I suppose most French people remember Jean-Francoise Bizot the owner of the underground newspaper Actuel. Bizot claimed Paris riots and the student protests of May 1968 so electrified him he quit his job at L’Express and decided to launch the counter-culture monthly magazine Actuel. It soon became required reading for the French elite. Actuel was like the independent newspaper of the time typically hippie commune-like in the vein of Village Voice, Los Angeles Free Press, Oz, and London’s IT. In spite of its Underground orientation, it had a widespread influence on French cultural life and was considered by some to be their intellectual bible. Actuel gave voice to ecologists, feminists, gay-rights activists, squatters, but it also included the arts and poetry, writing on existentialism, surrealism, articles about Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, and Soft Machine. Well actually anything new, which meant he also did an article on my brother’s flying car which was the reason I got to know him.

My musician friend Mike Zwerin the music journalist for the Herald Tribune in Paris, who had played jazz with Miles Davis, called Bizot the Jerry Rubin of France. obviously referring to the riots and = protests against the Vietnam War in the events of 1968. Jerry Rubin was the co-founder of the Youth International Party in America. His followers, known as yuppies, were brutally beaten, and arrested for demonstrating in Chicago in August 1968. In Paris in May 1968 the police were more aware that public sympathy was mostly with the protesters.

Mike had a fascinating story about Bizot, but I now wonder if he was having me on. Mike said in October 1971, Jean-Francoise while at the Angkor Conservation Centre had been a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge. He’d been kept in barbarous circumstances and endured three months of intense interrogation by the notorious Douch who managed one of Pol Pot’s largest torture and execution centers. Somehow in spite of Bizot being accused of being a CIA spy, Douch wrote a report to the Khmer Rouge high command exonerating him from the charge of espionage. Apparently according to Mike said Jean-Francoise was the only Westerner prisoner of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge to be released. Saved apparently from execution because of his deep knowledge of ancient Buddhist culture.

Bizot invited me and a large group of mutual friends to his Chateau outside Paris for Sunday lunch. He probably assumed, after coming to dinner at my townhouse that I was, like him, wealthy, and would have no difficulty getting to his Chateau. I don’t drive and I could have taken a taxi but in a moment of indecision I asked one of my occasional lovers, the organizer of artist’s parties at the Centre Pompidou if he would like to accompany me. Being only marginally Underground he was not the best choice. After picking me up, he asked if he could bring his brother, a guy in charge of security at the Cite de Music who had just broken up with his girlfriend. I had even more doubts about the suitability of my companions fitting in with the arty, intellectual crowd that would be at lunch, when a big burly guy, who looked like a bouncer, climbed into the back seat. When Jean Francois opened the gates of the chateau, it was obvious he has similar thoughts. The next day he sent me the message: “Next time I invite you, leave your chauffeur and bodyguard at home.”