Brigitte Bardot was pregnant and said her belly button was about to pop out.  She feared it would rise outwards like the lid of a spider's trap door. She said she had no feeling for the child's father whom she had not married, nor did she love. She was divorced from the young director, Roger Vadim, who was soon to marry Jane Fonda, a situation I had no way of guessing while close to Jane.

  What Bardot wanted to know from me was that if James Dean had been a girl, would he have had an abortion, pursued his career, or would he have had the baby and married its father? We were in a hallway on the top floor of a building somewhere off the Rue de la Paix, not far from the Opera and sitting on some steep iron steps that led to the roof. Filling the hallway were the voices and sounds of the party down the hall. Brigitte told me she could not talk in the crowded room, but what she had to say to me was a "matter of life and death."   She was at the party with another woman who wore a fedora-style hat and long suede jacket. As Bardot led me out of the main room, she told the woman to "stand in" for her and "chatter like a parrot." It took several minutes to get into the hall because people kept stopping Bardot, effusively talking to her and reaching for her hands. She seemed to carry her lovely face in a fixed, glowing smile, and kept introducing me as "Jonathan, the close friend of the dead". She meant James Dean.

                                                                                                    (full color version)
  I was intensely aware of her and she kept smiling and playing me like a yo-yo. She was in black, except for some sort of cotton trousers or jodhpurs she wore beneath a big baggy black skirt. There was something so incredibly perfect about her, like a religious vessel. I quickly got the notion that her pregnancy, and especially the marriage to the young French actor she had no feelings for, was most unsettling to Bardot at that point in her life, a perplexing interference with her career. I could see something in her from the moment I was introduced to her as the "American who was friends with James Dean," that there was this thing about her spirit, it kept showing as if threaded through pieces of what she'd say. She was not only the bouncing, saucy, international sexpot showed on the screen as a covering for a lack of feeling for humanity in general. She said she experienced empathy for animals, "for the littlest dog on the street," because it carried in its spirit an "unpoisoned pureness," that she could spontaneously relate to.  Bardot ... the animal. That's where it came from.

  When I told her, "I believe man is the only true disease in nature," she lit up and said I knew exactly what she was talking about. She said, "It is the same thing that James Dean understood inside of his person that could never be observed through the roles he played..." So, she asked, taking my hand and squeezing it, would "Jimmy" go ahead and have the baby, marrying the person or would he place his professional or personal needs above the customary sense of morality?

  I was afraid to answer her question as honestly as I felt, because she seemed so vulnerable in her sincerity, yet trying to appear more philosophical than she actually could. Those eyes hid nothing of what she felt or the electricity of the attraction we shared was like an arc flashing between two poles -- buzzing at moments like the shocks of a current. Little did I know right then that I'd be facing the same question myself a couple of years later with the Hungarian freedom fighter I'd eventually marry, and I'd then understand Bardot far greater in retrospect.

  She was divorced from Vadim, and said now the pregnancy represented a change that takes one to a different plateau, no longer just a matter of deliberating which part to play or not to play, or who to know or not to know. She knew in her heart that she did not want to make the change.

  If Jimmy'd been a girl, I said, it would've depended on the importance of the unborn's father in his immediate life, somehow the link between the two being the child. I could maybe see Jimmy bypassing a movie to have the baby, but I couldn't, in all honesty, see a long-term tie-in with parenthood. Personally being the product of a broken home, I told Bardot, I had survived and with either one parent or the other, I'd been granted a life that I now led as I decided.

  I offered her two convincing, yet opposing sides. Jimmy might have dumped the fetus in a second the first chance he got, possibly even as another flipping of a "fuck you" in their faces. But I said I thought he would've weighed it gently and carefully, and for Jimmy the child would've represented the same pureness Bardot said she understood in animals.

  The "poisoning" was not something God-given to the creature, but layered into it's being by convention, by the step-by-step initiation of the innocent's assault on truth, as Franz Kafka put it, and certainly George Orwell, the imperceptible and gradual destruction of one's ability to recognize what was false.

  "Oui!" Bardot said. "Yes, yes." I'd struck a chord and she leaned forward from the step above to kiss me on the mouth. Her lips seemed to have some searching, independent life of their own, a thankful kiss at first, comradely, even appreciative, but in a moment the two mouths touching, moving over one another, became something else. Our eyes But in a few seconds she was up and hurrying down the stairs back to the party, pulling me by the hand,

  A few days later I had a conversation about Bardot with Françoise Sagan. I told her I'd talked to Bardot about Dean, though I did not divulge what we'd shared. Sagan said Brigitte had suddenly decided to marry the young actor, Jacques, and that they'd have the baby, though Sagan believed it was much to Bardot's inner dissatisfaction. She predicted Bardot would become extinct. "She will be alive," the writer said, "but this person she is will become extinct as things change around us."

Bardot Scrapbook

Excerpts from Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip