Paris, 1967
It was a bad day for Lili.
Shortly past three in the afternoon the Paramount limousine pulled up to the polished revolving doors of the George V, that gangrenous gilt-edged birthday cake of cupids and cupolas that serves as Paris’ finest (and most expensive) hotel. The voice on the little pink-and-cream- colored rococo telephone downstairs announced that Leslie Caron had been detained. Give her five minutes. “I don’t understand,” said the pretty press agent, “she knew we were expected.”
About four minutes later a rather flushed Warren Beatty plunged out of the antique elevators wearing what people in the business have, through experience, come to regard as the Warren Beatty look: high-school basketball player face unshaven, suit rumpled, glasses horn-rimmed, expression enraged. The telephone tinkled bell-like in the cavernous silence of the padded lobby. Leslie Caron was ready now.
The girl-woman who opened the door bore only a slight wispy resemblance to Gigi or Fanny or Gaby or what’s-her-name who fell in love with Daddy Long Legs. Shoeless, with tired little plum-like bruises under the drooping eyes, long silvered nails picking nervously at the cuticles holding them together, she curled up on a long red velvet sofa in the middle of her vanilla malted milk-colored suite in a wrinkled mass of champagne ripcord double-breasted Christian Dior material and looked for all the world like a tiny piece of icing that had fallen off the top of a rather overcooked French pastry.
“Take off those glasses, so I can see what you look like. You Americans—always hiding behind dark glasses,” she said for starters. “I suppose you have come here to find out if I am a new Leslie Caron. Hell yes, and it’s about time. One can’t go on wading in brooks and eating ice cream cones forever.”
New approach. After all the ugly headlines, all the unfavorable publicity surrounding her divorce from her second husband, Director Peter Hall, in which Warren Beatty had been named corespondent, did she think she had profited by her mistakes? “What mistakes? I might as well commit suicide if you consider everything a mistake. Living through something dreadful doesn’t make it a mistake. Life is not a production number. Some people, like myself, take the direct route to what they want. I once broke a contract with MGM and spent the next eight years in Europe bearing children. Now I’ve decided I’m not a statue. I’m tired of that part of my life and I desire to do something new. You can call it a mistake, but now I’m giving my private life what it demands. An actor I worked with recently came up to me and asked me to go to bed with him. If I did, he said, it would make him act better the next day. Well, I only go to bed with people I’m in love with. I’m not bragging. I haven’t the slightest idea what the public thinks of me and I don’t care. People like to get beaten with whips by girls in leather boots, but they don’t brag about it. What I do with Warren Beatty is nobody’s business. I don’t want to talk about it.”
What would she like to talk about? The old days at MGM? “Please! Most miserable period in my life. I hate musicals. Warren is dying to do a musical, but I’ll never make another. I had toe-shoes on from 8:30 in the morning until six every night. I was constantly in agony. Ankles big as an elephant’s. I was in very bad health, worked under impossibly bad conditions, had to dance on concrete floors and windy sound stages. I had bruises and sprains that couldn’t heal. When I walked out of Hollywood, after years of unhappiness, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly both told me, ‘Leslie, you’re so smart to quit while you can still walk.’ I’m glad those days are gone forever. The only dancers I admire today are belly dancers.”
If she hated musicals so, perhaps she was excited about her new status as a dramatic actress. “I thought The L-Shaped Room was a pretty good film in spots, but my God, I did it for practically no money at all. Money isn’t everything. Financially, I never have to make another film. I have a company, but I don’t read the Stock Exchange every morning. I couldn’t be more bored about all that. I hate to admit that because then everybody will try to take advantage of me. I’m not an idealist. But I’ll never work for nothing again.”
What about her latest role in Is Paris Burning?—the grief-stricken wife of a Resistance leader who is torn from her arms and slaughtered by the Nazis on a public street? For months, the cinema talk in Paris had centered around nothing else: about how Director Rene Clement had begrimed areas of the city only recently cleaned up by Minister of Culture André Malraux, about how jack-booted Wehrmacht troops had set off bombs in the Place de la Concorde, thrown hand grenades into the Bois de Boulogne, uprooted the vast parvis in front of Notre Dame, even stormed down into the depths of Napoleon’s tomb to recreate the last five days of August, 1944. Surely a film costing several million dollars, involving 182 sets and six months’ work, in which even Charles de Gaulle will appear as himself, would be worth talking about.
“Leslie was so remarkable, she had everyone on the set and the onlookers in the street in tears,” offered the pretty press agent, nervously signaling the star to vitamize the conversation.
“Aaah,” groaned the reply. “I said hell before I did the scene and giggled right after. Dramatic scenes. I don’t enjoy them. Maybe I expect more than I can possibly give, so I become arrogant and contrary. When I see myself on the screen at first I usually catch the flu. When I come out of seeing a premiere of a film of mine I have sore throat, fever, headache and all the symptoms of a very serious illness. I go on with acting simply to prove to myself that I am alive. That’s why we all work, isn’t it? I refuse to be an image of something I’m not. I’ll never forget the day at MGM when they photographed me as a bunny. Yes, a French bunny! The caption was: Oooh, la la! and then there was a hoop I was jumping through. Quite funny actually. But when you have to go through it it’s simply awful. And so I put my foot down, and said no more bunnies for me. And I was considered very difficult, you know, and very few people liked me. And that to me is the whole of Hollywood, making people be bunnies when they’re not.”
The telephone rang and the star rubbed her temples nervously, trying to keep her voice down. “I told you, Warren, I’m busy! I don’t know when. Go out and walk around the block a few times. No. No! Later. I mean it.” She hung up the receiver and made a face.
“Now I suppose you’ll print that I’m having an affair with Warren and we’re holed up in the George V doing all sorts of tatty things. Just say we’re good friends. No, I have no plans for marriage. It’s deeply traumatically disturbing to withstand the kind of scandal the press builds up. I understand the side of the journalists and I understand the public’s interest, so I’m not angry or bitter or—you know, it doesn’t leave permanent scars on me at all, although I’ve had to live incognito, James Bond style, at times. But I guess that’s the price we have to pay. It’s for my children, I mean otherwise what does it matter to me. Do you want to ask me something? Ask! I don’t know what to say. I’m human and I don’t like scandal. Ever since I was sixteen in the ballet—long before Gene Kelly discovered me and signed me for An American in Paris—I’ve been in the press, so I don’t know anything else. But you’re all a bunch of bastards really, you know. Yes, you are.”
Does she like anybody? She thought a moment, scratching at her Sassoon bangs. “Not many. I have few friends. How can I know others well if I don’t know myself? When I was doing Gigi everybody loved me suddenly because I was Gigi, they thought! But I was character acting as far as I’m concerned; I already had one baby and I was already 25. I always wanted to play sophisticated women when I couldn’t and I didn’t look it, and I didn’t have the maturity. So I wasn’t really Gigi or Lili or any of those girls. Most of the people I know are not actors. You can’t have deep friendships in this business. It’s like politics. Also, I don’t trust people. For instance, if I’m recognized in the street I am bound to think it’s a sex maniac, or somebody—I think why are they staring at me?”
Mention the war. It’s like picking the lock on a cheetah cage. “You Americans. What do you know? You’ve never been bombed or occupied by an enemy or anything. During the war, I used to make shoes from my great-grandmother’s leather gloves. A pair of shoes was something you kept for 10 years. We lived on rations.”
“We had rations in America, too,” volunteered the press agent.
“Ha! What does that mean? You only got one chocolate bar instead of two? Hunger and unpleasantness and fear from the Nazis because my mother was American and my cousins were in the underground. It’s never worn off. I still save Kleenex. When I went to Hollywood for the first time, I was horrified. I had been raised in convents, knew nothing of the world. I had two pairs of panties and every American woman had 18 slips. My greatest luxury now is underwear. It is very hard to feel sorry for you Americans. If you want to, you can always work. I went to Cairo two years ago and it was dreadful. The rich people live in tombs, and they are the lucky ones. But in America you know nothing of this. You’ve had the best of everything and you know the least of anyone.”
Recovering from this attack, there seemed only one thing left to question: the future. “I don’t expect anything from that. I think you have to be a moron to be really happy all the time. In order to have great happiness you have to have great pain and great unhappiness—otherwise how would you know when you’re happy? Marriage is no solution. I’ve been married twice. It’s just a social habit that we have which makes our children have the name of a gentleman. But I don’t think it’s a perfect solution for human beings. I think the relationship has more chance to succeed without marriage. It’s very difficult to plan a life,” she said, ushering us to the door. “Very boring if you do, and more boring if you stick to it. Such questions, such odd ideas you must have of how a movie star lives. Americans. I don’t know how to talk to you.”
Downstairs, on the curb, Warren Beatty was pacing nervously. “I’ve never seen her like that before,” said the pretty press agent as Beatty bounded past us and leaped toward the elevators.
“Movie stars! Bah!” I mumbled, as the limousine swept us into the sane, welcome reality of the 5:00 traffic jam in the Place de la Concorde.