Haitian writer was model for bookBY AMBAR HERNANDEZaahernandez@herald.com
Haitian writer Aubelin Jolicoeur, better known as the model for the gossip columnist character in Graham Greene's 1966 novel The Comedians, has died at the age of 81.
Jolicoeur, which in French loosely means ''nice flirt'' -- a name that seems to have fit him perfectly -- died from respiratory failure on St. Valentine's Day in his native Jacmel in southeastern Haiti.
''He would say it was because he was a man of love,'' Richard Morse, the current owner of the Hotel Oloffson, Jolicoeur's favorite hangout and the setting for The Comedians, wrote in an e-mail to friends.
The newspaper Le Matin reported Tuesday that Jolicoeur suffered from Parkinson's disease as well as prostate problems.
Jolicoeur gained fame in the 1960s as the model for Petit Pierre, the chatty gossip columnist depicted in Greene's book about Haiti during the brutal dictatorship of Francois ''Papa Doc'' Duvalier.
Born to a well-off French father and a Haitian mother, he moved to Port-au-Prince when he was 19 and initially studied agronomy, but quickly changed careers when he was offered a job at Le Nouvelliste.
''I didn't go to journalism. Journalism came to me,'' Jolicoeur once told a reporter in the impeccable French that made even Parisians wonder at his command of the language.
Dressed in his trademark white suits and toting his signature cane, the diminutive Jolicoeur would daily visit the Oloffson, at the time the capital's best-known hotel, to see what interesting foreigners staying there he could weave into his weekly columns.
Although he was often accused of collaborating with the Duvalier regimes, he was arrested twice by the Francois Duvalier government and sometimes wrote columns that could be interpreted as slyly critical of the government in power.
Sometimes called ''Mr. Haiti'' for his reputation of mingling with the country's social and business elites, Jolicoeur also wrote for the newspapers Le Matin and Le Petit Samedi Soir and the English-language Haiti Sun.
He was believed to have eight children, according to a longtime friend.
In the late 1980s, Jolicoeur served as press secretary during the military regime of Gen. Henri Namphy. But by 1999, he appeared to have fallen on hard times, living in a shabby hotel in downtown Port-au-Prince.
Although his death was not widely reported outside Haiti, and the plans for his funeral have not been announced, the Haitian media gave the news prominent display.
''Everybody is talking about it,'' said Guyler Delva, a Haitian journalist based in Port-au-Prince. ``He is highly regarded. His funeral is going to be, I think, a big event.''

Aubelin Jolicoeur
Dandyish Haitian journalist immortalised by Graham GreeneGreg ChamberlainFriday February 18, 2005
GuardianFor nearly half a century, the Haitian journalist Aubelin Jolicoeur, who has died aged 80, cheerfully tried to convince the world that his country was better than its horrific image of political brutality and extreme poverty, that it was worth visiting and could be enjoyed. His own image took a knock when Graham Greene immortalised him in his 1966 novel The Comedians as Petit Pierre, a dandyish bon vivant and probable spy for the murderous dictatorship of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his family.
But the tiny, animated boulevardier with bedroom eyes and posh English accent, who flounced about in a white suit and silk ascot, twirling a gold-topped cane, thrived on the smear because it brought him the fame he craved - and, thanks also to his unctuous courting of other foreign celebrities, probably a shield against the whims of the mercurial dictator, whom he called his "father".
Jolicoeur was introduced to Greene in Haiti by the American writer Truman Capote in 1954, and the pair soon gravitated to the romantic, creaking Grand Hotel Oloffson, where Greene set his novel. For the next 40 years, Jolicoeur hobnobbed there, in the lingering ambiance of Haiti's belle époque, with a world-class panoply of showbiz, literary and media glitterati.
He was delighted when they nicknamed him "Mr Haiti" for greeting them at the airport and gushingly writing them up in his newspaper column. He called himself "Haiti's first public relations man".
His counterpoint was useful to Papa Doc, as the dictator grappled with international revulsion and boycotts of his regime. Jolicoeur showed the acceptable face of Haiti and the distinguished foreigners were charmed, despite the occasional body they would have glimpsed on the airport road.
Vain, boastful, buffoonish and bending his opinions this way and that to suit the political winds, Jolicoeur was nevertheless an astute, cultivated and industrious journalist. Under the Duvaliers, he mostly stuck to chronicling the social and literary doings of the country's elite, laced with the obscure classical references once de rigueur for recognition by Haiti's mannered upper class. He said Papa Doc liked him because "I write good French."
But Jolicoeur disdained the "vulgar" regime of Papa Doc's clueless son Jean-Claude, who took over as "president-for-life" in 1971, and eventually the journalist joined the veiled press criticism that helped nudge the Duvalier dynasty to its end.
He then became a more open political commentator, disgusted at the endless incompetence sinking Haiti into ever deeper poverty and political disorder. "There's a thug inside every Haitian," he liked to say. He thought Haitians were "not ready for democracy" and harshly criticised the recent excesses of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, with whom he was bitterly disappointed.
Jolicoeur was born in a cemetery - "among the spirits," he liked to joke - in the southern town of Jacmel, when his mother went into premature labour. His father was a local coffee and cocoa trader.
The young Aubelin hungrily learned French, the language of the Haitian ruling class, and it became his ticket to success as a journalist in the capital, Port-au-Prince, in the days when being his shade of black was a clear social disadvantage. The few minor political posts he accepted turned sour - press secretary to a fleeting general, who rigged elections in 1957, four months as a post-Duvalier director of tourism, and an even briefer tenure as deputy information minister, an appointment that ended when he spat at a crowd of strikers outside the ministry.
Jolicoeur's way with women was legendary. He greeted female guests at the Oloffson with poetic flourishes in his ringing voice, and they gigglingly checked the next morning's paper to see who had won the best encomium - "brilliant", "princess", "sparkling", "divine", "breathtaking" and other extravagances. His last name meant "flirt", and he had a dozen children by as many mothers, the last only a few years ago.
Unlike the upper class he fawned over, or the marquises and counts who put him up on occasional expeditions to Paris, Jolicoeur was never rich. He opened a small art gallery, named after his then wife Claire, a Canadian, and tried to wheedle tourists into buying the paintings - but few did and he gave many away. For years, he received a small stipend from Bollinger for mentioning their champagne in his columns. "Haitians are comedians," he would say. "It's all a show."
When he was evicted from his rented house several years ago, he moved into a shabby hotel, where he lived amid cardboard boxes of his memories and, out of shame, rarely ventured to the nearby Oloffson. His famous gold-topped cane was stolen and its replacement was only a silver one.
Enfeebled by Parkinson's disease and prostate cancer, he spent his last years at a seaside hotel in his home town run by an old Duvalierist friend.
· Aubelin Jolicoeur, journalist, born April 30 1924; died February 14 2005