Variation on a Vadim Theme
November, 1972
After prolonged exposure to Gwen Welles, it is necessary to redefine one's ideas about star quality, charisma and those mysterious attributes that transform seemingly ordinary little girls into luminous love goddesses.
Gwen is a worldly waif of 22 who stops traffic by pulling a toy turtle on a string through Le Drug Store in Paris, looking bigger but only slightly older than her shopping companion, a toddler named Vanessa, daughter of Jane Fonda and Jane's estranged husband, French director Roger Vadim, the man Gwen has come to live with in France.
As a Hollywood starlet and former Hollywood brat, Gwen eased the tension of her first movie role--just a couple of years ago--by sucking a baby's pacifier between takes, on the advice of her shrink. She's a jet setter with eyes so blue and a smile so dazzling that a mere flutter of her lashes whisks 80 pounds of overweight luggage past a check-in clerk at Kennedy airport, though a security guard wants to know more about the suspicious object hung around her slender neck--looks like a plastic Teddy bear on a piece of colored cord. "That's my teething ring," Gwen informs him precisely.
And so it was--a farewell gift, before she emplaned to Paris for the late-spring premiere of her second movie, the French-language Helle, directed by Vadim and starring Gwen Welles in the title role as a beautiful, vulnerable deaf-mute who is physically corrupted but spiritually untouched by two city boys on vacation in the French Alps.
Having such a part created for her by Vadim might easily give a girl extravagant hopes. Since 1956, when And God Created Woman made a durable sex symbol of Vadim's first wife, Brigitte Bardot, the formidable Frenchman--despite his spotty track record as a serious director--has provided steppingstones to superstardom for some of the film world's most desirable women. The official list includes his second wife, Annette Stroyberg, who didn't quite make it to the top but gave Vadim a daughter, Nathalie; Catherine Deneuve, who bore him a son, Christian; and, of course, Jane Fonda, whose career took a sharp turn upward after her 1965 marriage to Vadim.
Gwen Welles belongs in this golden company by virtue of talents other than those that caught Vadim's perennially roving eye. Prior to Helle, Hollywood came awake to her unique and subtle charms entirely on the strength of her arresting screen debut in A Safe Place, Henry Jaglom's flop d'estime that starred Tuesday Weld and Orson Welles (no relation) and sent a good many critics home to sharpen their hatchets. A few, however, remembered Gwen for her brief appearance as a laughing-crying girl of the streets who movingly discusses some of the strangers she has met.
Mention Gwen's name to writer-director Jaglom, who plans to write a movie around her as soon as Hollywood's moneymen recover from the fiscal insecurity of flamboyant experiments such as Safe Place, and he asserts without equivocation: "She is the most important young person to come out of Hollywood today.
"Gwen can be a star of the first magnitude, because she is so totally free and honest, totally released. She is a new breed of actor. Rather than assume a character, she has this fantastic ability to reveal a character--her own. She knows how to feel pain and communicate it. If she is careful about working with people who can draw this material from her, she can do wonderful things--the screen test I made of her for A Safe Place has been shown by request to film people all over the world--but she can only do what is open and truthful. She articulates, or represents, her generation the way Jane Fonda represents mine. Yet she's the antithesis of Jane, who is very outgoing. Gwen is focused inward, a complete child. It's a change for Vadim, but of course Gwen is a very clever child, who may finally be more difficult than he realizes. Wait'll you see the two of them together, like kids in a playpen."
For all his enthusiasm, Jaglom--donor of the teething ring--understated the initial impact of Gwen herself. Wearing a crimson skinny-knit top with blue corduroy coveralls, her auburn hair carelessly wind-blown, she got off to Paris with two huge suitcases, a bulging carryon, a cassette recorder and books on several of the subjects she is currently into--Sufi, Gurdjieff, Kundalini yoga, as well as Shirley MacLaine's Don't Fall off the Mountain and something called The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.
Hours before the 747 touched down at Orly, Gwen's own life was an open book and she riffled its pages at random. Her early years were dismissed with a shrug. A Hollywood child's garden of vices, standard version. Divorced parents. Moved to the Coast with her mother, dress designer Rebecca Welles, who became extremely successful and remarried. Always a problem, Gwen was sent back to an expensive Eastern school for overprivileged enfants terribles, and detested it. She ended up in a California hospital, where she was supposed to be having a nervous breakdown, and had the time of her life instead. And does she ever regret her unconventional up bringing? Hardly ever. "My mother is far out. Yesterday on the phone, she told me she is hallucinating designs for her new collection. I mean, hallucinating straight ... the whole collection ... she's not on anything. She makes a lot of money; she's the only dress designer in Hollywood who's doing so well."
Frankly success oriented since she began to study acting several years ago, Gwen has given up acid trips and the aimless drifting with movie-colony kids she used to enjoy. Her friends today are people like Jack Nicholson ("He makes me feel better than anyone I've ever met") and his constant companion, Michelle Phillips. Or Jaglom. Or Vadim. "Now I get high on my own. I love life, I'm happy, and Vadim has a lot to do with it. I think Vadim is my best friend, even though he's a monster sometimes." That last a reference to her longdistance quarrels with him back in California, when he had phoned nearly every day to postpone her departure because Jane and Vanessa were lingering in Paris while Jane wrapped up a movie with Jean-Luc Godard.
"I understand," Gwen admitted, mischievously nibbling her plastic bear. "He didn't want both of us in Paris at the same time. I like Jane. I think she and Ellen Burstyn are the best actresses in America. I'm also in favor of women's liberation, but those screaming revolutionaries turn me off. You can't tell people what to do in a hysterical manner, and you can't demand that someone respect you. Respect is earned. Women do have to get themselves together, though it's a much subtler problem than anyone has begun to talk about so far. It's got to be something other than this emotional shell shock we are all in. Mainly, women must be taught that they have a choice. Being dependent on Vadim, for example, is my choice. Anything you do with your life is OK, if it's what you want and you're not doing it simply because you've been conditioned that way. Even if you're emotionally or financially dependent on someone--a man--and you know what it's going to cost, then you can choose."
As Gwen chattered on, preternaturally hip in many respects, flares of shrewd self-knowledge penetrated the innocent-child disguise and Jaglom's glowing assessment of her began to make sense. At the same time, she was behaving like a spoiled, restless teenager--refusing to order dinner, then sampling meat and salad from the handiest plate, insisting she abhorred alcohol, then sipping champagne until the supply ran out. According to Gwen, eating, drinking and sex are pleasures of secondary importance to her. "Sensory gratification is a down for higher-consciousness types," she declared, gazing raptly at a fat passenger asleep across the aisle. "Look, that man is totally o.d.ed on food." She asked for a headset to catch the in-flight movie but tuned out Minnie and Moskowitz while the opening credits were still on. "Did this movie do well?" she asked. "I don't like Cassavetes." She dropped Shirley MacLaine's book after several pages and pronounced it dull. By the time dawn broke, some 36,000 feet above the eastern Atlantic, she had slept less than a half hour and was sitting alone on a settee in the first-class lounge--in lotus position, eyes shut, all that mercurial nervous energy suddenly and beautifully still.
Gwen's arrival at Orly was something else. Mirror in hand, touching up her lipstick, she decided there was a lot she would like to change in her looks. She looked fabulous, but semidesperate, as if secretly hopeful that one of the passengers stirring in the aisles might pull a bomb out of his raincoat and order the pilot to fly to Beirut. "I can't get off this plane and face Vadim. I'm terrified. We haven't seen each other for four months. I hope he didn't come to the airport."
As a matter of fact, he wasn't able to, and an hour later Gwen was deposited (continued on page 242)Vadim Theme(continued from page 116) at the door of his rented flat in Paris. By then, leaving her with Vadim smacked a bit of escorting Trilby to Svengali, or perhaps delivering Red Ridinghood to the Big Bad Wolf.
Springtime in Paris is made to order for lovers' reunions; thus, a day or so passed before Gwen and Vadim were ready to receive company in his den on the Avenue Foch--the second floor of a classic French manse only a stone's throw from the Arc de Triomphe. Vadim himself answered the door, barefoot and tousled, wearing a silk print robe, muttering sleepy apologies. Inside the flat, deep brocade chairs and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a garden and the broad tree-lined avenue. The walls were covered with tableaux galants of dallying Muses, the large gilt piano decorated with nymphs and cherubs strumming lyres. Scattered here and there were samples of Vanessa's crayon art, photographs of Vadim and his son from a recent skiing trip.
Gwen appeared in a terrycloth wrapper, also barefoot, sucking a bottle of Perrier. "We've been in the bathtub." she confided, "splashing around like kids. We play a lot, mental play and physical play. Vadim says he can't leave me, because I'm never boring."
Assured that she is anything but, she cast a quizzical glance at Vadim, who had gone to the telephone and was spewing French, with gestures. When he settled down on the sofa to discuss Helle over brunch, Gwen slid her feet into his lap and he studied her thoughtfully while he spoke, as if he were uncertain, still searching for clues. "I needed to make a picture when I met Gwen in America, and adapted Helle from a novel I wrote when I was eighteen or twenty. I had put it away in a drawer, unpublished."
"How old do I look?" asked Gwen. "Vadim says I show my age now, since I came back to Paris. I hated what I saw of myself in the movie, but Vadim insists I look better than I do in life. He says the fact that I don't like myself proves I'm an egomaniac."
"What I call her insecurity is her strength," Vadim continued. "She is far and away the most intelligent child-woman-female I have ever--how would you say--communicated with. She is even brilliant and has all the potential to become one of the most interesting actresses in films. Of course, to become a star, one must have the will to succeed, but she's a very strong presence on the screen. Fantastic to photograph. During Helle, Claude Renoir said she was phenomenal, the most amazingly photogenic creature he had ever seen, and Claude is the best cinematographer in the world for women."
Gwen shrugged. "I don't think of myself as sexy, and I'm not sure what I want, as Vadim says. Maybe I want to get married and have kids, or go contemplate on a mountain, or just go on acting. I want everything. I guess my aim in life is to be a well-fed meditator."
"I am depending on Gwen to make me a famous director," added Vadim with a wry smile. "In France, I am best known for the actresses I have worked with, who went on to other things. Like Jane. When she arrived in France, she was a very young, conventional Hollywood actress, known chiefly because of her father. Now she has won the Oscar and is doing some movie with Godard ... a cocktail for revolutionaries."
His irony was not lost on Gwen, who instantly resolved to resume work on her French. "I love your phrasing, Vadim. You must be a wipe-out in your own language." Soon a child again, she grew kittenish. "Do you know there are seventy-two-thousand nerve endings in a foot?"
The discussion of feet had scarcely got under way when the late-morning lull cause to an end. Young Christian, looking very Deneuve, arrived with a load of comic books, followed by Vanessa with her nanny, and Vadim's film editor, who was still tinkering with Helle. The phone rang incessantly, while various aides and unemployed actresses came and went as if on cue, to borrow money or to say bonjour or simply to establish the rhythm of a Parisian boulevard comedy starring Vadim, who seemed to find every disruption quite normal.
Several days as the American ingenue in this dizzy French farce took their toll on Gwen, who enrolled at Berlitz in self-defense. While Vadim continued work on Helle, she shopped and slept and worried about meeting a French director of documentaries, a friend of Vadim's, who had a role for her in his new film. "Appointments are made for me, without my consent. I'm coming apart.... Vadim creates such chaos around him," Given complained as she set off by taxi one afternoon to investigate a yoga school on the Left Bank. "What I have to do is take yoga, eat health-food lunches and go to Berlitz. I'll study French four hours a day, then maybe I'll be all right."
The address she had been given was a dingy doorway across from the bookstalls on the Seine. Up several flights in a two-by-four elevator, she reached a bright and tidy spiritual oasis identified as the Integral Yoga Institute, where she was greeted by a barefoot, bearded, soft-spoken young Frenchman in orange pajamas. They talked briefly, with mutual respect, about Swami Satchidananda, founder of the institute. "I feel better already, just being here," Gwen whispered as the young guru padded away to find a schedule of classes.
Within minutes, she had her shoes off and was lying in a U shape on the floor of the tiny reception room, toes over her head, ready for a session that was soon to begin. She asked if there were a shop nearby where she could buy seeds and nuts but evaded a question about her diet. "I'm living with a meat eater," she said, "so it's difficult. I'm kind of nervous and high-strung. I need some exercises to help me sleep."
"Perhaps it's the strain of travel. Is something troubling you?"
"Well...." Gwen smiled the weary, warm smile of a girl who has come a long way from nirvana.
That evening, there was a private screening of Helle at a film lab near the Champs Elysées. Several professional friends and a French critic were invited, but Vadim and Gwen arrived late, to find themselves locked out.
"I don't think it looks good to come to a screening and be there with everyone when it's over, do you?" Gwen asked more or less rhetorically.
"You can do anything, my darling ... so long as you do it with style," said Vadim, who then dashed around the corner of the building and began to kick in a side door, impatient and angry because the night porter did not answer the bell. All in all, a stylish performance. Gwen looked impressed.
Once inside the darkened screening room, the star of Helle fidgeted in her seat, whispering "What do you think so far?" every few minutes. Meanwhile, the silent, looming, lovely image of a dumb peasant girl held the audience without a word.
The congratulations afterward were effusive, as usual on such occasions. A real departure for Vadim, everyone agreed ... not a bit what the public expects of him ... like a first film by a sensitive young director. As if Vadim, through Helle, had recaptured the innocence of his youth. Gwen's beauty and promise were rewarded with profuse kisses on both cheeks, but she seemed wary of praise, diffident. A friend named Pierre drew her aside on the street while Vadim was walking other people to their cars. "Pierre told me I was marvelous," she reported, "but I'm not sure I believe him, and I think he hated the picture." She wondered whether it was going to make any money.
"Anyway," she said, "I owe a lot to Vadim. He likes me the most when I feel good, which encourages me to get my act together. I know he's a French charmer, but when he's with a woman, he gives you such fantastic total attention. I feel secure with him. He has good vibes and makes me want to do more, be active." She had not told him, however, about signing up for yoga classes. "Vadim gets very hostile when I mention anything like that, but that's my scene."
• • •
As unpredictable as Gwen herself, their relationship registered some staggering highs and lows in the weeks prior to their junket to Morocco (for Vadim to shoot the pictures of Gwen that appear here) and the Paris opening of Helle, which collected middling-to-good reviews from the snobbish French critics, most of whom were favorably impressed by "a radiant angel" named Gwen Welles.
So there she sat, shortly afterward. On her own in Paris. Vadim's new star, with no visible scars, seeking her natural orbit and waiting--well, some of the time--in Vadim's new Left Bank apartment, surrounded by piles of books and packing crates. While Gwen began to attract the friendly concern of director Louis Malle (Malle's Murmur of the Heart ranks among her all-time favorite movies), Vadim himself was off to St. Tropez with Bardot, hard at work preparing a new film about Don Juan.
Will this romance be saved? Talk to Gwen or Vadim and even the short-range possibilities appear rather dim. "Gwen would be delightful to live with," says he, "but I fear she is living on another planet."
"Vadim is a vampire, sucking my blood," Gwen declares when angry, with an instinct for dramatization that seldom hurts an actress' career. Kinky, charming, spoiled and spellbinding, La Welles is a lollipop kid who occasionally sounds about as vulnerable as an armored tank as she comes up with an answer for everything. "I say if you have a habit that's bad for you, break it. If you can't eat meat, learn to groove on vegetables. If something makes you unhappy, change it."
And if the signs don't lie, Vadim may have picked another winner.
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