Kiss & Tell : After a 1950 photo gets big exposure, couples around the world step in to say they’re the famous smoochers. The courts will decide who’s for real.

Who could imagine the bitterness, the anguish, the looming courtroom drama--all because of a romantic smooch nearly 43 years ago on the streets of Paris?

In the spring of 1950, Parisian photographer Robert Doisneau took a picture of a young couple kissing as they walked along the sidewalk in front of the Paris city hall. The black-and-white photograph, “Le Baiser de l’Hotel de Ville,” remained relatively obscure until 1986, when it was made into a best-selling poster, destined for the bedroom walls of love-struck college students the world around.

Part of the photograph’s charm was its anonymity, the half-hidden faces of lovers as they embraced midstream in a flow of solemn pedestrians.

It was quintessential “young love” bobbing in a sea of indifference. It was Paris, city of light and love, at its romantic best. To Doisneau, a photographer famed for his ‘50s-era Paris street scenes, the kissing couple symbolized lovers everywhere.

So he was delighted when, beginning in 1988, men and women began stepping forward to claim they were the lovers at the Hotel de Ville.

“All these people who see themselves in the picture,” Doisneau said in a recent interview with the Paris newspaper Le Monde, “I found it charming.”

The photo has inspired a movie project by British filmmaker Alan Parker and was featured in another film by French director Claude Miller, “La Petite Voleuse.” It also was the centerpiece of an advertising campaign by a French soft-drink company.

In six years, more than 410,000 copies of the poster featuring the photo, 80,000 postcards and 200 signed reprints (at a hefty price of $4,000 each) were sold, making Doisneau a small fortune. Over the same period, his Paris photo agency, Rapho, received at least 20 letters and phone calls from people who were certain they were the kissers.

After seeing the photograph in a magazine, a Mexican man wrote Rapho exaltedly: “Doisneau captured a romantic kiss I exchanged with my wife in the middle of the street.”

And after the slick French magazine Telerama reprinted the photo on its cover in 1988, another man wrote, claiming the picture portrayed him and his lost lover, Francoise. This would-be French kisser even attached a poem, which the magazine also published, declaring his undying love for his old flame.

Francoise! Francoise! Francoise!

My sweet heartache without truce

My sweet, sweet undying love

From the very first day

Unfortunately, the “Francoise” in question was a happily married woman, living in Bordeaux. She threatened to sue Doisneau and the letter writer for resurrecting an unwanted memory of a failed love affair. After legal negotiations, the woman eventually dropped her threat. But this early squabble was only a hint of the passions soon to be aroused by the photograph.

The most insistent of the Hotel de Ville claimants was a married couple from the Paris suburb of Vitry, Jean-Louis and Denise Lavergne. Jean-Louis, now 66, and Denise, now 64, asserted that the photo was taken just before their marriage on a day when they were shopping in the big department stores near the city hall.

Denise Lavergne said she recognized a scarf given as a Christmas present by a sister, as well as minor details, such as “my earlobes” and “my eyebrows.”

Photographer Doisneau agreed in 1990 to meet with the Lavergnes. They soon became objects of an intense media frenzy in France as the celebrated, rediscovered “lovers at the Hotel de Ville.” Although never officially acknowledging the Lavergnes as his kissers, Doisneau remained silent as the couple appeared on television talk shows and posed for “40 years after” photo spreads for magazines, shot at the original location, with the city hall in the background.

Everything was picture perfect until last February, when another entrant into the Hotel de Ville photo competition, retired actress Francoise Bornet, stepped into the frame. Bornet, now 63, said she was fed up with all the attention showered on the Lavergnes and Doisneau.

The true lovers pictured in the photograph, she insisted, were not the Lavergnes, but Bornet and her lover at the time, a former actor named Jacques Cartaud. She said she and Cartaud had been hired by Doisneau to pose for a sequence of photos on the Rue de Rivoli in front of the city hall.

Furthermore, Bornet offered proof of her contention, claiming to have a signed and numbered print of the photograph given to her by Doisneau in 1950.

“If Monsieur Doisneau had not recognized the Lavergnes at the beginning when he knew the photograph was posed,” Bornet said in a recent telephone interview, “I wouldn’t have said anything. But from the moment he stole my past and when people began saying it was someone else, I decided to step forward and be recognized.”

As for the Lavergnes, she says, they are “a couple of people that one meets quite often in life, minor hustlers looking for a little celebrity and a little money. Perhaps they are not even after money.”

The only problem with Bornet’s “stolen kiss” theory is that no one could find a trace of her supposed co-kisser, Jacques Cartaud. Bornet says she has not seen him since a few years after the famous kiss, when he was an extra in a movie she was making. The Lavergnes, meanwhile, defend their honor.

“We are very respectable people,” says Denise Lavergne, whose memory of the kiss and surrounding events is vivid and extremely detailed. “We are well known in Vitry, coming from three generations of printers, well known for our honesty. Now we are being treated like impostors by Bornet and other storytellers in the press. They say we are only interested in the money. That’s a grave charge that injured the memory of our youth and the fact that we remain a happy couple. You can’t treat people like that.”

To resolve the question over the identity of the Hotel De Ville kissers, both Bornet and the Lavergnes have filed suit against Doisneau in French courts. Bornet has asked for the equivalent of $20,000 in damages and a percentage of commercial profits. The Lavergnes have asked for $100,000 and offered to provide expert testimony that they are the couple pictured.

A Paris court is expected to decide the issue in the coming months. Meanwhile, each side contends stridently that honor, not money, is at stake.

Recently, however, evidence seems to be mounting in favor of Bornet.

Photographer Doisneau, who has never denied using models for some of his photos of Paris street life, has been quoted in recent articles--notably a Dec. 20 front-page story in Le Monde--as saying he believes it’s Bornet in the picture. Moreover, the directors of the Rapho photo agency say they have found several other photographs of the same couple, never completely identifiable, taken in other Paris locations.

The latest development tilting in Bornet’s favor was the sudden reappearance of Jacques Cartaud, the rakish actor she claims was her partner in the famous kiss.

Cartaud, 65, now twice divorced, now lives with a woman in the south of France on a small, wooded farm where he grows grapes. After years of struggling to become a successful actor, he chose a rural life far from the klieg lights and bustling Parisian avenues.

“I have the luck to live in a country house without television or newspapers,” he says, explaining his late appearance in the controversy.

He says he recognized himself and Bornet in the widely distributed poster several years ago, but never thought to say anything about it. Recently, a friend sent him articles in the French press about the photograph and he decided to come out of the wilderness.

“I recognized Francoise and me in the photo,” he says. “Without any doubt, it’s us. I remember it as a time when I called her ‘my little pussycat’ and we were great lovers.”