Loran Smith: Filing flaws brings back memories of Hollywood mover and shaker

While I am not a pack rat, I tend to hang on to anything that can be filed away. Then I forget where I filed it or the name of the folder which has treasured flashback content.  Then one day when rumbling around, like on a lazy weekend in winter, I come across a file that brings about a link to a vignette of yesteryear.

Richard Tardits − if you are a genuine Bulldog fan, you likely recall Le Sack − was the defensive end who walked on in the 1980s and set the UGA sack record, which Davey Pollack later broke.

When Richard was the incumbent Bulldog sack specialist, I made a trip to his hometown of Biarritz, which is anchored by the Atlantic in the heart of Basque country just a few miles north of Spain.

In Biarritz, I was the guest of Dennis LaLanne, who was a well-traveled sportswriter whose boyhood hero was UGA’s Spec Towns who won the Olympic high hurdles in Berlin in 1936.

At one point, LaLanne covered the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, the four golfing majors, every major sporting event in France and was well connected across the world.  One year at the British Open a friend of his, Dennis Machenaud, who was the editor of a popular magazine, “France Golf,” sat beside me.  The seat assignment officer mistook Athens, Georgia for Athens, Greece and placed me in the “international section.”  LaLanne wanted to cover the Masters and needed an introduction to Augusta National officials.  Machenaud asked for assistance which I was happy to do, recommending LaLanne to Augusta press executives.

That led to decades of LaLanne coming to Athens and spending the better part of a week with us.  He would host me in Biarritz for a week before the British Open in July.

Golf, the best in food and wine, introductions to each other’s friends along with long conversations about multiple subjects of mutual interest became our summer lifestyle.  I took him over to see Spec Towns, who lived three minutes from where I live.   “A highlight of my life,” he said afterwards, misty eyed and humbled.  “When I was a boy, I had Forrest Towns’ picture on my wall.”

He told me about his friend Jacques Bergerac with whom he was writing a book. Bergerac had moved from movies to business and headed up Revlon’s Paris office.

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While searching for notes about LaLanne last weekend, I came across a file about Biarritz and recalled a brief telephone conversation with Bergerac which LaLanne arranged.

LaLanne subsequently gave me an outline of the 21 chapters of Bergerac’s rags-to-riches memoir, “A Table at Romanoff’s.”  He and LaLanne were promoting their book at the time. We were to meet up for lunch in Paris, but schedule issues complicated plans which I regret.

Bergerac was a shepherd’s son from the countryside near Biarritz.  He was spotted by an MGM talent scout in Paris, and enjoyed a nice Hollywood career becoming a French heartthrob for movies such as “Gigi,” and “Les Girls.”  American movie fans took to Bergerac as well.

Bergerac went from obscurity to dining with film legends at Romanoff’s, “the hottest spot to see and be seen in Hollywood.”  The book was an insider’s recall of an aborted fistfight with Humphrey Bogart, drinking sessions with Errol Flynn, a friendship with Ronald Regan and “romances with some of the world’s most beautiful and desired women.”

A review of the book described the times as those when movie stars were “not flesh and blood but gods and goddesses.”  In a scene, described early on in the book, Bergerac is at Romanoff’s at a table which included, Gary Cooper, Ava Gardner, Alfred Hitchcock, Humphrey Bogart and Ginger Rogers who would become his wife.

Bergerac knew Clark Gable, star of “Gone with the Wind,” as a “regular guy who preferred hunting, fishing and other outdoor sports to treading red carpets and signing autographs.  Gable chose to live on a ranch in Beverly Hills in what had come to be called ‘the Valley.’  Clark Gable was a natural, something rare in a world where dreams were manufactured for sale.  His equal would never be seen again.”  At dinner, hosted that night by Gable, Bergerac was seated between Ava Gardner and Lana Turner, “arguably the best seat in the house.”

“Despite the star power surrounding me, my presence didn’t go unnoticed. Ginger and I had become an item, and the press had been having a field day, to a pitch that would not be seen again until the marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio,”

Later in the evening an inebriated Bogart tried to pick a fight with Bergerac until the Frenchman invited the aging actor outside. Bogart backed down.

Finding these notes from time spent with LaLanne, made me realize that I have a treasure trove of lasting memories in my basement office from a lifetime of travel.  If I could just put my hand on such vignettes when I need to.

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Loran Smith recalls conversation with a Hollywood and Revlon executive