Kitten into tigress
Sarah Bradford
Bardot: a Personal Biography Glenys Roberts (Sigwick & Jackson £9.95)
Once upon a time there was a good little girl called Brigitte Bardot who lived with her parents in the 16th arron- dissement of Paris; but one day, when she was only 14, along came big, bad Roger Vadim Pleimannikov who said to her mother, 'Madame, wouldn't it be fun to take your daughter and make it seem as if she had gone off the rails? . . And so Vadim created BB. He seduced her and, as soon as she reached the age of consent, married her. He introduced her to his bohemian friends at the Café Flore, taught her to use slang and to eat with her fingers, and gave her a reading list which included Camus, Gide, Aretino and de Sade. More importantly for her future career, he taught her to enjoy taking off her clothes and he introduced her to sex and the cinema. Brigitte learned her les- sons well, startling the British cameramen on the set of Doctor in the House in 1955 by tearing off the sticking plaster which had been applied to cover her nipples and private parts. Most of all, though, she liked making love, and when Vadim seemed more interested in stripping her for the benefit of the public, she took the bed scenes in And God Created Woman literal- ly and went off with her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant. Vadim's sex kitten was on the way to becoming a man-eating tigress. With And God Created Woman, which he directed, in 1956 Vadim made her a
superstar, so famous that she became known by her initials only as 'BB'. Although described by hostile critics as 'an existentialist hack . . . with the culture of a platypus', Vadim was a publicist and
image-maker of some genius. Exploiting to the full his young wife's amazing figure — 36,20,34 — and the aggressive sexuality expressed in those pouting lips, he turned her into the new international sex symbol. In 1957 an absurd statistic claimed that 47 per cent of the conversations held in France were about BB, and when she bought her St Tropez beach house, grew her hair into a mane and dyed it blonde, she launched a style for her time and a thousand look-alikes. Burying her bourgeois instincts deep, Brigitte embarked on a new life as a child of nature, spoiled, demanding, taking what or whom she wanted when she wanted. The rules were that she was always to be the taker, never the victim. Men were her principal victims (not Vadim, however, who, after their divorce, remained her best friend, comforter, direc- tor, even pimp). BB gutted husband no. 2, Jacques Charrier, dumping her child by him on her in-laws and going her predatory way, leaving him a nervous wreck after two bungled suicide attempts. Lover succeeded lover until she met her match in husband no. 3, Gunther Sachs von Opel, intro- duced, of course, by Vadim. It was the ultimate jet-set marriage — in a blaze of publicity orchestrated by Vadim, the cou- ple flew to Las Vegas accompanied by their own personal photographers and ten of Sachs's friends, amongst whom was Serge Marquand 'whose brief was to make a film of even the most intimate moments' (which was later sold, with some cuts, to Amer- ican television). Bardot demanded total attention and devotion which Sachs, the millionaire aristocrat and playboy, was not accustomed to give. When he showed signs of reverting to previous form by importing model girls to Marbella, Brigitte made the most bourgeois of scenes and retaliated by flaunting Patrick Gilles, ten years younger than herself and the son of a garagiste. As an European aristocrat, Sachs considered she was breaking the rules by cuckolding him publicly and began proceedings which ended in divorce in 1969.
Bardot's career was virtually over by the end of the Sixties, although she went on making unmemorable films and taking innumerable lovers. Out of tune with the Seventies (she thought Last Tango in Paris was disgusting), she finally retired at the age of 39 amid Hollywood rumours that she was in fact a man.
Her life was spectacular soap opera, and Glenys Roberts has chronicled it well, conveying a convincing portrait of BB and putting her into perspective in terms of her era, with some sharp insights into her motivations and relationships. Glenys Roberts cannot, however, resist the temp- tation to dress up what is essentially a colour magazine picture story with preten- tious theorising and trendy analysis. There are laboured attempts at identification with her subject; Roberts, too, was an actress although she was also a Girton girl — `. though Hollywood was my romance, I was wedded to the typewriter given to me by my father. It was Brigitte's father who arranged her marriage with the camera. We were both fickle brides at first, mis- trusting our condition even as we went down the aisle because we knew that as dutiful daughters we had not played around . . .' She is also given to mystifying- ly irrelevant name-dropping: 'I met people who had known Hitler personally, had been offered pacts by him . . . who had shaken the hand of Picasso and could afford to collect him . .' Some phrases come across in the good old Morecambe and Wise tradition of doubles entendres, as when Bardot flits between Vadim and Trintignant — 'Brigitte had it both ways that summer' — or, on the succession of young lovers, 'Meanwhile the young men kept on coming . . .' Some of the author's translations from the French are uninten- tionally comical: 'I am addressing you as a Mummy,' Madame Bardot, with shades of Karloff, tells the press.
Bardot herself, whatever else she may have been, was never a pseud. She is 50 this month. Still peering out from that mane of blonde hair, her kohl-rimmed eyes curiously resemble those of the baby seals (bebe-phoques) which she tries to protect. Ageing, bored and alone, she is, like them, an endangered species.
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