I am at the tweaking stage of a manuscript that mentions Roger Vadim. Last week I saw a 1986 book by him and purchased it, thinking I might have to answer to his inclusion. That the book is focused on Vadim's wives is something else I might have to answer to. That his wives are better-known than him is unimportant.
Vadim had an interesting life, a life worth sharing. The most lucrative way for him to share that life was through his wives, all of whom, at various times, were "sex symbols", though all have since become known as much for their activism -- Bardot for her "environmentalism", Fonda for her critique of U.S. foreign policy, Deneuve for a woman's right to be hit on by a man.
Biographies carry social histories, and Vadim's is no different. I enjoyed reading about St-Germain-de-Prés ("a village in the midst of a city") immediately after WW2; how the difference between Vadim's age (20) and Bardot (15) and her friends' made him "a total stranger to their concerns," for they "had never really known the war and ... lived a well-ordered existence, relying on their parents for everything." (21)
Vadim says the media dubbed the St-Germain youth "existentialists," but he says it was more like "a life of peaceful anarchy than a political or intellectual attitude based on Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy." (20) That said, a few sentences later Vadim makes a perfectly existential statement: "I refused a full-time job -- I learned more by doing nothing." (20)
Here's a Vadim insight worth sharing:
"I did not yet realize that women, obsessed with eternal love, are most susceptible to new relationships. 'You will always love me?' really means: 'Please don't allow me to fall in love with someone else.' Most men consider these words proof that they are the one and only. In reality, it is the exact opposite. Romantic women seek the absolute. They don't find it in any man. They talk about forever, but they run from present to present." (30)
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