Michou: Nightclub owner who embodied Parisian flamboyance

He presided over one of the city’s oldest and most beloved drag cabarets, Chez Michou

Always seated at a table near the bar, he greeted politicians and celebrities alike (AFP/Getty)

For more than half a century, the most flamboyant figure in Paris’s liveliest district was a bouffant-haired man with a single name: Michou.

Habitually dressed in blue – often with a blue satin jacket, blue leather loafers and blue tinted lenses inside a pair of large blue glasses – he presided over one of the city’s oldest and most beloved drag cabarets, Chez Michou, a small club in Montmartre that was said to have inspired the play and musical La Cage aux Folles.

Seated at a table near the bar, he greeted politicians and celebrities including Cabaret actor Liza Minnelli, musician Serge Gainsbourg and French president Jacques Chirac, who named Michou a knight in the country’s legion of honour. Later in the evening, he might apply lipstick, mascara, false eyelashes and a wig to perform as a “transformiste”, a ringer for stars such as Edith Piaf and Sylvie Vartan.

“Brigitte Bardot once told me that we have the same derriere,” said Michou, who sometimes donned a tutu and straw hat to perform as the actor.

He was still running his cabaret at the time of his death at the age of 88. French president Emmanuel Macron hailed him as a gay rights activist and cultural leader: “The sky of Montmartre, from now on, will be a little less blue.”

By most accounts, his drag career began in the early 1960s, when he and a few friends put on a Mardi Gras show at his cabaret in northern Paris, not far from the famed Moulin Rouge. He decorated his club at 80 Rue des Martyrs with dozens of gilt-framed mirrors and staffed it with servers, “Michettes”, who doubled as performers, wearing wigs and fishnet stockings while lip-syncing songs popularised by Maria Callas or Celine Dion.

His friends, a term he used for all his clients, included politicians from both the left and right, as well as entertainers such as Lauren Bacall, Josephine Baker, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Claudette Colbert and Peter Sellers. A week before his death, he was visited by first lady Brigitte Macron, who wore blue leather pants for the occasion; another first lady, Chirac’s widow Bernadette, proved a close friend as well.

(Top left to right) Jean-Claude Brialy, Liza Minnelli, Charles Aznavour, pose with (front row left to right) impersonator Silvestre, Michou and Georges Garaventz (AFP/Getty) (AFP via Getty)

“She sometimes criticises me for drinking too much champagne,” said Michou, who boasted of drinking more than two bottles a day. According to journalist Elaine Sciolino’s book The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs, Michou was fond of replying to Chirac: “Madame, I don’t touch girls; I don’t touch cocaine. I don’t touch hashish. Champagne keeps me young!”

“The last dinosaur of the Parisian night”, as he called himself, was born Michel Georges Alfred Catty in 1931, in the northern city of Amiens. Raised by his mother and grandmother, he worked at a shoe factory and hawked magazines in the streets before moving to Paris in 1949. The name Michou was a contraction of Mimi, as his grandmother called him, and Chouchou, a term of endearment used by friends.

For seven years, he washed dishes, waited tables, laid tiles and sold newspapers, eventually taking over a bar, Chez Madame Untel, and turning it into the venue that bore his name.

His cabaret was credited by French journalists as an inspiration for the 1973 play La Cage aux Folles, later adapted into a hit 1983 Broadway musical and 1996 film comedy The Birdcage, starring Robin Williams. Michou recorded several albums and appeared in French television programmes.

Before his death, he reportedly selected a blue coffin and acquired a blue marble tomb at Saint-Vincent cemetery in Montmartre. “Life will soon be over for me,” he said last year at Chez Michou. “But I can say that I’ve found happiness every single night that I’ve been here. When I disappear, I want people to remember this place and say: ‘This is where Michou gave people joy.’”

He is survived by his partner Erwann Toularastel.

Michou, nightclub owner, born 18 June 1931, died 26 January 2020

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