MRS. B.H.L.(The Talk of the Town)

Arielle Dombasle, a movie actress who is half of France's most famous couple--her husband is Bernard-Henri Levy, the dashing philosopher-journalist and timber-fortune heir--has hitherto been best known in this country for her appearance, in 1984, in the steamy miniseries "Lace," in which she played one of the bitches who were not Phoebe Cates's mother. She is about to present another facet of her artistic personality, that of chanteuse: next week she will be appearing at the Supper Club, performing hits from the forties and fifties that she delivers in a breathy Gallic soprano. The effect is as if Marilyn Monroe had attempted to channel Edith Piaf; and Dombasle, who is forty-eight and has long, honey-blond hair, a pronounced pout, and what has plausibly been described as the smallest waist in Paris, has been performing to capacity crowds all over France.

The other night, Dombasle was rehearsing in a recording studio in the West Twenties with the New York Big Band, which will be accompanying her at the Supper Club. She wore a clingy, fine-gauge cashmere sweater and low-rise jeans, her hair was pulled back into a fur scrunchie, and a pair of Chanel sunglasses sat atop her head. "Look how pretty they are! And so old!" she said, casting an approving eye over the mostly grizzled heads of the assembled musicians, some of whom could have played the songs on Dombasle's last album, "Amor Amor"--"Rhum and Coca-Cola," "Besame Mucho"--when they were fresh, new compositions. Joe Battaglia, the band's elderly leader, referred to her as "young lady."

"You photograph well," he said, looking at a picture, propped on her music stand, of a sultry Dombasle embracing her late, beloved cat, Sloogy.

"Well, with the right lighting everyone does," Dombasle said.

The era from which her repertoire is drawn was an epoque benie in which Franco-American relations were at their warmest, Dombasle had explained earlier in the week over tea at the Carlyle Hotel. She was born in Connecticut to French parents and brought up in Mexico, where her grandfather, an intimate of de Gaulle, was ambassador. She admits to a fondness for the United States currently uncommon among her French peers. ...