Gulyás d'amour

You know, I’ll read pretty much anything that has Paris in the title, because I’m just flat out a sucker for the place, and I feel an affinity for people who succumb to the charm. Especially if they do so in the face of the city’s overt and covert mechanisms for sorting out the sheep from the goats.

But I have to say that Kati Marton’s Paris, A Love Story is…well, it’s just self-serving, shallow, name-dropping drivel.

Plus—it’s not really about Paris. It’s all Kati, all the time, come day, go day, decade after decade. Well, except for the parts she must find uncomfortable, where not even she can paint herself in a golden light. There are great big gaping holes in this memoir glossing over years of inconvenient stuff, which I’m going to take as a positive, because it means that the finished edition is only 199 pages.

I’m guessing she meant it to be a memoir using Paris as an anchor, as the place she returns whenever she needs to recharge her batteries. Instead, Paris is apparently the place she likes to go on the arm of famous, influential and important men who book into in boutique hotels, buy her clothes and eat in trendy restaurants. This woman drops names not as the gentle rain, but from a firehose.

Really—that whole label-junkie thing made this like a Jackie Collins novel without all the cosmetic surgery. (I’m guessing about the surgery, though. That may be one of the inconvenient things Marton’s glossed over.)

Marton is the daughter of Hungarian intellectuals, who were targets of the Nazis and then the Communists. They fled to the West in the 1950s, ending up in the US. Marton became a TV journalist, and married Peter Jennings. That marriage was doomed, apparently, and later she married US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who gave her yet another stage for her Hungarian beauty and her Hungarian intellect and her Hungarian charm.

(It is Holbrooke’s sudden death in 2010 that propels Marton into the current “look at me, at my Hungarian tragedy” excess.)

At some point, she decided she’d become a writer and everything seems to circle back to the Hungarians sooner or later. Her first foray, an account of Raoul Wallenberg’s efforts to save Hungarian Jews from extermination, was (by her account) acclaimed by, well, everyone who matters, as being the quintessential biography of Wallenberg and blah, blah, blah.

During her research for that book, Marton discovered that she has Jewish ancestry, which gave her another hook to hang her personal Hungarian specialness on. She wrote The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World. They were Hungarian Jews, of course. I read it a few years ago; here’s the comment in my reading log: “She needs an editor; and apparently without Hungarians we’d all be speaking German…”

In the current oeuvre, Marton sets up her research for Great Escape as a pretext to tell us that Robert Capa’s old Magnum partner Henri Cartier-Bresson couldn’t resist her Hungarian beauty and her Hungarian intellect and her Hungarian charm and her fiery Hungarian sexuality; “the ninety-four-year-old legend suddenly pushed aside his walker and literally jumped me.”

If he’d been a 64-year-old dry cleaner from Newark, this wouldn’t have made the cut.

Marton is very big on slagging off other women—Jennings’s mother is cold and dismissive; Pam Harriman a manipulative bitch. No woman, apparently, can bear to compete with Marton’s Hungarian beauty, Hungarian intellect and Hungarian style. Interestingly, Hillary Rodham Clinton comes off well; primarily because she takes a completely supportive role when Marton is in that particular limbo in the time between Holbrooke’s heart attack and his death.

I also find it interesting that of the 35 photos in the book, Marton is the focal point of every one of them except for two. This woman has some serious issues.

As for Paris—well, eventually Marton gets round to it. After floundering a bit here and there following Holbrooke’s death, she sets up digs in a fashionable area (bien sûr) on rue des Ecoles. She goes to a Turkish bath. “The Algerian masseuse emits a ‘Mon Dieu!’ at the tightness of my shoulders. ‘My husband died,’ I explain. Over the deep chasm of culture, history, language, age and circumstance, we connect briefly, as two women.”

We are meant to understand that Marton is on the path to healing when she marches into a shop on the rue du Cherche-Midi and buys “a pair of dangerously high-heeled suede pumps”, framboise-colored dangerously high-heeled pumps. Non-Hungarian famboise-colored dangerously high-heeled pumps.

The only love affair Marton really describes throughout this vanity piece is with herself.