BEAUTY DOESN’T GUARANTEE HAPPINESS

I was shocked to learn that Brigitte Bardot was still alive. She just turned ninety.

Bridget who?   Around seventy years ago, she was a sex kitten.  With thick, pouting lips, sensual beyond measure and with a figure of blinding proportions, she was a French movie star sex bomb.  In her forty-seven films, she generally played hedonistic characters.  Bardot was an icon of the sexual revolution.  French President Charles de Gaulle called her "the French export as important as Renault cars".

The life of a sex goddess wasn’t all that great.  (Just ask Marilyn Monroe. She was married three times, the first at sixteen, and died of an apparent suicide at the age of thirty-six.) Bardot had no privacy.  She was known to hundreds of millions worldwide.  She was desired (lusted after) by millions.  Her life, according to Associated Press writer, Marilyn August, was filled with “frenzied, lonely days marked by love affairs and suicide attempts resulting from constant harassment and intrusions by gawking crowds…” (Like Princess Diana.)  Bardot married four times; the fourth was a charm, having lasted thirty-two years. She has one daughter.)

Unlike Monroe and Diana who were destroyed by their notoriety, Bardot was able to reinvent herself, create a new identity, and find meaning in life.  She obliterated her past.  “The cinema is linked to such confusion in my life that I never wish to hear about it again.”

Brigitte Bardot is not confused anymore; she knows exactly what her purpose in life is.  Those shallow, empty days are over; she found a sense of purpose in animal advocacy., and never looked back. “The woman who made those [sexy] movies, that’s not me, she’s someone else…My life today is only about animals.  Nothing that came before is me…” Unlike her natural good looks, this was something she could take credit for.  So intense was her conversion to the cause, that she ceased to be her former self.  She speaks of the sex kitten in the third person.    She wants to be remembered as the “fairy god mother of animals.” 

 Beautiful women, like the rest of us, have their ups and downs.  Dr. James Dobson calls good looks, “the golden coin of self-esteem.” Their attractiveness opens doors to fame and fortune, but sometimes doubts creep in; they want to be admired and respected – not for how they look – but for who they are and what they do. Vivian Diller, a psychologist, and Jill Muir-Sukenick, a psychoanalytic-psychotherapist, are two former models who were curious about how former models turned out.  They wondered why “so many models (who) seem to have everything - beauty, access, money, adoration…end-up drugged out, washed up, or in some other way fallen from grace.”

Models whose parents helped them develop strong self-esteem beyond their beauty, did much better in later life.  They were taught to like themselves, appreciate their God-given assets, but to “integrate it with other aspects of how (they) define(d) (themselves).

The investigators discovered that many of the models who “crashed” later in life had not emerged from their childhoods with “a solid sense of themselves.”  They often began their careers as teenagers whose only identity was that of gorgeous woman. While still adolescents, they jumped into a fantasy world of parties, money and “lots of adulation.”  Many dropped out of high school.  Instead of working through the usual teen problems and establishing a genuine identity, they “are swept up into an unreal world that temporarily solves some of these issues.”  But when the fantasy ends, they are only partially formed adults who have never really emerged from adolescence.  When the glamor ride is over, and they are driven out by the next crop of gorgeous 17-year-olds, it is hard to “negotiate your way back into reality.”   Consequently, many crash and burn.

Bardot’s second life, so to speak, was intense.  She was fined twice for insulting people in her animal rights speeches.  She was fined six times for inciting racial hatred.  The most recent fine, November 2021, was for criticizing racial mixing, immigration, the role of women in politics and Islam.  She called residents of Réunion "savages".

On the other hand, Bardot is a member of the “Global 500 Roll of Honour of the United Nations Environment Programme,” and has received several awards and accolades from UNESCO and PETA. She was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1985.     

Bardot obliterated her past and embraced the present. She found a place in life that gave her genuine substance and esteem.  She had finally become more than just another pretty face.  She is still going strong at ninety.

It would be an understatement to claim that beauty often has negative consequences, but like fame, it can be difficult to navigate.  Beauty opens doors for women, but those doors can lead to nowhere.

Bardot at 90