At age 78, Gunter Sachs, one of the last living international men of mystery, took his own life with a gunshot to the head at his Gstaad chalet. The German-born millionaire, womanizer, photographer, art collector and man-about-globe had followed the fast-living course of his life to its end: Better to go out with a bang than with a whimper (Sachs was believed to have Alzheimer's disease). That would have been bad form, old sport.

As the shot rang out in May, the Côte d'Azur, his old stomping grounds, was preparing for a "high season" that was a world apart from the one that Sachs knew. In the once rarefied fishing village of Saint-Tropez, the 300-foot super-yachts and private jets of the new-nouveau riche were gassed up and fruit-of-the-month-vodka-stocked, the Estonian "special-events models" booked, the guest lists of bold faces edited to meet gossip-column requirements. Few in the 21st-century jet set would know his name, but from the high-flying '50s through the '70s, in certain influential circles, Gunter Sachs was The Man.

"Playboy, moi?" Sachs once asked a reporter, giving collective voice to many of his peers. "I would rather call myself a gentleman." Famous for wooing French bombshell Brigitte Bardot by dropping hundreds of roses onto the grounds of her house from a helicopter (it worked, she married him) and the mock boast that he never worked a day in his life, Sachs left behind a bankroll estimated to be as much as $455 million, a modest sum compared to the billions being made by today's mega-yacht crowd.

The playboy is dead. Many of them actually lie underground and even the ones still roaming the earth have shed their tanned hides. Let us now toll the names: the red-blooded Pablo Picasso, the legendary Gianni Agnelli, the Dominican diplomat stud Porfirio Rubirosa (whose reported notches included Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ava Gardner, Jayne Mansfield and Rita Hayworth), the polo-playing novelist Jerzy Kosinski (who chronicled the mallet-wielding lifestyle in "Passion Play"), the man-of-wealth-and-taste Mick Jagger (in his Marianne Faithfull phase), the modelizing safari-photographer Peter Beard (once married to Cheryl Tiegs, romantically linked to Candice Bergen and Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie O.), Prince Albert, Roberto Rossellini, Marcello Mastroianni (who ultimately became the "La Dolce Vita" parts he played), Dodi Fayed (the Egyptian film producer who died with Princess Di in a 1997 car crash), and so many no-name but no less formidable Brazilians, Brits, French and Germans.

Despite their many sins, mortal and venal—sloth, lust, familial ties to Nazis and brutal dictators—most of the great playboys shared noble attributes. They embodied elan, impeccable taste, extreme discretion (regarding money as well as sexual conquests), and general good-natured bonhomie. To hear those who knew them tell it, they were captivating one-man shows, room-holders who, when they had everyone's attention, often put others before them. And wherever they rested their fox hats and crash helmets, they left apocryphal stories behind, repeated in private clubs and lawn parties, tall tales that separated them from the wolf pack.