How Do Americans Love Paris? Count the Ways

We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties or ease it could be reached. Paris was always worth it. . . .

--Ernest Hemingway,

“A Moveable Feast”

Americans--grinning, blunt, friendly Americans--have always come to Paris. Or have wanted to. It was probably Hemingway who started it, he and that whole scene known as the Lost Generation. They gave us the romantic image of bright, beautiful, talented people walking along the Seine on an overcast day, sipping wine for hours at Les Deux Magots or Closerie des Lila, living poor but happy in some Left Bank garret as they wrote the best that was in them to write.

Paris Doesn’t Disappoint

Even today, Paris doesn’t disappoint. By various estimates, there are 15,000 or 17,000 or 25,000 Americans living in Paris in 1987.

Some are students, here for a year or two, studying French and hanging out around the Sorbonne, seeing their time here shortened by every dip of the dollar. Others are business people representing American firms, a choice posting with a nice salary and even nicer expense account. A surprising number are people who came for a few months or a year, maybe as a sabbatical, then stayed on to make a life for themselves.

If they are lured by the beauty and romance of Paris, by the freedom--artistic and emotional--that the city has come to represent, all too soon there is a profound discovery: Nothing is easy here.

Indeed, the challenge of transacting everyday routine may be the Parisians’ greatest revenge on all those foreigners who’ve been invading this city since the Middle Ages.

As transplanted Pasadenan Joanne Menard, 34, put it, “Everyday life is miserable, but there are moments that are just great!”

Daily life, for example, means apartments that are always small--even when they are large by Paris standards. Nice buildings occasionally have no elevator, probably no laundry facilities and certainly no garbage disposal. Supermarkets are common, but parking lots rare. If a shopping list includes dog food, contact lens solution, aspirin and a hammer, figure on four different stores. And none will be open on Sunday or after 8 p.m.

Nothing all that important, of course. Except that the normal complications of everyday life become just that much more tiresome.

It’s Worse in Winter

“What I hate is the winter,” said Kathleen Navers, a 36-year-old librarian who has lived in Paris for nearly 10 years. Navers is not her real name. The Los Angeles native requested anonymity since she is living under a student visa and working in France without a permit.

“You’re coming home from work. You get off the Metro, maybe do a little shopping. Then you’ve got the umbrella in one hand, groceries in another and you’re walking along, trying to juggle them both going from the sidewalk to the street as you try not to bump into people. You’ve got to picture this on our narrow sidewalks. But if it’s not enough to dodge the cars and the puddles, there’s also the dog messes.”

Said Menard: “I think the French life style is just more difficult. You don’t drive your car to the supermarket, load it up and drive home, then walk a few steps from the garage to the kitchen. Even when you drive places, there’s a long walk. Carrying grocery bags on the Metro, great fun.”

Menard is a nurse-receptionist in a doctor’s office; she came to Paris seven years ago to learn French, met and married a Parisian and has been here ever since. She and her husband, who’s studying for a doctorate in neurosciences with a specialty in psychiatry, have two young children.

She’d given a lot of thought to the paradoxical nature of life in Paris and now, sitting at a small table in the tiny dining-living room of her 600-square-foot apartment on a quiet boulevard near Montparnasse, the mood was right to talk. Suddenly there was a screech of truck brakes and an ambulance siren. “That’s another thing,” Menard said ruefully, “the noise pollution is terrible.”

‘Everyone’s Grim’

As for the public transportation system, she continued, “it’s wonderful. You can get anywhere. Except using it can be so disturbing. People push and shove. You don’t see people smiling on the bus or Metro. Everyone’s grim. However, that was also true in Boston, I remember.”

She’d been here long enough to get used to it all, she said: the shower in her kitchen, the constant push and closeness in lines and restaurants, the disregard for safety or physical handicaps, how rudeness seems to get results better than courtesy. (“It’s terrible,” she said, almost embarrassed to admit it. “I’m not as polite anymore. I really have to watch myself when I visit my parents.”)

Yet the truth is, “I love this city. As long as you live here, you can discover a million things, then be walking down the street where you live and see something you’ve never seen before. . . . You know how it is. If you have a good week, if the weather is good, the flowers are out, there’s music in the streets, plus architecturally Paris is so thrilling. . . .”

Joanne Menard grinned, then laughed delightedly. “I know what this sounds like. I have a love-hate relationship with Paris. I guess that’s what living here is all about.”

These are good times to be an American in Paris. We are loved. We are respected. We are fashionable.

In a country where eating well is second nature, the newest nouvelle cuisine is Mexican, Sunday brunch or anything at Marshall’s Bar and Grill, a laid-back-fer-shure California restaurant off the Champs-Elysee serving classic Golden State cuisine in an atmosphere of minimalist sophistication.

Even more miraculous, the French are giving consideration to California wines. Bruce Macumber, who was in the wine business in California for 15 years before moving here in 1985 to set up the first Paris-based import company for California wines, last year filled a very respectable 120,000-bottle purchase by a French hotel chain plus enough smaller orders from restaurants and specialty shops to feel rather comfortable about the gamble he took. For the first time this June in Bordeaux, California wine producers will have a pavilion at the biennial Vinexpo, the largest wine-buying fair in the world.

Then there’s the General Store, the first American specialty-foods boutique in Paris. The inspiration of Elaine and Jean-Pierre Bourbeillon (she’s from New Zealand, he’s French, they lived in Boston for several years), it’s the place to find such down-home necessities as Texas chili, Vermont maple syrup, Mexican salsa, peanut butter, macadamia nuts. Bagels are flown in from New York three times a week. Fresh-baked chocolate-chip and oatmeal cookies are sold within minutes from the oven.

Half the General Store’s customers are transplanted Americans desperate for a taste of home, Elaine Bourbeillon said. The others are authentic Parisians with a newly developed passion for tacos.

But as far as he’s concerned, said Jesse Burke, 12 and a ringer for Huckleberry Finn, Paris has no redeeming value except perhaps for the comic-book store near the Pantheon. But Jesse is stuck. His parents, Joanne and David Burke, both quit their jobs, rented out their condominium in Manhattan and moved to Paris last August. They enrolled Jesse in a private school where lessons are given both in French and English and which Jesse can reach in a 10-minute Metro ride. It would be just for a year, his parents originally said. Now they’re talking two.

Joanne Burke is calling this the year of dreams come true. She’d lived here briefly when she was 20, hawking the International Herald-Tribune on a street corner by the Champs-Elysee, and she’s fantasized about returning to Paris to live ever since. “If it’s possible to be in love with a city, I am,” she tried to explain. “I mean I love New York, but I’m in love with Paris.”

This year, the time was as right as it would ever be. “We both turned 50 last year,” Joanne Burke said. “It was a big shock. We felt we’d either give ourselves a big blow-out party and make peace with our careers or we’d come and live in the City of Love.”

Joanne Burke is a film editor. David Burke is a producer, most recently with CBS, where he specialized in documentaries and worked on magazine news shows. Married 19 years, both are self-described workaholics who felt they were at the peak of their professions--and had just reached the end of the line on their current ventures.

So here they are in Paris, subleasing from an American acquaintance a three-room apartment, 700 square feet, on the sixth floor (with no elevator) of a run-down building, just up the street from the Pompidou Museum.

The Burkes have settled into an easy routine. Lots of reading, including the books by Sartre and Camus that Joanne lugged home from that first trip 30 years ago; lots of walking, exploring alleys, curious little shops and all those museums; what David calls “vacations within our vacation,” trips to Scandinavia, Egypt, Italy; and lots of movies, since Paris has a higher concentration of cinemas than any other city in the world, and the Parisians like their films V.O. ( version originale : sub-titled rather than dubbed).

Wash Clothes by Hand

They read Pariscope, “our bible,” which comes out every Wednesday with a listing of everything happening in Paris for the following week; shop daily, sometimes twice or three times, having found that baguettes barely last 10 minutes once out of the boulangerie; wash most of their clothes by hand since one load can take up to two hours at the overcrowded and undermachined coin laundry eight blocks away. Periodically, they get together with French or American friends in Paris, people also in the film or television industry. But not too often.

Even Jesse Burke admits that’s an advantage to this year in Paris. “My dad used to come home at 7:30; now he’s practically waiting for me to get home from school.”

Other Americans in Paris:

--”I was living in Laguna Beach, on the water. God, on the water,” exclaimed Bruce Charles, 34, a native Californian who came here four years ago. “But unless you’re into surfing and volleyball, it gets boring. So I came here. I have everything I need here once you get over the language. I don’t envision returning.” Charles plays classical guitar but is making a living waiting tables at the Studio, a small Mexican restaurant in the Marais district. He and his girlfriend, also an American, live on the Left Bank. “I don’t miss anything. My friends, the beach sometimes. But you can’t allow yourself to get nostalgic. Otherwise, you’ll go back.”

--Riley Lawrence Frank, 32, said he left a $32,000-a-year job as an assistant analyst with Western Railroad Assn. in Chicago, an apartment on the fashionable Near-North Side and “a good life” to move to Paris three years ago. Born and reared in Florida, he’d spent summers here “and I always felt more comfortable. In the U.S., I always felt conscious of the color of my skin,” said Frank, who is black.

“Here they just think of you as a person. I mean the French are prejudiced, but it’s toward what country you’re from instead of what color your skin is.” Frank studies French at the Sorbonne by day and at night also waits tables at the Studio. But that’s only temporary, he said. “I’m buying an apartment for myself. I’d like also to go into business for myself, like an American-type deli. I’m getting work papers and as soon as possible I’m going to become a French citizen.”

His life here is about two-thirds business and one-third play, probably not much different from his life in California, said Bruce Macumber, 43, who moved to Paris in July, 1985, to open Vin de Californie, the first Paris-based import firm for California wines. He came, he said, because he loves French wines and food, has been visiting France anyway every year since 1978 and “I was ready for an adventure.”

Prepared for “a downward comfort situation,” he found a studio apartment through an ad at the American Church, joined two wine groups and signed up for an aerobics class at a nearby gymnasium. He recently was among 50 Americans in Paris profiled in the fifth anniversary issue of Passion, the stylish English-written monthly magazine geared for Paris’ English-speaking community and Francophiles.

Americans in Paris--some learn French, some never do. Some become more French than the French themselves. Most, observed Ridgway Knight, president of the American Club of Paris, like the environment of France, specifically Paris, far more than they do the Parisians.

Knight, a former U.S. ambassador to Portugal and Belgium, is a career foreign officer who also served as political adviser to the NATO Supreme Command when it was located in Paris.

“Politically and sentimentally, I’m American,” he explained. “I’m from New York. But I like the food and I have more friends here.”

Knight has witnessed years of Americans coming to Paris. “I see couples come and they’re convinced they’re going to succeed. Then after a year, they fall back to America. It’s very difficult,” he said.

Survive several years here, say people who’ve done it, and the city is yours.

Now, Menard and Navers say, they feel a certain stability. They talk about a sense of freedom. Fewer comforts, but also fewer material things to tie you down. Like cars. Menard had an MGB in California and “I spent so much money on it. Now I have an old Peugeot, so beat up that if someone hits me, I laugh.”

They like the celebrity of living in Paris, visiting their friends and families in California and finding that people think they’re interesting, even if they’re dull.

Wealth of Cultural Activities

Navers likes sunbathing on the quay by the Seine, shopping in the same small markets everyday and chatting with the butcher, baker and the produce lady. Menard likes the wealth of cultural activities, those great concerts in churches, all the cinemas and the constant sense of intellectual stimulation. “In Los Angeles, I felt isolated. I had a lot of friends. But I didn’t know what life is about.

Navers suspects she will return to the U.S. someday. Her parents are getting older and she’d like to see her nieces and nephews grow up. Menard doesn’t know.

“Paris is like a drug,” she said. “You know it’s not always good for you. But you can’t do without it.”