The French film star Alain Delon died last week aged 88. He was the most beautiful and most elegant film actor of his day.
There is a photograph of a young Marianne Faithful sitting on a couch between Mick Jagger (her then boyfriend), and a besuited Delon. Her body language betrays that Delon has all the magnetism. That seems right, even if the photograph is misleading about was really going on. Jagger, rock icon that he was, couldn’t compete with Delon’s looks or charisma.
But in the rush to celebrate Delon’s beauty some aspects of his life have been played down. The New European and the BBC website drew attention to his support in later life for the far right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, and hinted at his misogyny, but most other articles glossed over these more distasteful aspects, as if because he was so handsome he was automatically a good person, or his peccadillos could be excused because of his looks. These sorts of “lookist” assumptions are dangerous.
The BBC obituary mentions that the police raided his home and found 72
firearms and 3,000 rounds of ammunition even though he didn’t have a gun licence. How did he get away with that? Why did so few obituaries mention it?
Delon’s love for animals, particularly his many dogs, is a point in his favour, though. Or it seemed to be. He built a chapel on his estate so that more than
35 of his dogs could be buried there. He genuinely adored them.
He’s buried there now, too. But it has emerged that he wanted his 10-year-old Belgian malinois (a type of shepherd dog), Loubo, put down and buried with him.
“Put down” is a euphemism. What we should say is he wanted his companion killed.
This breed of dog is intelligent and very loyal. Delon didn’t want his pet, which was very attached to him, to suffer after his death, and so arranged
for an act of non-voluntary euthanasia. Fortunately, Delon’s family, who were deluged with offers to care for Loubo, as well as by numerous expressions of outrage, overruled him and are keeping the dog themselves.
What was wrong with Delon’s wish? It’s not illegal to kill your dog humanely in France. The same is true in the UK.
In this case, Delon’s expressed desire was to prevent the dog from undergoing mental torment after his death – not unlike the acceptable desire to prevent an animal suffering in its final weeks from an incurable and painful disease (a common reason for dog euthanasia). It stemmed, or
seemed to, from a real empathy with the dog’s plight.
Were the dog a relative rather than a pet, it could, of course, have had a say
in the matter. But here Delon ventriloquised the dog, as anyone must in a situation where killing an animal for its own sake is being considered.
The problem is that Delon seems to have come to the sentimental conclusion that the dog would not be able to survive emotionally after his death. That was almost certainly a false conclusion – most dogs are adaptable, and the retired film star could have provided funds for Loubo to have 24-hour care.
Perhaps Delon’s good looks had so accustomed him to unconditional adoration that he couldn’t imagine that an animal which had loved him so intensely could transfer that love to anyone else.
Loubo’s predicted distress may have been the given reason for this bizarre
wish, but it does sound close to the banned Indian tradition of suttee in
which a widow was expected to self-immolate on her husband’s funeral
pyre.
There is at least the suspicion that Delon was treating the dog as a chattel, a possession, and as a means to an end (his own adoration) rather than an end in itself, a sentient intelligent being with an interest in continuing to live and go on doing the kind of things dogs enjoy doing. That is what makes Delon’s plans for Loubo’s death so wrong.
In somewhat grandiose fashion, Delon imagined that Loubo couldn’t continue to flourish in a world that no longer included him. If he really believed that he was the irreplaceable centre of Loubo’s existence, he could
have left instructions to observe the dog’s behaviour closely, and if he displayed signs of intense distress then, and only then, have him killed painlessly by a vet.
My strong suspicion, though, is that Loubo, who was probably more interested in Delon’s smell than his looks, is already getting over him.
