Paris
Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter still evoke the verbose sophistry of Sartre, although the tourist and expensive jewellery trades have replaced the ‘rendez-vous des intellectuels’. Yet the sheer stunning beauty of the 7ème reminds one why Paris is still the most romantic capital in Europe, the city Papa Hemingway called a fine place to be young in, and that it’s a necessary part of a man’s education. Late at night I walked the cobbled streets empty of traffic thinking of the art movements born in these here sidewalks — Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, you name the -ism — and when Paris was the place to meet great artists, where Dalí, Max Ernst and Joan Miró embraced surrealism, and other foreigners such as Chaim Soutine, Modigliani and Giacometti went their own Parisian way. No other city in the 19th and 20th century can boast such a concentration of talent, with the greatest Americans like Papa, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound and Henry Miller thrown in for good measure. Yet as I walked the streets that these great men had paced long ago, my mood was a sad one, as was the occasion of my visit. My close friend of more than 55 years, Jean-Claude Sauer, had died, in a military hospital, of complications that we have Uncle Sam’s Agent Orange spraying in Vietnam to thank for. I have often written about Jean-Claude in the past. He was for 45 years the number one photographer of Paris Match, and our friendship began in a smoky Paris bistro back in 1958, just after he had returned from military service in Algeria. JC, as the Americans called him, was a paratrooper who had served with distinction in that savage war of peace, as Alistair Horne was to call it in his definitive book about that conflict. Jean-Claude had caught the combat bug, and went on to Biafra, Vietnam, Yemen and back to Algeria, taking pictures while always pursuing the fair sex come hell or high water, as they say in Wyoming. (Where for a while he owned a farm until boredom almost killed him.) I met up with Jean-Claude in Vietnam in 1971–72, where he was based with a beautiful French girl called Betty, while trying to bed the wife of Air Vice-Marshal Cao Ky, as the Vietnam vice-president styled himself. I advised caution, telling him he was far more likely to get a bullet in the back than to strike it lucky with the beautiful Vietnamese. (Anyway, I had designs of my own.) In any case, no one got lucky until we reached Tel Aviv during the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Girls act funny during times of crisis, and give it away very generously. We had some very tricky days up on the Golan Heights but we were young and believed nothing could touch us. At night we’d drive back to Tel Aviv and party non-stop. By the time the war was over, we were both wrecks, and it wasn’t combat fatigue either. Jean-Claude had befriended Hemingway in the late Fifties and had taken wonderful pictures of Papa with the great matador Ordonez. He gave many of them to me, plus some very naked pics of Brigitte Bardot, whom both of us dated long ago. He married three times, and all his wives were named Brigitte. His end was very sad because it took him almost two years to die, four to six different hospitals, plus the nervous breakdown of his wife, who watched him slowly fade away. I spoke to him often, he never complaining, me always making plans for the two of us knowing damn well nothing would come of them. On a brilliant sunny day, another great friend of his and mine, John Sutin, a descendant of the great Soutine, flew by private jet from Geneva to Paris and proceeded to get wrecked at a dinner before the funeral, one given by John and attended by close friends who had flown in from all over Europe. That’s the night I stumbled late around the Left Bank streets, thinking back over my younger days in Paris and of JC. The next morning, in brilliant sunshine, we drove to the great church of Val-de-Grâce, next to the military hospital, an early baroque marvel built by Queen Anne of Austria, mother of Louis XIV. The French queen of Louis XIII had difficulty becoming pregnant, but once she did, she laid the cornerstone of the church and named it after Jesus born of the Virgin Mary. The original plans were by Mansart, and it is one of the most imposing churches in Paris. The mother of my children had organised the flowers and the singing by a lady who managed to break down even some of the toughies attending. I held out as long as I could, but Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ got to me. Behind me sat a toothless man with a beret, a Foreign Legionnaire who had fought under the great Colonel Bigeard in Dien Bien Phu. ‘This is probably my last funeral,’ he told me, then handed me a book of his own poems. I pointed out to my young son all the friends I hadn’t seen in many years, men and women who had come for ‘le dernier adieu’ to a brave and fine man with whom I never had a cross word. Goodbye, mon vieux ami
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