Jean Cocteau

Vanity Fair July 1935

flashback

No wonder Jean Cocteau was moved to make Beauty and the Beast, his cinematic masterpiece, in 1946. Mme. Le Prince de Beaumont's eighteenth-century children's story in which love redeems nobility from ugliness—suggested to Cocteau by Jean Marais, the actor who appeared in almost all his films—was the perfect parable for a liberated, but haunted, France. (Even though Cocteau was vilified by the Vichy ites, Marais was denied membership in an actors' Resistance group because, as Louis Jourdan complained, "Cocteau talks too much.") But production on this most enchantingly artful screen fantasy—the Beast's chateau is a surreal dreamscape Morticia Addams would love—was anything but magic. Postwar film batches didn't match, cameras jammed, and electricity was rationed. Cocteau's excruciating eczema forced him to wear black veils and to resume his opium addiction, and jaundice landed him in the Pasteur Institute. And, of course, the fable didn't have everybody's idea of a happy ending: upon seeing the film, Greta Garbo reportedly wailed, "Giff me back my beast!" Walt Disney Pictures is hoping to recast Cocteau's spell in its new, animated version of the fairy tale.