Brigitte Bardot: The Attraction of Detachment

Brigitte Bardot had a talent for beauty.  But it wasn’t the ridiculously perfect face of Catherine Deneuve. Or the seductive, interwoven curves of Raquel Welch. Bardot’s beauty was never cheekbone-dependent.

Indeed, she had an attitude that somehow forced her appearance to the wings, an insouciance that made her surprisingly relevant to the 1960s, where her sex-symbol sisters seemed increasingly absurd. It was a rebel streak, not a come-hither. The slight overbite. The updo cascade of blondeness. And a detachment that didn’t stop with the people in her room, but included everyone.

Bardot. Picasso. Beauty. Beast.

You just knew she was going to handle this film gig like last night’s lover, with a soft adieu and a pout and then out the door; that she didn’t care about character nuance or plot development.

It was her pilgrim spirit, an easy laughter than had more to with exits than entrances. You followed her into the next scene just to see if she showed up.

And then she left. No facelifts. No excuses. Seeking the 60s sunshine all golden over Cote d'Azur, alone with animals and others without guile.

What to make of her oeuvre? All the insubstantial films. The wasted time. Doesn't matter. She's not listening, caring as much about them as she does for you, held somewhere between a Gallic shrug and a seductive playfulness that comes so easily to those with no past.

William F. Buckley Jr.: Strategically Disheveled

Buckley. Vidal. Let's get it on.

He enjoyed being hated by liberals. They served to validate his beliefs. “There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance,” he suggested.

William F. Buckley Jr. was often the smartest guy in the room, but he usually chose the room.

Entertainer/Entrepreneur

Bill was the go-to telegenic conservative public intellectual for much of the 60s. He was everywhere. Even ran for mayor of New York City – likely for the platform, not the position.

They called his accent ‘mid-Atlantic’. It gave him a natural, privileged aura. He often appeared strategically disheveled.

Of the Vietnam War he said, “The pity is that we are saving our tactical nuclear weapons for melodramatic use.” Near the end of his life, looking back, he surmised Vietnam was a mistake. Also reversed himself on Civil Rights. Flip-flops…but he had the guts to flop.

His TV show, Firing Line, was on the air for thirty-three years. He met his match with guest Noam Chomsky and purposely avoided him from thereon.

The writer Gore Vidal believed “[Buckley] was a very stupid guy, who never read any of those books he referred to, and Americans, being such hicks, thought he was a great nobleman and a real gentleman.”

Bardot. Buckley. Let's get it on.

He wrote a series of spy novels.

Buckley wasn’t really an intellectual, academic, capitalist or provocateur. He was an entertainer/entrepreneur. He once said it was a tough way to make a buck.

Someone with his learning, brains, and vocabulary wouldn’t last thirty minutes on today’s airwaves.

His career? ...Commenting on his convictions.

Love him or leave him, William Buckley had a very rare talent for a TV host. He made people... think.

Au Revoir Playboys of the Western World




Hefner - the only man able to prosper as a playboy

A playboy — as conceived by publisher Hugh Hefner — owes much to 1950s America, the decade of his birth. No matter how many times Hefner tried to reboot his pipe-smoking Lothario into a more contemporary milieu, it didn’t really work. His jazz-swinging, cocktail-swirling bon vivant had nothing to do with the 60s counter-culture. He just wasn't cool.

And the disco-era was too dumbed-down for a guy who grooved on space-age vibes, Lenny Bruce and Stan Getz. The Playboy clubs became a kitschy anachronism and finally hit the wall. Eventually, Hef’s priapic creature lumbered into bed with soft porn, gobbled a Viagra, and then did it for the Gipper.

Rubirosa: Human pepper grinder

Post-WW II, real life playboys, as typified by Portfirio Rubirosa and Gunter Sachs, managed to rat-pack their way from the lizard lounges to the Whiskey-A-Go-Goes, and along the way learned how to stuff a wild bikini. But pop critics dismissed them as Euro-Trash, living off the avails of rich wives/girlfriends, or, in Gunter’s case, a substantial inheritance.

Gunter and B. Bardot (his wife)

So the playboy of the western world was forced to live with the Undead of Monaco and Vegas and Gstaad or any of those places that Peter Sarstedt knocked off in Where Do You Go to My Lovely – the ultimate anti-playboy/girl anthem.

In the end, following an all-night party in July 1965, Portfirio ran his Ferrari 250 GT into a tree in Paris, and violently removed himself from an era that was gearing up for Monterrey Pop. As for Gunter, he somehow made it to 2011, and then ended in suicide.

But those are just two high profile swingin’ guys. Millions of playboys got strangled by their own silk ascots, weighed under by their Peter-Lawford-sized sideburns, washing up on Malibu Beach, gamely clutching an Old Fashioned or Bloody Mary, gasping for one last listen to Herb Albert’s Whipped Cream LP.

Swingin' Guys...Swingin' Gals

And the pretty young girls who danced beneath the diamond sky, over the white sand, were too busy humming The Jefferson Airplane to even notice the tired mad men of yesteryear, now rolling in the waves, to be pulled out to sea.

Through it all, Hefner, clad only in pajamas and slippers, pads on, in a hermetically-sealed, time-resistant Miss Havisham biosphere, Vampire Number One, indestructible, and surely given to celebrating the colossal irony that the only man ever able to truly live as a playboy — and flourish — is Hugh Hefner.