My Life So Far (24 page)

Paris, 1963.

(Everett Collection)

But France seemed to be in the cards, because shortly thereafter French director René Clément flew to Los Angeles to pitch me a film idea that would co-star Alain Delon, one of the top male box-office stars in Europe at the time. I agreed. I liked the idea of putting an ocean’s distance between me, Hollywood, and my father’s long shadow. Moreover, France was then at the apex of the
nouvelle vague,
with young directors like Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, and Malle, and Vadim. Clément was up in years and wasn’t part of this new wave, but he had directed the brilliant
Forbidden Games.

On my second trip to Paris in the fall of 1963, it was love at first sight all over again. But this time the city felt like a friend ready to teach me the art of living rather than a big party from which I was excluded. You’d have thought I was a long-lost daughter coming home, so effusive was the French press. The person who took me under her wing and made me feel at home in Paris was the reknowned French actor Simone Signoret: Simone, with her charming lisp, sensual bee-stung lips, and heavy-lidded blue eyes—tough, opinionated, always insisting on being a human first, a star second. She lived with her actor-singer husband, Yves Montand, in an apartment above Restaurant Paul on Ile de la Cité, the little triangle of an island in the Seine right across from my hotel. They were good friends with the director Costa-Gavras, who coincidentally was the assistant director on
Les Félins,
my Clément film. He would later direct the great political thrillers
Z, State of Siege,
and
Missing,
and was often there among Simone and Yves’s friends when they ordered up meals from Restaurant Paul and talked heatedly into the night. The stimulating, we’re-not-in-a- hurry-to-get- anywhere, what-could-be- more-perfect-than- talking atmosphere was reminiscent of the Strasberg home in New York, where both Yves and Simone had often visited. Besides good food and wine, the French love all things cerebral. After all, “I think, therefore I am” was said by French philosopher René Descartes.

I had met Simone in 1959, when she’d accompanied Yves to New York, where his one-man show,
An Evening with Yves Montand,
was a smash hit on Broadway. My father, Afdera, and I had had dinner together with them at the Algonquin Hotel. I remember watching Simone stare adoringly across the table at my father, and now, in Paris, she talked to me about the films he’d made—
Blockade, The Grapes of Wrath, Young Mr. Lincoln,
and
12 Angry Men.
She said it was the values those films represented, the quality of the characters he played, that moved her so much, and I began to appreciate him in new ways. While he didn’t always bring the qualities she admired
home
with him, I was old enough now to understand that there are many kinds of needs: Children need loving parents, and people need heroes they can aspire to. Perhaps it’s hard to be a hero
and
a father. For the world, Dad
was
Tom Joad.

I began to realize that the enthusiasm with which France embraced me wasn’t only because I was an American actress, or even because I was the daughter of an American movie star, but because I was the child of
Henry Fonda,
who embodied the best of America to them—the same America President Kennedy represented. I had come to France hoping to shed the “father’s daughter” identity, only to discover that there was a lot of his identity I was proud of and wanted to be associated with.

Until coming to France, I had never been exposed to people who took an intellectual approach to filmmaking, nor had I really appreciated the effect American films had on European filmmakers, from the physical antics of Jerry Lewis’s comedies to the works of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Preston Sturges.

It was in France that I made an acquaintance with small-c communism, and since over the years I have been accused of being a Communist by those who want to discredit me, I want to say something about this. As I got to know Simone and Yves, I learned that they were among France’s intellectual Left, which included the other Simone (de Beauvoir), and her longtime companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, and of course Albert Camus, who had died in 1960. All of them were
engagé,
committed to activism, and in sympathy with the French Communist Party (PCF)—some joining it, then leaving; others never actually becoming party members. Simone and Yves had never joined, although they agreed with many of the party’s opinions. What they and other French artists abhorred was the party’s doctrinaire cultural policies, which held that artistic freedom was a petit bourgeois crime. Still, there was a long history of close ties between the French intellectual and artistic community and the PCF. They viewed the PCF as the party of change, and since the time of the French Revolution, when they had played a powerful role in toppling the monarchy, French intellectuals had always seen themselves as agents of progressive social change. They also tended to be distrustful of NATO, nuclear armament, and the new war that the United States was pretending not to be involved with—in Vietnam. Many of the French intelligentsia had been at the forefront of the movement against their own country’s colonial war in Vietnam, had been active in the underground Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France, and had seen the Communist Party as the only viable way to counteract Fascism.

Having grown up with our two-party system in America, I was stunned as I learned about the many French political parties, some large and powerful, some small, many coming into being in response to a particular crisis and then disappearing or morphing into some new party. The Communist Party was one among about six other legal political parties represented in the French parliament. I remember reading somewhere that during the time I lived in France, in the fifties and sixties, nearly 40 percent of the French people voted Communist. Communists were simply part of the complex French scene and didn’t seem especially threatening. I was not politically active then and especially not interested in theory or ideology (still not, to this day), and no one suggested I should be; no one proselytized. But I think this long, up-close-and-personal (nontoxic) brush with European communism is why, later, when I did become
engagé,
as Simone called it, I didn’t view it with the same phobic dread as did many other Americans. As I saw it, when given a choice, people tended to keep a balance between a free market capitalist system and one that had more centralized control—“choice” being the operative word.

O
ddly enough, living in Paris, I felt more American than ever before. I needed to get outside my own country to fully appreciate how different we are and what it means to be a citizen of the United States. In France (and, as I later realized, in other European countries) class differences are more entrenched. There is a marked difference between the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, and the proletariat (working class), and rarely do class lines get crossed. Birth
is
destiny. In the United States there is more class fluidity, which was especially true in the 1950s. While today in America a growing U.S. hereditary elite and severe economic disparities make it less likely, it was more or less taken for granted back then that a person from a modest background could compose his or her own life scenario, at least given good health, an encouraging parent, an education, and a little luck. This fluidity, which exists alongside our unique political stability, is I think what makes for our particular energy and optimism. Would that all Americans could have had the opportunity to look back at their country from across the ocean in the early 1960s.

It was a magical time to be an American in France. During the Eisenhower presidency, the French had thought of us as gauche, too loud, too styleless: “ugly Americans.” Now, with Kennedy and Jackie in the White House, everything seemed to have changed. The Kennedys brought us international esteem, and the Americans in Paris benefited from their popularity.

On November 22, I walked into the lobby of my hotel after a day’s shooting on the Clément movie. Standing at the reception desk, telephone to his ear, was American actor Keir Dullea. His face was ashen. “Kennedy’s been shot, they think he’s dead,” he told me. We stared at each other. I sat in the lobby, stunned, waiting to hear more news. A journalist came in to interview me for the French film magazine
Cahiers du Cinéma
and asked if I wanted to cancel. “No,” I said. “I need to talk.”

We went up to my hotel room, and after making a desultory attempt at conducting an interview, we both broke down.

Simone called. She was crying and said that I shouldn’t be alone on this night, that she wanted me to come over to their place. Sitting with Simone, Yves, and their friends that night, I realized that they mourned the loss of Kennedy as their own and shared a sense of terrible, unbelievable finality. For me a bubble had burst. The institutional world I grew up believing in was no longer stable. And it would get worse: The losses of Bobby and Martin were still to come.

I
had come to France for work, yet I had been drawn there for more personal reasons. Maybe here I could begin to hear the sounds of my own voice, try to find out who I was, or at the very least find a more interesting persona than the one I inevitably slipped into back home.

I would end up staying in France six years. And at the hands of a man who was a master at polishing a woman’s persona, I would start down a new path—as a female impersonator.

O
ur arms were linked as we solemnly followed his casket through the narrow, ochre-tinted streets of old Saint Tropez—Brigitte Bardot, Annette Stroyberg, Catherine Schneider, Marie-Christine Barrault, and me. Of all Vadim’s wives and companions, only Catherine Deneuve and Ann Biderman were missing. Our thirty-one-year-old daughter, Vanessa Vadim, carrying her infant son, Malcolm, and her half brother, Vania (Vadim’s son with Catherine Schneider), walked just in front of us. The streets were lined ten deep with fans, old friends, and onlookers who had come to pay their respects. It was two months into the new millennium.

At Vadim’s funeral: Brigitte Bardot, Annette Stroyberg, me, Catherine Schneider, and Marie-Christine Barrault in the foreground, out of focus.

(Nebinger/Niviere/Hadj/Niko/SIPA Press)

The services in the small Episcopal church had been arranged by Catherine Schneider, whom he’d married after me. A Scottish minister, in a thick brogue, solemnly gave the sermon in French. An odd amalgam it was. Vadim’s widow Marie-Christine Barrault, niece of fabled French actor Jean-Louis Barrault and the star of such films as
Cousin, Cousine,
was speaking of Vadim with the theatrics of high Greek tragedy when she was loudly interrupted by an unusually long fart, issuing forth from grandson Malcolm, bringing laughter to the assembled crowd, something Vadim would have appreciated. He was never one to shun laughter, especially if it meant interrupting a solemn occasion.

As we exited the church, we were surprised by three Russian violinists, in full costume, who began playing soulful Slavic music as they took their places behind the coffin. Brigitte had arranged this on her own as a surprise. I loved her for wanting to acknowledge Vadim’s Russianness on this day, in this way. We broke off sprigs of mimosa along the route to the cemetery and laid them on his coffin as we walked past to say our good-byes.

V
adim and I had spent many happy times together in Saint Tropez, and whenever we’d pull his fancy Chris-Craft into the harbor after a day of island picnicking or water-skiing, we’d look up to see this historic old cemetery, the one Vanessa referred to as the “dead people’s village,” perched on the edge of the cliff. Once, at about age five, Vanessa was walking with her dad on the road that ran just above the cemetery. She stopped and looked at the tall, lichen-covered grave markers and began asking questions about death and survival of the soul. Vadim wrote in his autobiography
Memoirs of the Devil: