Sexiest Couples of the 60's and 70's

These are my nominees for the sexiest couples of the free-wheeling 1965-75 era.  They were not necessarily the healthiest of relationships.  In fact, some of these couples were disastrous for each other.  But they were so sexy that if you had walked into a room and discovered any of these couples having sex, you might not have turned away immediately. 

Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd

Everyone knows their story.   Eric Clapton was madly in love with Pattie Boyd, the wife of his best friend, George Harrison.   In Layla, Eric claims Pattie brought him to his knees, but it really wasn't like that.   He never weakened in his pursuit of her.   He tracked her as though she were a wild animal.   Eventually, he exhausted her and Pattie let him take her.



As is so often the case, the prey, once captured, became less appealing.  While he was pursuing her, he wrote the heroin-fueled and agonized Layla.  Once he had married her, the best he could come up with was Wonderful Tonight.   That was just a song about the ego rush associated with walking into a party with a hot chick.  Nothing special about that.

They were married for nine tumultuous years.   Eric tried to recover from his heroin addiction by drinking.  In doing so, became an alcoholic.  He also cheated on her a lot and made no effort to hide it.  When she protested, he insulted her.   

Agreed; not too sexy.   The pursuit, though, was very sexy.

Pattie Boyd somehow got two of the most talented musicians in the world to fall in love with her.  Both vowed to spend the rest of their lives with her. Both composed some of their best music for her. 

Somewhere in all of that, there had to have been some crazy sex.

June Carter & Johnny Cash

These two were better together than they were apart.  He was so conventionally masculine and she, so very womanly.  My parents took me to see them in concert in the late 60's.  June joined him onstage to perform Jackson.  Even as a child, way up in the balcony seats, I felt the heat between them.  I couldn't have defined it then, but I could tell that underneath that frilly, swirly dress, she was a white-hot firebrand, and that he was insanely turned on by her.

I Walk the Line was his promise to her that he would never leave her side.  She wrote the lyrics to Ring of Fire to describe how it felt to fall in love with him, which was, exciting and frightening at the same time.  He was not the kind of man she had expected to fall for.  She knew that once she gave herself to him, it would be for good.  There would be no going back.  It was that serious.

He put her through a lot during those early years and he knew it.  They survived as a couple because he acknowledged his failings and humbled himself to her.  He saw her as his savior and that's how he treated her until the day she died. 

They also survived because she never gave up on him even though she often felt a bit out of his league.  Staying with him meant that she was often traveling down a dark, unfamiliar path.  Yet once she was on that path with him, she never turned back.  Each time he stumbled, she steadied him.  She was his lover, his wife, a mother to his children, and his professional partner--but they survived as a couple because more than anything else, she was his friend.

It is no surprise to anyone that he died just a few months after her.  There would be no new life for him; no companion to replace her.  There was no one capable of replacing June Carter.  Once she was gone, the only thing Johnny Cash could do was follow her.

Brigitte Bardot and Gunther Sachs

German-born Gunther Sachs was straight out of a Jacqueline Suzanne novel.  He came from old European money, the kind of money that made it unnecessary for him to work a day in his life.  He spent his time skiing and bobsledding in the Alps; scuba diving in the French Riviera; playing the casinos in Monte Carlo.  He chose beautiful, high-profile women.  Two of his conquests were Aristotle Onassis's ex-wife Tina and the former Queen Soraya of Persia.  Eventually he met Brigitte Bardot, and of course, he had to have her.  She was the ultimate prize.

He embarked on an aggressive courtship.  He took her yachting.  He flew her around on his private plane to hotspots across Europe.  He sent her 100 red roses every day.  When he feared she would tire of that, he dropped hundreds of roses from a helicopter into her garden.  Then one day he jumped out of the helicopter and into the sea in front of her villa.  With him were two Louis Vuitton suitcases.  His message was clear.  He was not coming to visit; he was coming to stay. 

The lust (and maybe even the love) between them was real.  They couldn't keep their hands off each other.  At their wedding reception, they were so entangled with each other that guests worried the two might not make it up to their hotel room in time to consummate their marriage.

The marriage was troubled right from the beginning.  At the minimum, there were stylistic differences.  As an old-school aristocrat, Gunther hated Brigitte's 1960's Bohemian lifestyle.  He hated her cluttered, eclectic apartment and the small, hippie-style gatherings that constituted her social life.  Brigitte hated Gunther's rich and reckless friends.  She hated his massive, mausoleum-style apartment and his grand ballroom style of entertaining.  On one occasion, in protest of yet another of his formal dinner parties, she arrived barefoot.  Her intent was to irritate him and she did.

Gunther in his middle age
at play on the French Riviera.

It soon became apparent to Gunther that by seducing Brigitte, he had bitten off more than he could chew.  He was old school, and thus, expected to continue his philandering with Brigitte's tacit approval.  He was wrong.  Once she became aware he was cheating on her, she started distancing herself from him.  She maintained a separate residence from him.  She socialized with her own friends, and rarely with his.  When Gunther decided he wanted to manage her career, she blocked him.  By then she knew she couldn't trust him as a husband.  She certainly wasn't going to trust him with her career.

After a couple of years, she began to cheat, too.  She crossed paths with French singer and composer Serge Gainsbourg and began a public, in-your-face affair with him.  It was that affair that eventually catapulted Brigitte out of her marriage.  After three draining years, the marriage was over.

For the rest of his life, Gunther kept his homes filled with sculptures, paintings and photos of Brigitte.  In 1974, five years after their divorce, he commissioned Andy Warhol to do a painting of Brigitte.  He hung it prominently in his home in Switzerland.  Several years after that, he sent Brigitte a diamond estimated to be worth one million dollars.  It was intended as a thank-you to her for not demanding any of the family money during their divorce.  For Brigitte, it had never been about the money anyway.  She accepted the ring, but soon auctioned it off in a benefit for her animal foundation.

In 2011 at the age of 78, Gunther committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.  He left behind a note that explained he had been dealing with "a loss of mental control over my life" as the result of "hopeless illness A."  It is believed he was referring to Alzheimers. 

He had been divorced from Brigitte for over forty years, but he never lost his fascination for her.  Small wonder.  She may have been the only woman he was unable to control.

Keith Richards & Anita Pallenberg
Mick Jagger & Marianne Faithfull

Keith & Anita

These four functioned as one unit.  There was so much crossover between the two couples that it's easy to lose track of who belonged to whom. 

Through the 60's, Mick and Keith worked together and socialized almost exclusively together.  This was due in part to the fact that their girlfriends, Marianne and Anita, were best friends.  All four were cocaine and heroin addicts.   All four were freaky, particularly Anita. She was bisexual, experimental, and at that time, deeply into black magic.  Keith was just raw masculine energy.  Mick was a showboater with bisexual tendencies.  Marianne just liked to have a lot of sex and then talk about it to whoever wanted to listen, which was pretty much everyone.

Mick & Marianne

In the ensuing years, Keith, Anita and Marianne have spoken openly about their sexual misadventures.  Not surprisingly, their stories often conflict.  It's doubtful any one of them is lying.  During all this sex, they were taking boat loads of drugs.   One can't blame them for being a little foggy on the details.


The short version, the one on which they all seem to agree, is this.  Keith and Anita were a couple.  Mick and Marianne were a couple.  Marianne and Anita frequently had sex with each other.  At one time or another, they had sex with each others' boyfriends.  They both had sex with Stones guitarist Brian Jones.  Oh, and according to Marianne, Mick confided that his fantasy was to perform oral sex on Keith.  The two couples were a mobile mosh pit.


There is something disturbing and yet alluring about these four.  With the exception of teenage boys and men in mid-life crisis, no one would not want the kind of sex they had.  It was the dark and dangerous kind.  They were like four neurons firing wildly out of control.  As soon as one touched another, things got a little scary.

Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg

Theirs was a complex relationship involving one of the most complex men of the era.  It is impossible to be brief when describing everything that Serge Gainsbourg was.  Every decade of his life would merit its own book or movie.  Suffice it to say he was a French composer and singer who is as legendary in France as Elvis is in the U.S.

While Serge was not classically handsome, he was an overtly sexual man.  Even in an era known for its sexual abandon, he was almost too sexual for the French to tolerate.  His sexuality (many would say his perversions) couldn't be contained.  It showed itself most obviously in his music.  He infused his lyrics with sexual innuendo and word play.  His voice was deep and slow.  It was the kind of voice that hit a woman's libido first, and then her ears.  "Sex," says Jane Birkin, "was his obsession."

In 1968, Serge was recovering from his breakup with Brigitte Bardot, who had left him in one last attempt to save her marriage to Gunther Sachs.  It was at that juncture that Serge met 21 year-old British actress Jane Birkin.  By then, Serge was a devoted alcoholic, but no matter.  Jane was a free spirit.  She considered Serge's drinking to be part of his charm. 

For the next thirteen years, Serge and Jane were not only inseparable as lovers; they were professional collaborators as well.  Their most famous recording was Je T'aime, Moi Non Plus, a song that featured Jane pantomiming an orgasm.  The song was banned from radio play throughout most of Europe.  France forbade radio stations from playing it before 11:00 pm.  The Vatican not only denounced Je T'aime, but excommunicated the producer responsible for introducing the song to Italy.  Gainsbourg couldn't have been happier.  He called the Pope "our greatest PR man."

Jane and Serge recorded separately and together throughout the 1970's.  However, toward the end of the decade, Serge's alcoholism had become too heavy a burden for the relationship to bear.  He would frequently stumble home when the sun was coming up, too drunk even to get the key in the door.  Jane might have found a way to live with this if not for the fact that in 1971, she had given birth to their only child together.  She could no longer keep up with the type of lifestyle Serge was continuing to lead. 

What happened during the ten years after they split is more revealing of their relationship than anything that happened during their thirteen years together.  Without Jane, Serge slowly fell apart.  He became a fixture on French talk shows but he was always more drunk than sober.  He looked horrific.  He was offensive to other guests, most infamously to Whitney Houston in 1986.  He struggled with crippling depression.  He lived for ten more years after their break-up, but as a friend noted, "He spent [those last ten years] committing suicide."

Even so, the two remained close friends after the split.  He asked to be the godfather to the child she had with Jacques Doillon (remarkable, given that the child was conceived while Jane was still living with Serge).  He continued to write songs for her.  Jane relates an incident that happened after they had broken up in which she was in the studio recording a series of love song Serge had recently written for her.  All of the songs concerned separation and regret.  As she sang, she watched Serge behind the glass crying.   She didn't know how to console him.  When she was finished recording, she asked him, "Can I say that I'm your feminine side, your B side?" referring to the vinyl albums back then.   Yes, he said, that suited him just fine.  It was an insightful comment for her to make because Jane was his feminine side, the yin to his yang, whether they were together as a couple or not.  She was the tempering influence to his extremes.  

In 1991, Jane mentioned to Serge that she had somehow misplaced a diamond ring he had given her in the early 70's.  A couple of days later he called her to tell her he had bought another to replace it.  She laughed him off.  "Oh, Serge, shut up and stop drinking," she said.  That night, Serge died in his sleep of heart failure.  When Jane arrived at his apartment in Paris the next day, Serge's manservent presented her with the ring in its Tiffany box.

Today, Jane still has a robust singing career.  She is active in a number of global humanitarian foundations.   She is involved in the daily lives and careers of her daughters.  She is financially secure, not only because of her own pursuits, but because Serge took considerable care of her in his will. 

Jane is not married or even involved with a man.  Her last relationship was with Jacques Doillon, the man for whom she left Serge.  Doillon ended his and Jane's relationship shortly after Serge's death, saying he could not compete with Jane's grief for Serge.  There has been no one since.

Brigitte Bardot: The Sex Kitten Who Roared

My, oh my, what is France to do with Brigitte Bardot? She's been oddly quiet lately, but she's due for an outburst. If you aren’t aware, every two or three years Brigitte causes a scandal by protesting the presence of Muslim immigrants in France.  She doesn't approve of the "mixing of genes" between the Arabs and the French.  She doesn't like the fact that 8% of France's population is now comprised of Muslim immigrants.  She doesn't like that Islam is on the verge of eclipsing Catholicism as France's dominant religion.  She especially dislikes that Muslims have brought with them their practice of slaughtering animals for religious holidays.  She wants Muslims to leave France, go home and slaughter no more.

If you're Muslim, don't feel singled out.  Brigitte has also been vocal about her contempt for gay men as well as people who are unemployed.  If you're gay or unemployed, don't you go feeling singled out either.  Brigitte has effectively said she holds the entire human race in low regard.  So condemn her all you want.  She's not listening.  She doesn't like you, me, or anyone else, and she doesn't care how we feel about it.  She's kind of cool like that.

She has been called a racist, a Fascist, and a neo-Nazi.  Mostly they call her a "crazy old bat."  You will see that, and many variations of it, in every comment section of every article written about her.  In our sanitized, politically correct world, we don't know what else to call a woman who refuses to respect the PC Handbook.  

France routinely punishes the crazy old bat by sending her to court when she acts up.  She has been convicted five times in eleven years for inciting racial hatred.  She has never been imprisoned, but she has paid massive fines for her comments.  She doesn't care.  She keeps doing it and she doesn’t apologize for it, not really.  The closest she ever came to apologizing is when she said in open court, "I never knowingly wanted to hurt anybody.  It is not in my character."  That was it. 


We're not used to that.  Certainly we're accustomed to celebrities and politicians saying offensive things.  It happens all the time.  They say something outrageous.  We express the obligatory outrage. They offer the obligatory apology, sometimes tearfully. Then we all settle down and move on.


The problem with Brigitte is, she skips the tearful apology part. In fact, it's possible that Brigitte has never apologized in her life. Dirk Bogard, her co-star in the 1955 comedy Doctor at Sea, says that as a girl of twenty, Brigitte taught him to never apologize.  He said, "According to Brigitte, one should never say, No, I'm sorry, but instead, simply, No."  It would seem that withholding apologies is not just a strategy for Brigitte. It is not meant as a personal affront. It is a mindset.   It is who she is.

People who disapprove of her sensibilities find a number of ways to punish her. Most commonly, they attack her for aging poorly.  It's an easy shot to take. Reporters and bloggers simply place before and after photos of her side by side.  Look!  Brigitte Bardot nude, Brigitte Bardot young.  Now look. Brigitte sun-damaged and jowley, just a crazy old woman who doesn't have the decency to get a face lift.  Pow.  The punishment meted out by we the people is more cruel than any fine her government can impose on her.

By representing her with before and after pictures, we're dividing Brigitte's lives into two halves.  We do this because Brigitte herself divided her life into two segments.  At the age of 38, aware that her visual appeal would be declining soon, she retired from acting.  She said she was "sick of it all" and she left.  She looked back only once, when she did a Playboy pictorial in honor of her 40th birthday.  Once that was done, she essentially drew a thick black line behind her.  Then she turned away and began the second half of her life.  Ending her career at that point, she said, "was a way to get out elegantly."  There were no further visits to the past; no talk show circuits; no cameo appearances on sitcoms.  She was gone.

Brigitte in St. Tropez
in the 60's.

It's just as well.  The sex kitten years weren't Brigitte's happiest.  She married three times during the first half of her life.  There were scores of affairs, some adulterous.  Reportedly there were turnstyle one-night stands, a convenience afforded by the playground that was the Riviera in the 60's and 70's. There were several suicide attempts.  One might assume that she allowed herself to be used by men, which is what many beautiful women do.  Quite the contrary is true.  Brigitte used them.  She picked them up, played with them for a while, then moved onto the next toy.  Sometimes she forgot to toss aside one toy before picking up the next.  She showed little respect for her marriages, and even less for the marriages of her lovers.  When an affair became inconvenient or complicated, she walked away from it.  She did not allow men to grow bored with her.  "I leave before being left," she said.  "I decide."

If a woman is beautiful enough, a man will often allow her to hurt him as she sees fit.  There's no question Brigitte was beautiful enough to do whatever she pleased, but so were a lot of women.  Italy had Sophia Loren.  The U.S. had Raquel Welch; France had not only Brigitte, but Catherine Deneuve.  Not only were they achingly beautiful, but they were magnetic too.  What set Brigitte apart from them was a tangible, chemical sexuality that surrounded her like a haze. ("Sex on legs" is how first husband Roger Vadim described her).  Brigitte's sexuality was cat-like, almost predatory.  She didn't have to fake it for the camera.  It was already there.  One can see, just by looking at her photos and listening to the songs she recorded, that she was a woman who loved sex.  This is confirmed by her friends, by her husbands, and by all the men in between.  They all say the same thing. She was naturally sexual and she was insatiable.

                                       

Brigitte representing the 70's woman.
The days before breast implants,
daily workouts, & waxing.

Exactly when she began to feel sated is anyone's guess.  It happened at some point after her retirement.  A lot of things happened after her retirement, actually.  She became an activist for the protection of animals.  She sold her jewelry, her clothing, and her memorabilia in order to fund her campaigns.  Essentially, she sold her past.  With the money she accrued, she cast a net across the globe.  Her cause became any animal anywhere who fell prey to the cruelty of humans.  It was (and is) an obsession for her.  In forty years she has not wavered from it.  "I gave my youth and my beauty to men," she says. "I am going to give my wisdom and my experience to animals."

While the first half of her life was defined by men and sex, the second half became defined by three elements.  She is primarily known for her animal protection activism.  Secondary to that role, she is known for her extreme right-wing political convictions and her fight against the "Islamization of France."  Third--and this is nothing short of bizarre--she is known for her resistance to cosmetic surgery.  Much has been made of this, especially within the gay community.  In the 1990's, Elton John was so offended by her appearance that he publicly offered to pay for a face lift for her.  Brigitte responded publicly, too.  She asked him to donate to charity whatever dollar amount he had allotted for the reconstruction of her face.  

Clearly, she does not understand the unspoken obligation that comes with beauty.  If a woman is granted that rare blessing, she must exhaust all of her time and money in order to preserve it.  Brigitte thumbed her nose at that rule.  She had the audacity to age.  She didn't even put up a fight. 

This may account for the mean-spiritedness that is woven throughout the articles that are written about her. Her critics claim they dislike her because of her bigotry and homophobia and conservative politics. However, it's likely they are not facing an underlying truth. They dislike her also because she has not behaved as an aging film star is supposed to behave. She has made no effort to fight the aging process. She has dismissed the first, more glamorous half of her life, the half we most enjoyed.  She has not become a savior for starving children in third world countries, or fought for cures for degenerative diseases.   It would seem she threw out that rulebook, too.

One of her most flagrant violations of the handbook is her failure to become a goodwill ambassador for France.  Of the infiltration of tourists to St. Tropez, she once said, "I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists."

She describes the immigration of Muslims as a "subterranean, dangerous, and uncontrolled infiltration, [they] not only resist adjusting to our laws and customs but they will, as the years pass, attempt to impose their own." She praises previous generations for "pushing back the invaders."

She is even less delicate when she speaks of gay men. She approves of the understated, deeply-closeted, polite gay men of her youth. These old-style types comprise her social circle these days.  The comments she has made that many consider homophobic are directed at modern, extroverted, uninhibited gay men.   In her book A Scream in the Silence, she describes them in very unflattering terms.   She mocks their gait, their hand gestures, and the pitch of their voices. She hates their "whining."  Some of them, she says, behave like "fairground freaks."

Brigitte and husband Bernard d'Ormale in the 1990's

Who among us does not have an elderly, Archie Bunker-type relative who says things like, "I don't care what they do in private, as long as they don't throw it in my face"?  We roll our eyes when they say such things but we let it go.  We understand it is a mindset typical to those born before 1950.  It is not homosexuality itself that is objectionable to people of that generation, but rather, the stereotypical "out there" behavior. 

Regardless, it is clear that Brigitte doesn't understand that we just don't say things like that anymore.  We aren't supposed to even think like that.  If we do, we are supposed to keep it to ourselves.  When we express how we feel about something, we must say it in a way that others do not find offensive. 

That was not always so.  In Brigitte's day, the onus of responsibility was not on the speaker; it lay with the listener.  When someone said something that offended us, we were expected to exercise tolerance and maturity.  In short, we sucked it up.  Somewhere along the line, the rules changed, but no one told Brigitte.

One has to wonder.  If she had done what she was supposed to--if she had just kept her mouth shut and boarded the PC Train with the rest of us--would her critics be more forgiving of her appearance?  Would they stop spitting out the word "old" as though her age were a character flaw?  Would they stop calling her "crazy" because she and her convictions go against the new social norms?  Would they allow her to be who she is?

La Madrague, Brigitte's villa in St. Tropez
She has lived there since 1958

Today, Brigitte Bardot lives rather reclusively at her villa in St. Tropez with ultra conservative fourth husband Bernard d'Ormale.  She tends to her animals.  Her friends come to visit.  She gets out once in a while.  Occasionally she gives interviews.  She talks very little about the first half of her life.  When she does, it is with disinterest, as though it all happened to a girl who died a long time ago.

She walks with the help of a cane, the result of an arthritic hip.  She says that at seventy-eight, she has finally reached her prime.  For her, this is probably true.  Every day, she wakes up and sharpens the sword anew.  There is more human brutality than ever.  There are animals to protect and immigrants to repel.  There are letters to be written to world leaders.  There are always new people to offend.  She has not grown tired of the battles she has chosen.  Much to the chagrin of her countrymen, the heat of battle actually seems to invigorate her.  "It is sad to grow old," she said recently, "but nice to ripen."