Gaumont Palace
© Albert Harlingue / Roger-Viollet — source
On his nightly trek through the Place de Clichy in the period of 1932-1934, Henry Miller’s attention would have naturally been drawn to the massive Gaumont Palace. The sleek Art Deco cinema with seating for 6,000 was then the largest film venue in the world.
Miller was an avid cinephile, but he was not drawn to the Gaumont Palace to see movies. In fact, he had a rather low opinion of the place. Incensed by a Gaumont-produced film, Quatre de l’Infanterie, which he felt had sanitized the carnage of WWI, he penned an invective-laced tirade against all things Gaumont. “Everything marked with the label ‘Gaumont’ is shit—pretentious shit,” he wrote in 1931. “And to harbor this pretentious shit a palace is being erected on the Boulevard de Clichy.”1
What attracted Miller to the Gaumont Palace was the vibrant streetlife surrounding the theater. He had read with delight Francis Carco’s sordid descriptions of this neighborhood in The Last Bohemia and now he prowled Carco’s precincts with eyes wide open, absorbing the louche atmosphere of pimps and prostitutes in the gritty cafés of the Place de Clichy.
Of particularly interest was a prostitute with a wooden leg who stood on the corner outside the Gaumont Palace every evening. The sight of her never failed to arouse Miller’s curiosity.
Approaching the Place Clichy toward evening I pass the little whore with the wooden stump who stands opposite the Gaumont Palace day in and day out. She doesn’t look a day over eighteen. Has her regular customers, I suppose. After midnight she stands there in her black rig rooted to the spot. Back of her is the little alleyway that blazes like an inferno.2
“Must be strange taking that wooden stump to bed with you,” he thought. “One imagines all sorts of things—splinters, etc.” He was fascinated to discover that in the Paris streetworld any pronounced defect or deviation from mainstream standards of beauty only served to enhance a woman’s sexual appeal. “I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender,” he wrote. “As soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the loose. Any misfortune that aggravates the natural homeliness of a female, seems to be regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male.”3
In the spring of 1932, Miller brought Anaïs Nin along for a whirlwind walking tour of the seedy areas around the Place de Clichy, making sure to point out the red light district and the girl with the wooden leg:
Henry makes me aware of the street, of people. He is smelling the street, observing. He shows me the whore with the wooden stump who stands near the Gaumont Palace. He shows me the narrow streets winding up, lined with small hotels, and the whores standing by the doorways, under red lights. We sit in several cafés, Francis Carco cafés, where the pimps are playing cards and watching their women on the sidewalk.4
Impressed, Nin later portrayed the girl with the wooden leg in Delta of Venus and gave her a passing mention in Seduction of the Minotaur.
The Gaumont Palace opened in 1911 in a graceful stone building that had formerly been a venue for horse races. At the time, its world record seating capacity was a mere 3,400. In 1930, a major renovation brought in a sleek Art Deco design and increased seating capacity to 6,000, once again setting the world record—only to be surpassed by the 6,200 seat Radio City Music Hall which opened in 1933. In 1972 the theater was torn down and replaced by a retail and office block.
Notes
- Henry Miller, "The New Instinctivism," Nexus vol. 4, 2007, pg 20
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 76-77
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 165
- Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1934, 77-78