They came from different worlds and had different styles, class and elegance, but if there is something they have in common other than the fact that they like women and exchange night for day, it is the use of an outdated word , almost completely in disuse, shredded by feminism and Me Too: playboy. Self Zanza from Rimini it is the local parody, popular from Romagna, the model that accounts for the conquests like a pinball machine and becomes, according to the mother, “a tourist attraction on the beaches of the Adriatic” for the Nordic beauties of the 1980s, up to the crash in the last fatal rendezvous, at the age of 63, in bed with a twenty-three-year-old, another was the quintessential owner of the brand in Italy, the prototype of the seducer who in the Sixties was also called tombeur des femmes: Gigi Rizzi, one with the stigmata of the gallant enterprise and not of boarding the tourists by chance, belated and fleeting hero of a generation that came out of the war, wrote Massimo Fini, who lived his ’68 without Molotov cocktails or barricades in the pleasure-loving summer of Saint Tropez , raising the tricolor on Madrague, the villa of the most beautiful and desired woman in the world: Brigitte Bardot.
The support of Gianni Agnelli
In the last century playboy was a challenging title and not yet politically incorrect. The real ones were few and with different characteristics from someone like Zanza, who would never have been admitted to the assault group on the Côte d’Azur, “les italiens”, Rizzi, Piroddi, Rapetti and Parisi, the most coveted quartet from Papagayo to the Esquinade, obligatory stops for viveurs from all over the world: not only for the name, but for the style that forbade putting «the accounting of the paraded underpants» in the square: they didn’t count the conquests, they weighed them. Only in this way could they boast the support of Gianni Agnelli, who made reserve a code of honor: the lawyer occasionally joined the quartet that depopulated on the Croisette and asked the highly envied Gigi: «Darling, what’s peppery tonight? …».
The «schools» and the styles of conquest
If they dedicate a plaque to Zanza, a memory book would be needed for those who, like Gigi Rizzi, have touched the myth of Porfirio Rubirosa with youthful exuberance by relaunching the made in Italy one of the incomparable Rodolfo Valentino. There weren’t many of them and they split into small teams, the Milanese, the Genoese and the Romans, the former very rich, the latter unleashed, the third fascinating. Master of ceremonies was Gianfranco Piacentini, a flirt with Dahlia Lavy and then with Linda Christian, but the emptiness in the capital was made by Renato Speziali known as “the kite” followed by Federico Pantanella, Francesco Bonetti, Paolo Vassallo, Beppe Ercole… The aura Marquis Lante della Rovere who amazed everyone at elegant dinners, they say, biting into crystal glasses, and Dado Ruspoli, who in Capri showed off with a bandana and a parrot on his shoulder…
The right places
Milan was the most selective school: in the 1960s the city of boom, cumenda and work had Brera and Jamaica in the Caribbean as the symbolic place to honor and the playboys navigated between Cova and Baretto, before diving into Bang Bang or Charlie Max, where Augusto Righetti played. Mina was the new voice, Vanoni the sensual one, the realm of the cheek to cheek was the Stork in Piazza Diaz, loved by those of the old guard like Gigi Perez. The playboys were called Cesare and Marco Spadaccini, who traveled in Miura or Ferrari, the surfer jeweler Pederzani enjoyed great success, the new entry was a right-wing politician, the black baron Tomaso Staiti di Cuddia, who boasted culture and gallant stories with Rosa Fumetto , Marisa Allasio and Capucine. Rizzi and Beppe Piroddi had also moved from Genoa to Milan, after their early forays into the Carillon in Portofino and the Pirate in Cap Martin: they had a fixed table among the models at the Leaning Tower of Pisa where a young Silvio Berlusconi would occasionally look out ( «but it wasn’t allowed», Baron Staiti will wickedly recall).
Gigi Rizzi and the love story with BB
At twenty-two Gigi Rizzi was already a top of the range, coupled with petrifying beauties: Patrizia Gallieni, Anna Mucci, Isa Stoppi, the model that the photographer Avedon defined as the most beautiful of the way, «with two lakes instead of eyes».. In 1967 he inaugurated Number One with Piroddi, with the first disc jokeys and the young Teo Teocoli to open the dance. In Paris he had the pass from Regine Zilberger, the lady of New Jimmi’s, where he made his debut in the company of Natalie Delon: at the tables next to him were Aristotle Onassis with Callas and Porfirio Rubirosa with Odile Rodin. If he went to London, the stops were Annabel’s and Dolly’s: evenings with Polansky and Sharon Tate, partner of the moment Fiona Lewis, while Piroddi was with Jaqueline Bisset. Then between a Cristal and a Dom Perignon the young man played a fortune in the infernal stakes of chemin de fer.
Beauty queens
It is possible that someone still remembers what life as a playboy was like and what it was like, from Liuba Rizzoli to Marisa Berenson, monuments of beauty together with Elsa Martinelli, one of the queens of Saint Tropez. Certainly the fascination, exhibitionism, narcissism, the mad illusion that everything was possible for Gigi Rizzi reached its peak one evening in June, in that ’68 which heralded the end of an era.
The most envied man in the world
The love story with Brigitte Bardot was something crazy, a bomb: a young Italian replaced Gunther Sachs, billionaire playboy heir to the Von Opel dynasty, the man who threw red roses from the helicopter to announce his arrival to Bardot. Gigi flamenco danced on the table with cheeky exuberance, walked around barefoot, played cards and with women. When Bardot invited him to Madrague and sent a Rolls Royce to her hotel to pick up spare clothes, she was just 24 years old. For three months he became the most envied man in the world.
Among vices, fragility and errors
“It has been said that Gigi is always and only Brigitte’s ex,” wrote Olghina di Robilant, the turtleneck muse of that group. «The journalistic deformation must be turned upside down. I’d say Bardot was just an ex of Gigi. One among many, as famous as she is…». Her story, unlike that of Zanza, is a metaphor for the life and also for the destiny of the playboy. It reveals vices, fragility, mistakes, the sense of omnipotence and emptiness, which often ends in loneliness to be drowned in alcohol or cocaine: Gigi Rizzi had everything, he lost everything, he eclipsed himself, he tried to change his life, he converted back to farming in Argentina, got married and remarried, fell and resurfaced, was in a community for drug addicts and alcoholics and he wasn’t ashamed to say it.
That shadow inside
When he returned to Italy at the age of sixty, he looked like a shipwrecked survivor of the Titanic disaster. He has never thought of a plaque that glorified a life that he considered vigorous, but wrong. He was good, sweet, gallant, nice, charming, capable of being moved, but he was carrying a shadow that was chasing him. And not just Bardot or Veruska, the latest love story. He unconsciously wanted to kill the old playboy by replacing him with his other self, to be at peace with his children or his last wife, but he was forced to play a part that he no longer loved.
Game over
Ten years ago he died during his birthday party, right in Saint Tropez, where it all began. Almost a sign of destiny. Of that quartet that honored itself with the title of «les italiens» there is none left. Game over, even for playboys. Today, influencers matter. Maybe Franco Califano was right: if you look back, everything else is boring.
2023-08-21 19:37:52
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