Tete-a-Tete (32 page)

The women were jealous, says Lanzmann, and Sartre kept them in almost total ignorance of each other. “If one lies, one has to lie well…. One needs accomplices. Simone de Beauvoir was an accomplice. And I sometimes found myself being one too.”
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Beauvoir was in love again. Lanzmann brought passion back into her life, with all its joys and anxieties. She had not thought a man would desire her again. (She told Algren that she saw Lanzmann as “rather a kind of incestuous son than a lover…. he asks for a motherly tenderness rather than something else.”
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) She had the joy of an intelligent, stimulating, energetic companion. They went to films together, they discussed books, they read each other's work, and they were always venturing out somewhere new—on long trips, weekend trips, and evening outings. “When time was short, we would content ourselves with going out to dine in the countryside near Paris, happy to smell
the greenery, to see the lights flowering along the highways, to feel the city's breath as we drove back.”
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At first, she was anxious. Algren had not been able to love on her terms. Would Lanzmann be able to? She soon realized that Sartre was an additional draw for Lanzmann. She also worried about her relationship with Sartre. Were they drifting apart? “Of course we would always remain intimate friends, but would our destinies, hitherto intertwined, eventually separate?”
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Together, she and Sartre negotiated the new waters. She did not want to give up the two months' vacation she had every year with Sartre, but neither did she want to leave Lanzmann for that long. Sartre agreed that Lanzmann could join them for two weeks of that time. And during the five weeks that Sartre was traveling, first with Michelle (three weeks) then with Wanda (two weeks), Beauvoir would go abroad with Lanzmann.

 

In February 1953, Jacques Lanzmann, the adventurous, red-haired, twenty-six-year-old middle sibling, returned from a two-year sojourn in South America. For two years he had been almost completely out of contact with his family.

From the airport he made his way to his mother's apartment. That's where he heard the astonishing news that Claude was living with Simone de Beauvoir, and that Evelyne, who had divorced Rezvani, was on tour in the provinces, acting in a Chekhov play under the stage name of Evelyne Rey. “Wait until you see her,” said Monny.

Jacques scarcely recognized his sister. Never had he seen anyone change so dramatically. As an adolescent, Evelyne had been thin and bony, with thick dark brown bangs, a prominent nose (like her mother), and crystal blue eyes (like her father and brothers). By the time she was married, at eighteen, she had rounded out and become a beautiful strong-faced brunette. Now, at twenty-three, she had transformed herself into a Barbie doll. She had the body of a pinup girl, and she accentuated it with clinging clothes and high heels. Her hair had become platinum blond. And she sported a small turned-up nose. “It was the fashion,” says Jacques Lanzmann. “It was horrible.”
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The problem—even Evelyne seemed to think this—was that her new appearance did not fit her personality. A highly intelligent, politically committed, intense, tormented woman, she had made herself into a sex symbol. As Beauvoir puts it, tactfully: “Evelyne was…so pretty that people were amazed by her intelligence.”
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Sartre had heard a great deal about Claude Lanzmann's sexy younger sister. He asked to meet her. Claude Lanzmann arranged a dinner. He remembers saying to Beauvoir, “Here we go. This will surely lead to an affair.”
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It was the spring of 1953, and
No Exit
was playing at the Théâtre de l'Athénée, with Evelyne in the role of the seductive young narcissist Estelle. The critic from
Le Monde
raved: “We can no longer imagine another Estelle than Evelyne Rey…the quintessence of the eternal feminine.”
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After the play, the four of them went out to eat. Evelyne was radiant, and Sartre was enchanted.

Beauvoir recalls: “Sartre said to me: ‘Do you think that I could perhaps, I don't know, send her some flowers?'…He wanted to have another affair. I said to him, yes, go for it, you can only try…. The desire for an affair, that's something he never lost.”
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In his memoir,
Le Testament amoureux,
Serge Rezvani claims that Claude Lanzmann acted as a “procurer” for his sister. Jacques Lanzmann says, “Yes, Claude regularly served as a ‘Madame' for Evelyne.”
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Several people, notably Bianca Bienenfeld and Nelson Algren, have said the same about Beauvoir, meaning that she set Sartre up with her young women friends, knowing exactly what would happen.

 

Evelyne was yet another of Sartre's fragile young women. She was six when her mother abandoned the family. During her adolescence her brothers were away—at school in Clermont-Ferrand, and then in Paris—and she lived alone with her Jewish father and Catholic stepmother in the countryside near Brioude. Her father thought she might be safer if she converted to Catholicism. But he had not expected her to embrace God with such passion. For a time she
became quite messianic, with dreams of becoming a nun and converting the blacks in Africa. She would always remain something of a mystic. Love, for her, meant adoration.

The love affair with Gilles Deleuze had been disastrous. She had become so thin and weepy after he jilted her that the family genuinely feared she would die. The marriage with Serge Rezvani had not made her happy either.
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Like her siblings, Evelyne was driven by ambition, while at the same time plagued by feelings of inadequacy. One day Rezvani had suggested she take up acting. Excited by the idea, she enrolled for classes with the famous drama teacher René Simon. He told her that with that Semitic nose of hers she would go precisely nowhere. “Fix it!” he ordered her imperiously. Rezvani remembers evening after evening in which Evelyne would stand in front of the mirror, curse her appearance, and weep.

To his dismay, Evelyne began to turn herself into a New Look model. She acquired vampish gestures, wore elbow-length black gloves, and smoked with a long cigarette holder. Rezvani could not help thinking that rather than actually being one, she was acting the part of a femme fatale.

The marriage ended in 1950. For several months the two of them did not see each other. When they met again, at the
Deux Magots,
Rezvani hardly recognized the smiling woman who came toward him, with her small, upturned nose. He was horrified. He thought she had “banalized” her beauty.

 

In June 1953, Sartre and Beauvoir, accompanied by their lovers, met up for a few days in Venice. The couples stayed in different hotels. On Saturday, June 20, Beauvoir and Lanzmann spent the morning walking on the Lido beach, then took a
vaporetto
back to the Piazza Roma, where they had arranged to meet Sartre and Michelle for a late lunch. As they disembarked, they caught sight of a newspaper with the large headline:
I Rosenberg sono stati assassinati.
The worldwide demonstrations and nine appeals to the U.S. Supreme court had not saved Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The previous evening, just before sundown (the start of the Sabbath), the two,
accused without evidence of transmitting the secret of the A-bomb to the Soviets, had been strapped into the electric chair and put to death.

Sartre's face, when they saw him, was rigid. Lunch was canceled. Sartre went straight back to his hotel and phoned the Parisian paper
Libération,
promising them an article by midnight.
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The four met up that evening at ten
P.M.
, in the Café Florian, in Piazza San Marco. Sartre handed his article to Beauvoir and Lanzmann. They read it and both had the same reaction. It was no good. In his fury, Sartre was ranting, and had lost his punch.

Sartre sat up all night rewriting the article, and phoned it through to Paris the next morning. The family had rarely seen him so angry and upset. “So much for ‘American leadership of the free world,'” he wrote. “Your free world is not ours.”
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Beauvoir wrote to Nelson Algren the next day, from the room she shared with Lanzmann at the Hotel Luna. Algren had been active on the “Save the Rosenbergs” committee, and she was sure he would feel as she did. “Even right wing people agree on one point: this is the biggest mistake made by USA in the Cold War,” she wrote.
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She had been profoundly moved by the letters Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had written each other from their prison cells. Gallimard had published them in translation, she told Algren, and the proceeds were going to the Rosenbergs' two young sons.

Algren wrote back in July. He was in one of his bitter moods. The Rosenbergs died for a lie, he said. The Soviet Union was no workers' democracy, and only second-rate people believed it was. He had not been moved by the Rosenbergs' letters from prison. Nor by the television coverage. He still kept seeing that “little fat fool of a woman in a shapeless green dressing gown walking up to that electric chair.” He had read Sartre's comments in a newspaper, and he thought Sartre was wrong. The United States was not yet a fascist country, even though executing the Rosenbergs was a fascist act. He still believed there was more hope in the United States than in the USSR. Sartre should not disown the United States too soon.
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She was interested in what he had to say about the Rosenbergs, Beauvoir replied. It was true that in the Soviet Union the former Stalinist leader Beria had just been arrested for spying. A strange business. She supposed Algren was right: it was difficult to have much confidence in the Soviet Union.

Beauvoir was conciliatory with the men she loved.

 

From Venice, Beauvoir and Lanzmann drove to Trieste, where they discovered, to their surprise, that it was not difficult to obtain visas for Tito's Yugoslavia. “We're fantastically excited,” Beauvoir wrote to Sartre.
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They stacked the car with provisions and spare oil, and ventured into communist territory. Lanzmann had already been to East Germany, but this was Beauvoir's first experience of life behind the iron curtain. They found Yugoslavia poverty-stricken, but they were impressed by the atmosphere of solidarity among the people.

Beauvoir then spent several weeks in Amsterdam with Sartre and was looking forward to meeting Lanzmann in Basel when she heard the news that he had had a car accident and was in a hospital in Cahors, in the southwest of France. She set off in the car immediately. Sartre took the train to Paris. He was going to join them in a week.

A few days later, Beauvoir wrote to Sartre from Cahors. Lanzmann had been in severe pain, but he was getting better and was back on his feet:

She closed with careful instructions. While Sartre was in Paris, would he please transfer his Italian royalties to his French bank account, ring the secretary at
Les Temps modernes,
and call at the Rue de la Bûcherie apartment to pick up mail, a work folder, shirts, socks, and underpants for Lanzmann? “Till Wednesday, o little yourself. A big hug and lots of kisses. Your charming Beaver.”

 

Later that week, the three of them spent a morning looking around the Gothic cathedral in Albi, northeast of Toulouse. After lunch, Lanzmann and Beauvoir explored the town while Sartre spent the afternoon sitting in the hotel garden, under an arbor, writing an immensely long letter to Evelyne Lanzmann. He read it to them that evening. “It was a magnificent letter,” Claude Lanzmann recalls, “a very
literary
letter. An account of his day and Albi's red cathedral. He spoke about himself, about her. He said he wished she were there.”
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Sartre had begun a tempestuous affair with Evelyne. A replay of the quasi-incestuous tangles between Beauvoir, Bost, and the Kosakiewicz sisters? Sartre's secretary, Jean Cau, joked that if Sartre and Beauvoir had a daughter, Jacques Lanzmann would be sleeping with
her.

In his autobiographical narrative
Words,
which he drafted the following year, Sartre comments on his incest fantasy:

There was nothing platonic about this relationship. “Evelyne was one of the women Sartre was most attached to,” Beauvoir would tell
John Gerassi in 1973. “He was extremely jealous…. When he did not get letters, he was very moody,…he became very dark.”

“With Evelyne, I saw him anguished like an adolescent,” Claude Lanzmann says of Sartre. “When he hadn't heard from her one day, he got up at least ten times from the table to phone.”
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