I think it is safe to say that for 99.999999…% of men, their sex lives do not come anywhere close to their sexual fantasies. In all of human history, one of the few exceptions might be the late Roger Vadim.
Vadim was a French filmmaker whose career peaked during the jet set/beautiful people/swinging 60s era. Born in 1928, he started working in the film industry at age 19 and worked his way up to writer/producer/director. Few of his films found an audience in the United States, but he had a global reputation, not so much for his films but for his private life, namely his marriages and/or long-term relationships with movie stars.
In 1986 Vadim published Bardot/Deneuve/Fonda: My Life with the Three Most Beautiful Women in the World. The title speaks for itself. I suspect a few film scholars and historians bought this book, but the bulk of the readership was likely composed of celebrity gossip hounds. Vadim was likened to Svengali and Pygmalion. Ingenues were his specialty.
Vadim was not a first-time author but this book had more commercial potential than his previous efforts. He noted, “My attitude is that if this book makes me a little money it will be a tiny compensation for all the money I helped those actresses make.” Whatever Vadim’s motivation, his book is more than a self-aggrandizing autobiography by the king of quim. His experiences offer life lessons to men of lesser renown in relationships with women who would never be mistaken for movie stars.
To start with, based on what he wrote and from what I could read between the lines, Vadim was almost the perfect chick magnet. Pictures in the book show a fit-looking fellow with a rugged but not craggy face. He was of French/Russian (Plemiannikov was his family name) heritage, which made him exotic, even though he was born in Paris. His work in the film industry enhanced his status while bringing him into contact with hordes of good-looking young women. And for good measure, he had such “sexy” hobbies as skiing and sports car racing. I could easily see him as the subject in one of those “What sort of man reads Playboy?” profiles that Hugh Hefner used to drop into his magazine. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he visited the Playboy Mansion when he was in Hollywood. If so, he might have been familiar enough with the host to address him as Hef.
In his book, Vadim doesn’t reveal any recognizable political philosophy. I’m just speculating, but since Vadim’s parents had fled Russia to escape the Bolshevik revolution, he probably was no fan of communism, even though he hobnobbed with French intellectuals and artists who almost always leaned that way. Having grown up in France during the Nazi occupation, he was certainly no fan of fascism. But if communism and fascism were of no to interest him, there was one ism he followed: hedonism.
At sixteen, I had established a rule for myself: In order to avoid cynicism, and worse, causticity and bitterness, I was going to take the best from life. Its pleasures. The sea, nature, sports, Ferraris, friends and pals, art, nights of intoxication, the beauty of women, insolence and nose-thumbing at society.
YOLO Vadim met Brigitte Bardot in 1949 when she was 15. Hard to believe, given all those pictures of her with cascading blond tresses, but in those days she was a brunette with a much less voluminous coiffure. Given her age, marriage had to wait but they eventually made it legal in 1952.
Male moviegoers around the world salivated over Bardot’s bare body in And God Created Woman in 1956. For the audience it was a fantasy; for Vadim it was reality. He was directing that bare body on the set and banging it at home. Call it work/life balance.
Hard to believe but at that point in their relationship Vadim admitted that sex with Bardot had become routine. Now you might say, hell, I’ll take routine sex with Brigitte Bardot over the best sex I ever got from my old lady, but there is more. Bardot repeatedly asked Vadim, “You will always love me, won’t you?” Vadim eventually figured out what she meant:
I did not yet realize that women, obsessed with eternal love, are most susceptible to new relationships. “You will always love me?” really means: “Please don’t allow me to fall in love with someone else.” Most men consider these words proof that they are the one and only. In reality, it’s exactly the opposite. Romantic women seek the absolute. They don’t find it in any man. They talk about forever, but they run from present to present.
While comparing women to cats is a longstanding trope, it is notable that the phrase sex kitten was coined to describe Bardot. A kitten, of course, is an immature cat, and Bardot was an immature woman.
It was probably Brigitte’s profoundly childlike nature…which made our marriage difficult in the end. Like a child, she demanded too much from those she loved. If one failed to pay attention to her for one moment, she would be filled with anxiety.
Whether this immaturity was her true self or a result of receiving too much attention too soon is debatable, but the situation did not improve as Bardot got older.
Brigitte didn’t grow up. On the contrary – the more attention success brought her, the more personal devotion she demanded. It wasn’t that, like certain domineering women, she wanted to control everything and make all the decisions; it was a much more subtle form of tyranny, an unquenchable thirst for love.
Vadim’s mother put it best: “Brigitte, like all children, doesn’t know what it is to feel remorse.” For the record, Bardot tried to commit suicide three times during her relationship with Vadim.
At any rate, Vadim moved on. Bardot is a tough act to follow, but he consoled himself by impregnating Annette Stroyberg, a Danish model/actress in 1957 and marrying her the following year. Vadim was able to secure some roles for Stroyberg in movies but ultimately she fizzled out, as did their marriage. Her relative obscurity is reflected by the omission of her name from the title of the book.
In his early 30s Vadim became acquainted with Catherine Deneuve. Like Bardot, Deneuve was young (17) and a virgin when she met Vadim. Also like Bardot, she was a bottle blond. These days when you meet a girl with purple hair, at least you know it is not natural. Blond hair is another matter, since it occurs in nature but is not always natural. Yet it has always been in demand. As a Clairol hair coloring ad once said, “If I’ve only one life…let me live it as a blonde!” But verisimilitude is a must for aspiring blondes. Clairol also had an ad campaign with the tag line “Does she or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.”
Also like Bardot, Deneuve was a looker but with a big difference. Bardot was popularly portrayed as an insouciant, pouty young thing with bee-stung lips (no Botox in those days). She gave the impression she would take on all comers (pun intended); I wouldn’t classify her as a slut, but slut-adjacent might not be inaccurate. Deneuve, however, was a classic beauty, much like the embodiment of some Apollonian ideal; in short, a classy dame. You could have your way with Bardot in a hayloft; for Deneuve, you would have to rent a suite in the most expensive hotel in town. Curiously, her image was even more effective when it was tarnished, as in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), wherein she portrays a woman undergoing a mental breakdown, and Luis Bunuel’s Belle Du Jour (1967), in which she plays a respectable Paris housewife with more kinks than her bourgeois lifestyle might indicate.
While Vadim was with Deneuve from 1961 to 1964 and sired a child by her, he never got around to marrying her. As for the breakup, she opined, “You know, you can leave someone by doing everything to make them leave you.”
After his relationship with Deneuve went south, Vadim observed “Women know many things without needing to learn them.” Economy is not one of them, apparently, as Deneuve owned roughly 200 pairs of shoes when she was with Vadim.
Next in line was Jane Fonda, and you might wonder what in the world Vadim would want with her, given her longstanding reputation as a social justice amazon. But she did not start out that way. In fact, if you ever get a chance to see any of her “starter” films from the early 60s (Tall Story, Walk on the Wild Side, Sunday in New York), you might conclude she was a babe. In fact, some journalists had characterized her as “the American Brigitte Bardot.” Lurking in the background, however, were daddy issues with papa Henry. This seems to be a common problem with the offspring of movie stars. It probably didn’t help that her mother committed suicide.
Vadim met Fonda in 1964 when he directed her in La Ronde/Circle of Love in France. She was a bit more mature (age 26) than Vadim’s previous women. They were married in 1965 and remained so through 1973. Vadim also directed her in The Game Is Over (1966) and Spirits of the Dead (1968). Their best known collaboration remains Barbarella (1968), a sexy science fiction film based on a French comic strip, and probably Vadim’s best known film in America.
Unfortunately for Vadim, Fonda gained more respect for her work with other directors. She received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969) and a Best Actress Oscar for Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971). Perhaps even more important, she got interested in geopolitics. In 1972 she made her infamous trip to Hanoi, highly controversial at the time, and still unforgivable in the eyes of surviving Vietnam veterans. Vadim didn’t see it coming when he first met her:
At the time I didn’t realize that Jane already showed certain symptoms of a progressive form of American puritanism. She had a deep need to justify her right to exist by influencing or deciding what was best for others for their own good.
So in today’s parlance, Jane was a Karen. It probably didn’t help that Vadim’s career was going in the opposite direction. When Fonda won her Oscar in 1971, Vadim was churning out T&A fluff like Pretty Maids All in a Row. He had become superfluous in her life, aside from the fact he was the father of her daughter. So it was splitsville for the Vadims.
Undaunted, Vadim continued to tie the knot. After Fonda divorced him, he was married to heiress/actress Catherine Schneider from 1975 through 1977, lived with TV writer/producer Ann Biderman from 1980-1987, and married French movie star Marie-Christine Barrault in 1990. That made a clean sweep: All of the women in his life were in show biz. No shop girls or secretaries for him.
So let’s review: five marriages, two shack jobs, four children. In his book Vadim relates how his children were shuttled around from place to place, accompanied by nannies, spending the Christmas holidays with mama here, a summer with daddy and stepmother there…in Malibu, the French Riviera, a ski resort in the Alps. Through it all, Vadim never voices any sort of second thoughts about having sired this chaos.
Vadim had a busy career and plenty of outside interests, so I don’t think he would have been sitting around twiddling his thumbs if he remained a bachelor, but monk mode and hedonism are incompatible. As the brief intervals between his relationships indicate, he was one of those guys who just had to have a woman in his life. Or was he simply a star-struck simp? Or did he feel he was, in the time-honored phrase “God’s gift to women”?
As Vadim noted in his book a sense of entitlement was common to his women. When he entered their lives he was useful to them; when they didn’t need him anymore, they left:
For them [Bardot and Deneuve] success had come without much effort, and when they were very young. They seemed to have forgotten that luck was a factor and thought the world owed them everything. Since they had always succeeded easily in everything, they deduced that they were always right.
Of course, much the same was true of Jane Fonda, although her sense of entitlement was something of a birthright as her father was a member of Hollywood royalty.
Vadim is an unusual case, as he was in a position to initiate and prosecute relationships with starlets and stars. He must have known that serial polygamy among actresses dates back to the dawn of the movie industry. Though almost all movie stars came from humble origins, achieving riches and fame allowed them to flout conventional morals. Given their lucrative contracts, a husband’s financial support was not necessary. While a number of stars were partial to male directors who could enhance their careers, in their private lives they didn’t need no man! Even when they met men who could make them tingle, it never lasted. The movie star could continue to search for “the love of her life” while other women had to be content with daydreams. So movie actresses went from man to man the way a dowdy housewife goes from romance novel to romance novel.
Unlike today, divorce was rare in the general public while it was rampant in the movie industry. The “till death do us part” crowd had their favorite movie stars but felt morally superior to them. It was a curious mixture of envy and resentment. Hence, any sort of Hollywood scandal met with intense public scrutiny.
Today, however, the female “star syndrome” has grown apace. Thanks to social media, every woman with an account can have fans. A mediocre women can have body counts comparable to movie queens. The feminist and DEI movements have inspired the promotion of women, often laughably unqualified, to high places. So even the girl next door is now endowed with a sense of entitlement her mother and grandmother never had. That is why reading about the travails of Roger Vadim is useful to the average man today. The female behavior he describes is no longer restricted to the upper echelons of the fair sex.
As much pride as Vadim must have felt for his Bardot-Deneuve-Fonda trifecta (otherwise, why write the book?), it must be noted that he died at age 72 in 2000. His three movie queens are still among the living: Bardot is 89, Deneuve is 80, and Fonda is 86.
Vadim was indeed a player. He scored early and often but in the long run he was not a winner. As for the cause of his downfall, it is tempting to say “Cherchez la femme,” or “Look for a Woman.” Actually, his downfall was caused by looking for a woman…over and over and over.
This behavior might have been understandable when he was a horny young buck, but if one is incapable of learning from one’s mistakes, life will not go well. ‘Tis the way of the world. Or, if you prefer, c’est la vie!
