It was in the room at the Hôtel Castille which Cocteau shared in 1937 with Al Brown and Marcel Khill that a dashingly handsome man half his age (an ‘Antinoüs sprung from the people’, as Cocteau later put it) came to hear him read aloud from his new play, Oedipe roi. Cocteau had first set eyes on Jean Marais at a casting session, yet he claimed he had been drawing him well before, proof that their meeting was preordained, or rather that Marais corresponded exactly to his pre-established idea of beauty incarnate, with his athletic build, perfectly chiselled face, blond hair, blue eyes and brilliant smile (the clichés roll out all too quickly with Marais). Marais, an aspiring actor and consummate opportunist, had managed to gatecrash the session, and Cocteau was immediately drawn by his winning combination of erotic presence and slight awkwardness. Cocteau chose him to play Oedipus, although other members of the cast promptly ensured that he gave Marais the minor – and completely silent – role of Chorus. Three weeks later, Cocteau ordered Marais to come urgently to the Hôtel Castille, where, as the legend goes, he told him: ‘I am in love with you’. ‘I am in love with you too’ was Marais’ automatic response, a lie. In rehearsals Cocteau was already imagining him naked in strips of cloth to maximize his raw physicality and instinctive sensuality, and this proved a scandalous touch in performance at the Théâtre Antoine, accentuated by Marais’ rather mediocre acting. Booing ensued, yet Marais prevailed, and Cocteau respected his fortitude. Shortly after he read aloud to Marais the first act of another play, Les Chevaliers de la table ronde (The Knights of the Round Table), a piece of cardboard cut-out medieval imaginary based on the theme of the Grail, which became in Cocteau’s hands a personal symbol of the impossible, that is, harmony and self-equilibrium. At the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in October 1937 Marais triumphed in the starring role of Galahad, for which he sported a ripped tunic revealing his bare breast. So began a long and exceptional collaboration between Cocteau and Marais that included not only their extensive work together on stage and screen, but also their many texts, poems and drawings, on, about and for each other.
Cocteau had started the year in desperate straits, not only physically weak but also extremely vulnerable mentally. He now saw himself spectacularly rejuvenated by this new boy-man. Marais, nicknamed ‘Jeannot’, was always of the order of a miracle for Cocteau, linked in mysterious ways with le merveilleux and possessing a quasi-religious dimension. The fact that Marais came from a poor Cherbourg family raised in the art of deception (his mother was a kleptomaniac) only increased Cocteau’s fascination. In early 1938 the two stayed for a while at the Hôtel de la Poste in Montargis, near the small village of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, where Max Jacob now lived in a presbytery. Later that spring they moved into a small apartment together at 9, Place de la Madeleine, before then leaving for Toulon and the villa at Pramousquier where Cocteau had spent the summer of 1922 with Radiguet. It was here that Cocteau inducted Marais into his artistic world and compiled lists of writers for him to read (number one, of course, Radiguet). The young actor began now to discover new things while displaying in Cocteau’s dazzled eyes every kind of virtue, kindness and practical or moral sense. For Cocteau had fallen completely in love with Jeannot, who seemed also to want the best for him. As well as penning some highly lyrical poetry about Marais, Cocteau drew him obsessively, establishing in his work a whole new tradition of rather artificial ‘Greco-Marais’ profiles. Their relationship was initially physical and they behaved like a couple of young lovers, for the good-natured Marais was more than happy to be intimate with Cocteau. Yet Cocteau soon began to doubt that Jeannot spontaneously desired him, surmising that if the young Eros was struggling to give himself to him at night it was because he wished to reserve for others his ‘blond strength’. Since Cocteau could not actually prevent Marais from going out, his only option was to demean the other young men whom Marais was meeting. Slowly but surely, Marais deserted Cocteau’s bed and Cocteau rationalized the situation by admitting that it was probably better to be deceived by a few men ‘passing through’ than to enter into full-scale rivalry with a woman. He now felt impelled to write elegiac poems, which he placed under Marais’ door at night to be read on his return. In fact, Marais soon established his own bachelor pad elsewhere and sometimes returned to embrace Cocteau for the sole benefit of the photographers. The noble knight was gradually morphing into an executioner, yet it never deterred Cocteau as Marais’ self-appointed mentor and impresario from pursuing his sacred artistic duty of grooming him for success on the Paris stage.
Marais, to repeat, was not an actor blessed with psychological depth and he appeared destined for mainly physical roles. Moreover, having failed to enter the Paris Conservatoire, he had never received formal training, apart from some odd acting classes with Charles Dullin. But this meant, theoretically at least, that he was totally malleable, and Cocteau took it upon himself to transform his jeune premier from a middling actor into a living idol of the Paris stage. Marais’ performance in 1938 in Les Parents terribles was to prove historic for them both. Cocteau had written the play according to Jeannot’s express requirements. Fearing typecasting as an action hero, he wished to play a nervous and confused man, not obviously attractive and even prone to tears. At times the stress reached unbearable proportions as Cocteau pushed still further the oppressive, impossible relationship between Michael and his mother Yvonne (partly based on Marais’ own mother, Rosalie). With Cocteau’s full support and in front of his eclectic ‘family’ who attended the final dress rehearsal on 14 November 1938 at the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs (Khill, Desbordes, Maritain, Picasso, etc.), Marais threw all caution to the wind and broke away from the contemporary ‘modern’ acting style imposed by the dictates of cinema. His was a totally new dramatic method focused on the body in action and, in the words of Cocteau, ‘without taste’. It shocked those in the audience who perceived only bluff and insolence, but seduced and disarmed the majority. Describing Marais as an ‘amalgam’ of different acting elements and styles, rather than perfection itself, Cocteau emphasized the young man’s natural ‘fire’ and excess, his professional honesty, his capacity for self-criticism and his total investment in a role. He also ascribed Marais’ hypnotic charisma and magnetic hold over spectators of both sexes not to his evident sensuality but to the childhood that ‘inhabited’ him. As for Marais, he regarded his Apollonian looks more as a natural curse than a blessing, and this certainly helps to explain his desire to take on very different and ‘unnatural’ roles under Cocteau’s aegis, most brilliantly in the film La Belle et la bête.
Buoyed by the artistic and commercial success of Les Parents terribles, Marais returned to the Place de la Madeleine to live with Cocteau. When he fell seriously ill Cocteau looked after him and would not let him out of his sight, earning in the process the respect of Marais’ still suspicious mother. But no sooner had Cocteau re-established ‘normal’ relations with Jeannot than the young man fell head over heels for Denham Foots, an American dandy who also dabbled in the theatre. Once again, Marais began to stray from the conjugal bedroom, leaving Cocteau traumatized to the point of taking it out on himself. And the threat of personal scandal loomed when, in Toulon in July 1938, in the company of Marais (who did not smoke opium), Cocteau was busted for drugs and taken for questioning. At the trial seven months later, with his ever-loyal young courtier Franz Thomassin supporting him in the public gallery, he escaped astonishingly with only a fine.
In the spring of 1939 Cocteau headed south-west to Dax, where he produced an unexpected sequel to Le Potomak entitled La Fin du Potomak, a humorous yet unsure and darkly disturbing novel (his last as it would turn out) comprising ‘anecdotes’ of his own life and work since 1914. Cocteau then travelled with Marais and a young acolyte, Roger Lannes, to Le Piquey, where together they created another version of happy family life: Cocteau wrote while Jeannot drove and painted and Lannes read. Marais would continue to spend his weekends with Foots, and all Cocteau could do was to make Marais agree that whatever happened he (Cocteau) was his sole confidant. He proclaimed to the world that their relationship was ‘absolutely pure’: his ephebe had become his son whose development he would continue to supervise and who, in return, would help him try to live like a saint. Marais, meanwhile, declared privately to friends that he felt only ‘affectionate feelings’ for Cocteau, who physically was now becoming increasingly grey and wan, like a spectre haunting his own destiny. In fact, Cocteau, who had all the while been wishing to live his work, now felt that his work was eating him whole (‘Jean Cocteau is dead and lives to frighten you’ was the caption he gave to one new painting). Yet Cocteau was not going to kill himself over this. Under the right lights he could, after all, muster just about enough energy still to smooth out his wizened face and become again ‘Cocteau’.
When France suddenly declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Cocteau found himself in Saint-Tropez with Marais, who was mobilized as a reservist and sent to the Somme. Cocteau returned home to Paris and ‘slummed’ it at the Ritz at Chanel’s invitation. He was determined during this honeymoon period of Franco-German cooperation to continue his artistic projects undisturbed by daily political and military events. Hence, with the aid of opium, which allowed him to indulge in fantasies of universal creative harmony extending beyond the borders of geography or politics, he focused on his most crucial concern, Jeannot, a large bronze bust of whom he was now completing that represented Marais as half-god and Adonis, a faun-like apparition with glowing hair and large, staglike eyes. He fretted about Marais’ well-being and safety, of course, but with the drôle de guerre quickly over followed by the signing of the Armistice, Marais was demobbed and returned to Paris. Together, the two would now spend the war in the relative peace and security of the small apartment at 36, rue de Montpensier in the Palais-Royal, which Cocteau started to rent in the spring of 1940, just across the way from Colette, who became one of his closest female friends. The routine and calm was interrupted only by Cocteau’s brief exodus that summer from Paris to Perpignan when the French government decamped to Bordeaux (he duly returned like thousands of other Parisians in September). Having signed up in the early stages of the war to fight the Germans, Marais had initially wished to join the Resistance, but this was denied on the grounds that his relationship with Cocteau would constitute a security risk (it was feared – correctly – that Cocteau would talk too much).
In June 1940 Cocteau entered into a different type of arrangement with Marais when Marais’ new lover, Paul Morihien, moved in with them with Cocteau’s full consent. How could Cocteau have refused the personal wishes of his young god Jeannot? Since they were no longer lovers in the physical sense, he did not wish to deprive Marais of any happiness, which, in Cocteau’s particular romantic way of thinking, was also his own. Moreover, the straight-seeming and athletic Morihien was an all-round nice guy, at once respectful and prudent, and he immediately slotted into the role of Cocteau’s official secretary. Together the trio functioned like a small inseparable family (although this did not prevent Marais from continuing to seek sex on the side). In the harsh opinion of some, then and now, Cocteau’s relationship with Marais was that of a faux couple, in the same way that Cocteau’s own life and career had been intrinsically false. Yet despite the complicated relations between them involving other men, Cocteau and Marais enjoyed a strong and caring friendship that cannot be relegated to the category of faux amour. And for all the lingering problems of insecurity, hurt and jealousy that Cocteau experienced, their working and affective relations provided them both with a degree of artistic stability and continuity that, for Cocteau, was always the bottom line. It would reap full rewards a few years later with the film scripted (and part directed) by Cocteau, The Eternal Return (L’Eternel retour), which transformed Marais in the leading role as the beautiful doomed lover Patrice into one of French cinema’s first male heart-throbs. On its release in October 1943, Marais’ heraldic Jacquard sweater created a tidal wave in men’s fashion, and crowds of young women began to besiege the apartment building. The film’s extraordinary success, which also featured Marais’ dog Moulouk, had a powerful effect on the public perception of the relationship between the two. Marais was now extremely eager to be seen with Cocteau, for it was a kind of implicit avowal of their unique relationship, at once half-brotherly and half-conjugal, and imbued with the mythic aura of the finally transcendent couple of The Eternal Return. Whatever the precise status of their private life, and despite their mutual reserve when out together in public (Cocteau could tone up or down his slightly effeminate and artfully campish gestures to suit the occasion), they became the first out-gay artistic couple to achieve popular celebrity in France and were even championed in the pages of Vogue. Whilst never claiming to be a gay figurehead or ‘sublime national queen’, as the writer Angelo Rinaldi later wryly put it, Cocteau helped to project a confident gay sensibility, actively supporting after the war the first official gay association, Arcadie.
The relations between Cocteau’s life and art were arguably at their most successful and productive in the films on which Marais collaborated. It was Marais, after all, who encouraged Cocteau to return to the cinema as a director after their spectacular success together with The Eternal Return, resulting in such remarkable films during the mid-to-late 1940s as La Belle et la bête, Les Parents terribles and The Eagle with Two Heads (L’Aigle à deux têtes). The last, written first as a play by Cocteau in 1943 in a manor in Brittany while Marais painted and Morihien cut wood (domestic bliss personified), was created like Les Parents terribles according to Marais’ express wishes: to be silent in Act I, cry with joy in Act II and fall backwards down a set of stairs in Act III. In this tale of political and romantic intrigue a young poet-cum-anarchist Stanislas breaks into the royal apartment of Queen Natasha on a mission to kill her; they both end up dead because of the impossible nature of their absolute love. Offered by Cocteau as a Christmas present to Marais, the play reflects the intensity but also the pathos and frustration of their relationship in some of the explosive exchanges between the Queen and Stanislas, who is left helpless and alone and suffocating in love.
Despite Marais’ diligence, hard work and genuine awe of Cocteau (he always declared that he owed everything to Cocteau, a father figure who both formed and transformed him), there was actually a constant tension to their collaboration. In later interviews Marais explained that he had struggled against Cocteau in early stage productions such as The Knights of the Round Table precisely because he did not wish to become a mere cog in Cocteau’s artistic machine. He made the point repeatedly that the collaborative process with Cocteau proved easier in the cinema because he was mature enough – and by implication humble enough – to receive Cocteau’s directions and interpret them in his own fashion. By the time of Orphée he was able to wax lyrical about Cocteau’s direction, or rather lack of it, celebrating in the process an ideal Coctelian harmony of life and work: ‘His [Cocteau’s] method is different: to live, speak, look at beautiful things together, to cultivate the soul without thinking of art – which in his eyes is no more than a margin of life.’1 As for Cocteau, in his book of 1951 entitled simply Jean Marais, a comprehensive and admiring but also impressively objective portrait of Marais’ life and artistic activities (including poetry and painting) he acknowledged the young man’s natural defensiveness towards him. He also, however, revealed how Marais usually came round to his point of view in such a way that he never betrayed his own and miraculously ended up unifying both. Theirs was a unique meeting of styles or ‘strong lines’, and Cocteau celebrated in particular the moral aspects of a collaboration that both shaped their friendship together and served to fine-tune his own artistic practice. Even as late as 1960 Cocteau still regarded Jeannot as indispensable to the correct interpretation and promulgation of his work. In return, until his own death in 1998, Marais powerfully defended Cocteau’s work against detractors and continued to act in revivals of his plays. He even produced successful stage shows about their professional relationship such as Cocteau–Marais, first performed in Paris in 1983. In so doing Marais ensured that he, too, would remain a living legend.