business and pleasure: roger vadim

In this six-part series, Kiah Meadows takes a look at the relationship between famous directors and their muses throughout Hollywood’s history.

Most of us have heard of Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve and Jane Fonda. But how many of us have heard of the man behind these screen legends, filmmaker and misogynist extraordinaire, Roger Vadim?

When Vadim was 20 years old, he was an assistant director in a buzzing film industry in France. Upon meeting an adorable 14-year-old high school student, dancer and part time model, Brigitte Bardot, the two became infatuated with each other and immediately began a sexual relationship.

Bardot’s parents wholeheartedly disapproved, and when they threatened to send Brigitte away so she couldn’t see Vadim, the unstable little girl put her head in the oven and would have died had her little sister not found her and had their parents call a doctor.

Vadim and Bardot were married as soon as Brigitte turned 18. The same year, Vadim pushed the aspiring ballerina into films.

The role that made her famous came when Brigitte was 22. Vadim wrote and directed the vehicle for his young bride that would catapult him to stardom also. A film that would see little bourgeois Brigitte turn into an internationally infamous onscreen sexpot; And God Created Woman (Et Deiu Crea La Femme).

And God Created Woman’s story line is a tragic glimpse at Bardot and Vadim’s private life, with extra marital affairs and men asserting their power over the young girl illustrated through threatening dialogue such as, ‘If I was your husband or father…’ However, the film gave Brigitte fame enough for her to realise that she was a commodity in herself, without Vadim, something that was too much for him to handle. Vadim then met his second wife, to whom he had his first child; Danish actress, Annette Stroyberg.

Within just a couple of years, Vadim’s second marriage had fallen apart but not yet been officially ended, and he claimed full custody of his daughter Nathalie. This is when 32-year-old Vadim met 17-year-old Catherine Deneuve.

‘The evening I first met her she was dancing the Charleston… but I was going through a temporary crisis of misogyny,’ writes Vadim in his aptly named autobiography Memoirs of the Devil.

Deneuve was with her older sister, Francoise Dorleac, a well-known actress at the time. Catherine hadn’t ever thought seriously about acting, she wanted to be a mother. Vadim took her to a friend’s apartment to make love. They couldn’t go home lest his baby daughter witness his adultery.

‘Society passes severe judgement on women who sleep with a man less than 24 hours after meeting him…’ wrote Vadim in another salacious autobiography Bardot, Deneuve and Fonda. ‘I had made love to Brigitte for the first time on the same bed in this room ten years ago’.

Vadim claimed the two were to be married, but his estranged wife threatened to take away their daughter if they did so.

He and Deneuve made their first film together in 1962, And Satan Calls the Turns (Et Satan Conduit Le Bal). Another eerie portrait of a girl so infatuated with a boy that she’s too scared to do anything without him.

Early the next year, she gave birth to Vadim’s son, Christian, not exactly the bandaid they were hoping for.

‘My shy adolescent had blossomed out into a hard-headed woman ruthlessly in control of her life… and that was something I couldn’t accept.’ That year, the 19-year-old mother was given the lead role in Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and she and Vadim were separated.

When Vadim met Jane Fonda in the mid sixties, it seemed he had found his perfect woman. The 28-year-old (who was 9 years his junior) had been suffering from an extreme inferiority complex, major father issues and severe bulimia.

Naturally the two married and Vadim put Jane to work in his infamous intergalactic soft-core porno, Barbarella.

In Fonda’s autobiography, she writes very honestly about her time with Vadim. Of threesomes with prostitutes Vadim would bring home, of the time when Vadim hysterically laughed at Jane for accidentally cooking her favourite animal, horse, for dinner, but nothing she writes quite compares to the discovery she made when reading Vadim’s autobiography herself…

‘Vadim left to go to Rome to fetch his baby son, Christian. I didn’t know until I read Vadim’s book that he had a passionate night with Catherine and he thought “everything would work out with her”. Reading that so many years later didn’t hurt me, but I wondered how I could have been so naïve as to think his commitment to me was real.’

Vadim left Jane when she began her involvement in human rights activism during the Vietnam War, stating ‘I can’t reconcile myself to the idea of centring my life on a “cause”’.

Roger Vadim made many horrendously sexist, exploitative and thoroughly entertaining films throughout his career, including Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Don Juan and Blood and Roses, but it’s hard to ignore his mistreatment of his wives, baby mamas and live-in Lolitas, both on screen and off.

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