“On a hill near Paris, was the village of Montmatre. It was not what my father had said but the center of the Bohemian world. Musicians, painters, writers. They were known as the children of the revolution. Yes, I had come to live a penniless existence. I had come to write about truth, beauty, freedom and at which I believed above all things, love.”
Christian, Moulin Rouge
Sites/Topics covered in this post:
- Moulin Rouge
- A Walk in the rain of Paris
Go-Date: Day 140, Tuesday, June 11
Life is a Cabaret, My Friend
This night, we went to the Moulin Rouge. They don’t allow photos to be taken, so I have none to show, except what I clipped off the Internet. The Moulin Rouge. A night club, a dance hall and a bordello. Ruled over by Harold Zidler. A kingdom of night time pleasures. Where the rich and powerful came to play with the young and beautiful creatures of the underworld. The most beautiful of these was the one I loved. Satine. A courtesan. She sold her love to men. They called her the “Sparkling Diamond”, and she was the star… of the Moulin Rouge. As so told in the movie Moulin Rouge. I guess I need to go watch that show sometime.
Moulin Rouge is French for “Red Mill”. It is the most celebrated cabaret in Paris and perhaps the world. Its hard to miss the Moulin Rouge since it has a 40-foot red windmill on the roof. Its also hard to miss with all the sex shops, topless joints, X-rated movie theaters, bars and cafés up and down the street and all around the neighborhood. Believe it or not, this area doesn’t have a seedy feel to it. There were kids zooming up and down the sidewalks on scooters, groups of high school and college girls strolling around in groups, and they were not working girls.
When we got to the theater, and that definitely is what the Moulin Rouge is, a Broadway-style dinner theater. We pulled down our umbrellas and got in line behind 4 old gals in their 70’s, a dozen Asian ladies that must have piled off a bus around the corner, and two gay guys that looked like they were on their first date. This was pretty much the same as going to the Louvre, based on the people filing into the place. We bought our tickets online last week, and that put a $300 dent in our bank account, but at least we didn’t have to stand in line in the rain to get our tickets (and we get a bottle of champagne with that, too).
The original Moulin Rouge, which burned down in 1915, was co-founded in 1889 by Charles Zidler and Joseph Oller. Moulin Rouge is close to Montmartre (where the original was located) in the Paris district of Pigalle on Boulevard de Clichy in the 18th arrondissement. It was really close to our apartment, so we walked the 1.1 kilometer to the theater.
Moulin Rouge is best known as the birthplace of the modern form of the can-can dance. The can-can, originally introduced as a seductive dance by the courtesans (the French have such a nice way to say whore, don’t you think?) who operated from the site. The can-can dance revue evolved into a form of entertainment of its own and led to the introduction of cabarets all across Europe. Today, the Moulin Rouge is a tourist attraction (i.e. trap), offering musical dance entertainment for visitors from around the world. The club’s decor still contains much of the romance of fin de siècle France (which I think means it still looks like a New Orleans whore house, but I could be wrong).
Don’t get me wrong, we had a good time, well, at least I did. Ellen is still trying to decide for herself. We were led to a table crammed in amongst 100 other tables on the main floor of the club. We were probably 60’ from the stage curtains, but the acting/dancing area was shaped like an erect penis and testicles so the tip of center stage thrust into the center of the floor seating area, dividing the auditorium in half. There was a waiters’ station right in front of us blocking our view of the stage, where about a dozen guys were dishing out horrible looking plates of broiled fish with steamed veggies for those who bought the dinner with the show. I’m glad we ate before we arrived. But, they broke down the station before the curtain went up, so we didn’t have 12-6 foot tall men standing in front of us all night during the festivities. That being said, we really didn’t have a bad seat for the show.
The original show was in the Montmartre (pronounced Mo-mar-truh) neighborhood, which is why the windmill. That area used to be covered by a couple of dozen windmills in the 17th century that powered grist mills, and other farming endeavors, including wine vineyards with grape presses. The theater site retained its bucolic village atmosphere, even in the center of modern Paris.
On 6 October 1889, the Moulin Rouge opened in the Jardin de Paris, at the foot of the Montmartre hill. Its creator Joseph Oller and his Manager Charles Zidler were formidable businessmen who understood the public’s tastes. The aim was to allow the very rich to come and ‘slum it’ in a fashionable district, Montmartre (I really love this part of Paris). The extravagant setting – the garden was adorned with a gigantic elephant – allowed people from all walks of life to mix. Workers, residents of the Place Blanche, artists, the middle classes, businessmen, elegant women, and foreigners passing through Paris rubbed shoulders. Nicknamed “The First Palace of Women” by Oller and Zidler, the cabaret quickly became a great success. Boobs, booze, and blind eyes of the authorities, how could it fail?
Those glory days have gone by the wayside, and Montmartre is civil now, as all the bohemians left and moved to Provincetown in Cape Cod (I love that place, too).
Make no mistake, the show is loud, colorful, great costumes, pre-recorded music and singing, OK dancing by very limber and lovely people (men and women). In short, it looks like a Las Vegas Casino show complete with all the tall, bare-breasted Casino-like showgirls. The one thing that really amazed me was how could they find 100 women with the same color nipples. OK, OK, its Paris, they used makeup, I get it, but such attention to details. Come to think of it, the guys must have been using the same makeup as well.
Back in 1900 when Paris hosted the Universal Exhibition, visitors from around the world, flocked to the “Moulin Rouch”. This gave Paris a reputation as a city of decadent pleasure. In many other countries imitation “Moulin Rouges” and “Montmartres” sprang up. They built the Concorde, the Grand Palais and Petit Palais for this world fair, though the Eiffel Tower was already in place since it was constructed for the 1889 World’s Fair, which was also held in Paris. So this town really put on a show for the visitors. I remember when they used to have World’s Fairs all the time, we went to the one in New Orleans, years ago, I also went to the Hemisfair in San Antonio, but I guess they just aren’t financially feasible any more.
Memorable Events at the Moulin Rouge
- 3 January 1907: during the show le Rêve d’Egypte, Colette exchanged kisses that showed her links with the Duchess of Morny. Deemed to be scandalous, the show was banned. So why is this a big deal? Colette was Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, a French author and woman of letters nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948; also known as a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette was most widely known for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Colette was an actress and courtesan at the Moulin Rouge, too.
- 29 July 1907: first appearance of Mistinguett on stage at the Moulin Rouge in the Revue de la Femme. Her talent was immediately obvious. The following year she had a huge success with Max Dearly in la Valse chaloupée. Mistinguett was born in poverty and had an undeniably quick wit. She wanted to build her own life and said “the poor suburbs, it’s not enough just to want to get out. I had a talent: life. All the rest remains to be done, to be thought about. I couldn’t allow myself just to be a beautiful animal, I had to think of everything”. She was known as a French actress and singer. She was at one time the highest-paid female entertainer in the world.
- 27 February 1915: the Moulin Rouge was destroyed by fire.
- 1921: The rebuilt Moulin Rouge reopened at its new location.
- June – August 1929: the revue Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds (totally not politically correct show title), starring jazz singer and Broadway star Adelaide Hall, with a troop of a hundred black artists accompanied by the Jazz Plantation Orchestra, opens at the Moulin Rouge and becomes the hit of the season.
- 19 May 1953: the 25th “Bal des Petits Lits Blancs“, organized by the novelist Guy des Cars, takes place at the Moulin Rouge in the presence of the French President, Vincent Auriol, and it includes, for the first time on a European stage, Bing Crosby. The evening attracts 1,200 artists and stars from around the world, including Josephine Baker who sings “J’ai deux amours”.
- 7 September 1979: the Moulin Rouge, celebrates its 90th birthday. On stage, for the show is Ginger Rogers.
It was not a perfect night, but it was a grand extravaganza. It’s one of those things that I’d put in the same category as going out to Versailles. We also enjoyed the connecting acts as much as the grand performances. They had three separate acts, 1) A juggler, 2) A gymnast guy that you could tell has done lots of work on the stationary rings, and 3) a roller skating couple that did acrobatics on a round platform that was only about 15’ in diameter, while the dancers changed costumes, and the sets were changed behind the closed curtains. They were all excellent. The Moulin Rouge may not be one of the things you most want to do in Paris, but you would kick yourself if you failed to have the experience. I could cook up several analogies (sexual, of course) but I know they all would be considered crude, insensitive, and downright offensive to some, so I’ll shut up and close with the thought that this is something you should do when in Paris. Ciao.
Walking in the Rain
I don’t mind the rain, I really don’t. I just wish we’d get some warm, nice weather on this trip. As a rule, we get about 5 days of cool, wet, windy days to one warm sunny day. I promise, we’ve only seen two days on this trip where the temperature has been over 30C (86 degrees Fahrenheit). We even had to wear jackets in Egypt, of all places. Perhaps when we get to Turkey the weather will warm up. I have no high expectations for warm weather in England or Ireland during our stay there, even though we were in London in 1995 when the temperature hit a sweltering 39C.
