Has any actor ever come close to the beauty of Alain Delon in his prime? The answer, obviously, is no. And never more so than in Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), whose most indelible scene finds the French actor manning the wheel of a sailboat on the Mediterranean, the corpse of his well-to-do victim, Dickie Greenleaf, lying unseen below. Delon stares ahead, steely-eyed, his distant, almost cruel perfection a shocking counterpoint to the sun-drenched vitality of his bronzed body.
Delon’s mystique and sex appeal were inseparable from his glacial, lone-wolf air of unknowability. It’s a quality that Edward Chisholm, in Murder in Paris 68, leans into hard in his account of the Marković affair, the late-sixties scandal whose tawdry ingredients – murder! Orgies! Political intrigue! – reached the highest levels of the French state, implicating the wife of prime minister Georges Pompidou.
In 1968, the plastic-wrapped, bludgeoned body of Delon’s friend and cinematic stand-in Stevan Marković was discovered in a ditch off a rural road. Marković was a chancer from Yugoslavia who supplemented meagre earnings as a street photographer with a healthy dollop of petty crime.
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After an illegal move to France, fate brought Marković into the orbit of a Delon on the verge of going supernova. Quick to grasp his good fortune, he sought to make himself indispensable to Delon and his wife, Nathalie. He ran errands, took care of their young son.
For these and other services, he was rewarded with quarters under the grand staircase of their Paris mansion and, in a bizarre echo of Delon’s character Tom Ripley in Purple Noon, invited to wear Delon’s clothes. For a time, Marković deluded himself that he was part of their glamorous life. But the Delons kept him humiliatingly beholden: if he wanted cash, he had to ask for it. He needed Delon to sign papers that would allow him to stay in France, but Delon kept stalling.
Chisholm’s search for Marković’s killer takes him deep into Delon’s murky background. Before finding fame, Delon served in the military, where he spent a third of his service in prison for assorted transgressions. Later, he was known to consort with bad actors – of the Corsican rather than thespian kind. Chisholm continually plays Delon’s off-screen life against the roles he inhabited on screen: the charming murderer of Purple Noon, the preternaturally cool, silent hitman of Le Samouraï.
Possible blackmail, and the fact that Marković slept with Nathalie, albeit during estrangement from Alain, made Delon a suspect in the killing. In this telling, though, even the officers who brought him in for questioning found themselves stammeringly starstruck.
Chisholm writes in a cocky present tense, with frequent first-person injections, and entirely pulls it off. Using stylish, jazzy prose sprung straight from a 1950s noir, he posits that Delon succeeded because, in the actor’s own words, he was his characters. The question this raises is how much of the violence he projected came from intimate knowledge, and it’s one that’s answered with tantalizing ambiguity.
The swept-back white mane, the long, aquiline face: the elder Frank Lloyd Wright of photographs looks every inch the patrician eminence grise. Then there are the buildings. The low-slung, Japanese-influenced Prairie School designs; Fallingwater in Pennsylvania; the white, peeled-orange spiral of Manhattan’s Guggenheim. All project a Zen-like calm. And yet Wright’s life, it turns out, was anything but.
For years, Wright’s romantic entanglements were catnip for the tabloid press. In 1909, he told his wife, Kitty, he was leaving her for the writer, translator and unabashed feminist Martha “Mamah” Borthwick, setting in motion a divorce that would prove considerably more drawn out than the design and construction of most of his buildings.
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Wright was famous enough that the affair made national headlines. And Kitty helped keep it there by repeatedly assuring reporters, whom she happily invited into the Wright home, that everything was just fine. When Wright and Mamah ran off to Europe together, she insisted he was merely away on business and would soon be back.
It’s hard to imagine, say, Frank Gehry being the subject of a TMZ hit. But then no contemporary starchitect approaches the level of celebrity Wright achieved in his day. His affair with Borthwick, whom he eventually married, is considered one of America’s first great celebrity scandals.
As the subtitle of Casey Sherman’s, The Killer and Frank Lloyd Wright: The True Story of Mass Murder in Paradise, makes plain, the book centres on a shockingly violent event that took place at Taliesin, the Wisconsin home Wright built for himself and Borthwick, in part as a refuge from the prying eyes of the press. There, the couple found themselves ostracized by pearl-clutching neighbours.
And yet the most fascinating part of Sherman’s story isn’t the senseless, random horror itself, but its illuminating portrait of the mores of the day.
A case in point is what happened after Borthwick’s death. When Wright took up with a “sculptress” named Miriam Noel, his morally offended elderly housekeeper stole the couple’s letters and fed them to the press. She even managed to get him investigated – by the celebrated attorney Clarence Darrow, no less – for violating the Mann Act, which made transporting women across state lines for “immoral purposes” a federal crime.
The case failed. A decade later, it was Miriam’s turn to invoke the Mann Act after Wright took up with yet another woman.
Sherman, the author of a raft of true crime titles, writes about all this suspensefully but not gratuitously, putting Wright’s career in useful context along the way. If nothing else, Wright’s story offers proof that serenity in art needn’t emanate from serenity of mind.