Trapping the French Casanova

At one point in my tumultuous Executive Editorship of Ramparts Magazine in the 1960s, it seemed time either to retreat or send in reinforcements. So I bludgeoned Larry Bensky, the current victim on the sacrificial altar of the Ramparts Managing Editor’s chair, into catching a night plane to Paris. Bensky was not all that happy about going, since he had been a founder of a Franco-American antiwar group during his previous residence as an editor of the Paris Review and had reason to think the French police would be watching him.

Bensky found Michel to be a very average-looking Frenchman, a chain smoker of Gitanes, a chain lover of women, with a strong taste for luxury, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of pocket money, and many flashily dressed friends with nice apartments and no visible means of support. He was an expert in “pillow-talk intelligence,” having been assigned by French intelligence, with its concern for industrial counterespionage, to infiltrate the social circles of the oil industry in New York and Texas by seducing the daughters of the petroleum magnates. “I learned English to fuck them,” the Frenchman told Bensky.

The French intelligence agent came on as an orgy freak, or, more precisely, he came on as a combination self-voyeur and fetishist about being an orgy freak. He sat in Paris sidewalk cafes ostentatiously picking his teeth, and otherwise acting the part of Terry-Thomas playing the stud. His conversation was that of an after-dinner speaker in a bordello catering to civil servants. He would preface intimate accounts of the sexual proclivities of prominent politicians with the phrase, “It is known in French intelligence that…,” then proceed to the nitty gritty about several American male politicians and their boyfriends.

Michel was in other ways the perfection of rottenness. He pulled off one of the meanest ploys in the book of dirty tricks: He deliberately got one of our men the clap. The victim was a Ramparts lad who had been standing by in Paris, another innocent New Leftie abroad. Michel apparently convinced his young victim that sexual intercourse was a prerequisite to commercial intercourse in Paris and that their discussions could best be held during nightly visitations to Paris whorehouses in which he was a stockholder. There our lad received a sexual mickey. Relying on the young American’s pride not to cry uncle, the fiendish Michel stepped up the whoring pace, putting his negotiating partner at the disadvantage of extreme physical and psychological discomfort.

Bensky arrived just in time to put a halt to this slow torture, which he learned about only by accident. The lad met him at the airport and on the way into Paris asked Bensky to wait for a minute in the cab while he ran up to a doctor’s office to get a “vaccination.” After the meter had ticked by 20 minutes, Bensky, figuring even Ramparts’ expense accounts did not have that much elasticity, paid off the driver and wandered upstairs.

After several wrong numbers in doctors’ offices, Bensky found the innocent American, all blushing red, pale white, and depressed blue, sitting uncomfortably on a folding chair in a VD clinic. The embarrassed investigator confessed his plight, which was redundant in light of his surroundings. He perked up a bit when Bensky explained to him, like Captain Ahab to Penrod, that his extended discomfort was not due to inexperience or bad luck but a trap of the devil, in all his cunning.

Benksy ducked Michel’s efforts to lure him to the whorehouses, where he was certain a trap lay germinating for him, pleading a Benedictine vow of celibacy from a previous incarnation, and instead maneuvered the Frenchman into successive cat-and-mouse encounter sessions of drinking cognac in bistros of Bensky’s choice. On the third night, he beat the Frenchman at the endurance game. As the sensuous intelligence agent wandered drunkenly around the bistro, having left his jacket on the chair, Bensky went through his pockets, discovering business cards and press cards in several identities, only a few of them in Michel’s own name, and a British passport in yet another name.

Bensky dropped these identities on Michel in subsequent conversations, which caused the Frenchman to raise ever so slightly his egg-skin eyebrows and compliment the Managing Editor on Ramparts’ “excellent sources” of information.