The woman known as “Madame Sex” crunches her way elegantly through a large
radish as she compares the pleasures of orgies and masturbation. An art
critic and sex-memoir author extraordinaire, Catherine Millet talks of
“pleasure in the solitary act” and “distractions” in orgies as
smoothly as she does of the weather during her last summer holiday. The
waiter at the Left Bank restaurant near her Parisian publisher doesn’t even
raise an eyebrow.
This is Millet as 1.2m readers of her 2001 sensation, The Sexual Life of
Catherine M, and countless French chat-show viewers know her: a confident,
unflappable defender of the unbridled exercise of what she calls her “right
to sexual freedom”, and by extension an authority on sex in general. A
youthful, tanned 60-year-old in smart grey trousers, a floral-print blouse
and a checked jacket, she is demure, petite and bird-like, speaking quickly
and gesticulating often.
In her bestseller, published worldwide in close to 40 languages, she wrote of
the “incalculable number” of her sex partners, the myriad backdrops to her
orgiastic assignments – offices, storerooms in exhibition venues, swingers’
clubs, underground car parks, the Bois de Boulogne forest west of Paris,
deserted stadiums, cemeteries, railway stations. Today the ultimate
modern-day libertine has a new memoir, Jour de Souffrance (Day of
Suffering), in which she shines a disconcerting light on a part of her
private life she previously swept under the carpet – the debilitating
jealousy that she paradoxically suffered from as her then lover, now her
husband, exercised his own right to sexual freedom. Millet being Millet, the
new book also gives pride of place to the masturbation fantasies she says
she suffered from as a result of her jealousy. There was little hint of such
personal anguish in her first book, which was billed as an unprecedentedly
frank account and widely criticised for its absence of feeling or emotion.
So how much of a facade is the “Madame Sex” persona, and what other aspects
of her personality, if any, has she kept hidden?
) ) ) ) )
When asked about her childhood, the first memory Millet comes up with is that
of raiding her mother and grandmother’s library at their flat in the western
Paris suburb of Bois-Colombes. Nobody told her what she could or couldn’t
read, and as a teenager she devoured children’s books alongside classics by
Balzac and Zola. Her father, a driving instructor, called her “Catherine
Millet of the Académie Française”. Nobody told her about the birds and the
bees either.
“The first time I had my period, nobody explained anything to me. A doctor
came, and that was it. I remember my dad joking, ‘You’ve got a nosebleed.’ I
was very naive; I learnt everything on my own,” she says. But her parents
did give her a Catholic education, complete with catechism and first
communion.
Millet’s voice, usually steady and strong, slows down as she recalls her
mother’s mental illness. “She always had difficulty living, if I can put it
like that. I remember fits that I won’t call fits of madness – they were
terrible anxiety attacks. She had obsessions, like household appliances not
working. She’d get into a terrible state because the fridge didn’t work. I
remember seeing her putting a leg over the window sill and being caught at
the last minute by my father.”
Did she witness other suicide attempts?
“I wouldn’t call it a suicide attempt. It was a moment of distraction, of
great confusion. And it happened while we were there – suicide is pretty
much a solitary act usually.” Her mother and father were both unfaithful,
and she once saw her mother kissing her lover outside their flat.
The editor of Art Press, a highbrow magazine on contemporary art, Millet wrote
books on art including Dalí and Me, and oversaw exhibitions in France and at
the Venice Biennale, but it is The Sexual Life that made her a household
name. In it, she describes in laconic, graphic detail and with mind-numbing
thoroughness how she took part in her first orgy – she uses the slang French
word partouse – a few weeks after losing her virginity at 18, and many of
those that followed. Such as at a club called Chez Aimé: “I was sometimes
set upon so violently that I had to hold on to the ends of the table with
both my hands, and for a long time I bore the scar of a little gash above my
coccyx, where my spine had rubbed against the rough wood.” She approvingly
quotes an acquaintance’s remark that “Elle baise comme elle respire” (She
f***s like she breathes). Up to 150 people were present at the biggest
orgies she took part in, and she would have sex of one form or another with
“about a quarter or a fifth of them”.
Millet has said that if she could find pleasure in such numbers it was because
her love life was “very stable” and the couples she formed a part of
were “very solid”. She has had only two lovers in her life. The first,
Daniel Templon, heads an art gallery and founded Art Press with her in 1972.
The second is her husband, Jacques Henric, then a communist schoolteacher
nine years her senior she met in the early 1970s, who is now a writer and
photographer. She was with both men for six years before breaking with
Templon. At the time The Sexual Life came out, Henric published a book of 32 nude
photographs of her.
Millet doesn’t believe that the dark side of her youth – including her
younger brother dying in a car accident – explains her sex life.
“At the orgies I went to I must have come across people who hadn’t suffered
such tragedies in their families. And at the same time I think that everyone
has the memory of a tragedy in their life, like an accident cutting short
the life of a loved one.”
Yet she talks of her sex life as “a refuge”. From what? “This kind of sex life
was a good way of negotiating my entry into the world. I was shy, I was a
bit afraid, and I had the impression that establishing a sexual relationship
very quickly and easily made things easier for me.” She could have
taken up stamp-collecting and met people that way, I say. She just laughs.
Wasn’t it a form of addiction? “I don’t think I’m an addict. I lived in an
environment where sexual relationships could be established pretty easily,
and I simply welcomed this. But I didn’t seek it out. I don’t think I am or
was a nymphomaniac. A nymphomaniac is a woman who jumps on all the men she
meets. That really wasn’t my case.”
She stopped going to orgies when she realised she felt increasingly detached:
“I felt more and more like a spectator.” Her professional success made her
feel more sure of herself, so she had less need of the gratification orgies
brought her.
Several critics have slated The Sexual Life for its coldness. The Peruvian
writer Mario Vargas Llosa slammed it as a “carnal gymnasium, devoid of any
sentiment or emotion”. Millet grimaces when I read that out. “Yes, I
remember it. But the lack of feeling was deliberate. My project was to write
a very factual book on sexual activity. I didn’t want to tell the story of
my life.”
She acknowledges that one of the rare feelings that does feature in the book
is her pride at being the most available woman at orgies, and skilled at
oral sex. “That wouldn’t be the case today! I mean, I have other reasons to
be proud of myself,” she laughs. “But that was one of the reasons for going
to orgies – being appreciated.”
What of the charge that the book was repetitive, even sad? Millet bristles
only slightly. The Marquis de Sade is repetitive too, she says: “Sexual
activity is pretty repetitive, however imaginative you try to be.”
A mixed critical reception didn’t stop The Sexual Life gaining Millet instant
notoriety and sizable wealth – she says she spent the latter on refurbishing
her flat in eastern Paris and on “a more comfortable life day to day”.
Did her colleagues in the art world treat her differently, even try to pick
her up? “No! If I’d wanted to discourage that kind of thing, I
couldn’t have found a better way. Writing about your sex life makes people
you know scared of you.” But she received plenty of interest from titillated
readers. One English train driver wrote to tell her about passengers he had
surprised having sex on his train. He even telephoned the art newspaper she
edits, but she didn’t take the call. Did he want more than a chat?
“Practically all those who wrote to me wanted to meet me. I was invited to
various places in the world, even with my partner,” she says with a grin.
She always turned the invitations down.
She was gratified, however, by women readers coming up to her and thanking her
for writing explicitly about masturbation and the pleasure women take in it.
“They said to me it was no longer taboo, that people would stop thinking
they were frigid simply because they enjoyed masturbation.” Millet proceeds
to compare the merits of masturbation and group sex. “You have greater
control in masturbation. In an orgy, the very fact that there are many
people makes access to pleasure more uncertain; you’ve got more
distractions and you’re playing a role a bit – and that can put a
brake on pleasure.”
) ) ) ) )
Her new book, Day of Suffering, fills in part of the picture left blank in her
bestseller. It focuses on her obsessive jealousy towards her husband,
Henric, whom she lived with for 10 years – during the orgy period – before
marrying him in 1991. Millet has written that she was attracted by Henric’s
voice. What else made her fall in love with him? She seems momentarily
thrown by the question. “What attracted me?” she repeats. Pause. “A
stability which is reflected in his physical appearance. He’s the
Mediterranean type, not very tall, a pretty square build and very calm. Um,
voilà,” she concludes.
The three-year “crise de jalousie” saw her rifle through Henric’s
correspondence and diaries, and suffer from nightmares and fits of rage and
tearful anxiety – so much so that she had problems breathing and her
heartbeat would go haywire. She took tranquillisers.
She explains that she started therapy after her brother died in a car
accident. “I wasn’t a happy person. I suffered enormously from the loss of
my brother and my mother in my thirties. But those losses didn’t have as
devastating an impact as the jealousy, which made me half mad.”
Did she think of suicide during her fits of jealousy? “I don’t think I have a
suicidal nature, but when I felt trapped, I’d escape by imagining I
was killing myself. Yet the very next minute I’d have been incapable of
actually doing it. The image comforted me a bit, but it was only an image.”
Did she think of her mother when she felt half mad? “Yes, it was more my
moments of hysteria that made me think of her, because I saw her throwing
herself against the walls headfirst. I didn’t think of the suicide.”
At the root of her desperation was feeling trapped. “I was conscious from the
outset that I was living a terrible contradiction. I couldn’t get angry with
Jacques and reproach him for his infidelity, because that would have been
absurd, given my own sex life. I felt there was no way out, I couldn’t turn
my pain into reprimands.”
One of the things she suffered from the most was being unable to have any
erotic fantasies other than imagining Henric with other women. She writes of
the “exasperating vision of Jacques’ sex organ penetrating that of one
of his girlfriends”, a vision she always “saw” as if she was behind him. One
scene has the beautiful Blandine, a “rival”, having sex with Henric in their
bed, in a position he and Millet are fond of.
She had no problems writing up her fantasies, which feature prominently in the
new book. “That was the easiest part. The hardest episodes were in Jacques’
study, going through his letters, because it didn’t make me look very good,
to say the least.” Often, the events she described were still so painful
that she wrote agonisingly slowly, managing only two or three sentences in
three hours. She has said she had only a few sexual relations with two or
three partners in the three years her crise de jalousie lasted. “Jacques
would make love to me to calm my hysteria.”
I ask her why she made only a few passing references to her jealousy in The
Sexual Life.
“I was worried that if I went into more detail, readers would interpret this
jealousy as a sort of punishment from heaven against the libertine. That
would make the book a confession of someone who had paid for their so-called
sin, and I really didn’t want that.” Odd, that. Millet doesn’t mind about
readers seeing her having sex with countless partners, but she doesn’t want
to be seen as being punished for it.
“The other thing I didn’t put in either book, because it would have dragged me
into complex things psychologically, is the abortions. After all, becoming
pregnant and choosing to have an abortion is part of a sex life.” It is the
first time Millet speaks of having abortions. I ask her how many times.
“Three times, I think.” Was she pregnant by the two loves of her
life, or her casual partners? “No, no, you see! Immediately this leads to
complex things.”
Later, I ask her whether she ever wanted children. She says she did, in her
mid-thirties, because she saw her friends were having kids, and that made
her want one of her own. “But that desire passed very quickly. I think I was
too focused on my life; probably I was selfish. I didn’t want to give up
certain things, like being free to do things and to work as much as
possible.”
Henric has called Millet “prudish” – although she posed naked for him and
disclosed so much about her sex life in her books. She has said one of the
reasons she had no qualms about writing her bestseller was that she
considered the protagonist to be another person. But Millet is still holding
back on much of what she sees as part of her make-up. The Sexual Life was
touted as a full account, yet the fits of jealousy were only briefly
described. In both her books and her interviews, her references to her youth
and its traumas are rare and short.
She does let drop, though, that pain can find relief in sex. “When people’s
lives are hit by a tragedy, it’s possible they want to forget and they look
for physical love. It gives them a pleasure which can be very violent, very
intense, and it heals the wound a bit.” I can’t help thinking this applies
to her to some extent.
She candidly admits that she expects Day of Suffering to do less well than her
earlier book. Her latest offering doesn’t have the same “whiff of scandal”.
She doesn’t mind if it’s not a big success. What’s more important to her is
some critics insinuating that she has had to pay for her life as a
libertine, as if it was a sin to be punished. She says: “I can’t stop people
thinking that. Perhaps it allows them to satisfy their morality. But I never
regretted anything I did, even when I was feeling the most wretched. What I
suffered never made me question my philosophy of life.”
That philosophy has softened. She says she wants to tell Henric: “Let’s take
it easy – time is beginning to count.” She explains: “I’ve reached an age in
which you no longer want hassle.” So you are faithful to each other? “I can
speak only for myself… The answer in my case is yes.”
She still defends the idea of sexual freedom as “the right of everyone”, but
she strikes a warning note: “Sexual freedom suited me for a time but it
isn’t the key to happiness. There are other things that come before sex.
Your work or family can also be the centre of your life.
“Andy Warhol once said we should show kids the sexual act very early because
they would understand it isn’t that big a deal. He is saying that we give
sex too much importance.”
Which takes the biscuit, coming from “Madame Sex” herself. Then again, she
stopped taking part in chat shows which cast her in that role a year or two
ago. It’s clear that the label has become a tight fit for Millet; she wants
to be known and praised not as a writer on sex, but as a writer tout court.
And there’s no doubt she has plenty of as-yet-undisclosed memories to draw
on, be they sexual, happy or sad.
