Making the Most of Love

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The passenger on the Air France flight from Paris to Mexico City whose bags were 260 Ibs. overweight was, of course, a movie star. Because of her, flowers were waiting at the airport, and so was the press. Floodlights were turned on to make a patch of noon on the dark runway, and the photographers stood poised at its fringes, squinting up into the light as the first tourists filed off the plane. Then she appeared in the welcoming glare--and nobody took her picture. An awkward moment. She smiled and started down the ramp. "There she is!" cried the producer of the film she had come to make. "That's Jeanne Moreau!"

The tired, startled eyes smiled out from all the papers the next morning, decorating stories that explained that Jeanne Moreau was the other girl in Viva Maria!, the movie that had brought Brigitte Bardot to Mexico five days earlier. Brigitte's arrival had been the real wild-eyed thing--riot police with tear-gas pistols, screams, a fight, grown men fainting. But Moreau is not the kind of actress who requires a motorcycle escort. Indeed, she hardly looks like an actress at all--too small, too thin, too true. "Beautiful?" she says. "Of course not. That's the whole point about me, isn't it?"

The Lingering Look. Perhaps it is, but Marcello Mastroianni falls into a Neapolitan reverie at the very mention of her name (". . . her childish, pouty lips, that slightly devastated look, her tiny, Japanese hands . . ."), and film directors all over the world have to struggle to praise her enough. "She can be elemental or elegant, warm or astringent--in fact, anything she chooses," says Orson Welles. England's Tony Richardson calls her "more informed, committed and passionate" than any actress he knows: "She is totally involved in the seriousness and importance of movies as distinct from the money and glamour." India's Satyajit Ray (the Apu trilogy) and Hollywood's Carl Foreman (The Victors) both say she is peerless in films today. And Franc,ois Truffaut, whose Jules and Jim caught much of her chameleonic range, says: "She has all the qualities one expects in a woman, plus all those one expects in a man--without the inconveniences of either."

Moreau, in a word, is it. There is no actress in Hollywood or Europe who can match the depth and breadth of her art. There is no personality in films so able to withstand the long, lingering look of the modern movie camera, no one whose simple presence on the screen evokes such a variety of moods. Her love scenes are among the most intense ever filmed, her suffering agonizingly acute. She is an actress of infinite complexity and conviction, and the only thing wrong with calling her the modern Garbo is that she is so much better an actress than Garbo ever was.

Imperfections & Cares. With 40 films and a brilliant career on the Paris stage already behind her, Moreau has been La Moreau to the French for years. But up until very recently, her American audience ran to cinemaphiles and espresso drinkers--the crowd that goes to Yugoslav film festivals, the people who liked 8 1/2. Her great films--The Lovers, La Notte, Jules and Jim--played mostly in art houses, and some of her films found no U.S. distributor at all. Now, in a turn of taste that is as encouraging as it is surprising, Moreau is everywhere: opposite Burt Lancaster in The Train, Eli Wallach in The Victors, Rex Harrison in The Yellow Rolls-Royce. None of these pictures are really much good--Moreau seems to have wandered in from other, much better movies; but she is splendid in all of them, and her name is spelled out in neon on the biggest and best marquees.

Despite such success, Moreau can still go unnoticed in a crowd: her forlorn, equivocal beauty is not to be seen at a glance. At 37, she looks younger than she did at 30, but at 30 she was older than winter. Her lips point down in an inverted smile, her teeth end in saws like a child's, the color of her hair is indistinctly reddish-blondish-brown. Her eyes can be hopeful and occasionally serene, but they kindle smaller fires in the imagination than do the dark circles under them. There is desperation in her mouth, especially when she smiles, always when she laughs. Her face is an album of experience and disappointment, and its imperfections and cares are the signature of her humanity. She may look like any woman, but she is every woman.

Moreau's face proves that beauty need not be fair. In every Moreau film, the unforgettable moment is when the camera draws in close and fixes its attention squarely upon her. It is then that her beauty is evident--as in the sight of her quiet ecstasy in The Lovers, or the crucial, almost unbearable sequence in Le Dialogue des Carmelites when tears spill down from her staring eyes. Jules and Jim showed her in librarian's glasses, wearing a charcoal mustache, smoking an Italian cigar --yet it was still perfectly conceivable that the boys fell in love with her because she looked so much like a statue they saw in Greece. Moreau's beauty is full of change and is totally charismatic. It is the particular kind of beauty that Goethe described in writing of nature: "To each man she appears as befits him alone. She cloaks herself under a thousand names, and is always the same."

Wine in the Morning. In Moreau's own eyes, her life is no more real in fact than in fantasy. "How annoyed I get to hear people speak of 'the profession of acting,' " she says. "The only thing worse is when they say, 'You're a real pro.' Acting is not a profession at all; it's a way of living--one completes the other. What an actor needs is a sense of involvement, an unconscious familiarity with his role, nothing more than that. There's no point in pursuing the character's real-life experience. It's absurd to think you can truly enter it for a tame little week, anyhow. I never study my role at all before the camera starts turning and then pffft! --it begins."

The intensity of Moreau's encounters with the characters she plays is not entirely an act of will. She may begin by interpreting them, but she winds up substituting herself for them, and in the end their adventures are quite literally her own. Is it she who becomes the character, or the character who emerges from the script to become her? --she does not know. But she cannot bear to see most of the films she has made; they force upon her too dramatic a confrontation with her own past. "The love, suffering and happiness I experience in life appear in my movies," she says. "When I see a film after I've made it, I see myself, I see my own life before me."

End as a Convalescent. Moreau's friends have observed her internal changeover time and again, and they have long since grown used to thinking of her in terms of what movie she's in. But the depth of the transformation amazes them, and they are always genuinely relieved to see her come out the other side, once the movie is made. "The drama of her life is that there is no difference between her acting and her private life," says Producer Raoul Levy, uneasily recalling that during the shooting of Moderato Cantabile in 1960, she started drinking wine in the morning, duplicating the troubling habit of the suicidal character she played. Says her friend Marguerite Duras, who wrote Moderato: "She emerges from her films a convalescent, both physically and morally."

Sometimes, as with La Notte, a study of conjugal boredom, the identity of art and artist chills Moreau's soul. She disagreed with the film's black point of view, hated making it, and still refuses to sympathize with the spiritually anesthetized character she played. Yet there was something of her in every tremor of the composed, presentable grief that La Notte mercilessly dissected, and four years afterward it can still make her shudder. "There are people like that poor woman, of course," she says, "but that is not what love is like. Not for me, at least. Not for me."

Necessary Mystery. Still, Moreau makes no effort at all to find parts that express so much as her passing mood, let alone anything substantial of her own life. She far prefers that other people choose her roles for her; to make the choice herself, she thinks, would invite a fatal struggle with her vanity. "If I get concerned with what kind of part I would like to play," she says, "I would then start to wonder what roles would be good for me, good for my career, pleasing to the public. Life does not invite this choice, and neither should films."

Her only question when she is offered a new part in a film is who the director will be, and the answer has to be right. "The actor must be totally at the director's disposal--that is the art of acting," she says, "and for that, one must have a complete, unquestioning rapport. In every role there are situations and attitudes in which I can imagine myself. The rest is a mystery, and I must preserve the mystery. It is the director's mystery, for him to unravel."

A Small Universe. Moreau's need for such a deep understanding with her directors often leads to her falling in love with them--and they with her--at least for the run of the show. "Making movies is very directly related to love," she believes. "That's the secret of it. It's like life aboard ship, but each day is a new emergency. It's like living with the air-raid sirens on for months at a time. Each person is undergoing an intense private experience without the consolation of privacy--he is part of a very excited crowd, yet he is alone.

"I create a small universe to live within," she says. "It's absolutely necessary. I go toward someone and build a relationship that helps explain my role. The urgency of the atmosphere makes everyone very familiar with each other, and familiarity of course leads to what might be called promiscuity. So much the better. I've made friends in films in a matter of days whom I would gladly devote a lifetime to knowing. It's a gift to lead this life at times."

Between films, Moreau lives very quietly within her circle of friends--Novelist Marguerite Duras, Director Franc,ois Truffaut, Actor Jean-Claude Brialy, Florence Malraux, daughter of the French Cultural Minister, a few others. She is almost never seen in a nightclub, only rarely at Paris parties. Instead she retreats to the country house she bought last March in the wooded hills above the Riviera, a secluded, rustic mansion which she has artfully converted into a kind of sanitarium for all that ails her and her friends. She cooks with imagination and flourish, inspects the yield of her chestnut trees, walks in her woods with her German shepherd dog. "I have begun to find serenity in the last few years," she says. "My life used to be in very poor balance."

Soldiers on the Stairs. Recalling her life often brings Moreau to the point of tears, and sometimes she cries. "All the bad ideas I have about marriage, I got from my family," she says. Her father, Anatole, was the rakish owner of a Montmartre restaurant called La Cloche d'Or, popular in the '20s with the show-business crowd. Her mother, an English dancer named Kathleen Buckley, had come to Paris at the age of 17 to dance with the Tiller Girls at the Folies-Bergere. She met Anatole at the restaurant, and they were married when she was 20. The Moreau family, descended from a long line of farmers, never quite welcomed her into the fold. Jeanne was born in Paris in 1928, and a few years later the family moved south to Vichy, spending vacations at the ancestral village of Mazirat, a town of 30 houses in a valley in the Allier. "It was wonderful there," Jeanne says. "Every tombstone in the cemetery was for a Moreau."

Jeanne's parents became a divided family. First the war separated them. Her father was in the south of France; her mother, as an enemy alien, was obliged to stay in Paris to register daily with the police. During the occupation, the family moved into a Paris apartment above a brothel; when Jeanne ran down to the street, she would hurry past a long queue of waiting German soldiers. "I was happy enough," Jeanne says, "but I was a miserable brat. I wouldn't eat unless my mother danced for me and the poor woman had to dance and dance. The Moreaus were all ashamed that Anatole had married a dancer. Perhaps that's why I insisted upon it." Her best friend had died when she was twelve, and she retreated into a world of books. "I read many books far too soon," she says. "They made me sick with terror and fascination. I read Zola when I was 13."

Debut at 20. Jeanne was a good student until she was 16, but then she lost interest in school. Her father had forbidden her to go to the theater, but the theater was all that her friends talked about. One day she lied her way out of the house, went off to see Jean Anouilh's Antigone. "It had a tremendous effect on me," she recalls. "It was the first time I had ever seen actors, ever seen a real play, and I was overwhelmed." Jeanne eventually confided her fascination to her mother, who complained to a neighbor: "I have a problem with my daughter. She wants to become an actress." The neighbor, an actor himself, prescribed a drama teacher, who carefully prepared her for an audition at the Conservatoire National d'Art Dramatique. She was accepted without hesitation. A year later she made her debut at the Comedie Franc,aise in Turgenev's A Month in the Country.

Moreau looks back on her first desire to act as a child's wish to escape her own identity--"I was tired of being myself. I wanted to be someone else." Her parents had separated while she was at the Conservatoire, and her mother, after 24 difficult years in France, had returned to England with Jeanne's sister, Michelle. The separation tugged Jeanne in opposite directions, as indeed it still does: though she sympathizes with her mother, she is her father's child. The only English trait Moreau admits to is a thirst for tea with milk and sugar --as many as a dozen cups a day. "If I am ever killed," she says, "the police will find nothing but my identity papers and a small pool of tea."

One for Two Roles. In 1949, Jeanne married her lover, a young actor from the Theatre National Populaire named Jean-Louis Richard, and the day after their wedding, their son, Jerome, was born. "I didn't want to marry," she says, "but everyone told me it wasn't fair not to give my child a name. I was concerned only that he should look like his father, and when he was born, at 6 in the morning, he did. But then he changed and looked like all other babies." Before Jerome was a year old, the marriage began to dissolve. "I was lost," Jeanne says, "alone with a husband and son, neither of whom needed me." Richard left after two years, but they were divorced only a year ago, discreetly and "without any bitterness," and they have remained close friends.

Jeanne left the Comedie Franc,aise in 1952. "Everyone thought I was mad to leave," she recalls, "but it had become a prison for me. I was disgusted by the immorality of the Comedie. Everyone had been very sweet to me because I was the youngest one there, but the situation there was terrible. The established actors would take roles they didn't want just to keep others from having them." For a year she played at the prestigious Theatre National Populaire, where her roles placed her opposite such celebrated actors as Gerard Philipe and Robert Hirsch. Then, on Philipe's advice, she took a role in a boulevard production of The Dazzling Hour. On her second night, the show's star fell ill and Jeanne was asked to play her role. Jeanne learned the new part overnight, and the next evening, since the two characters were never onstage at the same moment, she appeared in both roles, alternating between "an honest woman who feels like a street walker and a streetwalker who feels like an honest woman." It was a tour de force, and Paris discovered her.

Moreau stayed in The Dazzling Hour for two years, then moved on to other shows--Cocteau's La Machine Infernale (in which she appeared with her hair dusted with silver powder, her hands in clawed gloves, and her body covered with a flesh-colored net) and, for two years, Shaw's Pygmalion. She had already begun taking parts in small films, shooting all day, then racing to the theater for the show at night. The word was that Moreau was completely unphotogenic--the nose and ears too small, the mouth too thick, the body nothing special. By the time Director Louis Malle saw her in the Paris stage production of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and asked her to star in his first film, Moreau had 20 forgettable films behind her. "Nine years of bad films--it was a cinematic adolescence," she says. "I never felt at ease on the screen because I was aware that I was far from beautiful. People who wanted to be nice about my looks would say, 'You remind me so much of Bette Davis.' Very nice, except I can't stand Bette Davis."

The Ultimate. In L'Ascenseur pour I'Echafaud (U.S. title: Frantic], Malle put Moreau under an honest light and wisely let his camera linger. The film was nothing special, but it did accomplish one thing: it proposed a new ideal of cinematic realism, a new way to look at a woman. All the drama in the story was in Moreau's face--the face that had been hidden behind cosmetics and flattering lights in all her earlier films. When Malle made The Lovers the following year, it was obvious who his woman would be. For one thing, he had discovered her, and for another, they were in love.

The Lovers' scenario might have been the banal tale of any tryst set to a Brahms sextet. A provincial housewife grows bored with her lot, takes a pointless, guarded fling at the pleasures of Paris, meets an appealing man and abandons herself to him. Malle decided to be both mystic and realistic, to try to film both the passion and the poetry of love. The resulting sequence is by now duly celebrated in the annals of film. It follows the lovers from bedroom to bath tub and back to bed again, missing very little, zeroing in on Moreau's face at her ultimate moment of rapture. Jean-Marc Bory, who played the lover, was scarcely revealed as a character, let alone a lover. But Moreau emerged as the consummate woman. When The Lovers won a prize at the Venice Festival, Moreau became celebrated as the Brave New Woman, the "Jeanne d'Arc of the boudoir." But it was the end of the affair with Malle.

New Wave, New World. As an actress, Moreau enjoyed her first moment of triumph, but she was miserable over the loss of Malle. She moved from her old apartment in the Latin Quarter to a house in Versailles, and took stock. She was 30 years old, and what did she have? Offers of films. A pen for signing autographs. An occasional friend. It was a bleak time and she considered giving up films altogether. But her life was fully committed to the rhythm and whirl of moviemaking. And if she wasn't an actress, after all, she was very little else. She brooded over her situation for ten months, and then she met Franc,ois Truffaut.

At the time, Truffaut was the sternest critic on Cahiers du Cinema, the trumpet and bible of the New Wave, and he introduced Moreau to the company of serious filmmakers and intellectuals that has been her real world ever since. "I found myself among people I understood better," she recalls, "people I wanted to know, people I admired. The cinema began to mean something to me beyond simply being an actress." Moreau went back to work with a passion, and in two years she made four films, among them three of her best: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Le Dialogue des Carmelites, and Moderato Cantabile.

During the shooting of Moderat, her son Jerome came to visit her on location in the Charente. He was riding in a car driven by Jean-Paul Belmondo, her costar, when the car ran off the road; Belmondo broke a wrist, but Jerome suffered a severe concussion. He was in a coma for 14 days, during which time Jeanne left his side only to console the guilt-stricken Belmondo. "I was unaware she had such strength," said a friend.

Favors for Lovers. Jerome finally made a full recovery and is now at a boarding school near Grenoble. But his long ordeal was in some ways his mother's salvation: having witnessed life gravely threatened, she learned to value it more. Accordingly, she blossomed with new interests and enthusiasms. She has become a singer of some note in France, with two albums of songs already recorded and plans for a third. She spends her money in avalanches of generosity--presents for all her friends, a farm for her father back in Mazirat. She earnestly studies her horoscope, reads books with a passion, even mixes her own perfume.*

Moreau is a sensualist surrounded by intellectuals, but lately she has begun to sound like a sage. "I just started talking a short time ago," she says earnestly. "Before that I listened--it was my period of silence." The search for love continues, but it no longer totally dominates her. Moreau has always been greatly influenced by the man in her life; she aims to please, and her style and interests shift according to the taste of her friends. "I learn well from men," she admits. "Wouldn't my life be ridiculous if I didn't?"

"Jeanne is the reconciliation of the romantic and the modern," says Duras. "In love, she subordinates herself entirely to men; yet she holds her life and her career in her own hands. Professionally she is quite alone." This is not to say that her career doesn't depend on love: to be happy, to work, she still needs romance. "Many people fall in love with her," says Mastroianni. "I did. And she loves you in return. But just till the end of the film. She is always searching for love. And she leaves victims along the roadside."

But not many--and are they really victims? Most of the men Moreau has loved retain a place in her affections. "I would like to have a really big house," she says, dreaming like a child, "where I could live with a man I loved, and where there'd be enough space for every man I'd ever loved in the past to have a room to himself, and we'd all live there together."

A droll idea, but she does spend much of her time working with past lovers and old friends. She took parts in Orson Welles's The Trial and his forthcoming film about Falstaff out of simple admiration for Welles. She just finished making Mata Hari for her ex-husband and is making Viva Maria! for Malle, who couldn't get the production financed without her name on the contract. The present man in her life is Paris Couturier Pierre Cardin, and she dresses almost exclusively in clothes from his salon; they're lovely clothes, of course, but as a mannequin, she's worth millions.

Inviting as it is, Moreau's view of love has not made her happy; there is, as the observant Mastroianni notes, "an emptiness in her," and her acting reveals the urgency of her attempt to fill it. "If I weren't an actress," she says, "I would have been a hysteric." Only once has she performed in a film she couldn't bring herself to care about --Martin Ritt's disgraceful Five Branded Women, which she made one year when she fell behind in her income tax. In all the others, no matter how inconsequential some of them have been, Moreau has been totally engaged.

As a result, Moreau is commonly the only excuse for the movies she's in. Bay of Angels is flimsy and false, but Moreau's portrayal of a bleached and battered chippy whose universe is the gambling casino is an essay on compulsion. Banana Peel has all the makings of a conventional comedy-thriller, but Moreau and Belmondo turned their trifling roles into a virtuoso embroidery of refined comic techniques.

"Don't Search." Moreau's film acting is mainly visual: what she says always tells less than what she does. In the small dimension of the modern film, with its total emphasis on interior values, a subtle vocabulary of gesture and expression is crucial to any good actor. What makes Moreau uniquely convincing is how little she does to accomplish so much: she smiles warmly at the husband she is about to betray--but haven't her eyes changed focus? She obediently lends herself to her master's fetishes in Luis Bunuel's Diary of a Chambermaid, but the chill hints of resignation that cross her face prove a heart full of nausea and disdain. "You don't have to act in front of a camera," she says. "You just have to be concerned."

Still, she was trained in the classic tradition of the French theater, with its insistence that the whole gamut of roles, from Moliere to Montherlant, be mastered, and that the thousand niceties of acting, from beau geste to rhetorique, become ingrained. She has no patience with actors whose concern exceeds their craft: "Burt Lancaster! Before he can pick up an ashtray, he discusses his motivation for an hour or two. You want to say just pick up the ashtray and shut up."

Having mastered her own craft, Moreau now prefers to become engaged with her films without dwelling much on their significance. "One should never search for meaning in a script," she says. "When the work is over, the meaning comes out by itself." With her maquilleuse, Simone Knapp, she studies her script for makeup, hairdos and costume changes; the two of them have worked together so long that they can plan a whole film in 45 minutes. Then she reads over her lines to get the drift of things and puts her script aside until the shooting starts. The wait invariably makes her nervous. "When I was young," she says, "I was always sure of everything I did. I was sure the audience would love me, and I had to be dragged away from a stage. Now I know more, and sometimes I have awful periods of stage fright."

Burlesque Boxing. Moreau's constant fear is that "the inside will be stronger than the outside," that she will not be capable of physically expressing her approach to the character she will play. She broods over the character she is about to become, and as the metamorphosis begins, she often comes up with ideas and feelings that far exceed the ambitions of the film.

Thus with Viva Maria!, which aims at being little more than a fancifully photographed tale of two turn-of-the-century dance-hall girls who cheer up a Latin American revolution, Moreau saw a chance of expressing one of her firmest beliefs. "Films have never shown the kind of relationship that can exist between two women," she says. "Men like to think that women must be constantly jealous of each other, never trusting, never in rapport. That is not true, of course, certainly not today. This film could show that."

Since Malle conceives of his movie as a sort of burlesque boxing match--sexpot v. seductress--Moreau's attempt at philosophic rapport with Brigitte may not emerge on film. The one thing the two girls have in common, after all, is what all girls have in common--only in blinding, polar extremes. But Moreau begins drawing inward before her films begin shooting, and she did not concern herself with a possible collision of ideas. Instead, she settled into the palatial hacienda she had rented in the foothills above Cuernavaca, passing most of her time alone with Simone and Anna Pradella, her cook--two of her oldest friends. She shopped for flowers and fish and kept all her appointments, and when she swam in her cold azure pool, she swam like a boy, letting her hair trail back in the water. When the time came for work, she was ready.

Tribute of Silence. The cast and crew moved out to the badlands town of Texcoco, 25 miles from Mexico City. Because movies are made backward and inside out, the first scene shot was a eulogy after the death of the hero, Flores, played by George Hamilton. George, a 25-year-old Hollywood actor, is so absurdly good-looking, so sublimely innocent, that the very sight of him in Moreau's umber company induces a grin. Yet the script calls for him to win her heart in Spanish-accented French. Since he speaks neither language, he was working without a net, but he was dead in the first scene anyway, so there was no problem.

Moreau stood by on a balcony above a dusty square, hands on swaying hips, waiting for Malle to get the extras ready. An assistant chased a dozen hens into camera range, and another doused two sweltering pigs with cold water. Finally Malle was ready. "Silencio! On tourne! Moteur!" The camera began to roll, and the clapboard slapped. The crowd of onlookers fixed their attention on Moreau, paying her the tribute of utter silence. She walked to the balcony rail and turned to watch gravely as Hamilton's limp body was carried down the steps and into the square. And then she turned to face the camera, and in a throaty, broken voice, she began her 41st film: "Flores est mort."

*A blend of Guerlain essences: vetiver, jasmine, rose and heliotrope.

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