At age 78, Gunter Sachs, one of the last living international men of mystery, took his own life with a gunshot to the head at his Gstaad chalet. The German-born millionaire, womanizer, photographer, art collector and man-about-globe had followed the fast-living course of his life to its end: Better to go out with a bang than with a whimper (Sachs was believed to have Alzheimer’s disease). That would have been bad form, old sport.
As the shot rang out in May, the Côte d’Azur, his old stomping grounds, was preparing for a “high season” that was a world apart from the one that Sachs knew. In the once rarefied fishing village of Saint-Tropez, the 300-foot super-yachts and private jets of the new-nouveau riche were gassed up and fruit-of-the-month-vodka-stocked, the Estonian “special-events models” booked, the guest lists of bold faces edited to meet gossip-column requirements. Few in the 21st-century jet set would know his name, but from the high-flying ’50s through the ’70s, in certain influential circles, Gunter Sachs was The Man.
“Playboy, moi?” Sachs once asked a reporter, giving collective voice to many of his peers. “I would rather call myself a gentleman.” Famous for wooing French bombshell Brigitte Bardot by dropping hundreds of roses onto the grounds of her house from a helicopter (it worked, she married him) and the mock boast that he never worked a day in his life, Sachs left behind a bankroll estimated to be as much as $455 million, a modest sum compared to the billions being made by today’s mega-yacht crowd.
The playboy is dead. Many of them actually lie underground and even the ones still roaming the earth have shed their tanned hides. Let us now toll the names: the red-blooded Pablo Picasso, the legendary Gianni Agnelli, the Dominican diplomat stud Porfirio Rubirosa (whose reported notches included Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ava Gardner, Jayne Mansfield and Rita Hayworth), the polo-playing novelist Jerzy Kosinski (who chronicled the mallet-wielding lifestyle in “Passion Play”), the man-of-wealth-and-taste Mick Jagger (in his Marianne Faithfull phase), the modelizing safari-photographer Peter Beard (once married to Cheryl Tiegs, romantically linked to Candice Bergen and Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie O.), Prince Albert, Roberto Rossellini, Marcello Mastroianni (who ultimately became the “La Dolce Vita” parts he played), Dodi Fayed (the Egyptian film producer who died with Princess Di in a 1997 car crash), and so many no-name but no less formidable Brazilians, Brits, French and Germans.
Despite their many sins, mortal and venal—sloth, lust, familial ties to Nazis and brutal dictators—most of the great playboys shared noble attributes. They embodied elan, impeccable taste, extreme discretion (regarding money as well as sexual conquests), and general good-natured bonhomie. To hear those who knew them tell it, they were captivating one-man shows, room-holders who, when they had everyone’s attention, often put others before them. And wherever they rested their fox hats and crash helmets, they left apocryphal stories behind, repeated in private clubs and lawn parties, tall tales that separated them from the wolf pack.
In his memoir “Don’t Mind If I Do,” Hollywood playboy emeritus George Hamilton, now a ripe 72, provided some tips he learned over the years for attracting the most gorgeous women in the world, including the hardly press-shy Liz Taylor. “A world-class playboy once told me that the key to mesmerizing women is to listen to them and look deeply into their eyes. It was a lesson I’ve never forgotten. . . . My father also had advice for me. It was always important, he told me, to be a ladies’ man and a man’s man.”
“The playboys always married for a time,” says Dana Thomas, a longtime Saint-Tropez vacationer, author of “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster” and a contributor to WSJ. “They were hopeless romantics after all. It just never lasted because they all had wandering eyes.” (Rubirosa was married five times, Robert Evans, seven.)
Their fables entered the zeitgeist in the form of pop-culture swordsmen like Thomas Crown, Simon Templar, John Steed of “The Avengers” and, most famously, James Bond (played for a while by onetime Gstaad resident Roger Moore). “Why is this bunch of endlessly naff, morally dubious, sun-damaged sex addicts so beloved by the media?” moaned the Guardian recently. Well, because they were beloved by so many men who wanted to be them and women who wanted to be with them.
Today we are left not with real playboys but with synthetic playboy nostalgia. There is “Mad Men” and its paler imitators, “The Playboy Club” and “Pan Am.” Hugh Hefner, America’s homegrown playboy, is a husk of his former self, celebrating being ditched at the altar on the cover of his own magazine. Perhaps the phoniest version of the jet-setting “good life” appears in Sean “Diddy” Combs’s TV ads for his Sean John I Am King cologne. Diddy rides a jet-ski in a full tux, arrives at a helipad armed with body-suited supermodels Bar Refaeli and Ana Paula Araújo at his side, and strides through the Mediterranean in full black tie.
If he saw it, Sachs, the impeccably dressed, tousled-haired heir to Germany’s Opel automobile dynasty, might shoot himself all over again. In his day, a playboy didn’t shout he was a “playah”—he just . . . was. What the deuce did he care if anyone else knew it?
Some fabled playboys were born to the manor, and provided hefty trust funds, but made something of it. As a young man, Italian casanova Gianni Agnelli, the heir to the Fiat fortune and onetime lover of screen goddess Anita Ekberg, was provided a faux title at the auto company. As vice president of nothing, he was told by his grandfather to “have a fling [at the job] for a few years. Get it out of your system.” His allowance was $1 million per year. After buying a 28-room villa on the Côte d’Azur (as well as playboy pads in Manhattan and St. Moritz), becoming a Formula 1 race-car driver, and ultimately smashing his Ferrari going 140 mph above Monte Carlo (breaking his leg in six places), Agnelli grew up and “stopped playing and started thinking.” Under his run as the company president, he saved the beleaguered Fiat from going the way of the Edsel. Agnelli lived to a respectable 81.
Some had real life thrust upon them. Roman Polanski, Helmut Newton, Jerzy Kosinski and the composer Serge Gainsbourg (subject of the new bio-picture “Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life”) survived Nazi and wartime threats, poverty or family tragedy, and still won fame and fortune. Robert Evans, the Hollywood producer of such classics as “Chinatown” and “The Godfather,” was “discovered” tanning by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When his acting career proved fatal, he turned to movie producing, and the ladies followed. His father was a dentist. The message such men sent out was: This could happen to you.
Even the talented Mr. Ripleys of their day, the skillful golddiggers, proved to be loyal friends, generous hosts, discreet lovers and, well, just too damned much fun not to invite to the party. Take Porfirio Rubirosa, who wed two of the richest women in the world—Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton—helping to support his race cars and polo ponies, while befriending his country’s president, who provided him diplomat-in-residence titles and salaries. Men and women alike adulated him, enjoying his “ride” in the sidecar, regaling in his getting away with it all.
Charm, 50 years ago, went a long way.
After a besotted all-nighter with the Dominican polo player and race-car driver, Sammy Davis Jr. ran into the dapper Don Juan at lunch sitting at a bar. “Rubi,” as he was nicknamed, was dressed to the nines, drinking a Ramos gin fizz. The Rat Packer asked him how he kept going. “Your profession is being an entertainer,” said Rubirosa. “Mine is being a playboy.”
How couldn’t you like a guy like that, a throwback to Bogie in “Casablanca,” a ladies’ man and a man’s man. Rubirosa, by the way, exited the scene in true playboy style, wrapping his Ferrari around a tree in the Bois de Boulogne just a day after his racing team won the Coupe de France polo cup and celebrating all night at a Paris nightclub. He was 56.
According to Venezuelan-born Reinaldo Herrera, Carolina Herrera’s husband and heir to his family’s art-and-land-owning fortune, real playboys—”an unflattering term to be called in that day”—”were gentlemen, and often sportsmen.” Herrera, once an accomplished horseman, now a Vanity Fair contributing editor, adds: “They were interesting to be around. They worked but played well and lived well. They didn’t buy $10,000 bottles of champagne to impress a girl or their friends. They were brought up with an instinctive sense of obligation.”
“The word ‘millionaire’ was like the clap—you didn’t talk about it,” says Evans, who at 81 still counts in his intimate circle vintage-make playboys like Jack Nicholson, Polanski and Warren Beatty. “When money is everything, charm goes out the window.” Evans differentiates between style, a good thing, and fashion, a superficial thing. “Style preceded fashion for these guys.” Helmut Newton, the German-Australian photographer who died in a 2004 car crash by the driveway of the Chateau Marmont, was to the film producer “the epitome of style. He was the only person you couldn’t officially invite to a party because then too many people would try to crash it. He was that much of a wonderful charmer.”
Saint-Tropez acts as a bellwether of what’s been lost. It’s now all about liquor-brand-and-celebrity-endorsed private parties, pop-up clubs and techno-Gaga spectacle, and whirling choppers hitting the Riviera with the subtlety of a Michael Bay movie. Baggy shorts and backward ball caps are the uniform of choice worn by the new players, even at once-chic seaside spots like Club 55 and La Voile Rouge. This summer, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin stayed in an $8,000-per-night suite at the Hotel Byblos and ran up a $50,000 bar tab entertaining a flock of models.
“I don’t go to Saint-Tropez anymore—money-grubbers and vulgarians,” says Evans, who spent more than a decade hitting the French Riviera and staying at the once discreetly chic Hôtel du Cap. Evans says that the problem with the new-money players is that they’re money-smart but culturally anemic. The 10-digit successes have come so fast for them that there’s been no time—and, for most of them, no inclination—to pursue character-broadening hobbies like lepidoptery or oenology, or interests in Flemish paintings, Gregorian literature, the opera, learning new languages. No time to break Everest records for the Explorers Club or hunt black rhinos in Tanzania.
Have pity on the nouveau-riche playboys, for they know not what they do.
