Cinéma de Vanves

Movie poster for Moulin Rouge, 1929

It was a bleak summer day in 1930 when a dejected Henry Miller found himself trudging home to a cheap room at the Hôtel Alba following another fruitless scavenging expedition “in search of a crust or a bone to stop the gnawing in my stomach.”¹ He had not eaten in thirty-six hours and the advance rent he had paid on the room would soon be running out. As he neared his hotel, Miller was stopped in his tracks by the visage of Olga Chekhova staring out from a large theater poster a workman was busy plastering above the Cinéma de Vanves. The movie star’s languid eyes locked with Miller’s. “I’d like to see that film,” he called up to the man who smiled down warmly from the top of his ladder, “but I don’t have a cent in my pocket.” “What nationality are you?” “American,” Miller answered. “American? You’re joking!” Penniless Americans were rare in Paris and the workman, a Russian emigré, was under the impression that no such animal existed. He quickly invited Miller to join him for coffee at chez Duval, a bistro across the street.²

In the bistro Miller sat munching croissants and sipping his café crème while the Russian calmly beat him in game after game of chess. After a final checkmate, Miller gruffly demanded, “What’s your name?” “I am Alekhine,” came the measured response. Alexander Alekhine was then a famous Russian chess champion and a gullible Miller stood bolt upright. “Monsieur, it’s an honor to make your acquaintance. Now I see why I lost all three games.” The Russian grinned; he had only been joking. His real name was Eugene Pachoutinsky. “Just call me Eugene,” he told Miller and invited him to return to see the film that evening.³

Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad day after all—Miller had managed to scrounge up a bit of food, he had made a new friend and now he would get to see Moulin Rouge starring Olga Chekhova, that painted beauty whose gaze had stopped him dead on the street. The movie may have been the best part; Miller had heard that Chekhova was the daughter of Anton Chekhov, a writer he admired (actually she was Chekhov’s niece), and he felt “an insane desire to see that film.” Miller returned to see Moulin Rouge many times and he wrote copiously about the film in his notes for Tropic of Cancer:

They say she is the daughter of Anton Chekov. So be it! I say she is the daughter of Beelzebub, the mother of sin, Judith and Lilith combined, more seductive than vice, deadlier than the deadliest poison. She is woman incarnate, a great, throbbing womb of love. I saw her again last night at Cinema Vanves, in Moulin Rouge. She is one of those quiet Mongol types who, in the mere act of leaning against a wall to stifle a sob, produce cataclysms in the human heart.⁴

Checkhova plays Parysia, an aging but beautiful dancer at the Moulin Rouge. Her daughter, who has been away at school for five years, turns up unexpectedly at the cabaret one evening to introduce her mother to her new fiancé. The young man falls instantly for the mother and a tense unspoken love triangle emerges, as Miller recorded,

There is no story but this red hot lust of youth for maturity, of a son for his mother’s womb. Even when he is embracing his sweetheart the young man’s eyes are riveted on the mother. And she watches them embrace, and without a single convulsive movement, one can feel with her all the poignant yearning in her breast, all the fire that is flaming through her limbs, the furnace glowing between her legs.⁵

For Miller, the film dredged up long silent memories of his first torrid love affair, with a woman fourteen years his elder, named Pauline Chouteau:

There was a woman I used to mush it up with in the hallway, on the stairs, in the cellar, anywhere where it was dark and we wouldn’t be interrupted. She was much older than I, and at first, less willing. [...] Maybe you will go to see Moulin Rouge and have nothing but quiet peaceful thoughts. Maybe you will see in Olga nothing but a middle-aged siren, who has been taught a few lascivious tricks. As for me, I kept thinking about the love of a young man for an older woman. I know what that love is like. I know what it is to be passionate about an older body.⁶

Miller’s notes grew increasingly pornographic as his imagination mingled with the plot of Moulin Rouge. He ends with this final exhortation to see the film:

Men, maybe I have a rioutous imagination ... maybe nobody else saw what I saw, but—I saw it! Go see Olga the first chance you get. Have a vodka or two before going, and top it off with a Pernod or a Rhum des Incas. Get a front seat and don’t forget to bring your telescope along.⁷

After that first night at the cinema, Eugene introduced Miller to the proprietor, Monsieur Robert. There was nothing to do but head back across the street to chez Duval where Monsieur Robert bought glasses of Miller’s favorite Anjou wine. They didn’t leave until the café closed.

Eugene proved to be one of Miller’s most important friends in Paris. He helped Miller get work by posting a handwritten sign in the window of chez Duval announcing that “Henri Miller, of the Hotel Alba (a few doors away) was available to teach English for the modest sum of ten francs an hour.”⁸ Eugene also pointed him to a second-hand clothing dealer where Miller managed to sell four suits he had brought along from his father’s tailor shop in New York. Miller later credited Eugene with having saved his life during those early “dog years” in Paris: “He fed me, kept me in Gauloises Bleues and arranged for me to sleep in the Cinema Vanves.”⁹

The sleeping arrangement came courtesy of Monsieur Robert. By mid July Miller could no longer afford his room at the Alba and Monsieur Robert consented to have him to spend his nights in the theater. The caveat was that the cinema would have to be locked up overnight so Miller would be unable to leave until the ticket office opened in the morning. Eugene and Monsieur Robert always kept a seat reserved for Miller, who would usually turn up in the afternoon before showtime and hang around the ticket office scribbling away in his notebook.¹⁰ Sometimes Eugene would sing and play the piano for him from the orchestra pit:

In the afternoon we go to the cinema which is cool and dark. Eugene sits at the piano in the big pit and I sit on a bench up front. The house is empty, but Eugene sings as if he had for audience all the crowned heads of Europe. The garden door is open and the odor of wet leaves sops in and the rain blends with Eugene’s angoisse and tristesse. At midnight, after the spectators have saturated the hall with perspiration and foul breath, I return to sleep on a bench. The exit light, swimming in a halo of tobacco smoke, sheds a faint light on the lower corner of the asbestos curtain¹¹

Once locked alone inside the darkened theater Miller felt afraid and imprisoned. The only window in the place was boarded over and striped with heavy iron bars; The reels of highly flammable celluloid lying about aroused fears of being trapped in an inferno. Each night he fitfully stretched out in the office on Monsieur Robert’s overcoat and when sleep did come, so too did the nightmares. His dreams were filled with scrambled reminiscences of his meeting with the movie director Germaine Dulac, visions of an armless accordion player whose instrument turned into a writhing mass of snakes and the recurring image of a man extravagantly feeding paté to a dog while Miller looked on, starving and helpless, behind the iron bars of the office window.

While making a final rewrite of Tropic of Cancer, Miller recalled the mix of joy and despair that accompanied his nights at the Vanves, which he renamed “Cinema Splendide,”

Everything comes back to me in a rush—the toilets that wouldn’t work, the prince who shined my shoes, the Cinema Splendide where I slept on the patron’s overcoat, the bars in the window, the feeling of suffocation, the fat cockroaches, the drinking and carousing that went on between times.¹²

Miller was released from his nightly prison sentence at the cinema when he ran into an old acquaintance from New York at the Dôme. H.P. Nanavati wasn’t a pleasant companion, but his offer of a place to flop in his apartment on rue Lafayette came as welcome relief after the long nights locked in the movie theater.

Miller eventually found a way to repay Eugene and Monsieur Robert’s kindness when he landed a job at the Chicago Tribune. One day he strode into the cinema brandishing the day’s newspaper triumphantly in his hand. Miller had penned a glowing review of the cinema on the paper’s front page. The article was three columns wide with a large headline and it praised Monsieur Robert’s clever advertising, his discerning selection of American films and the exceeding example of Franco-American goodwill on offer at his establishment. “They would only let me have half a page,” Miller beamed.¹³

The Cinéma de Vanves first opened its doors in 1908 and remained in business until 1962. It’s former site is today occcupied by La Prudentielle, a private reception hall that can be rented for events like meetings, church services, weddings, concerts, etc.

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, 124
2. Brassaï, Henry Miller: Happy Rock, 54
3. Eugene Pachoutinsky, "Chair et Metal," Henry Miller: A Book of Tributes, 1931-1994, 201-202
4. Henry Miller, From Tropic of Cancer, Ed. Roger Jackson, 13
5. Henry Miller, From Tropic of Cancer, Ed. Roger Jackson, 22
6. Henry Miller, From Tropic of Cancer, Ed. Roger Jackson, 16-18
7. Henry Miller, From Tropic of Cancer, Ed. Roger Jackson, 24
8. Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, 217
9. Henry Miller, My Life and Times, 178
10. Eugene Pachoutinsky, "Chair et Metal," Henry Miller: A Book of Tributes, 1931-1994, 202
11. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 65
12. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 15
13. Eugene Pachoutinsky, "Chair et Metal," Henry Miller: A Book of Tributes, 1931-1994, 203

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