"Pretty Baby"

Fast and foot-loose ladies in controversial movies are pretty much the norm for Louis Malle, the 44-year-old French master who has been setting off furors about sex since 1958, though he has also scored high points with such serious films as Lacombe, Lucien, which was nominated for an Oscar in 1974. After he launched his career earlier in the Fifties as Jacques Cousteau's co-director on The Silent World, Malle's first cause célèbre in cinema was The Lovers, a landmark erotic film with Jeanne Moreau as a kind of latter-day Lady Chatterley, which provoked loud protests from bluestockings but established some new frontiers for the battle against censorship. As recently as 1971, Malle made waves again with Murmur of the Heart, a brilliant and exhilarating comedy about a wayward, wealthy family so sophisticated that the, mother (played by Lea Massari) sleeps with her teenaged son and has a good laugh about it later, as if incest were just another privilege of the rich. (Malle merely smiles at the apocryphal story that when his mother--the heiress to a sugar fortune before she married Malle's father and begat seven privileged children--first saw the film, she observed with relish that it certainly brought back the good old days.)

Since he has seldom hesitated to tackle delicate subjects on the screen while discreetly sharing his private life with a string of celebrated leading ladies, it seems just right that Malle's first film made in America should be Pretty Baby, Loosely based on fact, the screenplay by Hollywood production designer Polly Platt (Peter Bogdanovich's ex-wife) is set in the notorious Storyville section of New Orleans circa 1916, with Keith Carradine cast as photographer E. J. Bellocq, a compulsive voyeur and shutterbug who haunted the district's bordellos, creating a gallery of harlots that Malle compares to the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. "In the film," says Malle, "he meets Violet, the 12-year-old daughter of a prostitute, raised in the brothels. To get her out of this hell, Bellocq decides to marry her."

The real or potential problem with Pretty Baby is one of timing. Malle readily acknowledges that getting into hot water appears to be his forte. Perhaps he's the kind of guy who would unwittingly take Anita Bryant to a gay bar on their first date; most assuredly, he's the kind who would cross the Atlantic to make a breakthrough American movie about a child prostitute at the very moment that the media, state legislatures and even U. S. Congressional leaders were raising a furor about the sexual abuse of children. Malle, with Paramount Pictures behind him, stands ready to defend the film industry's argument that legislation in that area is more likely to cripple freedom of expression in general than to kill off child pornography or rid the streets of teeny-bopper prostitutes.

"If this hysteria becomes law, a great many recent movies will be banned--including my last three pictures before Pretty Baby, all of which deal with very young people having to face the world of adults for the first time," says Malle. "It's this passage, this moment of transition, that excites me creatively. The boy in Murmur of the Heart was only 14 years old; the boy who seduced the heroine of Lacombe, Lucien was 16. The girl I used in Black Moon--Cathryn Harrison. Rex's granddaughter--was just 15 and had a defloration scene with a snake.... I don't even know the age of the snake, but I doubt if that would pass.

"I guess I should be used to this," Malle continues. "The Lovers came over here in 1959 and the case went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court. Recently, I met an exhibitor in Cleveland who had been convicted because of it; yet you look at that film today and it's like go-to-church-on-Sunday, it's nothing.

"My God, this strange impulse of man's being sexually aroused by children has been part of every civilization. That's a fact, I'm sorry to say, a sociological fact--and it's going on today, in New York City, in the so-called Minnesota Strip on Eighth Avenue, which is nothing but kids whoring. Let me make clear that I'm a film maker, not a social worker. My cinema is not rhetorical and I don't send messages. Yet it's pure hypocrisy to pretend this is a modern phenomenon. Children have always been manipulated and exploited. You can trace it way back to China and the Greek classical culture, where a certain type of companionship between mature men and very young boys was considered normal, practically traditional.

"Pretty Baby just came together as it is because I'd always loved New Orleans jazz.... Ten years ago, I wanted to do a biography of Jelly Roll Morton, the jazz pianist. I ended up with a script by Jack Gelber that nobody wanted to do. Then I became interested in the Bellocq photos, which were published by the Museum of Modern Art. So little is known about Bellocq. He died in obscurity, totally unknown. There were stories about his being a misshapen dwarf. The love story between him and the girl is invented, of course. But Bellocq himself was real and Violet was (continued on page 218) "Pretty Baby" (continued from page 104) real. We got her from the Al Rose book called Storyville.... There was an interview, only a few pages long, with a respectable old woman, a grandmother living in a middle-class neighborhood. We didn't even change her name, Violet. She's dead now, but Violet recalled being a 'trick baby'--the daughter of a whore. She told how she was raised and started to work when she was about eight, doing what they call 'French,' how her virginity was sold at auction when she was 12 years old. She also described something I had to put in the film, which she called a mother-daughter act. It's on the screen, with Brooke and Susan, though you don't actually see anything."

While he was nursing Pretty Baby through the final stages of editing and scoring last fall, Malle commuted between a Manhattan lab and a country house in Westchester. It was then that he began to feel heat from the press, first in an inflammatory New York magazine cover story about 12-year-old Brooke Shields, the nymphetish prodigy cast as Violet. A top child model who was discovered by photographer Francesco Scavullo and became the Ivory Snow baby before she was a year old, Brooke from the neck up is a match for Ava Gardner in her prime, though the rest of her looks like any healthy elementary school girl (Malle first captured Brooke's elusive seductiveness in pictures for the Film Directors' Erotic Fantasies portfolio in our January issue).

New York's free-lancer Joan Goodman--an Englishwoman with a stiletto up her sleeve, according to reports from the wounded--visited Pretty Baby on location in New Orleans and returned to pigeonhole the movie as "Lolita, only in period costume and much more explicit." There was also some hand wringing in print about Brooke as the newest and brightest of Hollywood's "corrupted innocents" in the Jodie Foster--Tatum O'Neal tradition. All of Goodman's revelations were punctuated with sighs as if it hurt a lot to tell the world that Brooke had posed in the nude and would probably be doing a Penthouse spread (wrong) with the approval of her inexorably ambitious divorced mother, Teri Shields, manager of Brooke Shields & Co., Inc.

Public reaction was swift, with at least one child-welfare group threatening to take Teri's million-dollar baby out of her custody entirely. While Paramount publicity hawks flew in circles, Brooke and Teri went on a TV talk show to counterattack, insisting they had been misquoted and generally maligned and citing, for example, Goodman's alleged quote from Teri about Brooke's inconveniently having her first menstrual period while the film was being shot. "I don't even have periods yet," testified Brooke, who ought to know.

Malle's response was more vehement. "To me, it's a trashy article written for a trashy magazine. It's also full of lies, and I wrote a letter of insult to Joan Goodman to tell her my opinion. Disgusting. But I'd like to say, in defense of Brooke Shields--who is made out to be some kind of freak--that it's absolutely not so. Brooke has been very well educated by Teri. She's got the best possible manners, and for an inexperienced actress, she learns very fast. She's not one of these stage kids who behave like mechanical dolls."

As Brooke's leading man, Keith Carradine found himself done up to resemble a Chekhovian cradle snatcher in a role that Paramount's top brass had considered perfect for Jack Nicholson.

"I think it would have been a disaster," says Malle. "Though Jack is a very fine actor, he's too contemporary, too heavy. I was interested in Robert De Niro for the Bellocq part at one point. To me, he's the best American actor today, but he was busy. Finally. Keith is perfect, yet everyone was horrified when I cast him. They thought he was too young, too good-looking. But we have romanticized Bellocq, and Keith has that shy, tender quality, a kind of softness...."

Carradine nevertheless found some of his intimate scenes with Brooke pretty hard to face. "Difficult," he recalls now, "or at least delicate. But after seeing Murmur of the Heart, I had implicit faith in Louis' taste and judgment. Besides, I was very moved by the script. And no matter what you've heard, Brooke is a relatively innocent, normal little 12-year-old girl. Our scenes might have been easier, in a sense, if she had been more precocious that way. It took a bit of patience."

According to Teri, her daughter's crush on Keith ended abruptly when she was required to kiss him oncamera. "Brooke found that distasteful. She said she'd wanted to look back, when she's 25, on her first kiss with a boy her own age. I told her this was just acting and didn't count."

Pretty Baby's bawdier instances of sex and nudity are left to the grown-up whores who work for Madam Nell (Frances Faye) in a brothel that often humps with joy and funky Jelly Roll music. Top girl in the line-up is Violet's mother, played by Susan Sarandon, whose big Bette Davis eyes and obvious talent have kept her in the Hollywood limelight since she made her debut as the doomed runaway daughter in Joe. Susan struck pay dirt again with her role as the sinned-against wife in The Other Side of Midnight and has no reason at all to worry about competition from a mini--sex symbol. "The fact is," she observes matter-of-factly, "Brooke has been in the business a lot longer than I have. She also knows she's going to be a star, and at moments she can manipulate people and situations much more cleverly than her mother does. Brooke is terrific, just incredible, though you have to wonder what she'll be like by the time she's 30."

Malle insists that he never had any doubt about casting Susan as Hattie. His hang-up was finding the right Violet. "It's unimportant that mother and daughter don't look alike. But at first I felt Brooke was too extraordinarily beautiful for the part. There's something disturbing about her ... with this face of a woman, the body of a child. But Susan's is the difficult role in the movie. She's a horrible character. She's a monster, abandoning the girl. She's completely self-centered; she's also childish, born in a whorehouse herself and obsessed with the idea of escaping. She doesn't know what or where she is ... she's a mess, yet she is very touching."

This may be the spot for a footnote to acknowledge Malle and Sarandon as an offscreen couple whose togetherness started way down yonder in New Orleans and has been routinely fed into the gossip mills as a hot item ever since. Mention it to them and they look exquisitely bored--or perhaps just baffled that anyone in the civilized world still thinks it's news when a gifted director and his fetching star become fast friends for a while. Susan remains married to, and amiably separated from, actor Chris Sarandon (who played Margaux Hemingway's rapist in Lipstick and Al Pacino's gay "wife" in Dog Day Afternoon). Malle, once married and divorced, has two children from subsequent liaisons, nonchalantly identified in his official Paramount bio as "born out of wedlock to two different women."

Such statements elicit a heavenward glance accompanied by a perfect Gallic shrug from Malle. "They make my life sound more swinging than it actually is. We all get along-very well. The mothers come and go with the children, they stay at my house in France--near Toulouse, where the Concorde is made. The truth is so simple. I decided that marriage was not really my trip. When I was married, I didn't have children. It was only when I stopped being married that I started having children."

Though he's a man accustomed to doing his own thing in exactly his own way, Malle could scarcely hope to launch Pretty Baby without the risk of criticism, idle rumors and random flak. Soon after shooting began, stories out of New Orleans hinted at dissension between Malle, the European perfectionist, and his resentful, overworked American crew. Professional conflicts were exacerbated by personal tragedy when Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Malle's chief ally, was forced to leave the location for two weeks after his teenaged son was killed in a traffic accident in Europe.

"Contrary to published reports, our troubles had nothing to do with my being French," says Malle, "or my crew's being American, Swiss or Spanish. My methods are no different from the methods of 15 or 20 of the best American directors. I work in confusion and disorder; I keep contradicting myself all the time, making changes. That's my essential privilege as an artist."

Hurt feelings and harsh words are forgotten, in any case, now that everyone has seen and loved a highly promising rough cut of Pretty Baby. After the good word leaked, Paramount's top executives were wearing money-in-the-bank smiles. Meanwhile, Brooke Shields was with her mother in Santa Cruz, California, starring in a brand-new movie, Rudy Durand's Tilt. According to a late flash from Teri, Brooke plays a teenaged pinball champion who is finally beaten by Charles Durning: "He's the only one Brooke tilts to, because she's never tilted in her life."

Move over, Tatim. Make way, Jodie. Brooke is here, and from the look of things, she could be a Wunderkind to beat all.

"Violet was real. She told how her virginity was sold at auction when she was 12 years old."