In 1968, Alain Delon’s former bodyguard Stevan Markovic was found dead, a bullet in his head, wrapped in plastic, wearing the actor’s clothes. The scandal took France by storm, with Delon questioned by police and his friend, gangster François Marcantoni, spending a year in prison charged with the killing before he was released and the case dropped. "Murder In Paris '68: A True Story of Death and Glamour” attempts to uncover what really happened. RFI spoke to its author, Edward Chisholm.
Unfolding amidst the glamour of 1960s Paris and Delon’s starring role in it, the Markovic Affair exposed the city’s underbelly. But with bank robbers splashed across the front pages alongside film stars, and the biggest star of all, Delon, mixing with gangsters, were these two worlds as disparate as they appeared?
For Delon, life imitated art. He was filming La Piscine when police came to question him about the death of Markovic, who had once been his stand-in on film sets – a film in which his character was simultaneously being questioned by police over the suspicious death of the man he had replaced, his lover’s former flame.
Chisholm, author of the cult hit A Waiter in Paris, wrote of his new book: "A corpse in a plastic sheet. A legendary film star. A prime minister’s wife. Blackmail, gangsters, orgies, Cold War spies. Even the French police couldn’t believe what they were uncovering...The result of years of research, it draws on thousands of pages of French police and intelligence documents, depositions, surveillance reports, press clippings, biographies and interviews with those directly involved."
But has he found answers the police did not?
RFI: How well known is the Markovic case today?
Edward Chisholm: In France if you speak to a person who is old enough to remember it, they will remember it – it was huge. It occupied front pages for six, seven years. I got newspapers and magazines from 1968 all the way through to 1974 and '75 and Delon is still on the cover about the Markovic Affair.
With younger people, it’s something they haven't heard of. Occasionally when people asked me what I was working on I'd say a book about Alain Delon and they’d say, who's Alain Delon?
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RFI: You came upon the story almost by chance while exploring the archives at the Bibliothèque des Littératures Policières – Europe’s largest archive dedicated to crime – so what was it that drew you in?
EC: I was fascinated from the get-go because it just didn't seem like a real story and I couldn't believe I hadn’t heard of it. I’m a real cinephile and I used to spend a lot of time in Paris just going to whatever film was showing, so I saw an inordinate amount of old French films. And then suddenly I was staring in the face this case which sounded like a film.
The more I kept digging, the more insane it became. And what frustrated me was that there were so many things that were unanswered in the press at the time. I could never really get to the bottom of who this guy Stevan Markovic was – this outsider, this immigrant who came into France in 1958 a nobody and rose right to the top. His name is on Charles de Gaulle’s desk by 1968, it’s quite an incredible trajectory.
And I couldn't get to the bottom of Delon because he's so well known yet he's sort of a myth, he has this wall around him. So the two people at the centre of this story really frustrated me. Who the hell are they? What was their relationship? How on earth did this happen?
RFI: What’s also so interesting are the parallels between the two figures – the way you describe Markovic as someone that built himself up out of nowhere You could say the same about Delon...
EC: Delon’s a complicated character. People ask me if I like him... I'm not sure I like him, that’s not a word I’d use with Delon. But I do admire certain qualities he had and one of them is that drive, that determination and an unwavering belief in himself. And also his frankness. He says and does what he means.
This idea of "becoming" and identity and performance are themes that run through the book. It is interesting, the parallels between the two men and the similarities, down to their height and age and build – and the fact that Markovic was Delon’s double on film sets for a bit as well, it’s almost too good.
RFI: In the book you describe digging through the archives and all these old media sources. Détective magazine sounded particularly fantastic...
EC: They're so funny because on the front they'll have Delon and some lurid caption and they'll also have some half-naked girl who’s an escort about to blow secrets open on some Emir's stay in a maison close or something.
But speaking to a journalist called James Fox, who was a Sunday Times reporter and one of the three people at newspapers Delon spoke to when the Markovic Affair was big news at the beginning of 1970, he said the funny thing was that when he was looking for information in Paris, the guys who knew everything were the journalists at Détective magazine... they had all the contacts in the crime world.
They've got adverts for fake hairy chests, and at the same time really good writing on crime.
RFI: Did you have a feeling from the start about what had happened to Markovic?
EC: I couldn't help but imagine all these different scenarios. Obviously one of the most compelling is this idea that Marcantoni and Delon were in some back room with Markovic tied up on the floor and, after Markovic had been beaten up by Marcantoni and some heavies, someone hands Delon the gun and lets him have the honour of shooting him in the back of the head.
The police said in the final report 'just because he plays these people on the screen doesn't mean he acts like them in real life'. But all of the stuff I read about him suggests he does act like these people.
I'd love to think he was there – although it’s a dark thought. And I feel like he would have wanted to be, but I know he’s also got a sense of self-preservation and probably would have stayed away from it. For me it was a bit like that Thomas Becket thing: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
I mean, clearly Marcantoni did it. But I can just keep putting it together in different ways. Sorry, that's the really annoying answer...
RFI: The only people who know are the people who were in the room.
EC: Exactly. As Marcantoni said: "And God. And God doesn't snitch."
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RFI: With A Waiter in Paris you were busting myths about life in Paris today, which people idealise now possibly more than ever, thanks to social media. This book to an extent does that for 1960s Paris, a time also very much idealised but in which, similarly to Swinging '60s London, that legendary good time was only being had by the elite. Do you feel you’ve exposed the reality behind the glamour? Or perhaps the criminal underworld is part of the glamour?
EC: I have a thing with facades – I want to know what's really happening behind them. There was this glamorous side, but like you say, whether it was Saint Tropez or the parties, it was for a certain elite. For your average person, even talking about sexual liberation, it was trickling down slowly, the pill had just come in, but it’s still a very Catholic France. De Gaulle is still president and he has this quite backward-looking way of looking at France.
There's the same thing with the gangsters, they were sort of idealised in films. But when I was in the archives, they had all these headshots of real gangsters and it looked like a casting call for a film. They had the names too – I mention in the book this guy called Tony the Eel, because he slipped out of the hands of the police.
And so they did exist and they did have these lives. And, just before 1968, there was a sort of innocence to it as well because the police and the criminals had been on the same side in the war, so there was a sort of honour amongst thieves amongst them. But then as it progressed and heroin took over, by the end of the '60s they weren’t driving around Pigalle in sports cars. It all moved to the banlieues and it was much more violent.
RFI: You talk in the book about Markovic's death and Delon's declining career both mirroring the end of something bigger, the end of Les Trente Glorieuses [“the 30 glorious years”, a period of post-war boom in France between 1945 and 1975]. It all seemed to tie together, as if the affair marked the end of an era.
EC: Definitely. When I was trying to work out how to write the book, it felt like a bit of a cliché because '68 was obviously this watershed moment. And I realised I had to go back to 1958 because that’s when Markovic arrives, Delon explodes and De Gaulle becomes president again, for a 10-year tenure.
And this is all serendipity perhaps, but it allows me to tell the wider story of France and the end of those 30 Glorious Years of economic growth and this decline, this move into something else, something much darker. In the '70s even Delon’s films and the way he looks don't have the same burnish, they’re much more dark.
RFI: In later years Delon’s legacy has been tarnished, given his views on homosexuality and his allegations of violence against women. What effect did the scandal have on his career at the time? Did it change the way people saw him?
EC: I think it just added to the sense of mystery and danger that he carried around with him – this guy who played psychopaths and killers on screen was actually hanging out with them.
He's kind of a mix of Steve McQueen’s cool, Marlon Brando’s darkness and Sinatra’s association with organised crime. I think for a few years it really helped him. He did some incredible films after this, like The Sicilian Clan – huge films with American investment. So his star kept on rising. But then it did begin to wane, mainly because his beauty started to fade and he was no longer this otherworldly being.
I purposely didn't go deep into later on [in Delon’s life]. For me, I was looking at these people then – and they were pretty young at the time. You’re reading about Nathalie Delon and her ex-husband talking about her going out to nightclubs all the time. And I’m thinking, she's 24 years old… what's a 24-year-old girl meant to do? And when Delon’s in the limelight he’s 33, 34 – these are young people and that's how I must look at them. I’m not going to judge a 34-year-old by something he said when he was 68.
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RFI: Have you had any reaction from Delon’s family to the book?
EC: No, not yet. I had a conversation with some French film production people who might be interested in the book. And the first thing the lady said was: ‘Did you speak with the family? I'm great friends with Anthony [Delon’s son]’. And I thought, oh God…
I'm probably going to get contacted at some point, but they were all either not there or, you know, Anthony was two or three years old, so I sort of discount what he might have to say. I feel like had it been a book that’s just a cheap thrill, then maybe they'd get annoyed. But I feel it's a piece of work that really shows my admiration for Delon and his career and who he was. I wanted it to be more like a character study.
RFI: So do you think the book will be adapted into a film?
EC: People are interested, but I think they're interested in anything that comes out so we'll see. I wrote it cinematically, because that's what I love and it felt like the best way to write it.
When you're writing a film script, you're dealing with two drivers of narrative, which is what people do and what people say. And I realised as I was writing this book that I'm dealing with what people said and what they did, or what someone said they did. So it's like I’m the camera watching them. In the book I move point of view and chop between scenes, because it helped me use the material.
RFI: Who do you think would play Delon?
EC: Who on earth could play Delon? I don’t know. Who are the big actors these days in their thirties or late twenties? Jacob Elordi?
RFI: I was just going to say Jacob Elordi, but he’s very masculine – Delon was so beautiful it was almost a feminine beauty, even though he was very masculine in character.
EC: Exactly, feline-like. He had all these masculine traits but he was quite feminine in his beauty. There must be someone out there, a young Delon. In failing to answer that question it goes to show just how unique he was. There are these people who pass through the world once in a lifetime, and I just think Delon is one of those people. There’s no other person like him, there’s no other face like his.
Murder In Paris '68: A True Story of Death and Glamour, by Edward Chisholm, published by Monoray, is out now.
