Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976)

by Stadiem, William

  The victim’s name was Stevan Markovic, and he was not the first but the second of Delon’s dashing-looking Yugoslav doubles to meet a grisly end in the last two years. The first was Markovic’s cousin, Milos Milosevic, twenty-four, who in 1966 was found shot to death beside his lover, the estranged model wife of Mickey Rooney, in Mrs. Rooney’s home in Brentwood, the tony star-filled subdivision of Los Angeles near the Pacific beaches. The sixties were still close enough to Rooney’s heyday with Judy Garland and his marriage to Ava Gardner that he was considered a legend in Hollywood, not a candidate for Hollywood Squares. Barbara Ann Thomason, twenty-nine, was a Phoenix-born beauty-pageant blonde who had played on-screen in a low-budget film with Jack Nicholson (Cry Baby Killer) and had played offscreen with Cary Grant. She and Mickey had become friends with Alain Delon when “the prettiest man in Europe,” as he was known, came to Hollywood from Paris trying to ignite an American stardom off the fuse of his French celebrity as the “French James Dean” or, as others called him, “the male Brigitte Bardot.” The attempt fizzled when the best Delon could do was Texas Across the River, a 1966 flop comedy western with Dean Martin and Joey Bishop, past their Rat Pack sell-by date with JFK dead.

  Delon cut his losses and went back to Paris. However, his look-alike and best pal, Milosevic, decided to stay behind. He was having too much fun in Hollywood to return to the Old World. Milosevic had his own cinema dreams and began to realize them when he was cast as a Russian submarine commander in Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. Mickey Rooney returned from a location shoot of a war movie in the Philippines to find out he was being cuckolded by his new friend. Adding injury to insult, Rooney had come down with a rare tropical disease and had to check in to Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.

  With Mickey on his sickbed, the lovers went dancing at the Daisy, the Régine’s/Le Club of Beverly Hills, then went home to Brentwood, where, the morning after, they were found dead. Barbara Rooney had a bullet in her jaw; Milos Milosevic had a bullet in his temple. The murder weapon was Mickey Rooney’s chrome-plated .38-caliber revolver. Mickey had the perfect alibi of being in the hospital, where he remained, in shock, after he heard the news. Just as they had with the nearby Brentwood death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962, the LAPD quickly closed the books on the case, declaring it a murder-suicide. As with Marilyn, no one ever believed it.

  Two years later, the plot thickened with the discovery of the buff and toned body of Stevan Markovic, then thirty-one, in that Cardin suit, which probably belonged to his famous boss. While Delon was away making films and generally jet-setting around Europe, Markovic had been getting into more than Delon’s clothes. He was living in Delon’s art-filled luxe apartment on the Avenue de Messine, near the Parc Monceau. He had been having an affair with Delon’s goddess wife, Nathalie. He was hosting orgies at Delon’s flat for le tout Paris, a Claude Terrail crowd whose biggest trophy was supposedly Claude Pompidou (lots of Claudes in this crowd), the tall, blond, bronze, and superchic wife of De Gaulle’s prime minister, the man most likely to succeed him. And he was secretly filming the sex parties and threatening to use these home movies to make him as rich by blackmail as Delon was by acting. In short, Markovic was leading an even faster life in Paris than the one that probably got his cousin Milos Milosevic killed in Los Angeles.

  The Delon-Markovic relationship was something out of the Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter movie The Servant, wherein a valet covets and eventually takes over the life of his master. Delon’s was a life well worth stealing. The son of a suburban butcher, Alain Delon was born in 1935. He dropped out of school at fourteen and eventually went to Indochina with the French navy. He spent nearly a year of his four-year tour of duty in the brig for insubordination. Back in France, Delon worked as a vegetable porter in Les Halles, then bummed around the Riviera on the eve of the jet age, trading on his amazing looks to seduce women and impress men. One of the latter was Gone with the Wind’s David O. Selznick, who offered him a Hollywood contract, voice unheard. Selznick’s only precondition was that his discovery learn English, but the indolent, unacademic Delon preferred to coast on his beauty.

  Luckily, he was also discovered by two famous auteurs, René Clément, who cast him as Tom Ripley in Purple Noon, the adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith thriller; and Count Luchino Visconti, who starred him in Rocco and His Brothers. Almost overnight, Delon became a huge star, carving out a niche as a tragic, moody gangster. Art was imitating life, because Delon was deeply attracted to the lower depths, and not merely as homework for his roles in the arty underworld films of Jean-Pierre Melville. One of his best friends was François Marcantoni, the godfather of the Corsican Mafia. Marcantoni lived in a ghetto of the Riviera town of Toulon so tough that it was called Chicago, after Al Capone.

  Delon flitted effortlessly between underworld and haut monde, marrying movie star Romy Schneider before leaving her for the Moroccan-born, Bardot-esque Francine Canovas, who would change her first name to Nathalie and later would be linked romantically to both Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. In a sign of the wide-open times, Nathalie was maid of honor at Jagger’s wedding to Bianca. Alain Delon had met Milos Milosevic in Belgrade in 1963, when he was filming Marco Polo, a production that went bankrupt. When Milosevic decided to remain in Hollywood, he convinced the narcissistic Delon to accept his cousin Markovic as his replacement, for only a tough cool guy who looked exactly like Delon would do. Delon had already met Markovic in 1964 when Milosevic got Delon to bail his cousin out of jail, where he was languishing under suspicion of masterminding a jewel robbery. Delon seamlessly switched doppelgängers to Markovic, a compulsively ruthless man without legitimate options for whom the stolen-identity game became one of double or nothing.

  When Delon discovered Markovic’s treachery with his wife, compounded with his huge betting losses on horses and cards, the star angrily cut his double loose. Markovic returned to his gangland milieu, the Paris branch of the Yugoslav underworld. His only real assets were his orgy photos, which could have been far more damaging to the ancien régime than any general strike masterminded by Danny the Red. Alain Delon was questioned but never charged. Claude Pompidou was questioned and denied everything. The public may not have believed her, but this was France, sophisticated France, and the public shrugged off the orgies. Claude’s husband became president when De Gaulle died in 1970.

  The orgy films were never found. Alain Delon went on to another star marriage and more big hits, while Nathalie Delon continued to be the muse of the Rolling Stones, inspiring their hit “Exile on Main Street,” the perfect example of a Jet Set album, its tracks recorded between 1968 and 1972 in Jagger’s English stately home and Richards’s French Riviera villa, amid entourages of the decadently famous. The murders of the Delonian Yugoslavs were never solved. Nevertheless, from a Jet Set perspective, the case was a testament to the changes in society, even the stratified traditional class society of Europe. Here, two Balkan hustlers who heretofore would have been lucky to even visit Paris or Beverly Hills and, if so, to work as menials, suddenly found themselves rubbing far more than shoulders with the giants of two continents. That they both ended up dead for their upward mobility is a testament to the wages of overly ambitious sin.

  If the Markovic affair greatly tarnished the allure of the Jet Set as the public aspired to it, the death knell for glamour as Igor Cassini had created it was the 1973 dissolution of the marriage between perhaps the best-credentialed Euro-playboy of the entire era, Roger Vadim, with the preeminent Hollywood-American object of lust, Jane Fonda. The Jet Set judged men by the distaff company they kept. By that standard, Roger Vadim was the lord of this ring. He was to the Jet Set what Porfirio Rubirosa had been to Café Society. While Rubirosa had hit the financial daily double by marrying the two top heiresses of his time, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, Roger Vadim won the pulchritude trifecta in his unions with the three supergoddesses of the sixties: Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, and finally, Fonda. Roger Vadim was James
Bond, minus the gun. His was a license to thrill, not kill. Until the upheavals of the late sixties trashed the old ideal of suavity in favor of cool rebellion and drastically devalued the currency of playboys, as well as that of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire, Roger Vadim seemed like the Man to Be.

  Vadim’s only real competitors in the Jet Stud department were Claude Terrail and Oleg Cassini. However, for Terrail, the Tour d’Argent was a far more jealous mistress than Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth, and status, rather than sex, seemed to be the prime allure. Like his brother, Igor, Oleg Cassini was always too motivated by making money and achieving the security lost by his noble family to take sex as anything more than a gentleman’s diversion, like polo or shooting. Yes, he was great at it, but the Cassinis were great at everything, and look what it had gotten Igor—nearly deported. Chasing the American Dream was far more exhilarating than chasing celebrity skirt.

  What in the world did Vadim have? He had movies. Sam Spiegel had movies, too. But Spiegel was a producer, the producer, the creator of the stereotype, with the fat cigars and the harem of wannabe actresses and the yacht and the Rollses and the criminal record. In short, he was half genie but half ogre. Vadim, on the other hand, was a director, an artist, sensitive and smart, even if his films were duds. Plus, he was tall, handsome, charming, debonair, international.

  Vadim wasn’t by any means the stereotypical director, if there was such a thing. Orson Welles had a lot of the same Vadim allures but created great movies. He was more interested in making film than making love. Also, Welles’s beauty had only a narrow window, until he got as fat as the great Alfred Hitchcock, that stalker of icy blondes. No ladies’ man, either, was Federico Fellini, although Vadim was more in the mold of the Marcello Mastroianni director character in Fellini’s 8½. That film was pure fiction; Roger Vadim was stranger than fiction, the stuff of novels and of adolescent male dreams.

  JOLLY ROGER. French playboy-director Roger Vadim, with Jane Fonda, the third of his movie star wives, 1968. (photo credit 14.2)

  Roger Vadim was short for Roger Vadim Plemiannikov. He always bragged of being a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, genetics accounting for his savage Mongol brio in the boudoir. His Russian descent was no mere invention but truly a fact of his life. Lesser aristocrats, Vadim’s family, like the Cassinis, were uprooted by the Bolshevik Revolution. In the Jet Set, a time of travel and eros, multiple nationalities seemed to have an aphrodisiac effect. The Plemiannikovs ended up in Paris, where Vadim’s father took a French wife, passed the civil service exam, and was posted to the French consulate in Alexandria, Egypt. He died of a coronary at thirty-four in 1937, in front of a nine-year-old Roger, who returned with his mother to Europe, where she managed an alpine chalet hotel that hid Jews fleeing France and the onrushing Nazis. She remarried to an architect in the cabinet of Le Corbusier, but Roger left home to be on his own at sixteen.

  After dropping out of the Sorbonne and washing out as an actor, Vadim (as everyone called him, like Liberace) found a mentor/father figure in the French auteur Marc Allégret, who made Vadim his assistant director on a film he shot in London starring Valerie Hobson, the wife of John Profumo of the eponymous scandal. A precursor of Jet Set morality, Allégret was polymorphously perverse. He had been the gay lover of Jean Cocteau and André Gide, but on a trip to Africa with Gide, he discovered Congolese women and went straight.

  Most famous for directing the film of Marcel Pagnol’s Marseilles-docks love story Fanny, Allégret still had an eye for the boys and discovered both Louis Jourdan and Jean-Paul Belmondo, not to mention Vadim, who himself discovered Audrey Hepburn, as a swimsuited chorus girl in a seedy London private club, shades of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies and Expresso Bongo. Comme le Jet Set était petit! Vadim, the truffle hound of star-level beauty, was also in on the ground floor of the careers of Leslie Caron and Ursula Andress.

  Vadim met Bardot in 1950 when he was all of twenty-two. She was all of fifteen. They married in 1952 and were divorced in 1957, before the first 707 ever landed in Paris. However, the couple basically invented Saint-Tropez and set the standard of decadence and license that so many of Juan Trippe’s customers bought tickets to Europe just to experience, however fifth-hand. France’s Power Couple had used the then-sleepy and cheap Saint-Tropez as the location for their low-budget film And God Created Woman, an underground smash that was to the fifties, with sex, what Easy Rider was to the sixties, with drugs.

  Woman didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it was Bardot’s seventeenth film. She had helped earn the rent by dancing on cruise ships. She didn’t exactly emerge spontaneously as the French Marilyn Monroe. Vadim was also struggling. Despite having been a minor celebrity as the youngest screenwriter in France, Vadim had been forced to get a day job as a reporter for Paris Match, the French Life, and was in danger of ending up in total obscurity. What he had were his looks—very tall, lean, and lupine, with big glasses for his hypnotic green eyes, as needed for the left bank intellectual effect—and his charm. And his voice was a sex organ.

  Vadim was the ostensible Galahad of the Jet Set. Yet if one looked closely at the man, he wasn’t exactly a role model for the red-blooded aspiring playboys who were Hugh Hefner’s audience. To begin with, his first three great Euro-conquests were teenagers, and Jane Fonda was barely in her twenties when she became the fourth famous actress to fall under his spell. Vadim was arguably a pedophile. He was also an addict—of gambling, drinking, drugs, and prostitutes, whom he hired both independently and as marital aids. He was also kind of a geek, obsessed with reading MAD magazine. And he was a financial disaster and a parasite, if not a pimp, living off the earnings of his star child brides. In short, Vadim was about as much a credit to his race of lotharios as Eddie Gilbert was to his race of high financiers.

  Woman made a man, a world-famous man, out of Roger Vadim. Even if it didn’t put him in the Godard-Truffaut pantheon, the film was the most successful of all the French films of the nouvelle vague, surely because it showed the most flesh. The log line for the movie, about the amours of an oversexed teenage orphan, could have been “Lolita in Saint-Tropez.” Vadim was hoisted on the petard of his success. Bardot had an affair with costar Jean-Louis Trintignant, who left his own star wife, Stéphane Audran, for her, until Bardot dumped him for singer Gilbert Bécaud.

  Bardot and Vadim divorced just before the film’s 1957 premiere in New York, but, now rich and able to indulge his playboy passions like racing Ferraris, he moved on quickly to stunning Danish actress Annette Stroyberg, aged nineteen. The short-attention-span Vadim quickly left Stroyberg in 1960 for Catherine Deneuve, the seventeen-year-old daughter of esteemed Comédie-Française thespians. Under his tutelage, Deneuve bleached her brown hair blond and immediately became an icon, the icy goddess of Gaullist France. They lasted three years, until her hits The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Repulsion propelled her onward. She married Swinging London’s top photographer, David Bailey, who traded in Jean Shrimpton for her. Jane Fonda would become the flavor of Vadim’s next decade.

  It was very Liaisons Dangereuses, or low French farce, depending on one’s perspective. Whatever, the six degrees of Roger Vadim filled the gossip columns and fan magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, year after year. A big touch of class was contributed by Simone de Beauvoir, who bestowed upon Bardot the ultimate encomium, declaring her the first liberated woman of France, a genuine “locomotif” of feminism. All aboard the Eros Express!

  TOPLESS. French bombshell Brigitte Bardot, on the Saint-Tropez set of the scandalous And God Created Woman, directed by her husband, Roger Vadim, 1956. (photo credit 14.3)

  The Beauvoir validation must have made its impression on young Jane Fonda, who would become America’s sex symbol of liberation, if only by eventually throwing off the yoke of marriage to the sexist, dominant Svengali who was Vadim. He had earned the reputation as the greatest seducer Europe had seen since Casanova, albeit with a helping hand from Paris’s top procuress, Madame Claude, who dispatched her filles
de joie for the Vadim-Fonda sex orgies, with Jane—rich from her film roles and her late socialite mother’s inheritance—picking up Madame’s hefty tabs. It was an investment in Method acting research that she would recoup in 1971 when she won her first Oscar for playing a fancy call girl in Klute.

  If Vadim’s other great conquests were vulnerable to him because of their age and adolescent ambitions, Jane Fonda, seemingly untouchable Hollywood royalty who hardly needed a foreign operator like Vadim, turned out to be far more vulnerable than Bardot, Stroyberg, and Deneuve combined. Key to her sensitivity was the suicide of her mother, who slashed her own throat when Jane was twelve. Then there was the iconic but unloving father, whose fame was a seemingly impossible act to follow. Jane had, like Jackie Bouvier, gone to Vassar but just dropped out. Forsaking academe for showbiz appeared at first to be a misbegotten attempt to compete with her father, especially when the Harvard Hasty Pudding Club gave Jane the anti-Oscar as Worst Actress of 1962 for The Chapman Report.

  So off in 1963 Jane went to Europe, at the time when the siren call was loudest. Henry Fonda had heeded that same call in 1957, marrying a Venetian-Jewish socialite named Afdera Franchetti, decades his junior and just a few years older than Jane. To spite her father, Jane had begun an affair with one of Afdera’s recent lovers, Sandy Whitelaw, a young former Harvard skiing champion and Hasty Pudding member who had become a junior executive for David O. Selznick. It was Jane’s revenge on Harvard and Henry. However, it wasn’t enough. She needed Roger Vadim. He was the kind of lover guaranteed to give Henry Fonda, the symbol of American virtue and righteousness, apoplexy.

  After Whitelaw and before Vadim, there was Alain Delon, pre-Markovic. Jane got her first European film role in the 1964 mystery Joy House, directed by René Clément, who had showcased Delon in the estimable thriller Purple Noon (1960), one of the greatest cinematic advertisements for Jet Set European travel. Joy House, which divided its locations between a château and a Salvation Army mission, was the opposite of glamorous; plus, it made no sense, not even in the artiest way. Whatever heat was generated with Jane by Delon, who was even more beautiful than she, was dissipated by the anemic box office. The film was barely shown in America, except at a few art houses in New York. No stroke for Henry Fonda from this one.