The seven deadly sins of Hollywood (1957)

THE FLAMBOYANT SET you, they do not like to be treated too gently. They want a man to be masculine. No woman has ever slapped my face. She knows I would slap her right back. ..." About women, Brazzi can talk endlessly and with the enthusiasm of an adolescent. He knows more about them than Dr. Kinsey, and he does not need to take a poll to get his information. Knowledge has made him cynical. "Women," he says, "are much harder than men. Only a man can get all twisted up by love. To a woman what matters is who he is, how much he earns, and what position he holds in the world. No woman can love for longer than fifteen days. But I do not complain. They are all delightful creatures." I asked Brazzi, since he was such an authority on the subject, what three women he would take with him if he were cast away on a desert island. "That is very difficult," he said gravely, "if one is limited to three. But I would take Katharine Hepburn. With her the sex-appeal comes from the mind. Sometimes this is good. I would take Gyd Charisse, because she has the most beautiful legs. And I would take Marilyn Monroe, because she is molto sympatica." I expressed horror that he should have omitted from his list his compatriot Gina Lollobrigida, and his co-star of a previous film, Ava Gardner. It was an unforgivable oversight, I said, for a man who claimed to be such a connoisseur of women. "No," he said, "it is not an oversight. Ava Gardner — to me she is sexless. Lollobrigida? To me she has the sexappeal of a waxwork." My encounters with Liberace and Brazzi had amused me, but they failed to produce in me any degree of moral indignation. I felt that if I was to become genuinely outraged I would have to find someone who practised his excesses on a more formidable scale. So I sought out Errol Flynn, 35