They were elegant soirées which were cleverly devised and produced. How fascinating it was to sit in one of the most beautiful theatres in France watching French actors recount the life of a celebrated artist or writer.

Some days the fatigue and anxiety of a long week spent coping with the language, the housekeeping, the travelling, would be relieved by going to an American bar and having a few strong gin-and-tonics. It was a curious thing however, that the well-known cocktail bars of the 20s, the Ritz, the Bristol, the Hôtel Continental, were usually deserted at 6 pm. We could never figure it out whether we were too early or too late.

Theatre actors were held in high regard and were more respected than cinema stars. Jean Piat, the French equivalent of perhaps Nigel Patrick, Simon Williams, Alan Alda or Simon Callow, was not only celebrated for his work as a classical actor, but also in Boulevard theatre, popular, modern theatre. Most of his contemporaries worked more in the theatre than in films.

Occasionally, visiting companies provided some English speaking theatre. The Abbey Theatre from Dublin played for a short season in She Stoops to Conquer and the National Theatre came as well. The other source of enjoyment was following the up-coming programs at the Olympia. Although music-hall, it had the same excitement as New York's Radio City Music-Hall or the Palladium in London. French stars have all appeared there, including Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, Yves Montand, Sacha Distel and visiting stars such as Liza Minelli and Jerry Lewis, who was adored in Paris even though his act included his speaking nonsensical French but with the right gestures. Most Parisians regarded the Olympia as the home of the superstars.

If you enjoyed meeting these kinds of celebrities, all you had to do was to visit the little bar which was just around the corner from the stage door. I discovered it when I went to interview Sacha Distel for a magazine article. But maybe that secret has already been discovered.

Paris was not an easy city to live in. It was more difficult than New York or London. Not only the language but day-to-day routines were so different. In New York there were many stores and cafés open 24 hours, Duane Reade being one of them. But in Paris, if you wanted to go grocery shopping after lunch, forget it. Everything was closed till late afternoon, except the supermarkets which are hell on earth compared to those in the U.S. or the U.K. Transportation was more complicated and tiring, long passageways between subway stations and the air much dirtier than in other cities. People were less polite, especially shopkeepers. I used to think that their bad tempers were because of the cheap red wine they drank at lunch and then tried to sleep off without success.

When the weather turned cold it was far more bitterly cold than anything I'd known elsewhere. The damp iciness was unforgettable; it lingered inside stairwells and passageways that never seemed to get warm, even in summer. It was a particular cold that was extremely depressing, as it came with a cold grey mist and bleak skies. I remember visiting the Lachaise cemetery on such a day; death seemed to be very gruesome and near, with the chilling silent tombs on the other side of my path. Chilled to the bone was an apt expression.

But for whatever misgivings I might have had about the climate, the thrill of being in the middle of one of the greatest cities in Europe, and exploring so much historical and culinary culture more than made up for the physical discomforts. But all good things come to an end. Gerry was far more busy back in Canada, and an offer came that he couldn't refuse. Our son missed his school friends in Toronto and when one of the French boys stole his precious stamp collection one day, he was heartbroken and he also wanted to return. He had visited the famous stamp market in Paris every Saturday and spent his weekly allowance on buying and trading stamps. We returned to Toronto but after they had both settled in, I once again, found that there was no theatre work there so it was off to New York.