Feb 3, 2010
J.D. Salinger, Brigitte Bardot and the Movies
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.†–Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye
Here’s a little gem from this week’s New Yorker, from a tribute by Lillian Ross:
Salinger loved the movies, and he was more fun than anyone to discuss them with. He enjoyed watching actors work, and he enjoyed knowing them. (He loved Anne Bancroft, hated Audrey Hepburn, and said that he had seen “Grand Illusion” ten times.) Brigitte Bardot once wanted to buy the rights to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and he said that it was uplifting news. “I mean it,” he told me. “She’s a cute, talented lost enfante, and I’m tempted to accomodate her, pour le sport.”
Oh, J.D. Many men were tempted to accommodate her, and then some.
“She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.” — A Perfect Day for Bananafish
Unfortunately, Ms. Bardot has become a bit too fond of the vichyssoise soup these days. She is an outspoken supporter of Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and married his close friend and ally Bernard d’Ormale in 1992.
In her 1999 book Le Carré de Pluton Bardot wrote, “My country, France, my homeland, my land is again invaded by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims.”
In her 2003 book Un Cri Dans Le Silence she warns of Muslim immigration: “Over the last twenty years, we have given in to a subterranean, dangerous, and uncontrolled infiltration”. Bardot also describes homosexuals as “fairground freaks” and says they “jiggle their bottoms, put their little fingers in the air and with their little castrato voices moan about what those ghastly heteros put them through”.