One afternoon I ran into Schwab's drugstore to make a call and saw Jean Seberg at the counter. I told her we hadn't met, but that I'd thought we'd been set to do a picture in Paris. She said she knew I'd been in Paris -- Françoise Sagan had told her -- and Jean was very sorry I'd had to "experience the problems with that project." She said, "It was doomed from the start, and I was advised not to get involved. The producer actually went around telling everybody I'd signed to do the darned thing, while he was trying to finagle more money, I'm sure." She said she liked Brian Russell. He had seemed a sincere fellow, though sort of "ridden under" by the producer. I'd never met Tiedman, I told her, and she said he was a dreadful little man who wore crepe-soled shoes and a serge suit, and who'd "probably sell his mother's heart for a blue-plate special."

Jean was very frank and outgoing, cheerful and even funny. Her hair was still as short as Joan of Arc's, and she wore a small gold identification bracelet. She was eating one half of a tuna sandwich and said if I was hungry I could have the other half. "It's awful to waste good food," she said. "I can't order half a sandwich, and it always makes me feel so guilty, or wasteful -- one of the two, I don't know which it is ... maybe both wasteful and guilty ..." We talked about Josh Logan and Paris, and about There Was a Little Girl.  I knew Jane Fonda was up for the role, though Jean had initially been involved, and they now wanted me for a part opposite Jane. "I'd certainly take it if I were you," Jean said. I told her I was up for an underwater series that could conflict, and she said I was within my rights to refuse it in favor of more serious work. She said, "One should turn down something if it's not right--if it's no good, you know. She said it wasn't an unprofessional attitude, in fact quite the opposite.

It was more like "self-preservation for one's career. You have a lot of serious thinking to do.."  I said a part of me wanted to go back to New York, and I couldn't shake it; nor could I shake the other part that was a "native son of Hollywood."  I said I knew she was a long way from home, meaning Iowa, but she said, "Even farther, you know ... Paris is the only place I call home now. What's in Iowa belongs to my family. It doesn't belong to me."

I talked about Jean to producer Paul Levitt, who ran the Players Ring Theater, and later the three of us met at the Raincheck Room on Santa Monica Boulevard. We drank, and Jean had a small salad and talked to Paul about people at Columbia Pictures.

I wanted to go to Chez Paulette, but Jean didn't, so we went to Cyrano's instead. Steve McQueen's Ferrari was almost blocking the front door. He'd park there so people would have to walk around it, so they'd know he was there.

We maneuvered around the Ferrari and took a small table  by the curved wall. I was surprised to see Warren Gates with a Swiss girl I'd met at the beach once. I talked to Warren and the Swiss girl a little, although she kept looking at Jean.

McQueen spotted Jean as well, but he didn't come over -- he didn't want to talk to me. Even when I'd bump into him with Kantor, he'd avoid eye contact with me. He'd always ask Leonard, "How's your birdie?" and Kantor would say, "It's fine, Steve," but McQueen wouldn't look at me. But he stared at the back of Jean's head as if burning holes into her brain. She seemed  uneasy when we left and walked down Holloway to get off the Strip. When we came back for the car in Cyrano's lot, McQueen's Ferrari was gone. Jean put her head back on the seat and turned her face toward me. I said, "I'd like it if you'd come down to my place for a nightcap or something." She said she wanted to go to sleep. I asked if she wanted to go down to the beach, thinking the ocean air would wake her up. I said, "You can sleep down at my place." She just said okay.

Someone, I don't know who, honked as we drove west on Sunset, and we both waved and laughed -- a blind wave at a bunch of headlights. I wanted to eat something else, and Jean said she didn't care. We drove past my place on Pacific Coast and headed to the Sea Lion.  I ate red snapper, and Jean had another salad and part of my fish this time.  The windows were all steamed over and covered with fog. She told me her marriage was finished. "He's a nice guy, but a damned greedy opportunist -- if one can be bothered with such things." She didn't want to be married, but it wasn't because she wanted to play the field. Heading back through Malibu, I held her hand, and at the beach house I piled some wood I'd gathered at Zuma Beach into the fireplace. She was cold and sat on the floor in front of the fire, drinking Kahlua. I mixed vodka in with my Kahlua, and we listened to music on the radio. The windows were wet with perspiration, running like rain, and the waves crashed against the pilings beneath the house. We just sat on the floor looking at the fire until she started sniffing at her hands. She wanted to wash them, she said, as well as her face, because something from the Sea Lion or Cyrano's was smelling on her hands and she'd touched her face with her fingers.

When she came out of the bathroom, she said it must have been grease or smoke from those places. She asked if I had a new toothbrush and something she could wear to sleep in. I gave her a new toothbrush and a black cotton turtleneck pullover.

On the bed, she showed me the marks on her stomach from where she'd been burned at the stake in Saint Joan. "It was an accident," she said. "but I did almost burn, and I couldn't get out of the chains."

Though it had been an accidental fire, she said she'd often wondered if "Otto" hadn't tried to "pull something funny." She thought her stomach was scarred, but I said I could hardly see the marks. I told her she had a beautiful stomach, and I kissed her wherever she claimed there were scars.

Her mouth was lovely and warm and sweet -- but also very passionate. I kissed every part of her body. She pulled up the turtleneck and pulled down her panties, getting one leg out and then pulling them back up high on the other leg so that her clothing never quite left her body, but only bared that had been flesh being brought into play. The moon was very bright and appeared to be moving in and out of the sky. Reflections were shifting with the motion of the water.

"Do you believe in divine intervention?" she asked, and I said I didn't know.

"Do you think one can be chosen to fulfill a particular destiny?" she asked, and I said I wasn't sure. "Do you believe in God?" she asked.

"Well ..." I replied, "Maybe I do. I'd like to think we're not the center of the universe. Maybe that's religion." 

"I'd like this to be religious," she said. "Just between you and me." I said okay.

She was afraid of Otto Preminger. She didn't want to go to the Park Sunset or Tops Restaurant because Preminger's office was in the building. She didn't want to see him, she said. He'd just try to talk her into something. Preminger believed he had some kind of power over her, she told me, and if one thinks such a thing about a person, that person can usually exercise some control over the other person. It was like Jean had two different people inside her, quite divorced from one another -- two different voices, pulling from opposite sides. She moved through the world without being a part of it, as though this awkward mixture of selves in opposition kept her insulated from the life swirling around her, self-contained, detached, but also a prisoner. Marilyn Monroe was like this, as had been Jimmy Dean, but with Jean there was an odd difference -- perhaps she really was crazy back then. She said her "devils" kept her from being free. We were on the beach in a little cafe called La Mer where Jimmy and I had cheeseburgers once, our motorcycles parked on the sand off Pacific Coast Highway. We'd ridden at well over eighty, and at one point we'd reached out and touched fingers above the racing asphalt. He'd said you could feel the vibrations of the pistons and the unevenness of the highway that way. Leaving La Mer, I had told him I was freezing my ass off and he had given me his jacket. He'd had on a white sweat shirt and said he couldn't get cold because "a superstar is insulated against mortal coldness."

Jean told me she could never be that free. "The devils will stop that sort of stuff in a second," she said. "They ride right here ..."  She touched her collar bones with her fingers. "Sitting here, and here. There's one on each side."

I said, "You mean like a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other?"

She said, "No, these are both unfriendly influences." I asked her how she knew that, and she said they simply told her so. "What else did they say?" I asked.  "They tell me to run my car into other cars," she said, "or drive straight off a cliff.  They say I can't present myself as I desire -- can't act, can't do it in writing, though they want me to write because if I get sidetracked into that, then I will fail in other things ..." She said she would fail in writing, and at being a person. When I asked her what she thought the devils might look like, she said, "Oh, like me. They both look like little dolls of myself."  "No horns or tails?" I said, "That's imaginative of them."

"Yes, it is!" she said, and laughed. Her face was like sunshine, but I didn't think her brightness was the whole story. What hurt, she said, would never show through, it just seemed to swell up inside of her. She said usually she knew how to keep the lid on the pot.

Recollections fail to pinpoint anyone who could actually reach Jean through her mosaic of shields. There were gaps here and there, like small holes one could find if one looked hard enough, chance moments that offered a glimpse into Jean -- like a dip or some other motion in a dance, revealing the faces of those devil replicas of herself -- but far too brief to really grasp at anything. Those parts of herself would remain untapped and out of reach. She swore that no one could help her out of this.

She was so sparkling bright at times, and that wasn't a mask as others have hinted. I remember having dinner at Frascati, and Dennis Hopper, who was studying acting in Jean's class at Columbia, was having an argument with someone, but even they calmed down when Jean turned on her lights. She was, at times, a joy, and I was infatuated with her notoriety, and with her sexuality. But I would not or could not feel love for her. That wasn't part of our relationship. She was married, and the guy was in France but supposedly on his way to L.A.  I was neurotic and self-absorbed, and Jean, while appearing far less neurotic, was actually the lost soul.

I believed that to know the women I worked with, I had to take something of them inside of myself. Jean would pass her saliva into my mouth, and I would want more of it, and more, but the brief relationship was burdened with strange emotions from the start. Like many such affairs, ours was touched with a kind of holiness. I'd thought of having a child with Jane Fonda, but it had never gone further than a spontaneous picture in my head. Jean talked about marriage, though we didn't really know one another, and she was already married -- but separated, she said, once and for all. She said she wanted to feel a child moving inside her, and to feed the father of the child the milk from her breast.

I cared for Jean more than I was capable of knowing at the time. Pieces of feelings have survived the years, the movies and books, marriages, divorces and children, and careers and travels. Emotions appear like the tendrils of some slow-growing plant from a seed set down so long ago you don't even remember the planting.

But back then I couldn't reach her. Otto Preminger would tell me confidentially that he could only get at a part of her, and that this was all he'd needed, "a smaller part of the overall whole of Jean's personality," he said. "Her psyche, if you will. But it was only that one small part that I was able to single out and isolate and develop, the rest of her, which people did not see, was in absolute chaos." The rest of her, he said, had been "paradoxically provoked by the international acceptance of that fragment of her," and once it had come and gone out into the world, any hope for internal reconciliation had been lost.

"That is the Jean that lives in turmoil, in a black hole." Preminger said that some type of self-inflicted injury was inevitable. Had she been smart, he said, Jean would have taken the money and run home "as fast as her two little feet could've carried her." But the lure of fame, as he put it, "held her in bondage. You see, there is no focus to the thing. It is in those that must destroy their lives ..."

Jean encouraged me in turning down ZIV's underwater series. She was on the bed in Malibu, cracking walnuts with a pair of pliers when she suggested that if I came to Paris we'd make a movie after all. I could work there, and in Rome, but if I got stuck in Hollywood I'd be finished. "You'll be doing the same episodes over and over," she warned. I remembered Jimmy Dean saying that when Hollywood had you, they'd use you until there was nothing left. Jean said, "Do the play instead."

Josh Logan had optioned the film rights to Parrish and thought about Jean in the lead, but decided he wanted Jane Fonda and instead tested her in New York. He also wanted another unknown, Warren Beatty, but abandoned the project to begin working instead on Tall Story, a movie for which he'd tested Brooke Hayward as a "family obligation," although Logan later said that Brooke had been "completely unmalleable." In other words, she couldn't act.

I said no thanks to CBS, but while I was flying to New York to meet with Logan for the play, the image of Jimmy -- bare-chested in scuba pants -- kept sneaking into my head. He wouldn't have turned it down, I thought. He'd have given the town the best damned "aquanaut" they'd ever seen. He'd have done it in a monkey suit. He was the real actor, and I was the rebel.

An FBI agent who had worked close to J. Edgar Hoover during the last of the Vietnam War, while Jane Fonda was squeezing publicity from the situation, said, "Hoover said he was going to 'take care of those two bitches' -- meaning Jane and Jean Seberg. But Hoover said it was Seberg who kept him awake at nights. He said Fonda was 'puff,' a nothing, publicity and money-hungry, and an opportunist -- a true capitalist, Hoover said, playing pinko to keep her name in the news. He said, "You watch the bitch get out in the clearing when nobody's looking to grab her, and you'll see the money-hungry capitalist cunt in full regalia."

But "the nigger-loving Seberg" presented the real threat to the American people, according to Hoover, who said she was giving money to "radical niggers" and sleeping with them. As far as Hoover was concerned, there was nothing worse than a "white woman giving her body to a nigger." Yet it was not so much the idea of sex between the lily-white Seberg and the Black Panthers that distressed Hoover, but the fact that people could be sympathetic to her.

With a smile, Hoover said he knew she was pregnant and the bureau was glad, because it offered the chance to spread the word to gossip columnists that a "nigger Panther" had impregnated Seberg, already married to a white man and a diplomat. "She's willfully carrying this black baby."  Hoover made it very clear what he expected to be done about the gossip. He said, "I want this finished." The agent said, "What do you mean finished, sir?" He said, "You know fucking well what I mean finished, and when something is finished, then it's finished."

But when the gossip was spread, Jean tried to do the job herself, with an overdose of pills. The baby, born white, had to be taken two months early by Caesarean, and because of Jean's overdose, lived only two days. The father of the dead baby was French writer and diplomat, Romain Gary, author of several successful novels and one of several men Jean married. Jean wanted to display the infant in a glass casket for the world to see that the child was white. 

"When we got word the baby was dead," the agent said, "I passed this on to Hoover, who was putting some kind of makeup on his face. It reminded me of what I'd heard about Goering--the Nazi transvestite and head of the Luftwaffe. All Hoover said was 'Good'."

The frequency of Jean's breakdowns intensified, coming more quickly after the suicide attempt that killed the baby. Some of these collapses left her almost catatonic. In and out of French mental institutions, always just moments away from disaster and madness, Jean would finally manage to "finish" herself as per the wishes of the by-then dead J. Edgar Hoover. Jean used pills again, swallowing a bottle of them in the rear of her car. She'd maneuvered the vehicle into a parking space a short distance from the dingy Paris digs she shared with a young Arab. Her money exhausted, her talent gone along with her sanity, she rolled the car windows shut against the summer heat and, curling up in a blanket, finished her life huddled on the rear floor of the car. Ten days would pass before the car was located and her decomposing body found.

Another child, Jean's young son by Romain Gary, living with his father, was to receive her suicide note, asking the child's forgiveness. Then, some time after Jean's death, ex-husband Gary would abandon young Alexandre completely and wimp out of life by shooting himself in the head.

Back in Paris a few years later, I visited Jean's grave. I was writing a script for Orphée Arts, who'd had success with the soft-core classic Emmanuelle. The movie I was writing would have bean a classic Jean Seberg vehicle, but so many confusing years had passed since the time Jean had been so pretty and incredibly pure. Blunders back then had set that fatal course in motion, as with Jimmy Dean. As Sal Mineo had put it before his own death, Jean was now a skeleton, down in the ground.

Her producer, Jean-Pierre Rassam, would say something that should have been written on Jean's grave: "She was her own Manson, her own Charles Manson."

Excerpts from LAID BARE: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip