Last of the Italian playboys known for squiring glamorous women in the 1960s
Beppe Piroddi, who has died aged 82, objected to being termed a playboy. Playboys were mere collectors, purchasers of affection. He preferred to call himself an ‘‘amateur’’. The amateur sought only pleasure, concerned not with what his money could buy him but with the quality of what he desired. It was not perhaps a coincidence, however, that ‘‘amateur’’ derives from the Latin for ‘‘to love’’.
For in the mind of the Italian public, Piroddi was best known for the string of glamorous women he squired in sunny locales in the 1960s. He and a trio of friends were dubbed the ‘‘four musketeers’’, or ‘‘les Italiens’’.
Piroddi later recalled a conversation in
Saint-tropez with
Gunter Sachs, the
Opel cars heir and former husband of
Brigitte Bardot.
Sachs had courted the star by dropping hundreds of roses on her villa from his helicopter. He asked Piroddi how it was that he, not being rich, had so much success with the ladies. ‘‘By treating them well,’’ came the reply. ‘‘But you never get your wallet out!’’ said Sachs, contemptuously. ‘‘Exactly!’’ riposted Piroddi.
It may then have been his charm rather than his looks that were Piroddi’s entree to a world at once sophisticated and yet carefree, before the advent of petrodollars and roubles, and of hard drugs.
Shirt open to the waist and medallion glinting, he mingled with the likes of
Christina Onassis, Omar Sharif, Jane Fonda and Roman Polanski in the clubs and resorts of Capri and the Cote d’azur. He introduced Princess Caroline of Monaco to her husband Stefano Casiraghi, and took a road trip across California with Vittorio Emanuele, the only son of King Umberto II of Italy. When their car broke down, it was the man who would not be king who had to get his hands dirty.
Giuseppe Piroddi was born in Genoa. His father, Lorenzo, was a doctor credited with popularising the Mediterranean diet. Although he did not become very wealthy, his renown enabled him to open two clinics. Beppe and his sister Mirella grew up between Genoa and Ghiffa, on the shores of Lake Maggiore. Beppe did not go to university, nor seek work, but soon evolved the method that would enable him to live for the next few decades.
Packing a case with a smart change of clothes, he would head for Monte Carlo. Once he had won enough at the tables he would head for a summer playground or return to Genoa. There he paid his attentions to the bored wives of businessmen, often a different one each afternoon of the week.
He was launched on the jet set after a chance encounter in 1963 with Odile Rodin, last wife of playboy-in-chief Porfirio Rubirosa, at a nightclub in Turin. The pair ran off to
New York for three days. On one of them, Rodin vanished. She later claimed to have spent it entertaining President Kennedy.
After Rubirosa died in a car crash, his widow kept a castle outside Paris, where she and Piroddi hosted the likes of J Paul Getty and Jackie Kennedy. Piroddi remembered the latter as being emotionally cold, observing only that the cheese was marvellous.
By 1966 he was with the actor Jacqueline Bisset – ‘‘sweet like the French, unpredictable like the English,’’ he thought – but she soon tired of his predictable ways. The rest of the decade passed in a haze of Cointreau, drunk with the likes of French rock singer Johnny Hallyday. In 1968 one of the ‘‘musketeers’’, Gigi Rizzi, with whom Piroddi maintained a form of rivalry, sprang to fame when he spent the summer as Bardot’s lover.
His and Piroddi’s relationship never recovered after Piroddi described Bardot in his memoirs as a ‘‘housewife’’, with a housewife’s taste in men. Before that, however, Piroddi and Rizzi opened the first discotheque in Milan, Number One. This prospered in the early 1970s, for Piroddi could put in a shift when so minded, and they opened other clubs both in Italy and abroad.
The mafia, however, began to put the squeeze on them. Piroddi turned to Alain Delon for advice. The actor told him where to buy a gun and said that, when the gangsters came for their payoff, Piroddi should fire a few shots at the floor to show them who was boss. In the end, the discovery by the authorities of cocaine in the bathrooms of their clubs, and of a bomb planted in one of them, led the pair to close their ventures.
Rizzi fled to South America, where he became a drug addict for a time. The other musketeers met similarly melancholy fates. Franco Rapetti fell to his death from a window in New York. Rodolfo Parisi was decapitated by a London bus after he looked the wrong way crossing the road.
For several decades Piroddi had a relationship with American actress Kirsten Gille, but he was never the marrying kind. Some years ago he acknowledged a son, Roberto. He published a memoir, L’amateur, in 2007.
Although he continued partying into the era of Claudia Schiffer, he lived in muchreduced circumstances and was demoralised by having to explain to a younger generation of pretty girls who he had once been. Nonetheless, age had its consolations. ‘‘If earlier I looked at women through the lens of libido,’’ he concluded, ‘‘now I watch them through that of wisdom.’’ –