Arletty (1898–1992)

French actress, known as "the Garbo of France," who is famed for her work in Les Enfants du Paradis and Hôtel du Nord, and for her brief affair with a German flyer. Name variations: Arlette. Born Léonie Bathiat in Courbevoie, France, on May 15, 1898; diedin Paris on July 24, 1992; daughter of a miner and a laundress; never married; no children.

Filmography:

La Douceur D'aimer (1930); Un Chien qui rapporte (1931); Das schöne Abenteuer (La Belle Aventure with Käthe von Nagy , French-German, 1932); Un Idée Folle (1933); Walzerkrieg (La Guerre de Valses with Madeleine Ozeray , Fr.-Germ., 1933); Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon (1934); Le Grand Jeu (directed by Jacques Feyder, 1934); Pension Mimosas (1935); La Fille de Madame Angot (1935); L'É-cole des Cocottes (1935); Amants et Voleurs (1935); La Garçonne (1936); Faisons un Rêve (1937); Les Perles de la Couronne (1937); Aloha le Chant des Iles (1937); Mirages (1937); Désiré (1938); Le Petit Chose (1938); La Chaleur du Sein (1938); Hôtel du Nord (1938); Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939); Fric-Frac (1939); Circonstances atténuantes (Extenuating Circumstances, 1939); Madame Sans-Gêne (1941); Les Visiteurs du Soir (The Devil's Own Envoy, 1942); Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of the Paradise, 1945); Portrait d'un Assassin (1949); L'Amour Madame (1951); La Père de Mademoiselle (1953); Le Grand Jeu (Flesh and the Woman or The Big Game, with Gina Lollobrigida , directed by Robert Siodmak, 1954); Huis clos (No Exit, 1954); L'Air de Paris (1954); Maxime (1958); Un Drôle de Dimanche (1958); La Loi des Hommes (1962); La Gamberge (1962); Tempo di Roma (1963); Le Voyage à Biarritz (1964); The Longest Day (United States, 1962); Les Volets fermés (replaced by Marie Bell , 1972).

One of the immortals of the golden age of French cinema, the actress known as Arletty was born Léonie Bathiat at Courbevoie in the district of Auvergne in 1898, a district that served as a setting for Guy de Maupassant's story "Mont Oriol." She would later borrow her stage name from Maupassant's heroine Arlette. Though Courbevoie was then a Parisian suburb, its occupants considered themselves card-carrying Parisians with a wit and wisdom acquired from the streets.

Arletty came from a large family. When her miner father was killed by a streetcar in 1916, her mother had to take in washing, and they lived in poverty. In those early years, she gave no hint of acting ambitions. At 16, with little schooling, Arletty began work in a factory while living away from home; at 18, she learned shorthand and typing and found a job as a secretary. During World War I, she worked in the Darracq armament plant, which manufactured shells, but the young girl became fascinated with the bohemian life of Paris, frequenting cafes made popular by artists and writers. Spotted among the crowd by Cubist painter and art dealer Paul Guillaume, she was sent to see Armand Berthez, manager of the Capucines, a producer of revues.

By the end of the war, Arletty had been an artist's model (posing for Braque and Matisse), was working as a singer and dancer in music-hall revues, and had become a pacifist when her lover was killed in the war. With her new name, she became a draw for the caustic revues at the Théatre des Capucines. Arletty's dramatic stage work began in 1920 with a small part as a courtesan in L'École des Cocottes. She then took on an assortment of roles, most often in the meager costume of a prostitute or a woman of easy virtue, though she was at that time, in her own words, "as thin as a runner bean." "During most of her career she played tarts," writes David Shipman, "but then, it often seemed, so did most French actresses." She broke the casting mold long enough to portray Sacha Guitry's wife in O Mon Bel Inconnu, a play that costarred Jacqueline Delubac , soon to be Guitry's real wife.

In 1930, with the advent of sound, Arletty began to appear in films. A captivating, dark-haired beauty with a haunting style, she had supporting parts in Jacques Feyder's Le Grand Jeu (1934) and Pension Mimosas (1935). She had one lead and two bits in the 1937–38 films of Sacha Guitry: Désiré, Faisons un Rêve and Les Perles de la Couronne, in which she played the queen of Ethiopia in blackface. She made two movies with Michel Simon—La Chaleur du Sein and Circonstances Atténuantes—but was still playing filmdom's second-woman leads: "the other woman" or "the friend." Thus, the theater remained her principal career; in 1936, Jean Cocteau wrote a successful sketch for her, L'É-cole des Veuves. That same year, she starred in the play Fric-Frac with Simon and Victor Boucher. She was also involved with its transfer to the screen, though Fernandel replaced Boucher.

Though she was signed to do the first French film in Technicolor, Sardou's play Madame Sans-Géne, the advent of World War II effectively suspended plans for production. It would eventually be shot in 1941, though not in color. Arletty portrayed the washerwoman who becomes the mistress of Napoleon, played by Albert Dieudonné. Dieudonné had assayed the role once before, for Abel Gance's masterpiece.

In 1938, Arletty was teamed up with Marcel Carné for a supporting role in his Hôtel du Nord, which starred Annabella and Jean-Pierre Aumont, a tragi-comedy about working-class life in a shabby Paris hotel. Once again, she portrayed a prostitute, Madame Raymonde, "a kind of Mother Courage of the profession," noted the London Times. She had one major scene, crossing a bridge over the Canal St.-Martin in northern Paris with her wayward murderous lover Louis Jouvet. He is on his way to go fishing and tells her he prefers going alone. Why? Because she invades his mood, she does not contribute satisfactorily to the "atmosphère." "Atmosphère! Atmosphère!," cries Arletty in the accent of the Parisian suburbs, "Est-ce que j'ai une gueule d'atmosphère?" ("Have I got a mouth made of atmosphere?") This became one of the most memorable moments in film history, and her line became famous throughout the nation. "Overnight that one word—atmosphère—became indelibly associated with Arletty," writes James Lord. "In cafés and châteaux all over France men and women would exclaim to each other, 'Atmosphère! Atmosphère!' and burst out laughing."

Now a movie star of the first rank and blessed with self-assurance and an extraordinary range, Arletty teamed up with Carné for three more films, with screenplays by Jacques Prévert, a prominent French poet and screenwriter who had been affiliated with the surrealist movement in the 1920s and was influential in injecting "poetic realism" into French films. The triumvirate was responsible for Le Jour se lève (1939), Les Visiteurs du Soir (1943), and one of the most celebrated films in French cinema: Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise). Carné brought his impressionistic realism to the screen, his faithfulness to surroundings, to everyday life, to working people and lower classes; Prévert brought his theme of melancholy, of faded idealism and beauty, and fate-driven lives; Arletty added mystery and elegance.

In the memorable Le Jour se lève (Daybreak), filmed in 1939 as a metaphor for France's condition on the eve of war, she played the bitter mistress of the sadistic Valentin; as Clara, she falls in love with a kind stranger, played by Jean Gabin. In the movie, writes Roger Manvell, "she stands for profane love, an easy, friendly though somewhat ambivalent and fatalistic acceptance of pleasure as it comes. She plays with a superb casualness, establishing a special presence…. But above it all she embodies sheer, mature physical beauty…. Whereas most film stars reach their full stature comparatively early, Arletty reached hers only when she was already forty."

Les Visiteurs du Soir was shot in 1943, during the occupation of France by the Germans. The mise en scène is a castle in 15th-century France where two devils dressed as troubadours are intent on destroying a young couple's betrothal feast. As Dominique, Arletty is a seductive companion to one of the troubadours. It was one of her favorite films.

Marcel Carné tapped a strain of melancholy in his leading lady for their next venture, a movie made with difficulty during the last days of the German occupation under the noses of their Nazi occupiers. Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of the Paradise) took over two years to make. Filming began at the Joinville studio in August 1943, was interrupted, and began again in November. Production was often sabotaged; actors disappeared, roles were recast. Starving extras ate up most of the perishable props before the dinner scenes could be photographed. Actors who were working in the French underground had their scenes shot secretly or briefly came out of hiding. Even Carné and Prévert tried to slow up production, hiding key reels from Nazi super-visors, hoping that their occupiers would be gone by the time the movie was released. But the Nazis—anxious that the French film industry continue—were supportive. Wide in scope, the movie hinted that the drama "could only flourish where men are free, a subtlety of interpretation that eluded the Nazi mind," writes De Witt Bodeen; "otherwise, they would never have authorized production of the film."

This film, Marcel Carne's masterpiece, his tribute to the French theater, is as much a classic as Casablanca, and was dubbed by Andrew Sarris France's "Gone with the Wind of art films." It too was a movie about a vanishing epoch, with an enthralling woman, adored by many men. It also withstood the GWTW test of time: it ran for four hours. "Critically, it was the more highly regarded," writes Shipman, "and, now that the style of both films is extinct, it is, because of the maturity of its dialogue, the more persuasive."

Set in the theater district, Le Boulevard du Temple (more commonly known as the Boulevard of Crime), the film recreates a chaotic world of backstage life in early 19th-century Paris. On one level, the Paradise of the title is the gallery, the cheap upper seats in the second balcony, known by Parisians as "the Gods." Arletty as Garance, an elusive courtesan, is loved by four men—a talented and soulful mime named Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault), an ambitious actor (Pierre Brasseur), a philosophical villain (Marcel Herrand), and a haughty aristocrat (Louis Salou). She accepts them all, the good and the bad; she seems to make no distinction. But Garance remains aloof, coveting her independence. Her only love is Baptiste, her Pierrot, a shy mime. "Arletty is supreme in the near-symbolic, feminine character she had by now come to embody," wrote Manvell of her performance, "a character more subtle in its implications than that created by Garbo, but in many ways similar in its projection of a 'feminine mystique.'"

The movie opened in Paris on March 9, 1945, five months before the city's liberation. "Had the then-victorious German Army even faintly realized that in authorizing production of Les Enfants du Paradis, they were condoning the exploits of a free woman like Garance, they would have withdrawn their approval of the film immediately," writes Bodeen. "She symbolized the activating spirit of the Free French, a spirit of revolt and independence, a spirit that can never be broken or subjugated, as Hitler's generals soon learned."

Two of the Carné-Prévert-Arletty movies were not seen outside of France during the occupation: Les Enfants and Les Visiteurs. When they were released internationally in 1946, they would cause a sensation. In France, Les Enfants would run nine months, and the French Academy of Cinema Arts and Techniques would name it the Best French Film in the History of Talking Pictures. Not only is the movie visually rich, Jean-Louis Barrault's performance as the lovelorn mime is legendary, and Prévert's screen-play—considered by the Washington Post the "finest work … ever composed for the screen"—was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Arletty was dubbed "the Garbo of France."

Manvell points out other similarities between Arletty and Greta Garbo . Self-educated, an unaffected woman of taste, Arletty lived her personal life on her own terms, in style of dress, in style of life. Like Garbo, she did not marry, she often dressed in simple clothes, and she spent many years in reclusive withdrawal. Like her character Garance, Arletty had many friends—some good, some bad—including Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who also came from her Parisian

suburb of Courbevoie, and Josée Laval , daughter of Pierre Laval, prime minister of France and open collaborator with the Germans.

Arletty was wooed by many: men and women. ("It was no secret," writes Lord, "that Arlette had had lesbian attachments.") By 1939, her admirers were legion "and unrequited," noted The [London] Times. "The Aga Khan wooed her immensely from afar but never got beyond dinner à deux in the private dining room of Larue's restaurant. Sacha Guitry, too, made a stupendous effort and was rewarded with as he ruefully noted, 'everlasting friendship.' For a long time the most admired woman in Paris seemed to have no lover."

When she finally fell in love in 1941, he was Hans Söring, the son of a diplomat, born in Constantinople, fluent in French, and a high-ranking officer in the German Luftwaffe. "He was handsome and Arletty fell for him almost at first glance," continued the Times, "with a passion which seemed the more violent for having been so long suppressed." Though she was thought a traitor to her country, the affair was open and for all of France to see.

"It was the era of 'politeness,'" writes Lord, "when the French wanted to believe that their enemies, after all, were very well behaved, courteous to ladies, kindly to children, and that military catastrophe might not ravage the integrity of national life." It was tempting for people in the performing arts to "look on the Germans in Paris as no more than a new, cultivated elite," write Beevor and Cooper in Paris after the Liberation. German ambassador Otto Abetz "was an ardent Francophile and those who attended his parties at the German embassy in the rue de Lille found it hard to remember that this was the civilized face of a brutal and oppressive enemy." When asked why he had agreed to meet Göring, Sacha Guitry replied, "Par curiosité"; he would have been willing to meet Stalin, he said, for the same reason.

It did not help that Arletty put friendship before patriotism; she continued contact with her friend Céline, who was now infamous for his Nazi sympathies and hatred of liberal democracy, and the Lavals. She was apolitical at a time when to be so was unacceptable. In 1944, though she had refused to work for the German-controlled film company, Continental, that operated in France during World War II, she was told that a tribunal in Algiers (the conservative assembly of the French Committee of National Liberation) had condemned her to death.

Directly after the liberation of Paris, the roundup of suspected sympathizers was haphazard, at times unjust, and largely vigilante style. In late August of 1945, Arletty was accused of what was commonly called collaboration horizontale (sleeping with the enemy) and before her hearing spent two months in internment at Fresnes; the prison held many of le Tout Paris, including Sacha Guitry. There was little or no tolerance for women who slept with Germans, despite the usual French tolerance for affaires du coeur. The mood on the street was vicious. After spontaneous kangaroo courts, men were beaten; women had their heads shaved and were paraded through the streets under the fists and spittle of a jeering mob. Old women whose daughters or relatives had been judged guilty were also shaved.

[Arletty] was outspoken, witty, sometimes inflexibly frank, but never cynical. She bore no grudges, felt no self-pity.

—James Lord

On Arletty's arrest, a rumor spread through Paris that she had had her breasts cut off. Though this was untrue, she may have had her head shaved. Her hairdresser attested that a turbaned Arletty asked him to make a wig for her. She is said to have snapped at interrogators: "What is this government which is so interested in our sex lives!" In her memoirs, however, the incident of her arrest is played down. "Two very discreet gentlemen came to fetch me."

There was no trial, only a hearing, where it was decreed that she should be placed under house arrest in some locale 30 miles from Paris for an unspecified length of time. Casual acquaintances, Jacques and Lelette Bellanger , stepped forward and offered their château called La Houssaye. Every week, for over 18 months, Arletty walked the four miles to register at the local police station. "It was the best time of my life," she told Lord. "It gave me the opportunity and the initiative to become myself." She lived in the château library, reading Pascal and Proust. "Which is not to say that she became a fatalist," wrote Lord, "but, on the contrary, that she became able to accept a principle of existential commitment which took for granted the responsibility of every human being in his elemental solitude to act in mitigation of the solitude of others. In short, she saw that she had been blind to her own frivolity and failure of imagination."

From prison, under escort, Arletty had been allowed out to reshoot some scenes for Les Enfants du Paradis. Despite the film's international success, the untried accusation made it hard for her to get work following her release from house arrest. Though she was hired for three movies, all were abandoned for unrelated reasons. While living in a room at the Plaza Athénée, she waited four more years before she completed her next major film Portrait d'un Assassin (with Maria Montez and Erich von Stroheim) in 1949, at age 51. In November of that year, she returned to the stage as Blanche in Un tramway nommé désir, the French stage production of Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire, adapted by Cocteau. Despite some hostile reviews for the production, it was one of the year's hits. This marked a comeback of sorts, since the movie Portrait was released in the same month as the play opened. In 1952, she starred on stage in Marcel Achard's Les Compagnons de la Marjolaine with Melina Mercouri . Arletty would also appear in another play by Williams, La Descente d'Orphée (Orpheus Descending).

Arletty played the lesbian Inez in the movie of Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos (1945), which was directed by Jacqueline Audry . It was a performance, wrote Shipman, that was "scathing and taunting, and horribly fascinating." But in films she had now become a supporting actress: Maxime with Michèle Morgan and Charles Boyer; Drôle de Dimanche with Danielle Darrieux ; La Loi des Hommes with Micheline Presle . In 1962, American audiences were given an all-too-brief sample of her exquisite humor in the movie The Longest Day when she played a French housewife, hair in nightribbons, on a late-night walk to the privy, who encounters a stream of Allied parachutes wafting into her backyard. In 1968, she would return to the Paris stage in Cocteau's Montres Sacres.

By the 1960s, all had been forgotten, or at least forgiven. Arletty had become one of the most admired women in France. She lived at 31, rue Raynouard and owned a small house at Belle-Ile-en-Mer, an island off the southern coast of Brittany. "It was a lonely, solitary dwelling in its windswept location, the residence of a hermit," writes Lord. "And of course that is in a very real sense what by force of circumstances Arlette became." Fifty years earlier, Sarah Bernhardt had lived on the island and had retreated to a seat carved out of a cliff that overlooked the sea. Arletty loved to escape there also. Friends gave her money; her benefactors included a wealthy manufacturer, Michel Bolloré, and René de Chambrun, husband of Josée Laval, son-in-law of Pierre.

By the beginning of the 1960s, Arletty had begun to suffer a progressive loss of vision in her left eye. After an unsuccessful operation, she was told to apply different eyedrops nightly to each eye. One solution was to preserve the little sight remaining in the left, the other to prevent deterioration in the right. One night in 1962, returning home late and tired, she inadvertently switched the drops and blinded herself. She could still see, though poorly, and could read only for brief periods at a time. When Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci interviewed her in 1963, Fallaci wrote of the "brave Arletty" who was not only blind, but "the loneliest woman I have ever met." Though she continued on stage, Arletty could only accept parts in film requiring little movement. On November 11, 1966, Armistice Day, a couple of years after another operation, the 68-year-old Arletty woke up totally blind. The small house by the sea was sold, and she was moved by friends into a small two-room apartment at 14, rue Rémusat, where she lived the rest of her life with a sketch of Colette above her bed.

Though she had written a brief, explanatory memoir La Défense in 1948, her autobiography was dictated and published as Je Suis comme Je Suis (I Am as I Am). On its publication in 1971, the 73-year-old received enormous attention and experienced a rejuvenated popularity. Her 90th birthday was celebrated in the press; her films were shown on television. But she had no illusions. "Anyone who thinks that in three centuries people will pay to hear her laugh is a dreamer," she said. Asked by interviewers how she wanted to be remembered after her death, she replied, "That broad, she was the real thing." Arletty died on July 23, 1992, at age 94. In accordance with her wishes, she was buried at Courbevoie, but the hearse made a detour, passing the Hôtel du Nord where a large crowd had formed.

Over 40 years earlier, in 1950, her German soldier, who was about to be named an ambassador, had returned to France and asked her to marry him. She had refused. When asked why by her friend James Lord, she replied, "Can you imagine 'Mademoiselle Atmosphère' becoming 'Madame l'Ambassadrice? Not I…. He did me a great service by making it possible for me to make so much trouble for myself. Some people say that it ruined my life. It certainly ruined my career and made a mess of my reputation, but thanks to him I discovered the self in myself. And yet when I see him today I can't see what it was that led me to that discovery. The discovery was a marvel, while the man was only an affair."

sources:

"Arletty, 94, French Film Actress and a Legend of 'Hôtel du Nord,'" in The New York Times Biographical Service, July 1992, p. 927.

Bodeen, De Witt. "Les Enfants du Paradis," in The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume I. Edited by Christopher Lyon. Chicago, IL: St. James Press, 1984.

Lord, James. Six Exceptional Women: Further Memoirs. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.

Manvell, Roger. Love Goddesses of the Movies. NY: Crescent Books, 1975.

Shipman, David. The Great Movie Stars: The International Years. NY: Hill & Wang, 1980.

The Times [London]. July 25, 1992, p. 17.