Take Peter O'Toole, fresh from his smash success in Lawrence of Arabia, and Richard Burton, fresh from his smash success with Liz Taylor. Now put them on the bedroom set of Becket with a fun-loving French actress named Veronique Vendell during a between-scenes break from both filming and Peter Glenville's direction, and you get some of the wildest tom foolery a candid photographer ever snapped for Playboy. Unable to leave wild enough alone, we were prompted by the results to supply our own captions to the carryings-on, with the results you see here. Paramount's production of Becket is in the multimillion-dollar class, but like most movies of today, with big budget or small (see The Nudest Jayne Mansfield in our June 1963 issue, if you can still get one), it's not above actress-on-a-mattress theatrics.
The French Penchant for twinitialed cineminxes (Brigitte Bardot, Danielle Darrieux, Simone Signoret, et al.) is beautifully personified in Veronique Vendell, the young lady so strikingly pictured on these and the preceding pages. According to a Paramount news release, "[she] will have no lines" in the bedroom scene of Becket; we infer they mean spoken lines; if not, their release writer may need the services of an optometrist. Selected for the part by the film's producer, Hal Wallis, Veronique, daughter of a French biologist and his chemist wife, has obviously come by her body chemistry naturally. A holder of two degrees in philosophy from a Paris university, she played the Julie Newmar role in the French version of The Marriage-Go-Round, a role which called for her appearance onstage swathed in only a towel. In Becket, her wardrobe is somewhat less. A creature of appealing paradox, she wishes to someday be a famous actress, enjoys dating robust men and is found of swimming, yet on the other hand she states that she dislikes being photographed too much, indulging in gymnastics, and overly hot weather. Who's going to break the news to Hollywood?
