‘The most dangerous man I ever met’: Alain Delon’s devastating effect on women
When the actress and singer Marianne Faithfull appeared opposite the late actor Alain Delon in the 1968 erotic drama The Girl On A Motorcycle, she had the highest praise for him. “We think alike in a lot of ways and he’s a totally dedicated actor,” she said. “He helped me a lot through his ability to ignore outside things when he’s working.” There is a famous contemporary picture of the two of them laughing together, apparently completely wrapped up in one another, while Faithfull’s boyfriend Mick Jagger sits disconsolately next to her.
Yet Faithfull’s opinion of Delon soon cooled. Not only did she describe him as a “pompous prat” in her 1994 autobiography Faithfull after she became one of the few women to turn down his inevitable advances, but on her 2002 album Kissin Time, in a song that she wrote about an old friend, she described him as nothing more flattering than a “c___”.
That old friend was Faithfull’s Sixties compatriot Nico, and Song for Nico is scathing about her former lover; the lyrics to the song include the pungent lines “And will Delon be still a c___/Yes, she’s in the s___, though she is innocent.” Faithfull, who is still alive today, remains one of the great survivors of the rock’n’roll era, despite her battles with drug addiction and personal tragedy.
Nico, who died of a cerebral haemorrhage after a bicycle accident in 1988 at the age of 49, was considerably less lucky than her friend, leading a life studded with misery and controversy. And the man who was responsible for a large amount of this misery has just died at the age of 88, feted by everyone from President Macron downwards as one of the greatest French stars who ever lived.
Many of the high-profile women with whom Delon had relationships might disagree with this generous assessment. The famously handsome and charismatic actor was only married once, to the actress Nathalie Barthélémy between 1964 and 1969. But his list of paramours was one of the most distinguished and eclectic in French cultural history – which, given that country, is saying quite a lot. In addition to long-term involvements with the actresses Romy Schneider, Maddly Bamy and Mireille Darc (the latter pair as part of a menage-a-trois), Delon was with the model-turned-journalist Rosalie van Breemen between 1987 and 2001. They met when she was 21 and he was 52, as is the way of these things.
Yet it was his shorter-lived entanglements, real or rumoured, that attracted most attention. Delon was famously described as “the male Brigitte Bardot” in his 1960s heyday, being one of the most extraordinarily good-looking people on the planet, and it was fitting that Bardot herself came forward with a tribute to him after his death, saying that he left a “huge void that nothing and no-one will be able to fill”. Inevitably, the two were said to be romantically involved after meeting on the set of a 1961 film titled Famous Love Affairs (yes, really). Delon, however, denied this: “As surprising as it can be, nothing ever happened, we just had the best friendship for 65 years now,” he said.
There is a certain irony in that, in addition to both of them being the sex symbols of their generation, both Delon and Bardot had questionable political sympathies as they aged. He maintained a strong friendship with Jean-Marie Le Pen, president of the far-right National Front, and Bardot has been fined on multiple occasions for making racist and xenophobic remarks about those who she has claimed perpetuate animal abuse, as well as offering a series of extremely conservative opinions about everything from her nation’s schools (“dens of depravations filed with drug dealers, young terrorist clubs and condom users”) to gays and lesbians (“cheap faggots or circus freaks”). It is a long way from their youthful and glamorous heyday.
As, in its own way, was his involvement with Nico, which began when the two met on the Patricia Highsmith adaptation Plein Soleil. Delon, perhaps appropriately, was cast as the amoral but charming protagonist Tom Ripley, and Nico, who by then had established herself internationally with an iconic appearance as herself in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, had originally been offered a small supporting role, but her commitments to her modelling career in New York meant that she was unable to accept the part. (Other accounts suggest that she mixed up the filming dates and arrived on set late, to find that she had already been replaced,)
Nevertheless, she made a considerable impression on Delon, and he on her. She would later say that “he was the most dangerous man I ever met…he was like a gypsy, with strong eyes and dark hair, and I wanted him for myself.” She would be both satisfied and disappointed in this desire. Shortly after the film was completed, he headed out to the United States in search of her, before the two – inevitably – began an affair. After the first time she had sex with Delon, she told her friend Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock, “very happy and excited” that “I’ve just slept with Alain Delon!” He was unimpressed. “It was like Snow White had met her prince. She was obsessed with this ghastly man.”
Nico was studying acting, under the tutelage of Lee and Anna Strasberg, and it was, for a while, an intoxicating and exciting experience for her to be swept up in Delon’s orbit, a riot of New York nightclubs and glamorous associations. Typically, Delon had his Ferrari shipped over from France, driving Nico at hair-raising speeds across the country and frequently being stopped by the police, who, not being known aficionados of French cinema, failed to be seduced by the driver’s indefatigable charm.
After a few months of this, reality intruded. Nico discovered that she was pregnant by Delon, and for all of his protestations of love and undying devotion, he had already scarpered. As she later put it: “I stayed three months in New York, alone, thinking he would come; later on, distressed, I went to Paris to look for him, to meet him. I tried to call him but I couldn’t contact him. Invariably, they always told me Alain was absent.” Her mother urged her to have an abortion, but she refused. “I won’t let it drift away,” she said. “This child should be my own. I also want to have a person for me.” Eventually, their child was born on August 11 1962, a boy who she named Christian Aaron Boulogne but who had the nickname ‘Ari’.
Accounts of what then ensued differ considerably. In Nico’s perhaps romanticised recollection, she wrote to Delon to inform him about the arrival of his son, and, after a pause of a couple of months, the two reconciled in a “very sweet meeting”. Delon told Nico that “I’m going to buy you a flat where you could live with the kid. A mutual friend will take care of you. If you need something just call me at Hotel Carlton, in Cannes.” Thereafter, Delon provided some sporadic financial support for the child, but one day, his secretary Georges Beaume visited Nico and told her “sharply” that “Alain wants this story to be finished”. She was left to raise Ari as a single mother.
Yet that’s not quite what happened. Nico, keen to pursue her career without the burden of a child, left Ari with her mother in Ibiza. But as her mother was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and was unable to cope with the demands of a toddler, the child was left to himself, with predictably appalling consequences. Delon’s family arrived at the faeces and vomit-infested house in which the unfortunate infant was living, and forcibly adopted him.
As Delon’s half-sister Pauledith Soubrier recalled: “I arrived and I was shocked. The boy was kept in a room, quite dark, and he was afraid, crouching like an animal.” The child was then subjected to what Delon’s mother called “kidnapping, lawful kidnapping!” Even if his father wanted nothing to do with him, and if his mother saw her own career and life as more important than looking after her son, he would, at least, be given some semblance of a normal family life.
Thereafter, the unfortunate Ari had an existence not atypical of the cast-off illegitimate offspring of the carelessly famous. His father never acknowledged or accepted him, despite eventually having “at least four” other children with various women. But Nico, who swiftly went on to become involved with the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones and Lou Reed, was herself an absent and negligent mother. Delon’s mother claimed that Nico saw Ari once in three years at one point; the singer hit back, saying that she was refused access to see her son.
Ari himself would go on to live a chequered and eventful life after his mother’s death, embracing careers as an actor and photographer and eventually dying in 2023 at the age of 60 of a heroin overdose. By that time, he was partially paralysed, and a long-term user of drugs; the coverage of his death was limited, with one story noting only that he “claimed” to be Delon’s son.
The obituaries of Delon saluted his abilities as an actor, his charisma and his magnetism. All of these things can be true, but his failings as a human being should not be ignored, either. “Women became my motivation. I owe them everything,” he declared in 2018. “They were the ones who inspired me to look better than anyone else, to stand stronger and taller than anyone else, and to see it in their eyes.” This, however, was a far cry from the usually miserable end that befell his relationships.
He was incapable of fidelity or lasting love, and was rumoured to assault those who he was in relationships with. His son Alain-Fabien, who he had with van Breemen, claimed that Delon had broken his mother’s nose and eight of her ribs by beating her. Delon denied this but admitted to “slapping” her, as well as the other women in his life. So much for their seeing him standing “stronger and taller.”
One of Delon’s latter roles was in The Return of Casanova, an undistinguished 1992 romp in which he played the legendary lover. It is tempting to wonder if Delon came to see himself as figure like Casanova or Byron whose romances and affairs were all-consuming, and those unfortunate enough to be left in his wake simply faded into insignificance as a consequence. They should be remembered, too.