"Come to Me, Baby"

Even as they slog through the lave pits of childhood and adolescence, most youths are forming some vision of what shape the cooled adult crust will take, how high the peaks will soar. For their models, they look to their fathers, older brothers, a teacher, a figure plunked from history--an Alexander or a Gehrig, a Shaw or a Morgan, a Renoir or a Luciano. for Raoul Levy, born of a Russian-Jewish family in Antwerp, educated there and at the London School of Economics, an R.A.F. veteran of World War II, there never seems to have been much doubt. He wanted to be a Zanuck.

The surprise was not that he failed, but that he came within sighting distance of making it. A penny-ante player in a potluck game, he filled a couple of inside straights early, and these may have brought him more bad luck than good; when the law of averages straightened out, he fell easy prey to frustration, confusion and bitterness. He didn't have the equipment, and that only whetted his ambition further. What he did have was a fast spiel, a talent for flattering the real movers and shakers with grandiose ideas, and an astonishing gift for getting people to part with their money. "People do not understand me," he once said. "They reproach me for announcing six films for a year and then making only one in four years. It is very simple. You start a film, and then after three weeks you stop--to see if the mediocre people who furnished the money are really behind you. If you see them hesitate, you leave them flat."

French Czar. By 1957, show-business people in France had begun, not very precisely, to call Levy "the czar of French cinema." He won the title, typically, on a gamble, bringing together an unknown starlet named Bardot and a neophyte director named Vadim. And God Created Woman cost less than $400,000, but Levy plastered the world with publicity and grossed ten times that much in the U.S. alone. He made a handful of other pictures, including four more with Bardot, but he had neither the money nor the skills of a long-run mogul.

An inept administrator, a corrosive buttinsky on the set, a compulsive chiseler and a helpless planner, Levy was ripe for disaster when he announced his grand oeuvre in 1961: a version of Marco Polo budgeted at $4,000,000, mostly imaginary. He rented 200 elephants in Nepal, allowing 71 to die of malnutrition, ruined the careers of two Yugoslav bureaucrats when he conned state funds out of them, welshed on everything from actors' salaries to florists' bills. Finally finished, the film was uneditable.

Nobody Leaves. Levy's trump was an almost touchingly naive faith in the power of his incantation, "Come to me, baby." He even conned his onetime amoureuse, Jeanne Moreau, out of $10,000. When she threw him over, he took a heavy dose of barbiturates and nicked his wrists--but not before alerting two secretaries in the next room.

Last week he shouted, "Come to me, baby!" through a locked door in a St.-Tropez apartment house. Inside, Isabelle Pons, 24, a sometime model and script girl and his former mistress, told him to go away. Levy fired a shotgun into his belly and died 20 minutes later in the hospital.

His hard-eyed friends wouldn't even grant him the dignity of an intentional suicide. "He could not kill himself," said Actor Eddie Constantine. "He often scared his friends by shooting up in the air, and that's what he wanted to do to Isabelle. Like a fool, he hammered on the door with the stock of his shotgun without thinking of his stomach."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.