De-vine

By Sharon Rosenthal

Christopher Lambert has an attack of the giggles. It started slowly, as the broodingly handsome star of Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes sat down to a breakfast arranged to show him at his early morning sexiest; it grew as he suavely lit his companion's cigarette; and now his attack threatens to unstuff even the studiously correct New York hotel staff as he shares his three most intimate, closely guarded fantasies.

"To find Atlantis," he begins in a killer French accent, "because I believe in it totally, and because I know E.T.'s are coming from there.To find the secret of the Bermuda Triangle. And to be kidnapped by yoofoes."

"By what?"

"Yoofoes. How do you say it in English? Unidentified flying objects."

"Ah! UFOs."

"yeah, yoofoes."

Christopher Lambert, 28, may be the most childlike sex symbol ever to fill a loincloth. Along with UFOs, extraterrestrials and the "lost" city of Atlantis, he believes in Tinker Bell, witches, fairies and Santa Claus. "I'd rather believe," he explains, "the to say, 'No, this impossible,' when it seems beautiful and different that such things should exist," He owns at least sixty stuffed animals, rarely bathes without his plastic dolphin or toy boats, and counts among his favorite flimmakers Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg, "I saw E.T. four times in Paris, and cried every time." The kinkiest thing he's ever done with whipped cream, you imagine, is lick it off someone's sundae.

You do, however, imagine it's your sundae he's licking the whipped cream off of. Very, very deliberately.

After Greystoke was released to critical acclaim in 1984, American producers naturally tried to take advantage of the sensation Christopher Lambert and his loincloth had caused. They begged him to play Alexander the Great, half-naked in a laboratory. They begged him to play just about anything you can think of, so long as he was half-naked while he was playing it.

Quelle audace! Spurning their offers, Christopher returned home to France, where he made three movies in quick succession. For one, Subway - a sort of punk Romeo and Juliet shot largely in the bowels of the Paris Metro - he bleached his light-brown hair a shocking yellow-white. Scheduled to open here this winter, Subway marks his (fully clothed) return to American theaters.

"I liked Subway because, for me, it is a kind of story coming out of the imagination," says Christopher. "Like E.T., you know?"

Physical requirements aside, how does such a man-child get to be an international sex symbol? Does it come down to what Subway director Luc Besson calls Christopher's "wonderful naivete"? Or is there a more tangible explanation for his success?

"Myopia," says Christopher.

Let us explain.

It's been written that what prompted Greystoke's director, Hugh Hudson, to cast Lambert in the title role was the actor's smoldering, sometimes-blue, sometimes-green eyes. However, if Lambert's eyes appeared to smolder - both in screen tests and during the actual filming of Greystoke - it was because he was trying to see straight after removing the glasses he's worn since childhood to correct extreme nearsightedness. "I can't wear contacts, because it doesn't fit my eyes," explains the bespectacled Christopher, who at one point shyly slips off his spiffy pair of gold wire rims to reveal his green eyes, a little sleepy after an all-nighter at a local disco. "Anyway, I'd be too bored in the morning to put them in."

Ah, yes. Boredom. The Eighth Deadly Sin to the let-the-good-times-roll Christopher his friends know and love. "Christopher's life had never been dedicated to anything but fun, until he discovered he could act," says Yves Martin, a former Columbia Pictures International marketing executive who's paried with Lambert since age thirteen. "Even now, you could put him in the middle of fifty nerds he's never met before, and he could makes them laugh for three hours."

Presumably, Christopher's well-heeled parents - hid father was a United Nations diplomat, his mother an educational psychologist - were not amused by the number of schools (five) their son was expelled from for teenage high jinks. (Although, Christopher declares, hi pranks never involved "mental or physical torture. It was could start with somebody's got his fly open, and you don't know waht, but you laugh for two hours and the class becomes a mess.") Extracurricular activities included frequent fibbing to young girls about the extent of the family's wealth during vacations on the Riviera. "he'd offer them a ride on some yacht he pretended belonged to his parents, and them make these funny excuses why the yacht was unavailable when they showed up the dates," Martin chuckles.

Later, Christopher even managed to make his year of mandatory service in the French army an adventure of sorts. Assigned to serve in the tropical paradise of Tahiti, Christopher never quite hit it off with the military. "I would do things like hit my foot with a spoon for three hours so they would think it was - how do you says - sprained. Or pour boiling water on my body so they would send me home early." But the thought of his girlfriend - we're talking about one of the only two women he says he's loved - being far away in Geneva while he was in Tahiti struck out hero as totally unacceptable. Consequently, Christopher arranged to have himself reassigned to the rougher-and-tumbler Moutain Infantry in order to be near her. Whereupon, according to Martin, this obviously callous wench dumped him.

Well. What to do? Nearly nineteen, his tour of duty completed, Christopher heeded his parents' advice and traveled to London to learn how to be a stockbroker. "Boring," Christopher pronounces. He tried acting. Finally, several years later, a French director casting a gangster role in the 1981 film Le Bar du Telphone asked Christopher if he's be so kind as to remove him glasses.

"I thought they realized I've got someting, a problem with my eyes," says Christopher, "and when they're gonna see it, they won't take me."

They took him.

It's the following afternoon, and we're in the middle of FAO Schwarz, which is to the world of toys what Cooperstown is to the world of baseball. Whenvever he's in New York, Christopher almost always visits this store to check out the latest goodies. Today his attention is grabbed by a $3000 electric car and a new, state-of-the-art video game, on which he spends half-hour gleefully zapping bad guys.

Christopher decides he must have this game, only he's left his credit card back at his hotel. Immediately, your hearts breaks for him. "When you want a toy," he's previously explained, "you want it now. You don't want to wait for it. That's what was so terrible about Christmas as a kid."

Nevertheless, Christopher takes the setback in stride. What he's really wanted anyway, he says, was to have "a long lunch."

And so, an hour and a half later, having finished off a Lambert-selected bottle of kicky Califonia Chardonnay, Christopher is rhapsodizing about a Rickie Lee Jones song from Subway that he believes describes his life perfectly. What with Greystoke and Subway and another film due out here in March called Highlander, in which he stars opposite Sean Connery as a Scotsman who time-travels through past centuries to present-day New York, Christopher feels "Lucky Guy" says it all.

"It would be stupid to say I'm not lucky, because you can't look at yourself and say, 'I've done everything myself.' I don't have this feeling at all. I have the feeling that I've done nothing, and that somebody up there likes me."