In conversation with Terrance Gelenter.

Joel Stratte-McClure has lived in France for over three decades including a stint as publisher of the late, lamented Paris Metro and has been writing about his global trekking and hiking adventures since the 1970s. His walk around
the Mediterranean Sea gave birth to an exhilarating adventure. Armed with his trusty copy of Homer’s Odyssey he explored the coast, countryside and regional cultures including  Morocco, Spain, Italy, France and the world’s largest nudist colony.

Joel Stratte-McClure’s didactic but sensitive voice simultaneouslydescribes and contemplates the Mediterranean landscape he traverses and the individuals who inhabit it. He combines a knowledgeable guide’s eye of historic and cultural detail with a tourist’s awe of the fascinating scenery and people. Homer would love it!” -Vince Tomasso, Classics Department, Stanford University

TG: When and why did you first go to Paris?

JSM: Although I’d like to say that it was my opposition to the Vietnam War that brought me to Paris in 1970, my flight to France was actually due to a girlfriend I planned to visit at the Stanford campus in Tours. Unfortunately, her father made her fly home the day I arrived.

I met someone else within a few months and during the time we lived together on rue des Archives I tried out for a nude dance troupe in Pigalle (that ended when I fell on the third pirouette); used my car as a taxi to take innocent Americans on 100-franc guided tours of Paris when they arrived on the Pan Am flight at Orly; was part of a team that wrote a guidebook to Paris for Pan Am; was the first American waiter hired at Joe Allen; and started a news service with Harry Stein called Continental Features Syndicate. We claimed to have offices in Paris, London, Hamburg, Rome and Tel Aviv. We didn’t.

My girlfriend and I left town to drive to Cape Town in early 1973 because we were fed up with the cold Paris winter and wanted some African sun. We thought we could make the trip in two weeks. It took a year.

TG: When and why did you come back for an extended stay?

JSM: I became a thriving freelance journalist in Africa and was transferred back to Paris in April 1976 for McGraw-Hill World News, which serviced Business Week and other publications.  I had an expense account, a delightful and seductive apartment on Ile Saint Louis and frequently went sailing in Deauville. I later went to work for Fairchild Publications and left them to become publisher of The Paris Metro. That lasted until our fortnightly magazine folded in early 1979, though I had to write a column for Le Matin newspaper for two years to pay off some of the money they’d lent us.

TG: Discuss your experience at THE PARIS METRO.

JSM: I lost my first fortune. But we were all so involved in reveling in the magazine’s near-mythic reputation around town that we ignored financial reality and had a great time bringing “new“ journalism to France while violating all sorts of cultural and journalistic taboos about sex, money, politics and celebrities. Despite the magazine’s downfall, it was a linchpin to bigger things for almost everyone involved.

TG: Who were some of your most noted Paris Interviews?

JSM: Editors and journalists for the Metro talked to everyone in town. I wrote a fortnightly column called “On The Money” (using the pseudonym Psmith) and also did articles about Madame Billy’s brothel, posed for a cover called “Our Man in the Seine: Gets to the Bottom of the Dirty River and Comes Back Alive,“ profiled Le Bernardin long before it became a hot resto and was involved in scores of other editorial and advertising projects. There wasn’t a subject or personality that we didn’t investigate – au pairs, kept women, French TV, French bureaucracy, French women, death, birth and everything in between. And the publication, remarkably, lives on. Someone writing a PhD these in Spain contacted me this year to find out how one of our writers got in touch with Charles Bukowski for a profile.

TG: What were your favorite cafés? Professional and personal bistros?

JSM: “The Paris Metro” once ran a story about mental maps and my “map” of Paris was depicted by women, race tracks and bars/restaurants that ranged from La Tartine on rue de Rivoli and Le Tournon near the French Senate to what’s now La Guirlande de Julie in Place des Vosges, La Tour d’Argent (“Is the Tour d’Argent for Sale?” was one of the most popular articles I wrote for the International Herald Tribune in the early 1980s, when I also profiled upstarts like Karl Lagerfeld for the IHT), Bofinger, Au Beaujolais and Quasimodo on Ile Saint Louis. 

I always swam in the morning, usually at the Piscine Jean Taris near the Pantheon, and started the day with coffee and pinball near Place Contrescarpe. And we frequently had nude get togethers and naked dinners at the Hamman Saint-Paul on rue des Rosiers.
Pinball and 421 were big back in the day and there were numerous bars where Paris Metro writers went to play.  When I go back to these places today I’m still recognized by some of the owners, waiters and locker room attendants – or the sons and daughters who’ve taken them over. They seem to remember that I broke more glass covers on pinball machines than anyone in town.

TG: Describe the difference in the climate when you first arrived post 1968 and now Post-Bush?

JSM: I was studying in Vienna in 1968 but I brought the American excesses of those times here with me in the early 70s when I lived on the Place d’Odeon, scene of numerous street clashes between the students and the cops during the ’68 “revolution.” It was an era when everyone pushed everything – including booze, drugs, sex and journalism – to the edge of the envelope. Being an American alien in Paris added an exciting element to the intoxicating mix.

Although I still visit Paris frequently, usually renting an apartment for a week or two, I’ll be making my first post-Bush visit in May 2009. I think that Carla Bruni has probably had, so far, more of a post-Bush impact than Barack Obama.

TG: After the closing of THE PARIS METRO you moved to Antibes. Why the Riviera?

JSM: Paris weather stinks, especially when you have a young daughter with a second child on the way. Who wanted to live in a place where kids couldn’t walk on grass and the skies were predominantly grey? I remember watching the nightly TV news here during the early 80s and it would always be sunny in the south. I did a lot of reporting on the Riviera in the 1970s and early 80s, got to know Nice Mayor Jacques Medecin and others on the Cote d’Azur, and decided that the area around Sophia Antipolis would be a great place to watch communication technology evolve and raise/educate my kids. I remained on the Riviera for over twenty years and, besides covering Monaco for “People” and publishing/writing a newsletter about Sophia Antipolis called “Sophialet,” I travelled constantly throughout the world on assignments for the IHT, Time, People and other publications. It was a splendid base camp for a great gig.

TG: In your new book “The Idiot and the Odyssey: Walking the Mediterranean” you talk about the difficulties of cross-cultural relationships. Discuss the differences between American and French women.

JSM: I’ll let a passage in “The Idiot and the Odyssey” provide an initial portrayal of French and American women.

  “Despite these romantic suggestions Delphyne knows, or should know, that
I’m too emotionally raw to be at all interested in a purebred French woman. For
one, despite the way they look, they constantly seem to be having a dépression
nerveuse or a crise de foie or a dramatically sentimental love affair. And they
always use expressions like “tu me fais mal”, which I translate as “You are the
bane of my existence and make my life miserable whenever I see you and you
open your mouth.” I’m not alone. An unpublished study by La Patrouille d’Amour
characterised 72 percent of French women as “tu me fais mal-ers”. Whether the
figure is right or wrong, French women are usually too much for me.
  
Most of the serious women in my life, including my first wife, have been
Franco-American—a mixture of the American spirit of adventure and the French
sense of finesse and fashion—or Franco-something. Princess Caroline of Monaco,
half-Monegasque (which is just a few steps away from being half-French) and
half-American, embodies this breed best, though England’s snobby Princess
Michael of Kent once condemned her mixed heritage because Caroline is “the
daughter of a movie star, for God’s sake”.
   
And yet, I recently learned I wasn’t meant to marry even a half-French woman.
And right now I’m not thinking about any women at all, which makes Delphyne’s attitude a bit rankling, though maybe she’s just testing me again…..”

TG: Homer’s ODYSSEY is like de Toqueville’s DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA-often quoted, rarely read. How did that epic inform your journey around the Mediterranean or was it Kirk Douglas?

JSM: I’ve been a fan of Greek and Roman myths since I was a kid, have always considered “The Odyssey” the world’s first travel narrative, and vividly remember seeing Kirk Douglas playing Ulysses in a 1955 movie. I’ve read “The Odyssey” numerous times and still have the $6.95 Robert Fitzgerald translation that I first read my freshman year at Stanford University.

A decade ago I was in the middle of a melancholy divorce, mired in an emotional and spiritual cesspool and greatly in need of a cosmic uplift. As a jaded journalist, even exotic assignments smacked of déjà vu and I desperately sought an extended adventure on unexplored turf that would enable me to reflect, stay in shape, forge new friendships and perhaps have a life-changing adventure or two.

A hike around the world’s largest inland sea in my own version of The Odyssey, Homer’s epic about the dramatic homeward voyage of Odysseus after the decade-long Trojan War that began in 1194 BC, was just the ticket and inspiration I required. “The Idiot and the Odyssey” not only introduces readers to Homer and Odysseus while relating my experiences as a humble practitioner/student of Buddhism.

It also includes my ruminations about the environment, the art of walking, divorce, nudism, alcoholism and other enticing topics. I’m currently walking/researching a sequel and continue reading/interpreting The Odyssey as I move onward a step at a time.

TG: How has Paris and France affected your work?

JSM: Although I established myself as a journalist in Africa during the mid-1970s, I’ve lived in France for over twenty-five years. Not only did The Paris Metro have a journalistic and financial impact on me, but I’ve written more stories and articles set in France than anywhere else in the world.

These range from a piece about Jim Morrison’s death to descriptions in “The Idiot” about the ten most romantic spots in Paris, the world’s largest nudist colony in Cap d’Agde and my interactions with a concierge in the Marais and a Gypsy on the Med. France is an ideal spot for an American like myself to have engaged in everything from early excesses to later periods of self-examination and self-cultivation.

TG: How has Paris and France affected your life?

JSM: Paris and France, especially the south of France, are probably more a “part” of me than Cape Town, Los Angeles and other places that I’ve lived. I still, in the face of global economic and environmental collapse, abide by the truism that “l’amour, l’amour fait tourner le monde.”

 

Meet Joel at the Hotel Madison in Paris on June 8

Books available in Paris exclusively at
Librairie Ulysse
26 rue Saint Louis en L’Ile
01-4325-1735