Modern Screen (Jan-Dec 1960)

said sharply. "I'll use it." "Jean-Louis is a nice guy," Vadim said. "That's right, said Brigitte. "So long." There's been plenty of criticism leveled at Brigitte for her airy disregard of her marriage vows; there's been plenty of sympathy for Vadim, who's always been a glib talker. "I suppose I should have slapped her when she looked at another fellow," he's said breezily, "but how could I? She has always had such an innocent look." Still, perhaps Brigitte was more to be pitied than scorned. Picture a gawky adolescent in a pleated skirt, a heavy sweater, soft brown hair, being transformed by a brilliant promotor into a sex symbol — "the unattainable dream of every married man." And she loved the promoter. "I used to wake up at night just so I could look at him." But Vadim was a sophisticate who cared more about her as a property than a wife. "He wasn't even jealous," Brigitte said wistfully. "How could he have loved me if he wasn't even jealous?" With Jean-Louis (though he was already married), Brigitte moved into a duplex, furnished it with Empire-style couches, and hi-fi sets and animal-skin rugs. She gave Jean-Louis an allowance, and he gave her a few insights into herself. "The first scene we shot together," he said, "I thought to myself, What's the matter with that little mouse there? At fust. I felt pity for you. You must forgive me, but I said to myself, This girl is lost. They have put a mask on her face and told her it is her face, and now, without realizing it, she is trying to live up to the mask." "Say you love me," said Brigitte. "I love you," said Jean-Louis. "And your caprices, your bad side, all that is not really you. At heart, you are afraid of being judged as you are. You are afraid someone will find beneath that vamp exterior a silly little girl who is ashamed at being a silly little girl." For a while, Brigitte and Jean-Louis were happy. Vadim had been aloof, JeanLouis was warm, and Brigitte felt safe. As though a desperate old woman . . . But Jean-Louis was called into military service, and Brigitte, ever-needing, unable to be satisfied by long-distance phone calls, took up with a Spaniard called Gustavo Rojo who had movie ambitions and saw Brigitte as a logical means to his end. Rojo announced they'd marry, and Brigitte, outraged, promptly announced she was going to marry Jean-Louis, which surprised Jean-Louis' wife, who had refused him a divorce. In the end, it didn't matter. Jean-Louis, home on leave, found Brigitte in the arms of a singer named Gilbert Becaud, and made his final exit, after throwing a salad bowl at his love and her new friend. Becaud also had a wife, and gave Brigitte up when the going got public. Brigitte took sleeping pills, collapsed briefly, but recovered as soon as she met Italian actor Raf Valone. Raf liked her fine. The only trouble was he liked his wife and children even better, and soon that amour was fini. She seemed defeated. The most desirable girl in the world, reduced to picking up pretty boys as though she'd been a desperate old woman. In 1958, she had a mild fancy for a youth named Lhote, and she got him an extra's job in her picture, The Woman and the Puppet, and after the movie was finished, she moved him into the villa at St. Tropez. Dressed in a bikini, seated in Lhote's lap, occasionally kissing him, she received visitors. Asked about her new love, she reacted with a male kind of frankness. "He's not my love," she said. "He's my flirt." Cruelly, she gestured toward him. "He's cute, no? But oh, how stupid. . . ." One writer, calling her a bad little bad girl, saw Brigitte destined to continue down the long road Vadim set her on, without guidance, without loyalty, without love. Brigitte might have been the first to agree with that writer. Shifting between fits of elation and dejection, sometimes kind, sometimes mean, she cared more for her dog Froufrou than for anyone in the world until, late in 1958, she met Sacha Distel in St. Tropez. "I had known him slightly before that," she said, "and hadn't found him particularly interesting. He felt the same way about me. We were on vacation, and I was tired, depressed and a little sad." Brigitte hired Sacha to teach her the guitar, and the first afternoon he came over, she asked him to stay for dinner. He said no, she said yes. And he was undone by the anxiety in her voice. "I want to eat dinner with someone, I'm so alone here — " He stayed, and he believed her when she said the thing she most wanted was to be a wife "To bear children, to raise a loving family in the eyes of God — " With newspaper columnists, however, Brigitte waxed nowhere near so maternal. "I'm in love with Sacha," she said, "but I live from day to day. Maybe one day I will just decide to get married. Not now." Sacha and Brigitte got along famously, though they didn't agree on everything. "He can spend a whole day listening to Frank Sinatra," Brigitte once complained. "I like Sinatra too, but there's no need to exaggerate it — " Sacha enjoyed saying he'd fallen in love with Brigitte's piano before he'd fallen in love with Brigitte— "It's the best piano in Saint Tropez" — and on September 8th, Brigitte announced their engagement, and said they'd be married next spring. "Marriage," she commented, "is decidedly beautiful." What did Sacha most admire in his fiancee? Her youth, he said. And her frankness. "When she thinks something, she says it. When she wants something, she gets it." Even when that something was Jacques Charrier, as it turned out. Jacques appeared to co-star in Brigitte's picture, and stayed on to co-star in her life, but the very knowledge that he pushed Sacha aside must make Jacques nervous. After all, can't he be pushed aside too? And now Brigitte's gone on record as saying her first child will be her last. She doesn't want any more, she doesn't find pregnancy "much of a joke," she's alarmed by the coming birth, "but I'm afraid I cannot find any way of avoiding it." Restless, cooped up awaiting her confinement in February, Brigitte complains that she misses doing "hundred of things," but "I'll make up for it afterwards." There must be a threat in her words for Jacques, who can't kid himself into cherishing the picture of a contented little woman playing with a rosy baby while waiting for her husband's discharge. And it isn't just Brigitte's new words that threaten. So many of her old words could come back to haunt the troubled man. "When Jean-Louis was doing his military service, how I wanted him near me!" she said once. "I always need someone near me ... I need real affection. I need to feel it and to give it. The other day a contractor who was working on my house said to me: You know, you're really very nice.' That made me melt. I could have thrown my arms around him — " A wife who hates being pregnant, who falls in love too easily, who can't bear solitude, who's vulnerable to the kindness of any stranger . . . Behind barred doors set in the great, keyhole shaped stone wall of Val de Grace Hospital, Private Jacques Charrier paced like an animal, head down, shoulders hunched, thoughts pulling back, back, back ... END PERIODIC PAIN Midol acts three ways to bring relief from menstrual suffering. It relieves cramps, eases headache and it chases the "blues". Sally now takes Midol at the V» first sign of menstrual distress.^ WHAT WOMEN WANT TO KNOW a book expl is yours, FREE. Write Dep't F-30, Box 280, New York 18, N. Y. (Sent in plain wrapper)