‘Mother of Us All’ Is Pushed From Pedestal : Books: A new biography of Simone de Beauvoir, author of the feminist bible, “The Second Sex,” asserts that she did not live as she had preached.

The idea zings out over the Hollywood Hills like an awry Frisbee.

Industry insiders clustered around Deirdre Bair rock with laughter. The hostesses, Marcia Nassitir and Anne Goursaud, are stunned.

Nassitir (producer of “The Big Chill”) and Goursaud (editor of “The Two Jakes”) have optioned Bair’s new biography, “Simone de Beauvoir,” and are throwing one of La-La Land’s more cerebral thirst-quenchers up on the cloud-high terrace of a mountain adobe.

It’s Bair’s first fling with Hollywood (“I’m not used to this,” she confides). But she’s utterly serious about Woody Allen.

“I think he’d be perfect,” she enthuses later in her toothpaste-pink hotel room of the variety de Beauvoir resided in for years. Allen has the same droll sense of humor, Bair insists, and those little round spectacles like those worn by the French existentialist who was de Beauvoir’s companion for a half-century.

For the newcomer to Bair’s work, it is the first indication that her view of the near-legendary couple may not be one of ivory-tower reverence.

In the post-war years, de Beauvoir and Sartre became beacons for young Americans who rushed to the cafes of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, donning the de rigueur intellectual’s turtleneck and prowling late-night Left Bank clubs, eager to emulate every detail of the couple’s lives.

Sartre had written his philosophical treaty, “Being and Nothingness,” in 1943 and was at the height of his productivity. De Beauvoir had penned “The Second Sex,” published in 1949, establishing the cornerstone of contemporary feminist thought.

In their professional and personal lives, they seemed to be the perfect couple: loving, loyal equals passionately consumed by their intellectual ideals.

During more than five years of work, 90 hours of taped interviews with de Beauvoir and more than 600 book pages, however, Bair came to see a very different relationship.

The woman who inspired American feminists Betty Friedan and Kate Millett played the subservient second sex to Sartre, Bair concludes in her book.

In fiery interview sessions that began in 1981, Bair confronted de Beauvoir with the feminist accusation that she had played “bourgeois housewife” to Sartre. And she charged the author with “reconstructing” her life in her four volumes of memoirs: In her biography, Bair recounts a doomed affair between de Beauvoir and American writer Nelson Algren as a poignantly beautiful love story, despite de Beauvoir’s later dismissive treatment of Algren, and even-handedly describes de Beauvoir’s bisexuality, which she denied until her death.

“There’s no question in my mind that she would be upset with a lot of what I wrote,” says Bair, “especially everything about her life with Sartre that wasn’t as she felt it had been--perfect.”

An academician with a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University, Bair, 55, taught comparative literature for 12 years at the University of Pennsylvania. Her biography of Samuel Beckett received the National Book Award in 1981, and her study of de Beauvoir, published in April by Summit Books, has been consistently praised for its scholarship and readable narration.

Yet Bair admits she never understood de Beauvoir’s loyalty to Sartre--and de Beauvoir never understood why she did not.

“When I started the book, I thought it was a relationship between two equals,” Bair says. “As I wrote the book, I felt that I was like a balloon slowly deflating. The myth of the perfect couple turned out, in my mind, to be just that, a myth.”

The author of the feminist bible “had not lived what she preached.”

Stimulated and supported in her work by Sartre, de Beauvoir remained his intellectual companion until his death in 1980. As his “first reader” and editor, she repeatedly put aside her work for his. She justified her position by arguing that all Frenchmen agreed Sartre was the most brilliant man in France. “If every other man takes second place to Sartre, why shouldn’t I, just because I’m a woman,” she would tell Bair.

Bair sees de Beauvoir’s explanation as an impenetrable barrier or “the Lucite curtain.” “Her logic would progress up to a certain point and then it wouldn’t go further,” she says.

Persistently the biographer would probe de Beauvoir’s reasoning. Under her audacious questioning, de Beauvoir’s almost translucent complexion would mottle with rage. “It would just drive her crazy,” says Bair.

Once she even told Bair: “I wonder if you’re going to be able to tell my story. You don’t seem to understand me.”

A year into the research, the project almost came to an end. Bair was again pressing for an explanation of her role with Sartre, when de Beauvoir halted the session. “This interview is over,” she announced, “and I don’t know if there’s ever going to be another one.”

“She was very intimidating,” says Bair, who found de Beauvoir lacking a sense of humor and indifferent to social niceties. “I was constantly thinking on my feet,” not knowing how de Beauvoir would respond to her line of questioning.

Bair wouldn’t sleep the night before the interviews and could hardly eat. “I was really so tense that I would be exhausted when the interviews were over.”

Over the five years before de Beauvoir’s death in 1986, Bair made more than a dozen trips to Paris. Her sessions with de Beauvoir took place in the Montparnasse apartment, a former artist’s studio, that de Beauvoir bought following the prestigious Prix Goncourt award in 1954 for “Les Mandarins,” her biographically based novel about the intellectual circle surrounding Sartre.

It was a dusty place with piles of books and papers strewn across the floor, and one wall so thickly covered with photographs that they appeared to be a collage.

De Beauvoir would sit on a sofa decorated with brightly colored pillows, and Bair sat on a prim satin slippered chair, the tape recorder placed on a table between them. Despite occasional sparks, the sessions were mainly cordial. They began with chats about current films and novels, and often ended with a Scotch.

The women were diametrically different in certain respects. De Beauvoir did not understand Bair’s need for a warm family life (she has a husband, two children, two cats and a dog, and divides her life between Connecticut and a New York apartment). When de Beauvoir once spied needlework in Bair’s briefcase (an ex-smoker’s busy work, Bair explains), her glance made it clear she considered such activity a waste of time.

“I liked her as an old woman,” Bair says of de Beauvoir, who died at 78. “But had we been the same age, she wouldn’t have liked me any more than I would have liked her.”

Bair admired de Beauvoir as “one of the greatest minds of our time” and would leave their meetings with such an intellectual high she would often walk back to her St. Germain hotel to wind down. While admiring her intellectually, however, Bair could not understand de Beauvoir’s behavior on a practical level. Despite support of her work, Sartre treated her badly, Bair believes.

Said to treat women as objects, he had a succession of affairs with women who became younger and younger as he aged.

One of the cruelest blows came in 1945, with the inaugural issue of Sartre’s monthly literary review, “Les Temps Modernes.” De Beauvoir had single-handedly gotten it out, yet Sartre dedicated it to his New York girlfriend, Dolores Vanetti Ehrenreich.

“People told me how she stood and proudly opened the copy of the first magazine and saw that name and blanched. They thought she was going to faint,” says Bair.

Commenting on this incident and others, de Beauvoir would conclude, “but then Sartre persuaded me of the rightness of his thinking.”

After a few amorous years following their meeting as philosophy students at the Sorbonne, de Beauvoir and Sartre settled into an intellectual relationship. In a familiar definition of their rapport, Sartre called it “essential” with each of them having “contingent” relationships on the periphery.

“You have to look at them as a construct,” says Bair. “They set themselves apart from the rest of the human race.”

If de Beauvoir has been criticized by feminists for separating herself from the lot of women, argues Bair, she was only paralleling Sartre, who set himself apart from all other men.

Their sexual relationships with others became grist for their intellectual mills. “Neither one of them could have a physical relationship without the need to intellectualize it and replay it with the other in great, lurid detail,” says Bair.

Thus, after a trip to the United States in 1947, during which de Beauvoir fell passionately in love with novelist Algren, she returned to France to retreat with Sartre to a little “blue and yellow inn” outside Paris. While they renewed their “pact” of intellectual loyalty, de Beauvoir wrote long, effusive letters to Algren in Chicago.

De Beauvoir called Algren “the only truly passionate love in my life.” Beginning hundreds of letters of correspondence (de Beauvoir previously had allowed no one to read Algren’s letters to her and Bair was not permitted to quote widely from them), de Beauvoir first writes to Algren in English as “my own nice wonderful and beloved local youth,” and he bids her farewell with a poem “That part of me may go with you.”

De Beauvoir habitually referred to Algren as “my husband” and to herself as his wife, and wore to her grave a large silver ring that he gave her.

Nevertheless, she refused his proposal of marriage. “I think both of them knew from the beginning it wasn’t going to work. But they loved each other so much that they really tried,” says Bair.

After a decade, their affair came to a close; de Beauvoir’s place was at the vortex of events in post-war Paris, and in her conversations with Bair, she was curt and dismissive when speaking of Algren.

Only once did the “Lucite curtain” rise. In an idle comment as she was gathering up her interview materials one afternoon, Bair complimented de Beauvoir on her beautiful silver ring. For the next 40 minutes, de Beauvoir spoke of Algren, describing how handsome he was, swaggering her shoulders to illustrate his machismo.

“The whole voice changed,” recalls Bair. “She talked about him with tenderness.” And she never spoke of him in that manner again.

Algren also had a significant influence on de Beauvoir’s work. As Bair reveals, it was Algren with whom de Beauvoir first discussed her “essay on women” that became “The Second Sex.” He was the first to encourage her to expand it into a book and to look at the condition of women in the light of the experience of black Americans, introducing her to contemporary black literature.

Observes Bair of de Beauvoir’s work on “The Second Sex”: “She had a curious relationship to that book. It was like, ‘OK, I wrote it. I made my feminist statement, now let me live my life.’ ”

De Beauvoir felt its importance was out of proportion to her other work, favoring “Les Mandarins” and her “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.”

“She’d say time and again, ‘I was just a secretary putting it all down. Anybody could have written that book,’ ” says Bair, whose admiration for the work is unconcealed. The two volumes, which draw on the multiple references of history, biology, philosophy, psychology and anthropology, Bair notes, were researched and written with a fountain pen in 14 months.

Indeed, de Beauvoir’s nickname of “Beaver,” says Bair, was well-earned. She was industrious, prompt and had an iron constitution, often drinking heavily but rising early to work.

She also never outlived the conservative background represented by the particule “de” in her name. The 3-year-old who had her personally engraved calling cards grew into an elderly woman who still spoke of anatomical sex in schoolgirl terms.

Three weeks before her unexpected death, she told Bair furiously that she had heard a year before that Bair was going to call her a lesbian in her book.

“I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ ”

“She said, ‘Well, I didn’t want to talk about it.’ ”

“There was this feeling of shame and embarrassment. In her background, anything other than missionary position heterosexual sex was (considered) deviant.”

After speaking to lesbian scholars, Bair decided to describe de Beauvoir’s relationship with women, particularly with Sylvie Le Bon, whom she later adopted, but not to define her as a lesbian since “she didn’t believe her behavior classified her as a lesbian or bisexual.”

Allowing de Beauvoir her view of her life and presenting it as a biographer was Bair’s most difficult challenge. De Beauvoir wrote extensively about herself in her memoirs, but, says Bair, “she would rewrite history,” at times altering facts to represent her feeling about a subject.

One thing de Beauvoir insisted: She had had a happy life. “ ‘I lived my life exactly the way I wanted to, and you have to say that in your book,’ ” she commanded Bair at their final meeting three weeks before she died.

Bair is currently engaged in research for a biography of Anias Nin, and, in principle, de Beauvoir’s story is behind her. But in a recent interview with Nin’s brother in Berkeley, the shadow of de Beauvoir uncannily cropped up. Nin’s first apartment in Paris was the very one de Beauvoir later lived in, with the satin slippered chair Bair had sat in so often.

Despite their differences, Bair sums up the “feisty woman” in her final sentence: “She may have been a mass of contradictions, but she was still, in the most profoundly respectful sense of the phrase, ‘the mother of us all.’ ”