‘I left all the sexual stuff to Monroe’
Leslie Caron still possesses allure that enticed Warren Beatty
She is dressed stylishly and is still instantly recognizable, perhaps thanks to a couple of facelifts she has had over the years — Leslie Caron, 84, is very open about these things, as she is about her past struggles with anorexia, and her tumultuous affair with Warren Beatty in the Sixties.
An American in Paris, a musical she made in 1951 with Gene Kelly, had been a huge box-office hit, and so Arthur Freed, an MGM producer, not only agreed with her suggestion to make a film of Gigi, the novelist Colette’s story of a Parisian courtesan, but also immediately set about securing the rights and commissioning a screenplay. “He told me it was going to take a year so I asked permission of the studio (you had to in those days), to have a holiday in France. While I was there, an English producer asked if there was a play I’d like to do in London so I suggested I could play Gigi. I thought it would be a good way to warm up for the film.”
Again the producer agreed, and — another reflection of her star power at the time — asked her who she would like to direct it. “I asked my New York agent who asked another of his clients, Tennessee Williams, and he suggested a bright young English director called Peter Hall. So I thought if this Peter Hall is good enough for Tennessee he’s good enough for me. So that was how Peter came to direct Gigi and how we fell very much in love. The attraction between us was magnetic and we got married and had two children ...”
When Caron’s marriage was no longer working she ended it. “Peter did not want me to carry on working and I couldn’t see my future making the flower arrangements.”
I ask her what it was like being seen as the definitive French beauty in Hollywood at the time. “I downplayed all that, downplayed anything overtly sexual. I wasn’t vying for that and I left it to the busty blond girls like Monroe. I played the demure brunette.”
Warren Beatty was cited as a corespondent in her divorce from Peter Hall and was even made to pay costs.
“We were a Hollywood It couple, but I found it very difficult and tiring. It wasn’t me. I’m not made for that level of public scrutiny. Warren enjoyed it. He found it essential for his image. He created the hullabaloo. When things quietened down he would stir them up again.”
What was his secret with women? “He would woo a woman until finally she would say ‘OK, OK.’ He seduced me through persistence and charm. It helped that he was very handsome and amusing too. He was wonderful company. He appreciated women and would try it on with every up-and-coming Hollywood actress he saw.”
Caron married three times. In her autobiography, which she published in 2009, she admitted to depression following her divorce from her last husband and an unhappy period during the Eighties and Nineties when she starred in bad television dramas, battled alcoholism and drove herself halfmad trying to convert a ruin outside Paris into an auberge.
But she insists those problems are “totally” behind her. The memoir also tells the story of her “discovery” by Gene Kelly in 1951, when she was dancing on the Paris stage. She went on to dance not only with him but also Fred Astaire, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
So, crass question, but who was the greatest? “No one moved like Fred. He had a beautiful, fluid way of moving, even when he was walking to the shops. He had a swing and elegance. Even the way he would put his hand in his pocket was beautiful.”
And Gene Kelly? “I didn’t know anything about him. When I arrived in Hollywood, aged 18, I hadn’t seen any of his films so he showed me a two-hour montage of all his numbers. I said ‘That looks fun’, and he was on me like a ton of bricks. ‘Fun? Fun? You call that fun, it was bloody hard work.’ I guess I didn’t say the right thing. I think he preferred being the producer and director. Fred simply enjoyed the dancing.”
We were a Hollywood It couple, but I found it very difficult and tiring. It wasn’t me.