Labro: Hit at Home, a Dud Abroad : Frenchman’s Struggle for a Toehold in American Letters

CARGESE, France — If Tom Brokaw wrote best-selling novels, or Philip Roth made feature films, or Robert Altman ran a radio network, or Russell Baker anchored the television news, their combined cross-disciplinary renown might approximate Philippe Labro’s in France. Yet his name, on American shores, rings not the faintest bell.

This shouldn’t be surprising but it rankles Labro, especially now that he has crossed the Atlantic with his French best seller, “The Foreign Student,” a wistful and often perceptive account of his youthful passage through Eisenhower’s America--at that time, for a Frenchman, an impossibly exotic land.

Today, Labro erupts in frustration at his U.S. publisher’s tepid commitment to the American translation.

“I kept telling them, ‘Look, you have a man who is bilingual and bicultural, who pays tribute to America, who has received great lessons from his American experience. . . . He can speak English, he can go on TV, he can express himself--he was made an honorary doctor of letters in June (at his alma mater, Washington and Lee University). This is a news story: Frenchman Comes Back and Makes Good! What . . . are you doing?’ ”

‘Like a Firebrush’

Relatively little, it seems. Yet when it appeared in France two years ago, the novel achieved instantaneous success and won the prestigious Prix Interallie.

“The word-of-mouth was like a firebrush,” Labro said, in one of his infrequent mangles of his second language. A sequel this fall, “Un Ete Dans l’Ouest” (“A Summer in the West”), based on Labro’s stint 33 years ago as a U.S. Forest Service grunt in Colorado, has followed the first book onto the French best-seller lists.

At his rented villa near this Corsican village not long ago, the 52-year-old Labro reflected on his two years as a bug-eyed foreign student at the all-gentleman Washington and Lee, in the green lap of Virginia’s Shenandoahs, and all that has followed.

“This American experience,” he said with syrupy ease, “gave me more boldness and more self-confidence.” More than he needed, it seems.

When he swaggered home to Paris to seek his journalistic destiny, “I pushed open the doors of the newsrooms like Gary Cooper pushed open the doors of a saloon. . . . But people looked at me and said, ‘So what? So you came from America--so what? So you’re bilingual--so what?’ I lived a year of total humiliation, which is good for your ego.”

Ego Survived

Thus toughened, his ego survived. And in the 30 years since, in career after career, it has been rewarded.

Labro’s vocations have been as often simultaneous as sequential: He’s been a newspaper reporter in Paris and what he calls a “ free-lancer de luxe”; a producer of documentaries and a director of feature films starring the likes of Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Gerard Depardieu; a television personality and a media executive, and an author of seven books, four of them novels.

As he chatted with his visitor--in a melodious American vernacular sprinkled with four-letter echoes of dormitory life--Labro demonstrated a comparable versatility.

When his two young children crawled on his lap, whispering for his attention, parental Labro would stop to answer them gently, holding them and stroking their backs.

When a house guest began building a charcoal fire for lunch, baronial Labro would interject unsolicited advice. When the phone would ring, every few minutes, with bulletins and inquiries from Paris, executive Labro would bound into the house and be heard to bellow his replies: “Oui! Oui! OUI! NON!”

Though he is today the director of RTL (Radio-Tele Luxembourg, France’s largest radio network) and says he’s being mentioned to take over Antenne 2, the country’s largest commercial television network, “my pride is that I’ve been finally accepted as a novelist,” Labro said. And that cherished identity is rooted in American soil.

“The Foreign Student” (Ballantine Books) follows a shy young Frenchman’s arrival at W&L;, his awkward embrace of native customs in that sheltered enclave, his dogged pursuit of his very own Buick, his sexual initiation by a young black housekeeper in Lexington (and his subsequent confrontation with small-town racism) and his ardent courtship of an alienated Brahmin princess down the road at Sweet Briar College.

The Women in His Life

Asked about the factual origins of the latter episodes, Labro said, “The women are blendings of total invention, total imagination--things that may have happened in those days, plus things that have happened in days later. . . . Over the past 35 years I’ve gone back and forth all the time, and I’ve dealt with American women, I’ve had affairs with American women--before meeting my wife.” (Francoise Labro, his second wife and the mother of his two youngest children, is editor in chief of a new shelter magazine, Elle Decoration.)

Extraordinary as it was for a French student to study here in the ‘50s, like most authors Labro thinks his story has universal themes--”the transportation of a young mind and a young body somewhere else, the first time you’re cut from your roots,” he said, beginning to list the reasons he thinks his novel was so popular.

Second is the French fascination with the United States. “They have a love-hate relationship with it, but the love is 10 times bigger than the hate. They want to know the rites, the mores, the behavior--all this was new to them, so they were interested almost in a documentary sense.

“Third, there is a craze for the ‘50s now, a craze. . . . I didn’t count on it, I didn’t calculate it, it just happened at the right moment.

Fourth and fifth are the quality of the writing and the fame of the author. None of which has helped the American edition.

“The exoticism that the French found is of course not present for an American reader,” Labro concedes, “but without being harsh on my publisher, I can’t say that he helps.” By Labro’s account, Ballantine bought (“for peanuts, mind you”) the rights to “The Foreign Student” and spent “a few pennies” to have it translated.

But since--so goes the authorial lament that knows no nationality--the publisher has kept the book a secret.

Despite his high dudgeon, Labro professes serenity. “I’m not a pessimist. I think I will make it, either through this book or another one. It’s going to take longer, and it’s going to be harder.”

Labro, by all measures of the term, “made it” long before the success of his novels and his accession to media moguldom.

During the student uprising of 1968, as an independent television producer, he and a colleague locked horns with President Charles de Gaulle, who was “keeping a lid on the news--it was pure censorship. We tried to break that. . . . We started a (TV journalists’) strike all by ourselves. I was considered for years afterward a dangerous revolutionary. . . . They had branded me as an agitator.”

Gesturing around the veranda and toward the swimming pool beyond, Labro laughed. “When you look at me, it’s funny.”

In the 1970s he won attention in the French film world directing such pictures as “Sans Mobile Apparent” (“Without Apparent Motive”) and “L’Heritier” (“The Heir,” with Belmondo), and as the anchor of a popular midday news broadcast on Antenne 2. But by 1984, he was restless again.

Hurt by the Critics

“I was coming out of a not-too-good experience with my last movie, called “ Rive Droite, Rive Gauche “ (“Right Bank, Left Bank,” with Depardieu). I was hurt by the critics. I thought that I was not really the director I wanted to be. I was lucid enough to realize my limits as a film maker.”

But something more than modesty possessed him. “I had this hint that movie-making in France was . . . not any longer the royal path that it used to be. The media is where the power will be, where the action will be, where the creation and movement will be. And I have this thing in me to be where the action is.”

Philippe Labro as Gary Cooper, single-handedly facing down Paris, still seems the operative self-image.

“Paris is a very sophisticated city,” said Labro, who was born near Toulouse, in the southwest of France. “We’re talking about the Paris of Balzac; we’re not talking about the Paris of Judy Krantz, OK? This is a very subtle town, where people look at you and say, ‘All right, show me.’ It’s like Washington, but it’s even more vicious, I think, because it’s older. Two thousand years old. . . . You have to break the codes, and it takes time. You don’t just arrive and win the city like this.”

Labro snapped his fingers.

“It takes you about 30 years to conquer a town, and it took me about that time. But I did it,” he said, beginning a prolonged laugh. “I’m not shy enough to say I didn’t do it. I did.”