Today – Jun 8th 1963
Miss DEMONGEOT flies in and says
I CARRY KISSES FOR DIRK BOGARDE
They’re red hot from Paris and I’m delivering in person
Cover story by Tony Wells
THIS is the tale of a sex kitten named Mylene, a cat named Melanie Lolotte Dou-Dou-and a consignment of red hot kisses from gay Paree.
All of which may sound foolishly feline… until I explain that the kitten is French actress Mylene Demongeot, the cat is the pet she keeps as a safety valve for her marriage and the kisses are the ones I am watching her plant firmly on the lips of Dirk Bogarde.
She leans forward lusciously. puckers her lips provocatively and – voila! – there isn’t a man in sight who doesn’t wish he’d been born Bogarde. Mr. Bogarde, with understandable satisfaction, wipes his lips and wanders off.
Miss Demongeot, with understandable diplomacy (her husband is here) stays around to explain.
“It is simple.” she said with a smile.
“With the women of Paris Dirk is now a very big heart-throb. He played Franz Liszt (in Song Without End), then had this romance with Capucine and suddenly the women of Paris said: ‘Who is this Dirk Bogarde? He is marvellous.'” Hence the consignment of kisses .
“When the girls in my Paris hairdresser’s heard I was coming to London to work with Dirk they said ‘Ooh la la! If we cannot give him kisses ourselves you must kiss him for us…'”
Miss Demongeot’s arrival at Pinewood Studios – to deliver these tokens of affection and then star with Bogarde in the fifth “Doctor” film, Doctor In Distress – also marks her vigorous re-arrival in the business of film-making.
For two years she has quietly forsaken her career (once in opposition to Bardot) to nurse her husband. Henri Coste, back to health after a serious skiing accident.
“It was the only thing I could do, the thing any woman would do for her husband,” she said quietly. Poor Henri! He was so bad. Both legs smashed. An arm broken. We even thought once that be would be crippled for life.”
A smile of relief lit her face. But now Henri is well again and I can think of my career,” she said.
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HUSBAND Henri knows how much her career means – he gave up his own work as a successful photographer to be with her while she dedicated herself to acting. “It is fifty per cent of my life,” she told me. “When I turned down work to be with Henri it was like giving up fifty percent of myself- although I didn’t think of it like that at the time.” She kissed her husband on the cheek.
“But now,” she added. “Now I can be one hundred per cent again. Actress and wife-fifty, fifty.”
Miss Demongeot’s determination to carve herself a considerable slice of success-and her clear-cut attitude towards marriage and career-rule out children for the time being. Which is where the cat named Melanie Lolotte Dou-Dou comes in.
“She is my temporary baby. “Mylene confessed with a grin. ‘”She also helps to keep our marriage strong.
“You see, when Henri and I are on the verge of a row we talk to the cat instead of shouting at each other and saying things we know we shall regret later. If an argument is coming the first of us who gets the cat tells her all the troubles.
“If Henri gets her he sits down and tells her how much he hates me sometimes. If I get her I tell her how nasty Henri is sometimes.”
❖ ❖ ❖
I REMARKED that the philosophy was almost as strange as the cats name. “Oh,” she said, “we only call it one name at a time. We say Melanie when she is a beautiful, nice little cat. Lolotte when she is a beautiful, nice little cat with a hint of trouble brewing. And Dou Dou when she is a nasty, horrible cat…. “
I have known Miss Demongeot for some time. It must not he said that her off-beat ideas mean she has not got her feet firmly planted on the ground.
Even when her lips are planted on Dirk Bogarde…
