The French comedian Jacques Tati, whom we make no bones about calling one of the funniest men alive, was in town briefly for the opening of his movie, “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.” As was the case with his previous movie success, “Jour de Fête,” M. Tati is not only the star of the picture but also its author and director. We called on this great benefactor of humanity one warm afternoon recently and found him perplexed in the extreme by the air-conditioning of his hotel suite. He had on a blue-and-white striped sports shirt and a heavy topcoat. “My first experience of your winter-in-summer machines,” he said in admirable English, fingering his topcoat and shivering. “I do not yet understand the principle. You take off your coat when you go outside and you put on your coat when you come inside. Bien! But where is the gain?” M. Tati is well over two yards tall and looks taller. He has broad shoulders, long arms, and big hands, and wears an expression of perpetual pleased surprise. No sooner had we sat down than he volunteered to show us a snapshot of his two children—Sophie, who is seven, and Pierre, who is five. “They are simple and honest,” he said with a father’s pride.
While Tati and his wife were in New York, their children stayed at Tati’s father’s house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a suburb of Paris. Tati was born a few miles from there, in Le Pecq, in 1908. His real name is Jacques Tatischeff, and if he liked, he could call himself a count. His grandfather, Count Dimitri Tatischeff, an attaché of the Russian Embassy in Paris, married a Frenchwoman. On Tati’s maternal side, his grandmother was Italian and his grandfather was Dutch. This man, van Hoof by name, ran a picture-framing shop in Paris and numbered among his customers Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh. On more than one occasion, van Gogh offered to pay his bill with some of his paintings, but canny old van Hoof held out for cash. Tati’s father took over the business, and Tati, at sixteen, was sent to a college of arts and engineering to prepare him for a prosperous picture-framing future. After a year’s fumbling with more mathematics than he knew what to do with, Tati gave up college, and his father bundled him off to London, to serve as an apprentice to an English framer. He boarded with a family whose son, also seventeen, had a passion for Rugby, and in six months Tati learned much English, much Rugby, and very little picture framing. “Rugby is not a gentle game,” he told us. “Sometimes the players hurt each other quite badly, and afterward they wish to be friendly again, so they have dinner together and try to make one another laugh. I used to imitate the way Rugby players look during a game. Everyone would laugh at me, and I was encouraged to start imitating people playing tennis and other sports. My friends said, ‘Why not go into the music halls?’ I went back to Paris and told my father I wanted to quit picture framing and do imitations. You can imagine his anger. He said at last that I could do as I pleased but he wouldn’t give me a sou.”
Young Tati’s specialty was so peculiar that not an impresario in Paris would look at him. “For years, I was broke,” Tati said. “I slept every night in a different place. I sat in cafés and talked with friends, and when I needed to eat, I would go to a certain cabaret and imitate a drunken waiter who is constantly making mistakes. For an evening of supposedly drunken waiting, I would be given my dinner and fifty francs. It was the happiest and most free time I have ever known.” Tati got his big break in 1934, when a friend arranged for him to appear on a program at the Ritz with Chevalier and Mistinguett. “I was so frightened that though I was supposed to go on first, I couldn’t stand or talk,” Tati said. “I hid in a corner backstage and the show started without me. When it was over and the people were leaving, the manager of the show saw me hiding in the corner. He ran out on the stage and shouted that one of the entertainers had been forgotten. Then he introduced me. The people returned to their seats and I had to go on. The next thing I knew, I heard them laughing. I could not imagine that they were laughing at me. I looked around for the entertainer they were laughing at. No one else was onstage. It had to be me. Soon they were applauding and shouting, and the manager was shaking my hand. Then came the impresarios, and I was playing in music halls and circuses all over Europe.”
This was Tati’s first visit to the United States. He was scheduled to play at the Radio City Music Hall in 1939 but wound up in the French infantry instead. He attended several baseball games in the course of his visit and plans to add a baseball pantomime to his sports act. It took him a year and a half to make “Jour de Fête” and as long to make “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday,” and he is only just beginning to think about a new movie. His favorite comedian is an English music-hall performer named Little Tich, whom he saw when he was seven. The comedian who makes him laugh most is the late W. C. Fields. He admires Chaplin, but for the most part Chaplin doesn’t make him laugh. “Chaplin is full of ideas,” Tati said. “I am so busy watching the working out of his beautiful ideas that I never find time to laugh.” ♦
