RIGHT BANK AMERICANS
In 1948, Theodore H. White was a household name in New York journalism, except every editor in town seemed to have forgotten about him. The reason was simple. To many of his colleagues, he was a Red. White considered himself a liberal, certainly, but had never been a Communist, and he was now stuck writing for obscure little publications that were, ironically, much more left-wing than he was. If he stayed in America, he would become a Communist, he joked to himself, not knowing Beauvoir had thought exactly the same a year earlier during her trip to New York. When a little-known news feature service, the Overseas News Agency, phoned him one afternoon to offer him a job as its Paris correspondent, with the task of covering the Marshall Plan and “how America was to save Europe from communism,”1 he punched the air with joy. His young bride, Nancy, was also elated at the news. Speaking of himself, he wrote: “He had no idea what Europe meant. He would discover how Europeans tormented each other and continued to torment each other, all the while creating the values by which civilized men live.”2
Theodore and Nancy opted for the nineteen-hour flight rather than the six-day sea passage. The thirty-three-year-old White found Paris unchanged from a brief visit ten years earlier: “The old lavender and pewter buildings rose in the familiar fin-de-siècle shades and shapes of gray, the mansard skyline of the Impressionists still unspiked and unspoiled by new skyscrapers.”3 The summer of 1948 was, in fact, a summer that would last several years. “Frenchmen were beginning to feel French again, but with a returning pride that still embraced Americans.”4
Like all his compatriots, Theodore discovered with amazement all the privileges bestowed upon American citizens, and foreign correspondents in particular: “the embossed press card of the accredited correspondent was a laissez-passer anywhere.”5 The French Ministry of Information made tickets to state concerts, festivals, municipal opera, and theater available at all times and instantly; cabinet offices were open to all American reporters, “down to the lowest crawling order of our species. We enjoyed semi-diplomatic privileges—such as participation in the American National Interests Commissary, where we could buy American luxuries which the still-strangled French economy could not provide, as if we were war correspondents at an army outpost in Bavaria.”6 An American reporter did not have to wait for a year for an automobile, as did most Frenchmen, who had to put their names on waiting lists; his passport and his dollars let him purchase one in a matter of days, fresh off the Citroën factory line in suburban Paris. The Whites could not believe their luck and, in the springtime of their marriage, young and feeling rich, they were “silly in the way they lived.”7
Theodore was not only married, he was also a name. He did not have to attend Sorbonne lectures, he was not penniless, he liked comfort and could afford it. In other words, the Left Bank was not for him. He could only look for a flat to rent on the Right Bank, and as close to the Champs-Élysées as possible, an old American habit. He was not, could not ever become, a Left Bank kid. He found an apartment for $100 a month, at 24 rue du Boccador in the 8th arrondissement. When he learned that Guy de Maupassant had lived there in the early 1890s, he asked where to sign on the lease papers. He might have had a rental contract but he was paying his rent in cash and had found the flat on the black market. A draft of dollars issued in New York could be cashed for French francs that summer at the rate of 500 to one. Every American had his own money changer in Paris. White’s was a “jolly old lady full of gossip and good will who became a friend of the family. She would bustle in with a large parcel of paper francs, slip us the penciled named of a Swiss bank account to which our New York check must be sent—and disappear.”8 The Whites kept the paper francs in a satchel under their bed, and into this satchel “Nancy and I dipped at will, with no sense of budget or restraint.”9 They dined out every night, gorging on fine meals costing a thousand francs (two dollars at their rate); they even bought a second car, hired a servant, and looked for a nurse when Nancy found out she was pregnant. In other words, the Whites fitted “not only happily but shamelessly into this returning rhythm of life, knowing it to be ineffably bourgeois, inexpungeably Right Bank in quality, obnoxiously self-indulgent and sneered at by our unmarried friends who were artists and musicians of the Left Bank.”10
THE UNITED NATIONS’ FIRST GENERAL ASSEMBLY AND THE LAUNCH OF THE MARSHALL PLAN
The United Nations had its first general assembly at the Palais de Chaillot, place du Trocadéro, in October 1948, exactly where, eight years earlier, Hitler had paraded in front of photographers with the Eiffel Tower right behind him. At first sight, the historic meeting felt dull to the newly arrived Theodore H. White. The Americans were busy targeting the Dutch: “we were getting the Dutch out of the East Indies, as, in those days, we were busily urging white empires out of everywhere,” recalled White, who soon left the hall to sit on the broad white stone steps that creep down from the Trocadéro to the banks of the Seine. On his right stood the Musée de l’Homme, on his left the Musée de la Marine. He could see on the horizon, slightly to the left, the golden dome of the Invalides, Napoleon’s mausoleum. Everywhere he set his gaze, history was tempting him to walk into the past rather than write about the present. “To live and report out of Paris was like trying to do business in a museum. I found I could not hurry. Here were numberless pockets of memories in stone, anthems in gray, celebrating past stories I had known only in books. All these stories connected somehow but the buildings would not speak, and I had to string episode and panorama together, to make past connect to present.”11
History was in fact a cornerstone of the Marshall Plan and the choice of Paris as its headquarters could not have been more appropriate. Through a very practical problem, the allocation of the first $5 billion granted by the U.S. Congress, the American administration was forcing Europeans to look at their continent as a whole, to envision Europe not just as a beautiful abstraction but as a concrete reality. The Marshall Plan administrators had set up the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), which was to supervise the way America’s money was to be distributed. Each of the sixteen12 European nations that were beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan had a vote in the OEEC. At first, when the sixteen met at the Château de la Muette, “a lovely old yellow and beige mansion with high scalloped windows, and floors that creaked properly”13 in Paris’s plush 16th arrondissement, their voices were simply “babble” to American ears. Theodore H. White listened to each member in disbelief. He thought he was back “in conversation with Charlemagne; the Duke of Alba; traditional fishing rights; the three sons of Louis I, the Pious.”14 For him, Europe carried too much history, split by too many boundaries.
The mechanism of the Marshall Plan needed to be put in place before the whole machine could be set in motion. One needed to be efficient and straightforward. As White explained:
The Americans took a simple tack. Let the Europeans first diagram their own problems, deciding who could physically supply whom on the Continent with what they needed for each other, ignoring the payment difficulties in European currencies. Then, all should bring to the Americans, Dispensers of the Great Purse, what the net margin of their needs was in dollars and supplies from the outside world, which the Marshall Plan would cover.15
In other words, Americans would yield dollars only to the consensus of all claimants. Sensible and practical. And without actually imposing one, the Marshall Plan was, in effect, inconspicuously mapping out a future European Common Market. A common market that would go hand in hand with a united Europe, one that Sartre and the non-Communist Third Way proponents were ardently calling for, as a solution to counterbalance the world’s two great powers. To think of a united Europe, both politically and commercially, was in 1948 an audacious thought but not one reserved to a minority of naive dreamers. A few months earlier, in June 1948, Janet Flanner had witnessed a vote in the National Assembly that had impressed her vividly.
A mere handful of 130 upsurging intelligent Deputies of many parties have formally laid before the Parliament a resolution demanding “the immediate meeting of a European constituent assembly, having as its mission the founding of the permanent institution of a Federated Europe.” Whatever else happens in Parliament, now or tomorrow, this is the one vital political proposal of the moment, of the year, of the century.16
From his flat on the rue du Boccador to the International Herald Tribune building at 21 rue de Berri, on the other side of the Champs-Élysées, it was just a ten-minute walk. Every day Theodore H. White would greet his concierge, Germain, a Spanish Republican veteran, with a loud Bonjour!, walk past Saul Bellow’s building on the rue Marbeuf, and go to the headquarters for all American correspondents in Paris. He would start his day by reading the French and international press, an education in itself. “The Paris press of 1948 was so beautifully written, engraved with such incision of phrase, enameled with such subtlety of sarcasm and subjunctive, that I did not realize for months after my arrival that its literary talents were devoted chiefly to the embroidery of trivia.”17
Every morning, White would also squint through his horn-rimmed glasses at news reports that looked to him highly partisan in tone and extremely light on facts. French editors, journalist heroes who had risked death in underground publications during the war, “still believed that fact could be subordinated to passion and polemic.”18 They felt “entitled to drive their own particular logic through the facts, fearlessly presenting their arrangement as the real truth.”19 French newspapers were also universally suspicious of the Marshall Plan. Depending on the political color of the publication, the plan was variously described as “a capitalist plot, a finance plot against French industry, a plot against French workers, a plot against Russia, a plot against French culture. But what the plan was, and what it was doing, was scarcely ever reported factually in the Paris press.”20 However, the story of the Marshall Plan, once Theodore White had found his way to it, beyond the trivia, polemics, and untruths, would prove to be the most intellectually exciting thing he was to report on for the next decade.
A ROOM WITH A VIEW
By October 1948, Simone had found a room for rent and finally left the hotel life she had tired of. Considering the housing calamity that plagued Paris, a room was all she could afford, but it would do. She found a room by word of mouth. It was a typical maid’s room, about ten by fifteen feet, on the fifth floor of 11 rue de la Bûcherie, a little medieval street snaking along the Left Bank and facing the south flank of Notre Dame. She decided to paint the walls and ceiling red and have red curtains. Giacometti designed oxidized bronze lamps especially for her and she hung on the exposed beam some exotic and colorful objects she had brought back from her travels in Portugal, Tunisia, Mexico, Guatemala, and Scandinavia. Fernand Léger had given her a watercolor, and she had bought a print from Picasso, which was handy, as she otherwise lacked pictures to decorate the walls. One of her windows looked out on the rue de l’Hôtel Colbert; “I can see the River Seine, some ivy, trees and Notre Dame.”21 Many friends would have killed for such a view. The other window gave onto a hotel for poor Arabs and Africans, who often fought at night. The hotel had a café opening out onto the sidewalk, Le Café des Amis, where fighting between immigrants went on during the day. To complete the picture, a few tramps, or clochards as the Parisians called them, who had their favorite spot right below Simone’s window, enjoyed gulping down their liters of cheap red wine sitting on the pavement’s three steps leading to the riverbank, the Quai Montebello. “They spent their days drinking, dancing, soliloquizing, and bickering.”22 On the roof’s gutters, an army of cats kept Simone company at night, meowing away.
In a corner of her room was a tiny space with a sink, some kitchen utensils, and a tiny stove. The kitchen space also served as the bathroom. Simone was lucky: she had a fireplace, her only means of heating. She bought a couple of white armchairs, grapefruit juice and a bottle of gin, jam, bread, and tea. From her tiny, plain wooden table, which she used as a desk and placed in front of the window with the Notre Dame view, she wrote on the morning of Sunday, October 24, to her dear Nelson, her “cunning crocodile”: “I begin to be in love with my room.”23 And the day after: “I stay at home, I light up the fire, I make tea, and work and work, and I like my little nest more and more. I have people home for lunch and dinner and I cook nice meals: chiefly, already cooked vegetables and cold ham. But I do not know very well how to manage the can-opener, I broke already two of them. I should need a nice house-keeper husband to open the cans for me.”24 Simone sometimes asked for help from the woman who lived next door, in another small maid’s room. Her name was Nora Stern. Her mother, Betty Stern, whom Simone often invited for tea, was a close friend of Marlene Dietrich. In the 1920s, married to a fur and textile tycoon, Betty had held one of the most influential artistic and literary salons in Berlin and had fled to Paris when the Nazis rose to power, only to find she had to go into hiding during the Occupation.
Like Saul Bellow, Simone de Beauvoir was sensitive to the Paris weather, but instead of resenting it she embraced it. “It has been a strange weather in Paris all these last days, a thick grey fog from morning to night, and at night so deep it is dangerous to ride a cab. It is so thick that it comes inside houses—the library for instance is all foggy!”25
She was working hard finishing her study on womanhood. Her publisher, Gallimard, had decided to publish it in two volumes, with only four months between the two releases, the first in June 1949 and the second in November 1949. Le petit Bost had come up with the title: Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex). She had chosen to dedicate it to him, the ex-lover turned brother. As she later explained, “I dedicated it to Jacques-Laurent Bost because he was the least macho of the men I had ever known.”26
When advocating equality between men and women in matters of love and sex, Simone de Beauvoir was taking risks. She was taking even greater ones when exposing her views on abortion. She had dedicated a whole chapter on the subject of abortion in Le deuxième sexe; she wondered how it would be received, but she felt she had no choice after doctors she knew in Paris had been arrested and tried for criminal activities. In a letter to Nelson she had explained: “There are a lot of abortion scandals just now in France and I feel quite indignant about them. There is no kind of birth control here; it is forbidden. They just arrested a doctor I knew very well and to whom I sent a lot of worried girls. He helped them all, poor and wealthy ones.”27 Les Temps modernes had made its position on abortion clear through eloquent and searing reportages and testimonies, showing both the hypocrisy and inhumanity of criminalizing abortion.
Twenty-five beds in a long hospital ward painted green. For twelve days, I am Madame number 10. Out of the fifteen miscarriages, I will soon discover that a dozen have been “triggered.” It only took Madame number 9’s announcement that it was her fifth self-inflicted abortion for everyone else on the ward to start speaking up. Doctors and nurses know about it all, of course, and so do not use anaesthetics. The operation is short, between seven and twelve minutes, but extremely painful. Society gets its revenge the way it can.28
Jean-Paul Sartre was constantly being asked to help pay for the abortions of his former students or impoverished friends’ lovers and wives, not to mention his own mistresses. One of Boris Vian’s brothers, a doctor, performed them for friends and friends of friends, risking arrest and prison.
BRINGING THE LEFT BANK TO NEW YORK AND HOLLYWOOD
In the spring of 1948, Norman Mailer had experienced the greatest joyful shock of his life in France, one he would relish for the rest of his life. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, had come out a few months earlier in the United States and the first reviews had been glowing. Driving back to Paris from Italy with his mother, Fanny, his wife, Bea, and his younger sister, Barbara, in a small Peugeot with too little horsepower for his taste, Norman had stopped at Nice’s central post office to gather his poste restante mail. A huge pile of letters had been awaiting him. Back in the car, he had started happily tearing away par avion blue envelopes and brown packages and begun reading their content: there were his book’s reviews. Dozens of them. From the New York Times to the Daily Worker, praise was flowing from page to page, and for the eleventh consecutive week his novel had been number one on the New York Times bestseller list (it would stay on the list for a total of sixty-two weeks). He was about to lose his anonymity and felt funny about it. “I knew I’d be a celebrity when I came back to America … I’d always seen myself as an observer … I was going to become an actor on the American stage.”29 He would always look back and cherish his last months in Paris as an observer.
When he packed his suitcase after the end of the academic year and bade farewell to Paris on July 21, Mailer took Paris’s fiery appetite for the political with him. He had already made plans for Jean Malaquais, his coach, guru, translator, and mentor, to follow him to New York and then to Hollywood. For better and for worse, he was to take Paris’s spirit back with him to the United States.
In New York, with Malaquais now a lecturer at the New School for Social Research, Mailer embraced politics with the passion of a Left Bank student. He had chosen sides and decided to work on the campaign of the Progressive Party’s Henry Wallace in the forthcoming presidential election. Wallace, Roosevelt’s former vice president, advocated universal health insurance and the end of racial segregation and did not mind being associated with the Communist Party. Mailer wrote speeches for Wallace, and his first journalism consisted of pieces for the party’s newspaper, the National Guardian. In October 1948, he took Malaquais with him to Hollywood to woo the movie liberals. At a party at the home of Gene Kelly and his wife, Betsy Blair, Mailer improvised a passionate speech in front of Shelley Winters, Edward G. Robinson, Farley Granger, and Montgomery Clift, but when Mailer quoted Malaquais and mentioned raising money to help the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, Edward G. Robinson shouted at him: “You little punk!”
Mailer continued campaigning tirelessly while being taught by Malaquais, who had drawn up a reading list for him. The two men lived next door to each other in Brooklyn—Malaquais was on Montague Street while the Mailers had a little flat at 49 Remsen Street. Mailer’s friends did not like Malaquais at all. The playwright Lillian Hellman, who wanted to adapt Mailer’s first novel for the stage, found him “cocksure, opinionated and dogmatic.” In other words, they found him too French. But Mailer had been transformed once and for all by his Parisian experience.
Malaquais’ reading list obliterated what remained of Mailer’s belief in the Soviet Union as the foundation of a new world culture. The political tutorials Malaquais gave Mailer that summer convinced the young American novelist not only that Stalin was a monster but also that both the Soviet and American economic systems were implicitly geared for war. And to complete his education, Mailer read Marx’s Capital. As he later recalled: “I spent a year living more closely in the history of Russia from 1917 to 1937 than in the events of my own life.”30
GARRY DAVIS, FIRST CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
Meanwhile, a “carrot-topped, pleasant, shrewd and slightly corny Air Force veteran”31 named Garry Davis entered the Parisian arena and made world news. He was the son of Meyer Davis, the bandleader who played for American presidents and high society. The twenty-seven-year-old idealist Garry was a roommate of Art Buchwald’s at the Hôtel des États-Unis. He thought the solution to the Cold War and a looming third world war was to create a world government, in order to dilute nationalism once and for all. The UN needed to have its power extended. To preserve the peace was not a good and broad enough mandate; the UN needed to be able to impose peace. “To dramatize this,” Art Buchwald later wrote, “he decided to become the first World Citizen by giving up his American passport in front of the Palais de Chaillot where the UN was meeting.” In 1948 an American passport was the most cherished document on earth. “Anyone who would give one up was regarded as crazy.”32
The plans for the passport surrender were formulated in the bar of the Hôtel des États-Unis between Davis, Buchwald, and all their roommates.
We weighed the pros and cons of Garry’s act. If he did it, we warned him, Garry would be arrested by the French for not having proof he existed. He said that was exactly what he had in mind. He wanted to prove how ridiculous any sort of identification papers really were. Since there wasn’t much going on that day, we encouraged him to do it. The next morning he went to Palais de Chaillot and tore it into pieces. The police arrested him for not having proper identification. A star was born.33
Davis then decided to camp opposite the UN headquarters at the Trocadéro. Everyone from Albert Camus to Parisian teenagers embraced Davis’s cause with the passion of the newly converted, transfixed by this young American’s coup de génie. On November 18, 1948, Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s future life and business partner, was celebrating his eighteenth birthday. He had managed to obtain entrance to the UN afternoon session for three dozen friends of Garry Davis. UN sessions were open to the public, and seats in the balcony of the Palais de Chaillot were allocated to whoever made a request. Everything had been carefully plotted. When the Soviet Union’s high representative took to the podium to speak, Garry Davis got up and spoke loudly of the urgent need for a world government, “one government for one world,” while his young comrades threw leaflets on the UN delegates seated below. The military police arrived and the youngsters decamped, but three of Garry Davis’s acolytes did not run fast enough and were arrested: the war reporter and former résistant Jean-François Armorin, Pierre Bergé, and Albert Camus. A night at the police station did not dent their energy, though—far from it. A few days later Camus, accompanied by André Breton, who delighted in the Surrealism of Davis’s concept, improvised a press conference in a café at the Trocadéro. They and myriad other intellectuals supported Davis and announced a public meeting at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a covered cycling track standing in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. On November 22, twenty thousand people flocked to the velodrome to hear Garry Davis, Albert Camus, and Richard Wright speak. The world media reported their every word in print and on the airwaves. There was no escaping this new Parisian utopia.
It was late on the evening of November 28 when a shocked-looking Art Buchwald walked toward Garry, a cablegram in his hand. It was from Albert Einstein and it was for “Monsieur Davis.” This was the longest cablegram the two young men had ever seen. They both asked for a double shot of vodka before opening it. It said, among other things:
I am eager to express to the young war veteran Davis my recognition of the sacrifice he has made for the well-being of humanity, in voluntarily giving up his citizenship-rights. He has made out of himself a “displaced person” in order to fight for the natural rights of those who are the mute evidence of the low moral level of our time. The worst kind of slavery which burdens the people of our time is the militarization of the people, but this militarization results from the fear of new mass-destruction in threatening world war. The well-intentioned effort to master this situation by the creation of the United Nations had shown itself to be regrettably insufficient. A supra-national institution must have enough powers and independence if it shall be able to solve the problems of international security. Neither can one nor has one the right to leave the taking of such a decisive step entirely to the initiative of the governments.34
A few days later, praising Davis’s scheme, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her famous newspaper column “My Day”: “How very much better it would be if Mr. Davis would set up his own governmental organization and start then and there a worldwide international government.”35
Art Buchwald felt both slightly responsible and concerned for his idealist compatriot. Letters from the whole world started pouring in, and soon Davis was renting ten rooms in the hotel to accommodate his staff, all volunteers. Art, himself struggling to get by in Paris, was looking at the whole affair with unavoidable sarcasm: “Clad in his leather bomber jacket, Garry became a hero and instant celebrity. For fifteen minutes, people were transfixed by the idea of World citizenship. We were the beneficiaries of Garry’s noble deed. The Hôtel des États-Unis was suddenly besieged by foreign correspondents and newsreel cameramen. I volunteered assessments on Garry to anyone who offered to buy me a drink.”
Until sarcasm turned into anger. Just before Christmas, Art and all the other residents of the hotel found a note in their mailboxes. “It was a terse letter from the management, announcing that Garry planned to take over all the rooms in the hotel for the administration of his World Citizenship movement.” Art knocked at everyone’s door, and an informal emergency council was held at the bar: “we all agreed that it was a bunch of pork sausage, and we announced we were not going to leave for some crazy peace movement.”36 Art and his beleaguered friends told the Poles in charge of the hotel management that they would not move. The face-off lasted until it became clear that Davis could not come up with the rent. Art kept his small room and the world lost its government, for now. Garry Davis would fight on.37