A film man in Paris

Meet William Klein: photographer, filmmaker and friend to everyone who was anyone in post-war Paris.

May 12 2006

William Klein is the ultimate post-war incarnation of that very twentieth-century beast: the American in Paris. A photographer and filmmaker, he's lived in the city for over half a century now and, at 78, still lives in the same sprawling apartment overlooking the bijou Jardins du Luxembourg that he and his wife Jeanne (who died last October) moved into over forty years ago.

It's at Klein's home that we meet to talk about his trip to London this week to introduce his 1966 film, 'Who are You, Polly Maggoo?' at the Fashion in Film Festival at the Ciné Lumière.

Excited by his British visitors, he talks about London in characteristic magpie fashion, darting from one thought to the next: 'England is a lot of fun actually, you have all these rock musicians… Everyone was bluffed by Swinging London… That Pete Doherty, what's his music like? What about the Queen: you having a good time with her now? So, how come Time Out is talking about a film that is 40 years old? What's the big deal?'

He's obviously proud that 'Polly Maggoo', a zeitgeisty and very funny satire of the French fashion industry, is causing some noise four decades after he filmed it in Paris with the American model Dorothy McGowan in the title role as a beautiful clothes-horse who is followed around by a pushy TV reporter (Jean Rochefort).

He's amused too by his sly infiltration of the French cultural establishment. He hands me a cutting from the New York Times, and the headline reads, 'A film series that celebrates the truly, deeply French'. The accompanying article tells of recent screenings in New York of work by such French filmmakers as Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Pialat – and Klein. He is also quick to remind me that Pedro Almódovar picked 'Polly Maggoo' as one of his films fetishes to accompany a retrospective of his work currently playing at Paris' cinémathèque. He hands me a photocopied testimony in which Almódovar says that 'Polly Maggoo' is 'one of the few intelligent films about the fashion world, its beauty, its self-conceit, its craziness, its business, its snobbery and the naivety of models.'

Born to a Jewish family in New York in 1928, Klein arrived in the French capital as a peacetime soldier in 1948. By the late 1950s, he had married a French woman, was working as a painter and an assistant to artist Fernand Léger and had published a celebrated collection of photos of the people and streets of New York called 'Life is Good and Good for You in New York'. Despite enjoying the patronage of Vogue, Klein couldn't find a publisher for the book in America. It's the story of his life; France was quick to embrace this cocky, progressive foreigner while America barely registered the work of a New Yorker who in the 1950s produced some of the most alive and real images of his native city.

'Coming back to New York, I had a lot of things to say about the city,' explains Klein, who today looks like an ageing boxer in his dark hoodie and ankle-high trainers adorned with thick red laces. 'I knew a lot of editors and their general reaction was: "These aren't photos, these are shit! You show New York as a slum!" I said: "Well, New York is a slum!" It was in those days...'

Ever the creative butterfly, curious and impatient, Klein ditched photography in the early 1960s in favour of running with the likes of Alain Resnais ('Hiroshima, Mon Amour') and Chris Marker ('La Jetée') as the sole American filmmaker working on the edges of the city's Nouvelle Vague with films such as 'Polly Maggoo?' and 'Muhammad Ali, the Greatest' (1969), an intimate documentary-portrait of the boxer that betrayed Klein's roots as a photo-journalist.

Klein has continued ever since to make small, low-budget films about such subjects as Eldridge Cleaver and Little Richard; the last, in 1999, was about the global dominance of Handel's oratorio 'The Messiah'. Last year, Klein enjoyed a retrospective at the Centre de Pompidou which acknowledged the diversity of his work across film, photography, painting and graphic design.

To talk to Klein is to take a fascinating, anecdotal, crazy and quite unstructured tour of some of the icons of the cultural scene of post-war Paris. He rattles off famous names, often presuming you know who they belong to, occasionally pausing to ask if indeed you do. Outside his apartment block there's a plaque in honour of the French composer Francis Poulenc, who died in the building in 1963. Of course it emerges that it was actually Poulenc who told Klein and his wife that the flat was available. At the time the Kleins' own home was suffering structural problems; naturally one of the world's great composers stepped in to lend the young Kleins a hand.

'He was a friend, actually,' Klein says, his accent a unique mix of American and French. 'He said to us, "Mes pauvres enfants, where are you going to live? There's an old guy leaving an apartment here, why don't you come and see it?"'

It's the first of many connections to the worlds of art, film and music that arise from our conversation, betraying the true extent of his influence on late twentieth-century culture – and, in turn, its influence on him. There's Fernand Léger, who hired Klein as an assistant in the early 1950s and sneered at the young upstart's ambition ('I was a 20-year-old bourgeois dreaming of having a gallery and making a name for myself and selling paintings, and Léger would say to me: "That's all bullshit"').

There's Fellini, whom Klein assisted in the early '60s and helped to find real pimps and whores for 'Nights of Cabiria' ('Those days Fellini was like Mick Jagger – no, The Beatles') . There's Godard, with whom he collaborated on the 1967 portmanteau protest film 'Far From Vietnam' ('Godard filmed himself saying how he thought about Vietnam night and day... It was a shitty self-portrait. Nobody wanted a self-portrait of Godard'). There's Serge Gainsbourg, the subject of one of Klein's more famous portraits in which the singer poses as a woman but more resembles Quentin Crisp ('Serge and I were friends, two Jewish assholes doing things… He called me up and said, "Look, I want to make my comeback; I want to be a transsexual, I want to be beautiful"').

It was two more of his friends, filmmakers Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, who encouraged Klein to start making movies, beginning with the short 'Broadway by Light' in 1958. By the time Klein came to make his first feature, 'Polly Maggoo' in 1966, the fashion world was quite familiar to him. He'd been shooting stories for Vogue since the art director Alexander Liberman began courting him in the mid-1950s. Furthermore, his wife Jeanne was a successful model.

'You know, I'd never really looked at fashion magazines. But my wife was really the most beautiful woman in the world and at one point we really had no money and so she went down to Vogue and dressed up and they said: Do you have a book? She didn't – but there was a famous photographer there, Horst, from Germany, and he saw her and she really was a knockout. He took a photograph of her in the next-door studio which was the cover of Vogue the next month. This was about 1953 or something.'

And so begins another typical Klein anecdote that manages to define an entire age in a few sentences. This one involves the photographer Richard Avedon, for whom Klein's wife often modelled. He popped into Klein's studio one day after learning that the husband of his subject was a painter.

'He said to the two of us, "You're an incredible looking couple." I was much prettier then of course. He had a commission: to photograph a couple kissing in front of the Sacre Coeur. 'We did it, and he offered us $500 – we thought it was a fortune – but then a couple of months later a friend of ours said, "You know you're in the window of every drug store all over New York?" He probably got $20,000 for the models! I never even saw the advert.'

The world of 'Polly Maggoo' was the world of William Klein, although he stresses that he always felt an outsider among those with 'harlequin glasses and chic sorts of clothing'. The film mirrors his unease but also channels his insider knowledge. Indeed the film's monstrous editor-in-chief character Miss Maxwell (Grayson Hall) was a version of notorious Vogue editor Diana Vreeland.

'She was the Maggie Thatcher or Queen of fashion,' laughs Klein. 'No one ever said a word against her except me. I thought she was full of shit, I couldn't stand her'.

'Who are You, Polly Maggoo?' screens at the Ciné Lumiere on May 14 followed by a Q&A with William Klein. The festival then runs at the Ciné Lumiere, The Horse Hospital and ICA until May 27.

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