Belinda (24 page)

I also bought a toothbrush, a plastic razor, and some shaving cream and went to the front desk and rented the most inexpensive room they could give me. Luggage? "Painters redoing my house, fumes nearly killed me." Here are all the credit cards known in the Western world. I don't need luggage!

Just room service breakfast immediately. And a pot of coffee please.

I STRETCHED OUT on the bed and opened the stupid little bio. Just as I thought, lots of facts, quotes, and no attribution anywhere. Publishing houses who issue this sort of thing should be burnt down. But for the moment it gave me exactly what I wanted.

BORN Bonnie Blanchard in Dallas, Texas, in October 1942, Bonnie had grown up in Highland Park, daughter of a wall-to-do plastic surgeon. Mother died when she was six. Went to live with brother, Daryl, on a ranch outside Denton after her father's unexpected death. Majored in philosophy at North Texas State.

"Everybody always thought Bonnie was just a big dumb pretty Dallas girl," said brother, Daryl Blanchard, Dallas lawyer and Bonnie's financial manager. "Nothing could be further from the truth. She was an A-student at Highland Park High. My sister always had her nose in a book. And she really can't see without the famous glasses."

It was the famous Music Department at North Texas State that changed the course of Bonnie's life.

"Here you have this dry college town," said her old Highland Park friend Mona Freeman, "I mean, you have to drive thirty miles north or south to buy a can of beer; yet here are these long-haired beatnik jazz musicians from New York City come all the way down here to play with the lab band, they called it, and don't you know they brought their beatnik poetry and their drugs with them?"

"It was after the lab band had won the award at the Newport Jazz Festival," said brother, Daryl. "North Texas was very hot. Stan Kenton used to come to recruit musicians for his band. The town was real proud of it. And, of course, Bonnie had never listened to jazz before and suddenly she was wearing black stockings and reading Kierkegaard and bringing home these writer characters and these musicians. Next thing you knew they were all jamming, as they called it, and then everybody was going to France."

"We were sitting in the Deux Magots when it happened," said sax player Paul Reisner. "Up comes this gang of Frenchmen carrying all their equipment on their shoulders. And it turns our it's this guy Andre Flarebeaux and he takes one look at Bonnie and he goes down on one knee and he says in this thick French accent: 'Brigitte! Marilyn! Aphrodite! I want you in my movie.'"

Sweet Darkness was to make Bonnie the rage of the Paris Nouvelle Vague, along with Jean Seberg and later Jane Fonda.

"They were lined up all around the town square in Denton to see those first two films," said Mona Freeman. "But, you know, you expect that in your own hometown. It was when we heard about the billboard on Times Square that we knew she had really made it. And then came that sensational ad in Vogue for Midnight Mink."

"Bonnie really launched the Midnight Mink campaign," said Blair Sackwell, president of Midnight Mink. "And that first picture launched Eric Arlington's career as a photographer, whether Eric cares to admit it or not. We were running around frantically trying to decide which coat, and should we show her shoes, and what about her hair and all, and then somebody realized she was taking off all her clothes, and she had put on the full4ength coat, and was letting it hang open all the way down, turned so you couldn't really see anything, you know, except of course that she was naked, and then she said, 'What's wrong with bare feet?'"

"Of course, people reprinted the advertisement everywhere," said Mona Freeman. "It was news, Bonnie barefoot in white fur. Midnight Mink was just the rage after that."

Ten films in five years had made her a household word in the United States and Europe. The New York Times, Variety, Time, Newsweek, they all loved her. Finally after the Italian Mater Dolorosa, an American box office smash, Hollywood finally did pay her enough to come home for two big budget all-star disasters.

"Never again," Bonnie said, going back to France to make Of Love and Sorrow with Flambeaux, the last of her "artistic" films to be released in this country.

In 1976 Bonnie moved with six-year-old daughter Belinda to Spain, venturing out of her lavish suite at the Palace Hotel only to make Continental films for her sometime lover, director Leonardo Gallo.

"Why should a woman marry to have a child? I'll bring up Belinda to be as independent as I am."

Gallo's pictures, though never released in the United States, have made a fortune all over the Continent.

In 1980 Bonnie was hospitalized in London during the filming of a television movie with American star Alex Clementine.

"It was not a suicide attempt. I don't know how those rumors start. I would never do a thing like that. Never. You don't have to believe in God to believe in life."

She made a dozen more international films after that. She worked in England, Spain, Italy, Germany, even Sweden. Horror films, Westerns, costume adventures, murder mysteries. She played everything from a gun-toting saloon keeper to a vampire.

"No matter what you say about the films themselves," said United Theatricals publicist Liz Harper, "Bonnie was always terrific in them. And remember, even in the worst of times she was getting two hundred thousand to five hundred thousand dollars a picture."

"It was crazy," said Trish, Bonnie's oldest friend and longtime companion. "One time we visited her while she was making this picture in Vienna. We couldn't even tell what the story was, whether or not Bonnie was supposed to be sympathetic or somebody mean. But she always earned her money. She just did what the director told her."

After two more mysterious hospitalizations, one in Vienna and one in Rome, Bonnie finally retired for good to her private island paradise, Saint Esprit, which she'd purchased years before from a Greek shipping magi]ate.

"More pictures of me have been taken by the paparazzi off the coast of Saint Esprit in the last two years than in my entire life before that. I wake up and walk out on the terrace and it ends up in an Italian newspaper."

Bonnie's former European agent, Marcella Guitron, reported that she would not even look at scripts anymore.

"The quality erotic film she once made with Flarebeaux is now dead. Hard-core porn had seen to that. And the great European directors she worked with were no longer making pictures. Of course, if Polanski or Fellini or Bergman had asked for her, that might have been different."

"Serious American directors had come into their own by that time," said New York film critic Rudy Meyer. "Airman, Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Lucas-those were the ones everybody was talking about."

"She was smart to quit when she did," said an actor who had worked with her in Hollywood. "On Saint Esprit she became a mystery with a new market value. That's when the big picture books on her started to appear in the chain stores all over the country. 'The Legend of Bonnie,' you know, all that. Course, she didn't get a nickel off it, but it kept her famous, especially with the college kids. They had a Bonnie Festival in New Haven and one in Berkeley and one in some little art house in LA.

Saint Esprit: a fifteen-room villa featured in Architectural Digest in 1982, two swimming pools, a private stable, a tennis court, a yacht, and two sail boats. Friends from Texas were flown in regularly for parties, dinners, reunions. Jill Fleming and Trish Cody, old Highland Park classmates, came to live there permanently in 1986.

Jill Fleming:

"You never saw anything like it. There we were in the middle of all that luxury, and Bonnie was just the same Texas girl we'd always known and loved, serving barbecue and beer on the terrace, making everybody feel at home. Her idea of a good time was being with old friends, watching the tube, reading a good book."

Texas friend Travis Buckner:

"Nothing could get Bonnie off that island. She had a closed system there. Every week Daryl shipped her crates of videotapes, books, magazines. Jill and Trish went to Paris or Rome to get Bonnie's clothes. The only way the perfume company ever got the endorsement from her was through Daryl. Daryl brought the company to her. Bonnie had her spot on that balcony, and she never moved from it except to go to the bathroom or to bed."

Trish Cody:

"Bonnie was the commodity and Daryl the brains behind it. No matter how much Bonnie ever made on a picture, half of it went to Daryl, and Daryl invested every penny in Texas land. She even sent half her expense checks back home. It was Daryl who had the foresight to buy the Beverly Hills house back in the sixties before property skyrocketed. Bonnie didn't want a house in California. And it was Daryl who rented it out to motion picture people all those years, getting them to foot the bill for the new pool and the new carpet and the new landscaping and the paint jobs, until it was a showcase when Bonnie finally came home."

Jill Fleming:

"Of course, it was Daryl who was behind the famous dalmatians picture. Eric Arlington could never have gotten Bonnie to pose if Daryl hadn't flown him in. These people had to go through Daryl."

Eric Arlington, photographer:

"I hadn't laid eyes on her since old Midnight Mink days. Frankly I had no idea what to expect. And there she was just lying there on the terrace, as lovely as ever, and these gorgeous black-and-white dogs were there beside her. And she said: 'Mr. Arlington, I'll pose for you if I don't have to move from here.'"

"'Just take off your clothes, ma cherie, the way you did last time,' I said to her. 'And let the dogs come into your arms.'"

Trish Cody:

"Of course, Bonnie just loved those dogs. She didn't see anything unnatural about letting them crawl all over her. Never occurred to her anybody would find it kinky."

Daryl:

"The college kids just loved it."

Eric Arlington:

"She is the most naturally exhibitionistic woman I have ever photographed. She adores the camera. And she trusts it completely. She lay down with the animals, stroking them and crooning to them, letting them lie naturally with her. It was done without the slightest contrivance. I never even asked her to brush her hair."

Hollywood columnist Lauren Dalton:

"Calling her the dark-haired Marilyn Monroe, that was all wrong. Bonnie was never used in her films as Monroe was used, to play a stupid woman who is unaware of her power over men. On the contrary, Bonnie knew and used her power. It was Rita Hayworth she admired and imitated. The sadness of Monroe has nothing to do with Bonnie and never did."

New York critic Samuel Davenport:

"When they put that scandalous billboard on Times Square in the sixties, Bonnie admitted that she had given approval. She didn't play games like the other sex goddesses in those days. When they were filming La Joyeuse, it was Bonnie who let the Playboy photographers onto the set. Even Andr6 Flambeaux was shocked. Bonnie said, 'We need the publicity, don't we?

Brother Daryl:

"Texas has always loved Bonnie. I think they made fun of Jane Mansfield. She embarrassed them. But my sister they absolutely adore."

Trish:

"Of course, she said she would never come back to Hollywood. You should have seen the scripts they sent her agent. Every now and then Jill and I would pick up a bundle of them in Paris and bring them back to Saint Esprit. They were those all-star disaster pictures, or the big Arthur Hailey Airport-style movies. They would have made her look like a fool."

Daryl:

"Hollywood never really knew how to use Bonnie. They were afraid of her-how shall we say?-her feminine charms. She just looked like a big doll in those pictures."

Joe Klein, Houston reporter:

"If it hadn't been for Susan Jeremiah, Bonnie would never never have gone to Cannes. Of course, young filmmakers were always after Bonnie to finance something, but here was a woman, and a woman from Houston, Texas, too, and the film was like the old Nouvelle Vague pictures that Bonnie had loved. No script, no plot. No lights even. And a handheld camera. A thousand kids have tried it, but Susan Jeremiah knew what she was doing. Always did."

Director Susan Jeremiah, from an interview at Cannes:

"When I came to see Bonnie on Saint Esprit, I fully expected to get thrown off the island within the hour. We'd filmed half of Final Score on Mykonos, and now we were fiat broke and nobody would give us a dime. Of course, I'd seen Bonnie's French films. I knew she was an artist. I hoped she would understand what we were trying to do."

Cinematographer Barry Flint, Cannes interview:

"Well, for five days we were her guests, just eating and drinking anything we wanted. Swimming in the sea, swimming in her pool. And this gorgeous Texas woman, just sitting there in her lounger, drinking one beer after another and reading her book and telling everybody to do what they wanted to do. The crew was delirious. Then Bonnie agreed to put up the money to let us finish the picture right there. 'Half our color film is ruined, got ruined by the heat on Mykonos,' I told her. 'Well, here's some money,' she said. 'Go get some more film and this time keep it on ice.'"

Those who saw Final Score at Cannes say the scenes with Bonnie's fourteen-year-old daughter, Belinda, rival any explicit role ever played by her mother. For twenty-four hours at least Susan Jeremiah and Belinda were the talk of Cannes.

Houston producer Barry Fields

(who is no longer associated with Susan Jeremiah or the film): "Well, first of all, we didn't know Belinda was fourteen when we shot that picture. She was just there and she was absolutely stunning and Susan wanted to use her. But anyone who calls it kiddie porn just hasn't seen that film. We got a standing ovation at Cannes."

Final Score to date has not been released in America-and may never be released.

United Theatricals executive Joe Holtzer:

"The legend of that film has really grown completely out of proportion. Calling it Susan Jeremiah's master's thesis might be more realistic. I think we can expect bigger and better things from Susan, certainly things that are more suitable for the American market as time goes on. Susan is presently doing some very good work for us in movies for television.