Shelter Island profile: Marie Eiffel, grateful and fearless
Marie Eiffel is a woman reborn, a self-created person whose first 40 years have almost nothing to do with the life she lives now.
Since 2004, she’s lived and worked on Shelter Island, starting with a consignment shop and building a series of retail businesses that now includes a successful market, catering business, two clothing shops and plans to open a new store in Greenport.
The new life began with a terrible automobile accident in 2002 and the financial, material and physical losses she endured in its wake. “From the moment of the accident to now, what matters is I started from scratch,” she said. “I didn’t have a pair of shoes, a toothbrush.”
She decided to start her new life with a new name. “Marie Eiffel is the name my father gave me before he died. That’s my father’s doing,” she said. “Marie Eiffel is my identity.”
Marie said she was born and educated in Paris. Her brother Alain is a mathematics professor, who lives in Annecy, France. “My mom was tough,” Marie said. “Fun was not in her vocabulary.”
Marie said her mother, who is now suffering from Alzheimer’s, is not generally lucid when Marie visits.
“Sometimes she has one little minute in three days, so you better catch it.” Her father died when Marie was 30. “I was just getting to know him,” she said.
She said she was a good student, but lacked motivation, was easily bored and ended up graduating with a degree in musicology from the Sorbonne. Teaching music for a year after graduating, she enjoyed getting in front of a classroom as a teacher who refused to stick to a standard curriculum and often made her students laugh.
Seeking to turn her gift for making people laugh into a career in acting, she found her way to a Paris after-hours club frequented by actors and directors. “The owner of the club asked me, ‘Who are you?’ and I told him I want to be an actor,” she said. “He pointed to some guys and said, ‘Then go speak to them, they know Romain Bouteille,’” referring to a well-known director with a troupe of comic actors.
In 1984 Marie said she began a three-year period working and touring with Bouteille’s troupe, followed by television and movie work.
By 1989, Marie said her acting career was over. She had been cast in and fired from a movie for slapping the director; she was drinking and increasingly unmoored. “To be an actor, you have to have a good family. You have to have an emotional support system,” she said. “I had no support. There was a lot of drugs, I had two friends who died. It was a very strange world.”
After a year away from acting, she tried to go back to it, but could never regain the momentum she called, “le vent en poupe,” — the wind at your back. “When I started, every audition I went for, I got the job,” she said. “When I went back after a year, everyone forgot. You can only leave the job of acting and come back if you are famous.”
By the early 1990s, Marie was living in New York, working in a restaurant. She studied to be a life coach, began consulting with restaurants, helping struggling businesses deal with communication issues to improve performance and her business grew. “I was consulting and living a very high-paced life, flying to Fiji, coaching people, living in Paris for a year,” she said. “I was an executive, making a lot of money, as much as when I was an actor.”
In an effort to scale back the pace, Marie said she decided to leave her New York apartment for a year and move to a rental on the South Fork. She was on her way to move in, her car packed with most of her belongings on October 1, 2002, when her car left the road near the end of the Long Island Expressway and rolled. “It was a beautiful day, around 1 p.m., there was no one else on the road. I stayed 20 months in the hospital,” she said.
Marie considered her time in the hospital as a bridge to a new life. Although she had medical insurance, the costs of her treatment combined with her inability to work ruined her financially.
“In the hospital, I had to find bliss inside myself. Within is so much peace, so much happiness,” she said.
“My joy came from irrelevant stuff, a nice piece of cake made me happy. When I left the hospital, I was grateful and fearless.”
After working as a hostess at a Bridgehampton restaurant and living in a series of tiny apartments, she spent Christmas of 2004 on Shelter Island at the invitation of an old friend, Marcel Iattoni, who was the chef at the Olde Country Inn.
“He told me, ‘I’m cooking Christmas dinner for Governor Carey,’” Marie remembered. “So I had my first Christmas outside the hospital at Governor Carey’s House.”
In 2005, she opened a consignment store on Route 114 near the Olde Country Inn. “I was sitting there seven days a week from 10 to 5 and almost nobody came in,” she said. “Of the few that did, very few bought something, but they all thought I had good taste.”
With the help of a small business loan, Marie slowly expanded her business, moving it to the Heights and opening a children’s store. Expanding again, she opened a clothing store in Sag Harbor and in 2012 opened Marie Eiffel’s Market on Bridge Street. Her latest store, a food market in the movie theatre building in Greenport has just opened, she said.
When Marie hired Annabel Cohen a few years back to make the pastries and bread that are such an important part of the market’s offerings, Annabel was fresh out of a French pastry school and thinking of looking for work in New York after a summer on the Island.
“She came and worked crazy hours,” Marie said, “and decided to stay longer. I offered her an interest in the business, I love her.”
More than a decade into her new life on the Island, she has established deep roots here. She and Jason Penney, her companion of seven years, recently moved into a house near the Center with a handsome black and white cat named Ringo. The cat came to them when someone visiting the Island found, and then abandoned him. “When he first came to live with us he bit everybody, but now look,” Maria said as
Ringo followed her and curled sweetly around her leg, perfectly at home.
