Patrice de Méritens — You are the living example of Franco- American friendship …
Mireille Guiliano — Of course! Paradoxically, I was able to test this again very recently in a Parisian taxi when the driver, who knew I had arrived from New York, cried out: ‘But what hell the traffic is in that city and what hell that country!’ There followed a litany of the stereotypes that abound in France: ‘The Americans, all they care about is money, they don’t like us. There’s violence everywhere’ etc. It is so easy, without moving from home, to get your little viewpoint by gorging yourself on the worst television series … In fact, it takes months and years to discover a country. After a first stay in the United States at 17 thanks to a scholarship to study in a high school, I settled there at the age of 29 and I am still there today, more than 45 years later. Everything is open, everything is luck there, according to the local expression, with the opportunity ‘to go from rags to riches’. As for me, with two masters in languages and my ISIT interpreter’s diploma, I was all set to join the staff of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, but crossing the Atlantic was something different. I began my professional career as a translator and interpreter at the UN before going into business. My mother had just one fear: that I would marry an American. I reassured her in all good faith until the day I met Edward, my future husband, during a trip to Turkey. When I joined up with him in New York, I discovered an intellectual, a professor of 19th century English literature and American poetry of the 20th combined with a musician. Over the years, he went from teaching to the presidency of the New York Institute of Technology and it was with him that I entered a universe to which I would never have had access in Paris. The little intellectuals of the sixth arrondissement, the snobbery and the closed world of Saint-Germain-des-Prés were not for me who came from Lorraine. New York is a special world, with a very rich intellectual milieu from which it is difficult to free oneself. That was why I lived more years there than in France.
P. de M. — That said, it was for your French culture that you were hired by an American company?
M. G. — Precisely. I had been raised at the time on Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Duras, on sociology, geography and, particularly, on history, which allowed me to converse with academics as well as with the business world. That is why I was recruited by an American agency which had as a client the Interprofessional Committee of the Wines of Champagne, which represented all the brands in the United States. My European upbringing and my enthusiasm interested them as well as my ‘so French’ sense of humour and my supposed ‘French charisma’! For the first 15 years, I was the only woman in an exclusively masculine world that was particularly greedy for financial results and which left no room for error. In that, in France as in the U.S., it was the same struggle. To move from communication to the local chairmanship of the Veuve Clicquot brand, I followed courses in marketing and finance to become a pioneer in the wine world in America.
P. de M. — And ambassador of French excellence …
M. G. — Ambassador is something of an exaggeration. Let’s say rather that, to win market share, I had to transmit and explain. Although champagne is not the main drink across the Atlantic, no one disputes the French predominance that it embodies since the local sparkling wines don’t compare; from this stems a sort of fascination for excellence. This was not just thirst for a wine; it was, for those I was talking to, a thirst notably for historical culture. To talk about champagne, I had to talk about its inventor, Dom Pérignon, who at the first glass is said to have exclaimed: ‘Come, my brothers, I am drinking stars!’ but also Louis XIV, the Duke of Orleans and the Pompadour whose breast, legend would have it, served as the model for the champagne glass, the Enlightenment etc. All that fascinated them.
P. de M. — The title of your first best-seller, French Women Don’t Get Fat, can, however, seem like a hollow criticism of American ways …
M. G. — This is not the case. Firstly, because I had no pretension in writing this book and, then, because large women exist in all countries. The title is catching, of course, but it reflects above all the good sense which means that, without submitting to multiple diets, the way we feed ourselves has for a long time protected us from the wave of obesity which is currently unfurling on the planet through junk food and snacking. It was perfectly privately, in advising friends and colleagues who were overweight and who asked me what I did so as not to put on weight without depriving myself of anything and while still going to restaurants, that the idea of this book was born – an initiative that was absolutely not mine. I was even taken to task for taking this on when my work for champagne was so time- consuming. In New York at the time, everyone wanted to write a book, that was the ultimate. And everything came about in a way that some were to describe as the American dream. A big New York literary agent became enthralled by the subject, as did Knopf, the famous publishing house that published V.S. Naipaul, other works of literature, and books on architecture and the economy and Julia Child on gastronomy. Knopf! Edward couldn’t believe it! Six weeks after its publication, French Women Don’t Get Fat had become an international best-seller that went on to 2 million sales, of which 1.3 million were in the United States alone. As for the media, given my connection to champagne, I was entitled to the very best, the big television networks such as CBS or NBC, magazines like Time, The Wall Street Journal, etc.
What fascinated the average American woman in my book was the catchiness of the title which aroused a sort of prurience, and the idea of France in what it conveys as the wisdom and moderation of an ancient nation. American women who have travelled admire the elegance of the Parisienne who has something of the anorexic. Yet, for me, it’s the opposite about her. I don’t deprive anyone of anything, I teach all comers to make soups, to eat simply and healthily and especially not to snack. My mother, a Protestant from Lorraine whose ethics were accompanied by good sense in cooking, had brought us up that way. The same was true of my grandmother whose recipes I have used, whereas nutrition books are either limiting as far as diet goes or are used to sell packets of food by subscription. The fact of being French, that simple diversity, with the aesthetics specific to our country, was essential. I talk the talk, I walk the walk and that was a success with the Americans who realised I was not a phony. They saw me eat bread without gaining weight. The principle was to inculcate moderation which is not easy in the country of all extremes.
P. de M. — Is being married to an American the secret of happiness?
M. G. — Of course, especially if the American is highly cultured! From that point of view, I can’t complain. That reminds me of that deadpan saying of William Somerset Maugham who said American women expect from their husband a perfection that the English expect only from a head waiter. Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and died in 1965; one might have thought that era had completely disappeared with the arrival of the middle class, generalised divorce, the work and independence of women. Yes, of course. And, yet, not entirely. Imagine that Edward’s friends sometimes confide how lucky he is to have married a Frenchwoman, ‘American women,’ and I quote them, ‘being hysterical and a pain in the neck.’ Sexist generalities, of course. However, many couples across the Atlantic do not have the same liberty as prevails in France. Whereas a Frenchwoman, me in this case, will tell her intellectual husband: ‘if you want to write tonight, I’ll go to the theatre with a friend,’ an American woman would see in such an offer a violation of the family nucleus. They believe in the perfectionism of overachievement. From that to being ‘hysterical and a pain in the neck’ is all a matter of opinion … Nothing is perfect in this world, except happiness with an American!