Starlet Letters

BOOKS

Director Roger Vadim on his own life and loves

What ever happened to the sex goddess—to luminous creatures like Nita Naldi, Clara Bow, Greta Garbo, Mae West, Jean Harlow, and Rita Hayworth? Writing in 1968, the late poet and critic Parker Tyler bemoaned their "awful fate": in the age of camp and giggly self-consciousness, they could no longer be taken seriously—and not to take them seriously was not to take them at all. In the two decades since, the sex goddess has virtually vanished from the movies, killed off by parody, by feminism, and by the ennui that inevitably shuffles in on the heels of explicitness. Movie stars aren't deities anymore; they don't even look the part. They're pixieish or cute or just "interesting"—Meryl Streep, Sissy Spacek, Diane Keaton, Sally Field, Glenn (yawn) Close. If a real knockout, a Gene Tierney or a Linda Darnell, were unearthed in today's Hollywood, she'd probably be dispatched to Days of Our Lives—the dishy she-monsters on TV soaps are the last surviving dinosaurs of Hollywood eroticism. Which is a shame. When a certain sensual piquancy deserts the movies, it deserts our lives as well. After all, as Tyler observed, sex goddesses weren't meant to be slept with; they were meant to be slept about.

What occasions these ruminations is Simon and Schuster's publication of Bardot Deneuve Fonda, an autobiography by Roger Vadim. Vadim is the director who, in 1956, almost singlehandedly liberated the French cinema with And God Created Woman; he later made homy-pomy adaptations of Laclos and Zola and Sheridan Le Fanu. Yet it comes as no surprise that Vadim has named his life story after his three most famous lovers (Bardot and Fonda also became wives), for they were finally his only significant contribution to the culture. Vadim has been the cinema's most accomplished Svengali, a saturnine smoothy who wooed blonde beauties while they were still brunettes (and mostly virginal teenage brunettes at that) and then trained them to be bombshells—or, in the case of Deneuve and Fonda, something even more imposing.

For all its potential voltage, though, the book is a snooze. It's full of Gallic wisdom: "Bergson wrote that laughter is man's special gift. I've always thought that it was one of Brigitte's special qualities." And Gallic humility: "I experienced none of the anxieties that one might expect of a director making his first film. . . .Like the young Bonaparte at the beginning of his Italian campaign, I felt certain of victory." Above all, it's full of Gallic gall: "Brigitte and Ursula [Andress] were resting their naked golden bodies unashamedly in the heat of summer.

. . .Neither in films nor in the presence of great masterpieces in museums have I ever felt such a rush of emotion for art as I felt then." Mmm-mmm—check out the art on that one.

Still, Vadim represents an authentic turning point in the history of sex goddesses. Under his humid tutelage, they reached their apotheosis (with Bardot, the most self-aware sexpot of them all), acquired their greatest respectability (with Deneuve, the ice maiden adopted by highbrows like Bunuel and Truffaut), and finally suffered

Roger Vadim wooed blonde beauties while they were still brunettes and then trained them to be bombshells. their downfall (with Fonda, whom Vadim taught to exploit her own sexuality in movies like Barbarella and who later learned to despise herself for it). The beginning of the end of the sex goddess might well date from Fonda's virtuoso performance as the brittle call girl in Klute, checking her watch as she mimics passion in the arms of a salesman who could be anybody in the audience—the exploited turned exploiter.

Vadim understood that screen sexuality was about voyeurism and slow revelation, about Venus rising from the sea. And he realized early on that he could apply the science of voyeurism to expand his sway beyond the paltry reaches of his art. In fact, Vadim crafted a life far more titillating than his films—or, rather, a life meant to be devoured along with his films, as a sort of supplement: You've ogled these babes on the big screen, now just imagine what I do with them on the big mattress. Imagine—and envy.

The yen to be envied smacks of schoolboy braggadocio, and there is in Vadim something incurably callow. In his book, we watch him picking his women when they're barely ripe and then sulking and snapping when they grow beyond him. And behind his bitching, one senses the exhaustion of the chronic impotent. "Making love to Brigitte excited me less,'' he whimpers. "I suddenly understood the meaning of the term 'fulfilling one's marital duties.' " And then, lest we forget what a lucky dog he is, "Weariness was inexcusable on my part when one remembers that at twenty-one Brigitte was at the height of her beauty. Any man would have sold his soul to take my place in bed with her." Could it be that Vadim exposed and flaunted his women in his movies in order to revive his own wilted excitement? Was he turning his life into pom because pom is so much sexier than life?

Sex goddesses tickle the imagination, but Vadim's story suggests an imagination that has become weirdly stunted. Here was a man hell-bent on making the queens of his fantasies real, a man driven to invent brand-new goddesses whenever the first whiff of boredom blew in. He doesn't mention his final attempt. In 1980, he made a tepid little movie called Night Games, in which he tried (and failed) to sell the world on his latest brainchild—flat-chested, shorthaired Cindy Pickett, who in the film couldn't be aroused unless her lover swooped down at her dressed as a giant flapping bird. This was a soft-pom movie in which the sex goddess could function only if her lover was a sex god (albeit a feathery sex god), a movie in which, for once, Vadim sympathized less with the voyeurs in the audience than with the woman he'd created on the screen. Some guys just weren't cut out to be the Sensitive Male.

Stephen Schiff