High life | 14 May 2011

Why would a German playboy-billionaire industrialist with a large family and lots of old and good friends have dinner in Gstaad with one of his closest buddies, then go up to his chalet and put a bullet in his brain? As of writing, Gunter Sachs’s suicide is a mystery. But Gunter was always somewhat mysterious, and I have known him since the late Fifties. His uncle, Fritz von Opel, was the heir to the Opel car fortune and lived the grand life in St Moritz and St Tropez, where he had opulent houses. Von Opel was his uncle on his mother’s side. His father was also an industrialist — Sachs ball bearings, machines or something like that — and was probably richer than the Opels. Fritz von Opel’s son, Ricky, blew his share; Gunter’s side multiplied it. But his father did commit suicide, so escaping the claustrophobia of life and old age was in Gunter’s genes.

Gunter and I hung out together quite a lot in Paris during the early Sixties. His close friend Jean-Claude Sauer was a Paris Match photographer who was also a close buddy of mine. But after a year or two we went our own ways. Gunter loved to have a crowd with him at all times. His friends were his life, even more than the women he collected non-stop. He married Brigitte Bardot after a brief courtship — ‘I have a tiger in my bed,’ he once told me, paraphrasing the Shell advertisement which had just appeared. But he soon wandered off with some prettier models. La BB needed too much attention, something Gunter was not about to provide.

His brother Ernst was killed skiing; he was a daredevil, as was Gunter, who raced the bob as well as the Cresta in St Moritz.