He Plasters Paris’ Elite With Cream Pies

He’s already the French-speaking world’s best-known prankster, the self-appointed deflator of egos who smites poseurs and the powerful with a cream pie in the face. So what is Noel Godin planning these days for an encore?

An attack on the popemobile, with whipped-cream-filled condoms fired from a catapult while Pope John Paul II is riding inside? Sympathizers in Italy think it’s doable. An aerial pie bombardment of the Tour de France cycling race? A longtime dream.

Or perhaps a real coup in front of the worldwide television audience that will be watching next summer’s World Cup soccer tournament? Godin and his small army of accomplices are pondering the feasibility of flying over the stadium near Paris where the final match will be held and dumping hundreds of soccer balls onto the field at a crucial moment of play.

“We want to do it by helicopter; the pilots would only run the risk of a few days in prison for such a funny stunt,” the 52-year-old Godin says. “As long as they weren’t lynched by spectators first.”

The world will have to wait until July to discover whether Belgium’s pastry-throwing anarchist manages to pull off what would be his most audacious feat. The French language has been compelled to coin a word to describe what Godin already has become famous (or infamous) for doing: entarter, or, loosely translated, to hit somebody in the face with a pie.

“Our world is so sinister that we have to laugh, to play the fool a bit,” says the paunchy, gray-haired Godin, a part-time movie actor (“The Sexual Life of Belgians”), author (“Cream and Punishment,” an autobiography) and journalist who lives in a modest row house in northern Brussels with five cats, 4,000 videocassettes of old movies and his companion, Sylvie Van Hiel, an English-to-French translator and publisher of children’s books.

His sworn enemies, says the genial Belgian known to millions as L’Entarteur, or the Pieman, are “authority, depressing laws, the return of the moral order, nuclear power, any form of political power.”

“I have always said to myself that it was necessary to fight back, to carry out a revolt through laughter,” Godin says. “Now, what is the weapon that is at once the most comic and the most dreaded? For 30 years, I have been convinced that it is the cream pie.”

Over those decades, Godin’s targets have included some of the brightest stars in the firmament of French culture and entertainment: New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, choreographer Maurice Bejart, television executive Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, film producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier, and France’s best-known television anchorman, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, who was creamed by Godin and some of his numerous accomplices as the newsman jogged through the streets of Paris in his UCLA sweats. (He goes after the French, the Pieman points out, because few notice when a Belgian is entarte.)

What seems extraordinary to an outsider is how deeply Godin’s “pastry terrorism” has tapped into a vein of popular dissatisfaction with the intelligentsia and elite. In a way, it is similar to the rude jokes that ordinary people in the Soviet Union used to tell to mock their geriatric rulers in the Kremlin.

“The French love it when somebody inflated by the media sees it turn against him,” says Serge Halimi, a journalist with Le Monde Diplomatique who recently wrote a critical study on the French media and intellectual star system, “The New Guard Dogs.”

“It’s a sentiment of revenge or justice,” Halimi says. “But if the politician is respected, they don’t like it. They enjoy derision, but only when it is turned against somebody who deserves it, who’s been looking for it.”

Hence, a pie attack on the esteemed former European Commission President Jacques Delors by a Godin imitator was booed.

Godin acknowledges that he has one special vendetta, against the handsome, wealthy and successful Bernard-Henri Levy, one of France’s “new philosophers,” whose frequent appearances on television have made him one of his country’s best-known thinkers and writers. No less than five times, Godin and his accomplices have scored a creme Chantilly bull’s-eye on Levy, most memorably in May 1994 as the Parisian intellectual was on stage at the Cannes Film Festival presenting a documentary he had made on Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“He’s the worst,” Godin says. “For us, he represents empty, vanity-filled literature. He is totally in love with himself to the most spectacular degree of imbecility.”

Levy declined to be interviewed for this article about his Belgian nemesis, but has previously called the Pieman’s action’s “stupid” and accused him of subjecting all intellectuals to ridicule. Godin happily pleads guilty to the charges--and plans to go after his favorite prey again in two months. Accomplices have learned where Levy lives in Paris, and the door code to the building, Godin confides. The author-philosopher will be left alone only if he sings a silly song after the next pie attack, he says.

Good humor, in fact, is all a target need demonstrate to obtain mercy, Godin says. In May 1985, Godard was entarte at the Cannes festival, a favorite stalking ground for Godin, who claims he is now banned from entering the French Riviera town. The famed director licked thoughtfully at the thick cream on his face and played down the whole thing. He was never targeted again.

But as a rule, the strong and powerful don’t like being made to look ridiculous. Two women belonging to Godin’s “Pastry International” hurled a pie at French teeny-bopper singer Helene when she was performing at a Brussels theater two years ago. Bodyguards dragged them away, dazed them with uppercuts and were about to stick their heads down a toilet when police intervened, Godin says.

After the first pie was lobbed at Levy, in 1985 in the Belgian city of Liege, the furious philosopher knocked down Godin and threatened to stomp his head.

Despite such risks, the Pieman has assembled a network of supporters in his own country, France, Switzerland and Britain. “By phone call, fax, letter, in the street, people keep offering us their services,” Godin says. He hopes for recruits in the United States, and was thrilled by news last month of a tofu pie attack on couturier Oscar de la Renta by an anti-fur campaigner in Portland, Ore.

“We only attack the wicked--the great and the wicked,” is Godin’s credo. That, he says, means all politicians. To show the evenhandedness of its scorn, both France’s right-wing President Jacques Chirac and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin have been put on the Pastry International’s blacklist. When French Rally for the Republic party bigwig Nicolas Sarkozy visited Brussels in February, he was pursued through a downtown conference center by 30-odd people carrying pies and equipped with cameras. He was hit three times.

“People are mad today, and this form of burlesque terrorism hurts nobody,” says Van Hiel, Godin’s companion and sometime accomplice. “The cream pie is the arm of the weak and powerless.”

Godin seems to have been a born buffoon. As a young man, he studied law at Liege University, but that came to a sudden end when he emptied a pot of glue over the head of a lecturer who helped write the constitution for Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

In 1968, a wave of student revolt swept over Europe. That helped mold his anarchistic mind-set, Godin recalls--but so did Bugs Bunny cartoons and the medieval legend of Till Eulenspiegel, a German peasant who used his cleverness to outwit nobles, priests and tradesmen.

A successful pie attack often requires meticulous planning. Sometimes Godin disguises himself. Pies have been smuggled past security guards on the backs of dogs; crusts have been tucked down shirts and cans of whipped cream hidden in pockets for assembly later.

L’Entarteur’s proudest moment came at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, before the startled eyes of actress Holly Hunter and millions of French TV viewers. Journalist Alain Beverini was interviewing Hunter, winner of the best actress prize for “The Piano,” live on a pier outside the Hotel Carlton. As many as 30 security guards stood watch. In a brilliant diversionary maneuver, Godin showed himself on the seafront boulevard, the Croisette, and whipped out a pie. The guards rushed at him. Meanwhile, an outboard motorboat with three of Godin’s henchmen aboard was lazily moving toward the outdoor TV set.

By the time anybody noticed the craft, it was too late: Beverini’s face was covered with gobs of white cream, and Hunter was struggling to contain her laughter.

Godin finances his sorties by selling film and photos of the attacks to the media. He has been offered a fortune, he says, to target well-known film stars such as Sharon Stone and Catherine Deneuve. But he refuses out of a prickly sense of anarchistic honor.

“We want to be freebooters, pirates with pies,” he says. “We will never be mercenaries, because then we’d be a pathetic bunch indeed.”