{"id":166410,"date":"2024-01-02T10:45:09","date_gmt":"2024-01-02T15:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=166410"},"modified":"2024-01-03T11:17:16","modified_gmt":"2024-01-03T16:17:16","slug":"the-life-and-times-of-the-paris-metro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/01\/02\/the-life-and-times-of-the-paris-metro\/","title":{"rendered":"The Life and Times of The Paris Metro<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Cover of The Paris Metro<\/em>. Courtesy of the fortieth anniversary issue, published in 2016.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1974, Harry Stein and Thomas Moore, young editors who\u2019d worked together at New Times<\/em>, a glossy biweekly in New York, had an idea: Let\u2019s start a magazine\u2014in Paris. Moore had recently come into a windfall when one of his articles, about a bank robbery in Brooklyn, became the basis for the film Dog Day Afternoon<\/em>. He moved to Paris, following his then girlfriend; the relationship ended, but he stayed. Stein had previously lived in Paris, writing features for the International <\/em>Herald Tribune<\/em>, and also had a European girlfriend at the time. At first, the idea seemed impossible: Maybe we should sell baseball caps instead of starting a magazine, Stein thought. But Moore had a vision. He stole the name from the caf\u00e9 outside his living room window, stole the masthead logo from the subway sign, and their publication was born: The Paris Metro<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Stein and Moore called Joel Stratte-McClure, a fellow journalist then in Paris on assignment, to tell him that they had a \u201cscoop\u201d on a nuclear meltdown and ask him to meet them in the Bar Hemingway at the Ritz. (There was no meltdown.) Several martinis in, Stratte-McClure joined the Metro<\/em> team. He quickly became one of the core reporters, writing everything from regular features\u2014an On the Money column, which advised readers about how to invest in wine or bet on horses\u2014to cover stories like \u201cOur Man in the Seine: Gets to the Bottom of the Dirty River\u2014And Comes Back Alive!\u201d A few months later, Moore approached Stratte-McClure about a new role. \u201cDo you balance your checkbook?\u201d Moore asked. \u201cOf course. I\u2019m a fanatic about it,\u201d said Stratte-McClure. Moore\u2019s follow-up: \u201cWould you like to be publisher?\u201d<\/p>\n

Nothing else remotely like Metro <\/em>existed at the time. Other English-language competitors like the Herald Tribune <\/em>provided local news coverage, but the Metro<\/em> offered a full high-low smorgasbord, from in-depth interviews with city employees to poetry by writers such as Gregory Corso and capsule reviews of Paris\u2019s worst restaurants to coverage of pickup softball leagues. Stratte-McClure told me in a recent interview that the Metro <\/em>routinely \u201ctackled taboo subjects. Money, salary, who\u2019s voting for whom, personal details about people.\u201d The Metro<\/em> also had a robust list of what was going on in Paris, such as job opportunities (\u201cURGENT: Seek Modern Dance Teacher\u201d), personal ads (\u201cWIFE JUST DIED\u2014looking for attractive woman dress size 36, between 20 & 31\u201d; \u201cI should like to offer my husband a totally original birthday present: a good meal out with an attractive girl\/woman\u201d), requests for information (\u201cHave you had an abortion in Paris? Share your experience with your sisters\u201d), events (such as, on Bastille Day, the Communist Party\u2019s \u201ctraditional swinging affair on the \u00cele Saint-Louis\u201d), and shoestring-budget recipes (\u201cIn addition to being extremely good for your health, chicken livers are the biggest bargain at Monoprix\u201d). The magazine allowed its writers the freedom to write what they wanted: to explore longer-form stories that leaned quirky, the result of enmeshment in a subculture or riffing on one\u2019s pet topic.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"

Cover of The Paris Metro<\/em>. Courtesy of the fortieth anniversary issue, 2016.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Metro<\/em> had its finger on the pulse of Parisian life\u2014or, at least, the life that expats mythologized: one in which, upon arriving in the City of Lights, one immediately was in an intime <\/em>inner circle with France\u2019s most glamorous celebrities. In the magazine\u2019s first issue, an interview with Jean Seberg, the star of Godard\u2019s Breathless<\/em>, spoke frankly about the difficulties of being a working actress in her thirties, no longer an ingenue yet unable to get cast in meaty character roles. A luxurious interview with Henry Miller, which ranged from discussions of sex to watercolors to American politics (\u201cTake Ford, for example. My God, he\u2019s worse than Nixon. He\u2019s more stupid\u201d), featured a full-page photo spread of the author playing ping-pong with a nude, blond model. Karl Lagerfeld posed for the \u201cDisco Fever Paris\u201d cover in the style of John Travolta. Another cover story, \u201cDo the French Take Tourists for Pigeons?,\u201d superimposed pigeon heads onto the most stereotypically American-looking people, strolling the Seine in crummy shorts and cameras. For a high-fashion issue, they posed a supermodel in Yves Saint-Laurent next to a clochard<\/em> with a bottle of champagne and a cigar.<\/p>\n

Intuition, serendipitous connections, and being in the right place at the right time helped the founders catapult their publication to the center of a Parisian zeitgeist. Though it would last for only two years, the Metro<\/em> became a gravitational force field for American journalists in Paris. \u201cWriters would appear off the street,\u201d Stein told me. Young Metro <\/em>contributors like Frank Rich, Roger Cohen, and Joan Dupont would go on to have international careers. The Metro <\/em>itself would become a fashion accessory\u2014people who didn\u2019t even read English bought the magazine, to see and be seen with le magazine hot. <\/em><\/p>\n

Most importantly, the editors and writers\u2014and, it seemed, readers\u2014were having fun. \u201cThe more we criticized the French, the more they loved us,\u201d said Stein. The journalist Dominique Torr\u00e8s, laid up in her apartment with a broken leg, wrote a column on \u201cWhat\u2019s In and What\u2019s Out in Paris.\u201d The column was blatantly arbitrary, yet many readers took it seriously, writing into the Metro<\/em> that they\u2019d pinned it to their kitchen walls. Stein and Stratte-McClure claimed, when I spoke with them, that Torr\u00e8s\u2019s column was the first of its kind, a precursor to hot-or-not indices like New York Magazine<\/em>\u2019s Approval Matrix. An early cover story featured an in-depth ranking of the best ice cream shops in Paris, with an illustration of a cartoon figure licking a giant cone in the shape of an upside-down Eiffel Tower that transforms, in the final panel, into a bottle of wine. The major scoop: Berthillon, long-acknowledged cr\u00e8me de les cr\u00e8me of Parisian glac\u00e9<\/em>, was ranked only fourth, because the owners had been rude to the Metro<\/em>\u2019s reporter.<\/p>\n

Especially in the early days, the Metro <\/em>was never afraid to go <\/em>there. (Stratte-McClure told me that one of his favorite cover stories was \u201cWhere to Go in Paris,\u201d a review of Paris\u2019s public toilets.) The July 1976 \u201cSex in Paris\u201d issue reviewed the gay bars of Gay Paree with unabashed frankness. \u201cPartouzing at the Porte Dauphine\u201d taught readers the art of wife-swapping and orgy orchestration at a major traffic intersection, which was a famous central hub for swingers. \u201cI stop the car under a street lamp, figuring the other couples will see us better. I feel like a storefront,\u201d Richard Goodman, intrepid reporter, wrote, describing a trip undertaken along with his wife, Helen. \u201cThe flesh agent, leaving us no time to decide, is already forming the group\u2014five cars, six couples and himself\u2014into a wagon train. On his signal, which sounds eerily like \u2018Roll \u2019em out,\u2019 we pull out toward his place.\u201d Leaving nothing to the imagination, Goodman takes the reader straight from the partouze<\/em> to the voulez-vous <\/em>to the rendezvous. \u201cAfter a good half-hour of rising and falling,\u201d he wrote of his wife swap, \u201cI fall back triumphantly, proud of my performance but still insincere enough to ask, \u2018How was it for you?\u2019 She rolls her eyes in response. I love it.\u201d<\/p>\n

For \u201cThe Doorman Bigger Than the Ritz,\u201d an expos\u00e9 on behind-the-scenes hotel life, Stratte-McClure interviewed a disillusioned teenager working as a bellhop at the Ritz\u2014identified in his photo caption as simply \u201cHenri, 18, Communist\u201d\u2014who reported very frankly on his experiences. \u201cThe Ritz is not the same for its employees as it is for guests,\u201d he said. Not only did employees earn less in a month than top clients spent in a single night, \u201cthe basement [had] the smell of dead rats and the breakfasts they feed us are terrible.\u201d But Stratte-McClure didn\u2019t think through the ramifications\u2014though the Ritz wasn\u2019t an advertiser itself, others might not be so comfortable signing over their dollars to a newspaper liable to blast them in its pages.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Cover of The Paris Metro<\/em>. Courtesy of the fortieth anniversary issue, 2016.<\/p><\/div>\n

All of this came at a price. After \u201cSex in Paris,\u201d Stratte-McClure told me that several potential advertisers simply stopped replying to their calls. Despite the boon of some major companies like Air France and Philip Morris advertising in its pages, the Metro<\/em> was always bleeding money. Instead of retaining a strict low page count and therefore a limited printing budget, the magazine ballooned in size, sprawling to fifty color pages. As Stein told me, \u201cFrench media outfits, and banks started throwing money at us\u2014alas, money that eventually had to be repaid. Had we retrenched, stayed at the initial twenty-four pages as circulation and advertising continued to build, we would have had a chance. But none of us understood that. Like most of us, I got my family to invest in the Metro<\/em>, truly believing, idiot that I was, that it was destined to be a mammoth success.\u201d Even in the magazine\u2019s last weeks, the editors were searching for a larger office to accommodate future daycare for pregnant staff writers.<\/p>\n

In 1978, Stratte-McClure told me, the Metro<\/em> put together a handshake deal with the Herald Tribune<\/em> to become that publication\u2019s Sunday supplement section. At the last moment, however, the Tribune<\/em> pulled out. In retrospect, \u201cthe reason it didn\u2019t work was pretty obvious,\u201d Stratte-McClure told me. \u201cWe had half a million dollars in debt. No one in their right mind would incur half a million dollars in debt.\u201d Once that deal fell apart, it was lights out for the Metro<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Cover of The Paris Metro<\/em>. Courtesy of the fortieth anniversary issue, 2016.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Metro <\/em>was short-lived, but its legend has a long afterlife. A 2016 fortieth-anniversary-edition collection about the magazine features a nostalgia-larded parade of essays dedicated to chronicling those brief yet momentous two years, and there\u2019s a television show in development about the glory days. And yet, or, arguably, relatedly, the magazine is not digitized\u2014if you want to look at all the back issues, you still have to actually go to Paris to read the Metro<\/em>. Even this captures an element of expatriate Parisian life many writers wish we could return to. Back then, Stein recalled, Paris truly was a world away. \u201cYou were really gone,\u201d Stein told me. \u201cCut off from the States, didn\u2019t make phone calls to people, no internet. Turkish toilets in every caf\u00e9. Everyone smoked Gitanes or Gauloises. Our whole sense of life was inhaling that noxious smoke.\u201d Of course, this too is myth. As a friend of the Metro <\/em>put it, \u201cIt\u2019s hard not to feel like the rest of life couldn\u2019t have been as fun as that.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adrienne Raphel is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People who Can\u2019t Live Without Them,\u00a0Our Dark Academia,\u00a0and<\/em> What Was It For.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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