Alain Delon – Actor Superbe & Sacred Monster Turns 85. A Hommage

A man is born lonely, lives lonely, and dies lonely.

Alain Delon

Summer 2001- my good friend Cem comes to visit me and hang around, but I tell him that I have to pick up something important quickly and ask him to come with me. ‘Quickly’ meant to drag him to the end of the city with several buses for one and a half hour until I was holding the object of desire in my hands: a beautiful vintage book by Philippe Barbier with over 600 photos and film stills of Alain Delon that I picked up in a remote store selling antiques in the middle of nowhere. That Cem was homosexual saved me, so when he took a deep breath to lash out at me for wasting his time, he suddenly stopped and had a look at the book’s blue cover, „What a handsome bastard!“ and melted. On the bus drive back, we looked at each page and each photography together while passing by the rural lowlands with its hot shimmering air and the chirping of insects, above all the smell of tires. It was a wisely spent afternoon, an elaborate moment of memory-making, all sensually tied to my beloved Alain.

Other friends made other experiences: some of them would call or visit me and then discover that I was binge-watching Delon flicks whilst smoking on my bed. Others got mix-tapes with pictures of Delon that I cut out from magazines as cover. But I rarely talked about him, treasuring him like a twisted, delicate secret. It is very easy to revel in that Alain Delon is a beautiful man, and to disrespect his tremendous qualities as actor with that one-dimensional assessment. An actor and objet d’art like Delon deserves more than being the pinup of hordes of women, in one line with actor-models like the Brad Pitt’s of this world. Dignity is reciprocal, you should be careful to not take it away from somebody who does not ask for it. And if beauty is a breathing organism living from the personality treats of the inhabitor, then one has to take a deeper look at what makes the cruel beauty and complex grandezza of Delon.

A more male look at Delon seems more rewarding. My admiration for the French actor started with around ten years, when there were just two men in my life, my father and Elvis. The one not living in Memphis had a chest with two drawers packed with about one hundred self-recorded video tapes with handwritten labels on them which said “Old Gangster Film”, “Noir”, “Black and White Film”, “French Cop Film” or simply “Bronson” or “Delon”. Only he would understand the system of organization and alternate titles and know which films were on the single video cassettes, while my mother would fight over that small personal refuge of his, trying to annex it with her sewing and knitting kits with a mind-blowing persistence and impertinence.

Proud to say that my father’s drawer stood where it was until long after the end of VHS. I remember many afternoons watching these films with him in silence and without pedagogical follow-up conversations. We became the stoic men in those old black and white crime and noir films or Sergio Leone Westerns in sepia. One day it was a film called Le Samouraï that we watched. The film was an anomaly even within the most exquisite selections of the genre. Delon’s cold and unemotional delivery paralyzed me, and he looked like an uncomedic caricature in his fedora and trench coat. Immediately iconic. I was looking at a killer with dead blue eyes, watery like blotted paper, gracing the screen with his glacious presence and seemingly untouched by it all, but moved by an anonymous compassion. An ice-cold destructive angel in a dreamlike, somnambule state that blurred his beauty, making it tolerable. I was looking at a screen killer that had something disturbingly real about him. It was an intense viewing experience that would repeat itself years later when I watched Purple Noon for the first time.

Born on 8 November 1935, Delon had a rocky childhood with his parents divorcing when he was just four years old, “I understood early on what rupture, abandonment and loneliness meant… I was only 4 years old when I realized that you could be abandoned by those you love the most,” Delon resumed in 2018. His parents sent little Alain to a foster family which lived in front of the Fresnes high-security prison. After his foster parents got killed, he moved back to his biological mother Édith and visited a couple of boarding schools from which he was frequently expelled before quitting school at 15. He worked in his step-father’s butcher shop, which might have been the perfect preparation for him to join the marines with 17. Still a minor, his parents must give their consent and do not hesitate to send him to war. Delon served in Indochina and fought in the infamous Battle of Dien Bein Phu in 1954. Legends and myths about savagery, killings, and bisexual excesses surround his time in the military from which he was dishonorably discharged. His superior, Henri Guy de Vignac, said about Delon: “He was a sadist, a boy who enjoyed killing, a sexual pervert.”

One year after his discharge in 1956, he attended the Cannes Film Festival and got discovered there because of his good looks. Delon was offered several movie roles that were the onset to a career that started as a “French James Dean”, but quickly developed into a huge international career where he became a sex symbol and face of the nouvelle vague, performed for auteurs like Louis Malle or Luchino Visconti in some of the best films of all times (The Leopard), and acted in countless high-quality crime and neo noir films. When working the first time with the master of the genre, Jean Pierre Melville, Delon created his trademark character for his role in Le Samouraï (1967): the calm and psychopathic gangster with an austere wickedness. His mysterious past might have helped, „I played it so well because I was the Samouraï.“

Reality and cinema merged in Delon’s life, who was obsessed with weapons and loved to surround himself with figures from the underworld who were his friends long before he became an actor. Delon became one of the dazzling and tragic-comic advocates of the underworld, who, contrary to the glorifications of “honor, male friendship and loyalty”, expose it as a degenerate and homoerotic-sadistic den of iniquity.

Two years after Le Samouraï, Delon got involved in a massive scandal while filming the sizzling La Piscine (The Swimming Pool) with his ex Romy Schneider: his bodyguard and friend, Stefan Markovic, was found shot to death, his body left in a garbage dump. According to Wikipedia. Markovic was known for his orgiastic parties where he allegedly set up cameras in the bedrooms to blackmail the upper class guests with compromising photos, “Some of these photographs would be alleged to be directly targeting Delon and his gangster friend Marcantoni themselves. However, the most important photos that Marković supposedly possessed were scandalous shots of Pompidou’s wife. That was a major concern to Pompidou, who was preparing to run for president. On 1 October 1968, Marković’s body was found”. 

Markovic had also been hired by Delon to monitor his cheating wife Nathalie Delon. The surveillance ended with Nathalie seducing Markovic and playing tapes of her sexual encounters with him to her husband of world-star fame. But the entire sex, crime & corruption story had already started 3 years ago, on January 30, 1966, when another bodyguard of Delon, Milos Milosevic, died in the bathroom of actor Mickey Rooney from a bullet. Milos was the partner of Nathalie Barthélémy- later Nathalie Delon. Alain Delon, who was filming Texas Across The River in Hollywood, was a guest at Milos’ house in the Rooney mansion on the night of the murder. Both murder cases were never solved.

Delon came under investigation because of a letter written by Marković to his brother, saying that if any harm came to him, the police should get in touch with Delon and Marcantoni, implicating them to be „1000%“ guilty. Another reason were the never-ending rumors about Delon’s bisexuality and supposed compromising photos that showed him in homosexual acts. Asked by a reporter about his alleged affairs with men, Delon replied: „So what’s wrong if I had? Or I did? Would I be guilty of something? If I like it I’ll do it. If you like your goat, make love with your goat. But the only matter is to love.“ Statements and behaviour like this should be kept in mind when nowadays Delon is being labeled a homophobe because he objects on same-sex couples having children. Romy Schneider told her former co-star Karlheinz Böhm in 1960 that Delon was bisexual, that she had caught him in bed with a man and that she had tried to kill herself because of that.

Romy also tried to kill herself after Delon left her for Nathalie, ending an almost 5 year long feverish love story and engagement with the German actress with a bouquet of red roses and a note, “I’m in Mexico with Nathalie. All the best. Alain”. The actress Nathalie Barthélémy was already pregnant by Alain, half a year later she was his wife. Romy still kept Alain in high regards, remembering him as the man to whom she owes most: “The most important man in my life is and always will be Alain Delon. He is always there when I need a shoulder to cry on… even today Alain is the only man I can count on. He would always help me. Only Alain shaped me as a woman.” It was Delon who empowered his lover, the former actress of homeland-films like “Sissy”, to new levels and heights. He introduced her to the Parisian Bohème and brokered her an engagement with Luchino Visconti, helping her transform to a modern woman and serious actress that went on to work with directors like Claude Sautet and Orson Welles. Romy is the one woman we have to consider when Delon is accused of being a “sexist and bigoted anti-feminist” like in 2019, when Cannes decided to award an honorary Palme d’Or to the French actor, described by the festival’s website as “a sacred monster, a living legend, a planetary icon”.

The other woman we have to consider is Nico, the iconic supermodel, actress and musician, best known for her singing on Velvet Underground and Nico.  If the Delon-Schneider love was a glamorous and passionate Amour fou ending with tears and suicide attempts, his brief affair to German icon Nico was an “Amour Cruel”, a one-night stand with disproportionately tragic consequences. The two met in Ischia, where Delon was in the production of a movie in which Nico was supposed to play a part. Nico got pregnant after sleeping with Delon just once, and later was threatened by Delon’s underworld friends when she tried to contact the unborn baby’s father. Nico gave birth to their son Ari, and failed horribly as mother. The little child grew up at parties, drinking the leftover drinks of party guests every night, taking amphetamines at the age of 4 after confusing the pills with candy, spending the nights with strangers while his mother forgot him at parties. With 16, Ari started to share the heroin and syringe with his mother.

By now one should be able to guess that Delon’s punishment for an unwanted child would be most cruel and outlast the death of Nico: to this day (with 85 years) he denies paternity to Ari Boulogne, who looks very much like his famous father. Instead, father and son have the legal status of “half-brothers”: Overwhelmed by motherhood, Nico contacted Delon’s mother Èdith Boulogne, who recognized Ari Boulogne as her grandson and took him with her to raise him in France. She adopted Ari against the will of her son Alain, of whom she in 1984 said, “I think my son is as evil as I am good… When he does something stupid, then everybody has to pay for it… All of the people, important or not important to him, who come close to my son get damaged.”

When Nico got close to her son Alain, he was filming the brilliant and menacing Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), where he played the role of Patricia Highsmith’s sinister Tom Ripley, a con artist and parvenu taking over other people’s lives, a cultivated criminal and serial killer who manages to evade justice. Ripley feels regret but no guilt, since he doesn’t kill unless it’s “absolutely necessary”, and he is capable of feelings of genuine affection and love. Alain Delon might be described as „Tom Ripley if Tom Ripley had been real“. In the sense that he is a Ripley who did not have to envy and strive for other’s lives, but had a great, full life of his own, albeit only complete with the void left by a damaged and loveless childhood. It was a life that granted Delon love and passion and a most successful career where he could channel some of the evil and wicked aspects of his personality in his stellar performances on screen- some of them.

by Saliha Enzenauer