IN THE eighth day God created Brigitte Bardot, and the rest is motion picture history. From the moment that Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman was released, Brigitte Bardot became France's most famous export the face that set off a thousand flashes, a body that would be recognised by almost anyone alive even if her head was covered with a bag. She was almost immediately dubbed by the (mostly male) press as a sex kitten and she knew how to play the game - both the purring and the clawing.
Now Bardot, who turns 62 this week, has published her memoirs, a breathless tell almost all that takes us at a full gallop from her first picture for Elle magazine as a good bourgeois girl through her tabloid love life to her self imposed exile from movies in that famous menagerie in Saint Tropez. And what a life!
Here are the tungsten lit, cork popping highs, fame, money the adulation of millions! The foreign trips, with red carpets and crowds awaiting the planes! The husbands (four)! The lovers, both the protectors and the toy boys (uncountable)! The trysts in unspoiled paradises, where birds are left to fly and fish to swim! The wonderful meals! The terrific family! The (mostly) loyal entourage, friends, fixers, majordomos, make up people, body doubles! The animals, The animals, the animals!
And then there are the lows, the lonely rooms with just a dog or a duck for companion, the long waits by the phone, the dangerous stampedes of vulgarians armed with telephoto lenses, the faithless lovers, the jealous lovers, the impatient lovers, the boring lovers, the venal lovers and all the suicide attempts. There are more than a few gory details and, almost in passing, acknowledgment of her failure as a mother to her son Nicholas, by actor Jacques Charrier.
Although the well orchestrated hype surrounding Initiales B.B. (published this week by Grasset) has emphasised that Bardot spits and scratches in the book, it's pretty careful stuff: Alain Deton is called vain; the crooner Sacha Distel is accused of making his name by hanging from the strings of her curvy aprons; Gilbert Becaud, the singer who came to be known as "Monsieur 100,000 Volts", is careful to the point of being callous, making Bardot hide in a toilet so as to conceal their affair from his family; Gunther Sachs, the rich German who was husband Number 3, a crude publicity seeker; Sophia Loren is cold; Catherine Deneuve, also launched by Vadim, is described as cutrate Bardot and a whiner. But almost everyone is in turn praised for class, talent, elegance, just plain goodness. None of this is going to hurt anybody.
The people who really get it in this book are all the unfamous - the maids, the butlers, the secretaries, the hotel employees, the red faced and ridiculous local officials who come to present flowers or be photographed with the sex kitten, a few of the more anonymous lovers and the press, all of whom get on B.B.'s fragile nerves and without whom she might have found the serenity that seems to elude her.
From the time she reached puberty Bardot was too hot to handle. Her well off family tried to contain the damage after the movie maker Marc Allegret plucked her from Elle into the movies in 1950 and Bardot fell in love with Allegret's assistant Vadim. She was, as she puts it, not 15 but 15 and a half. By the time her family relented and let her marry Vadim, in white, a good deal of their passion was spent and Bardot was launched into a career of mostly mediocre movies and mock scandalous pop songs, culminating with Harley Davidson.
But if Bardot's fame grew in the 1960s, she remained a woman of the 1950s. The 50s didn't end in 1960 but, as Philip Larkin might have said, in 1963 with the Beatles' first LP or, as Bardot might see it, in 1962, with the death by suicide of Marilyn Monroe.
Although Bardot was magnificent barefoot or with flowers in her hair or in the long North African inspired clothes of the 60s, and although she boasts on and off of being able to rise above anything, she is anything but the liberated woman of the late 60s or 1970s (although she makes a point of saying that she was reading Simone de Beauvoir's and The Second Sex while on location in Mexico).
She is a bundle of contradictions both naive and shrewd the girl from a good family who wants to run on the beach barefoot in the moonlight and marry someone exciting but also Daddy like, she is the star who shows up late and flirts her way out of trouble but also has a messianic cause (animals), she's the tough broad with a heart of gold (she repeatedly reminds us of all she does for strays, both animal and human), the independent spirit who can't handle an evening alone, but also just a girl who wants to have fun, so why does the fun always stop so soon, and why oh why are people so mean?
She has a social conscience of sorts, and a grab bag of reasonable and not so reasonable ideas that mix badly with her brand of back to nature conservative politics, with its whiffs of veggie green ideas and agrarian romanticism. She's very much against war, she tells us. She says she tore up a contract from Universal on principle because the US executed the Rosenbergs. She says she's glad she got out of movies before they became so pornographic, and it's sad the way kids live today.
Her hero is Charles de Gaulle, who she sees as a father figure, leaving France an orphan when he died in 1970. All the rest are just politicians (although she makes a point of thanking former president Valery Giscard d'Estaing for backing her campaign against the killing of baby seals, she also ridicules him). She finds Jean Marie Le Pen - the leader of the National Front who recently referred to what he called the "inequality" of the races - charming, and feels that he has been "demonised". She knows what she is talking about, she tells us, she has been demonised too. Quad erat demonstrandum.
SHE retired from the movies in 1973 and turned her energies to the organisation she founded to protect animals. (The book ends there, and so Bardot does not go into her fourth marriage, to National Front sympathiser Bernard d'Ormale.) From the beginning of the book - when she saves a mouse from her father's broomstick - and throughout all her troubles, she is never without animals. Things don't always turn out so well. When she takes in Alain Delon's aggressive German Shepherd, it eats her sheep. She has to abandon her duck after an ultimatum from a lover, and the duck left with other feathered friends, gets plucked by these less pampered beasts; we don't find out how that ends.
There are also the borderline racist or zenophobic statements, as in her criticism of the Muslim ritual slaughter of sheep which seems underlaid with more extreme feelings. All in all, Bardot in recent years has concocted a characteristically murky mix of political and emotional ideas that are a lot less cute than the tantrums of a young star.