Because nothing except singing really interested me, I had dreamed madly of making a record. Convinced this would never happen, I had never thought beyond that point. Nor had I ever dared dream or imagine that I would become a “star” from one day to the next. But the whirlwind that my sudden and unexpected fame had pulled me into toward the end of 1962 concerned me even less because I was also enjoying my first love affair.
Building on the success of his show Salut les copains, Daniel Filipacchi launched a magazine with the same name. This was why the photographer Jean-Marie Périer knocked on my mother’s door one September afternoon to bring me some photos. Not only was I fully aware of my physical failings, I had also recently realized that my style of dress no longer suited me either. Because of this I hardly paid Jean-Marie any attention, as the position he put me in revived an inborn discomfort around looks and lenses.
The Vogue press agent, the mysterious Georgieff, who made it a point of honor to never take anything seriously, told me one day that Jean-Marie found me attractive. A short time later I was stunned and stupefied to learn that the actor François Périer had brought him up, although he was the biological son of Henri Salvador. A kind of alchemy took place then between the narcissistic reassurance inspired by the first piece of information and the intuition of a painful past inspired by the second. All at once, I saw Jean-Marie with new eyes. The range of his knowledge and the richness of his life experience, which was inversely proportional to mine, did the rest.
Our relationship quickly went beyond simple flirting. My mother realized what was going on and was broadminded enough to encourage me to find a place where I could live my own life. I found a studio apartment under the eaves of 8 Rue du Rocher, close to the Gare Saint-Lazare. The obligation to leave my mother and sister in the unpleasant apartment on the Rue d’Aumale did cast a shadow over the happiness of getting my own place for the first time. I swore I would find them a new place as pleasant as the one I had moved into as soon as possible. They moved several months later to 29 Rue d’Anjou, five minutes from my place. Meanwhile, Jean-Marie shared a place with his friend Régis Pagnés, the inspired page designer of Filipachi’s publications. In his mind, this apartment was for the two of us, but he presented me with this as a fait accompli and the idea of sharing a residence with one of his friends, charming as he might be, disturbed me. So he continued to visit Rue du Rocher from time to time, while I went a little more often to Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, where my feeling of being at his, not our, home increased over the course of time.
It is really a shame to create your own unhappiness by focusing on the empty half of the glass instead of enjoying the possible benefits of the precious full half! Our respective activities constantly kept us apart. Far too often Jean-Marie would depart in the morning, then call several hours later to tell me he was leaving for a reporting assignment on the other side of the world. This would plunge me into a state of distress comparable to the devastation I felt when the Orient Express tore me away from my mother.
Yet we had all we needed to be happy: youth, professional success, and mutual affection. When I recently saw a documentary shot in London at the beginning of the sixties in which Jean-Marie photographed me in the rain, I could see, a little too late, that my charm did not compare unfavorably to his. But I should point out that I barely blossomed during the four years of our relationship. This did not matter to Jean-Marie, who had the soul of a Pygmalion and tried to open my mind and help me in all domains with his characteristic generosity. For example, he taught me to love the cinema by bringing me to see great films, and under his tutelage I realized the importance of aesthetics, which became one of my major criteria. He taught me how to carry myself and to dress, and gave me advice on social skills—which I did not always follow, but which nagged me every time my capacity to go emotionally overboard made me forget the most elementary rule of courtesy.
Jean-Marie had been taught, like me, to put the reality principle1 before all other considerations. He consistently recommended that I do a tour or a film shoot that would keep us apart for a long time, simply because he thought it would help my career. It was he who brought me to Corsica to meet his father’s in-laws, Madeline and Jean Billon.2 Jean was an architect and amateur decorator. Once he built and set up his superb house in the village of Monticello, he sought to attract artists to this then still little-frequented corner of Balagne. Jean-Marie, who I obeyed without question, had me buy a plot of land and with the help of his friend Régis drew up the plans for a house. Jean assured me he would oversee its construction from start to finish.
I have completely forgotten my first performance at the Olympia in a concert sponsored by Europe n° 1—Musicorama—where I was to open for Richard Anthony, with whom I was going on tour throughout France for the modest fee of 300 francs3 a night. On the other hand, I can remember all too clearly my dressing room, where a friend had taken refuge following the performance. She had just seen the man she loved at the side of his main squeeze, and this distressed her so much she tried to jam the pins from a hat she found there into her veins. I heard her cries of pain—they sounded like an animal howling at the moon. Shattered at seeing her suffer this way, Jean-Marie and I thought it was imperative that he stay with her and keep her from hurting herself while I attended festivities planned by Lucien Morisse4 in honor of Richard Anthony and myself. But we had so few opportunities to be together that going to that party without him was a chore. To my complete dismay, I was—as I have been all too often throughout my entire life—blind and deaf to what was going on around me the entire time I was there.
In the early days, Daniel Filipachi insisted that Jean-Marie take the record jacket photos of Sylvie Vartan. In his mind this meant he was excluded from taking mine. He also sent him on reporting assignments for most of her trips abroad or in the provinces. Because Sylvie was as beautiful as she was charming, I was initially haunted by the thought that Jean-Marie would fall in love with her. While the way things turned out allowed me more peace of mind in this regard, the frustration of spending less time with him than he spent with her was still hard to take.
Seen from the vantage point of my sixties, Sylvie had everything I did not: great willpower and guts, but also femininity … the art of filling the stage and finding the spotlight, among others. She was extremely unpretentious in private and could handle the order of performer billing better than me. And she was capable of acting like a true star when circumstances demanded. We corresponded regularly during her one-year stay in the United States following a car accident that partially disfigured her. The exemplary way she overcame such a monumental ordeal impressed me and my respect for her only grew greater. When she returned to Paris, all her friends were invited to a banquet organized at an elegant restaurant on the Champs-Élysées. When she arrived, our hearts dropped when we saw the nasty scars that, despite several reconstructive surgeries, still slashed her face. It was easy to see why she stayed out of sight so long given the extent of the damage she suffered and the nightmare she had lived through. Several weeks later, I took part in the triumph that crowned her new show at the Olympia. Surrounded by her dancers, she was more beautiful than ever.
I also envied Sylvie for how broadminded she was about the rumors of Johnny’s affairs; he was the second man of her life. She took them for what they were—no big deal—and did not needlessly self-destruct by surrendering to the throes of jealousy as I would have done in her place. One thing we shared in common brought us together permanently; as mother hens we were both fixated on the welfare of our respective chicks, and we similarly weighed them down with our rampant fears about all the catastrophes that might happen to them. Alas, even when they reached adulthood our respective anxieties in this regard remained just as keen.
My inferiority complexes, which I tried my best to hide from Jean-Marie, poisoned our relationship. He was easily moving ahead in a world that was too different from mine for me to fit in. For example, when I went to meet him at the offices of Salut les copains (which quickly became those of the magazine Lui, the French equivalent of Playboy) I ran into his male colleagues, whose displays of misogyny and male chauvinism seemed threatening to the very essence of the teenybopper I was then, as well as to her aspirations. Four years older than I, growing up in an artistic milieu that encouraged meeting all different kinds of people, and having returned from his military service in Algeria, where he had had his first important love affair, Jean-Marie possessed an experience in every domain that I totally lacked. I felt clumsy, sad, and boring in his presence. To be honest, I did not understand what he saw in me, and I was terrified not so much of his leaving me but of the prince charming who would be replaced by an awful husband who took sleeping pills before dinner.
Yet during these long separations I dreamed of nothing but romantic evenings and torrid nights. My belief that I barely inspired him undermined me, and I realized too late that it was because he found my presence reassuring that he felt able to take a break from his hyperactivity and jet lag. My heightened awareness of the precarious nature of life and love made me live each moment of our reunions as if they were the last, and I must have given Jean-Marie the feeling, despite myself, that he had won me completely. I wished instead that he was tormented by anxiety and jealousy, but nothing in my behavior inspired that.
The rhythm imposed by the tours and the galas presided over my free days. I would go to sleep around four in the morning and get up at noon. When Jean-Marie was away, I would end my evenings at Régine’s or Castel’s, the two most popular Parisian nightclubs of that time. A couple sometimes danced in the doorway of New Jimmy’s5 whose grace and sensuality fascinated me. Poles apart from the eternal teenager with the unprepossessing appearance I believed myself to be, the young female dancer was so radiant and emanated such a sense of femininity that I tortured myself with the obsessive notion that if Jean-Marie ever met her, he would immediately fall in love with her. I always had the devastating impression that I did not match his deepest tastes, imagining that his interest in me was based on me being the exact antithesis of the mother who had abandoned him. Why couldn’t I stop thinking that the dice were loaded, and that the first femme fatale to come along would be more attractive to him than me? The fact remains that a dozen years later, Jean-Marie married Nathalie, the mysterious stranger. In February 1975, when I went to the clinic where their son Paul had just been born, I noticed a photo of Nathalie on the bedside table and was surprised by her strange hairdo. How astounded I was when I learned that it was a photo of Jacqueline Porel, Jean-Marie’s mother, who went off to live her own life, leaving François Périer to raise their three still very young children alone! At the same age, Nathalie and she were as alike as two peas in a pod.
While Jean-Marie was photographing the “idols”—Johnny, Eddy, Cloclo,6 Sylvie, Sheila—I was moping on my tours in the provinces or abroad. I had learned to drive and bought a car. I was at the wheel returning from a gala at the Deauville casino in the company of one of my backup singers, Margaret Hélian, who had just had an operation for a brain tumor. You should never drive after a concert, especially when the most minor public appearance turns you inside out. However, the temptation to finish the night with Jean-Marie proved to be stronger than the voice of reason. There was no traffic on the road from Deauville to Paris, but it was so dark that I was driving too far over the centerline and I was unable to avoid some poorly marked construction. The car flipped over once or twice and landed in a ditch. There was no such thing as seat belts then. By a miracle, Margaret came out of the back without a scratch. I was meanwhile feeling relief that I had not been broken into pieces. I told myself that an accident was inevitable in the course of a lifetime and that I had gotten off lightly. In reality, my back was riddled with shards of glass and I had lost so much blood that after a moment I almost fainted.
The accident happened at a crossroads that had seen its fair share, in the middle of nowhere where there were two or three houses close by, one of which was the home of a doctor. Alerted by the noise, he came to our rescue and brought me home, where he stitched me up to stop the bleeding. How Margaret and I were able to leave immediately afterward for Paris, I have no idea, but I can still remember the shakes that affected me until my transfer to the hospital the next morning, as well as Jean-Marie’s attentiveness. With infinite tenderness and sensitivity, he removed my blood-soaked clothes and cleaned me like a baby in the Rue du Rocher bathroom.
It was not yet officially the era of globalization, but my success in France extended almost simultaneously to several countries in about the same proportions. I was therefore traveling a lot to take part in either major television shows, or in festivals and concert tours. At this time, telephone communication was difficult and sometimes even impossible between one country and another, and as my personal life was on hold, I often felt down in the dumps. Between the rehearsals and the public appearances, I hid out in my hotel bathrooms, as generally their acoustics were excellent. With the help of my guitar, I tirelessly attempted to put my needs and grief into music.
I was hired for the Cantagiro, a surrealistic tour of Italy, not with bikes but with songs as it brought together the most popular singers on the peninsula. Between two stopovers, a crowd would gather along the road to watch the convertibles drive by with each star responding to the cheers with much waving and smiling. The performances took place every evening in a stadium where everyone performed their current hit song before a restless crowd of thousands. Adriano Celentano was already a legend revered by the Italian public for his talent and highly colorful personality. Their reverence was so great that if there was too much commotion during a performance, all he had to do was appear, like a pope, and speak three well-chosen words for a religious silence to immediately settle in. I had a weakness for Gianni Morandi, who was as idolized at that time as Eros Ramazzotti is today. His hit song, which I listened to repeatedly, “Se non avessi piu te,” was one of Ennio Morricone’s first compositions. Handsome as a god, he would plant himself on his outspread legs and galvanize the audience by singing his magnificent song at the top of his lungs with a typically Italian blend of energy, conviction, and naturalness. Jean-Marie and I had dinner in Paris with Gianni and his agent. The latter told us that initially his protégé and he were vacillating between boxing and singing—the only ways someone of the people could make their fortune. They decided to first try their luck with singing, holding boxing in reserve if that failed. Before our amused surprise, Gianni showed us his hands—large, handsome, and powerful—as if to convince us that his vocal cords were not the only string to his bow.
The festival of San Remo was a popular singing competition; the finals, featuring experienced singers, were televised live and all Italy would watch. The combined pressure of my French and Italian record companies forced me to take part. For this occasion, Edoardo Vianello wrote “Parlami di te” for me, a song that was too pompous for my liking, but at the same time he offered me on a platter “Ci sono cose,” a little gem that still brings tears to my eyes even today. I have a very bad memory of my performance: I was utterly paralyzed by stage fright and convinced it was even more obvious because it could not be seen. Oddly enough, Adriano Celentano had been eliminated during the first round with a song that was far superior to “Parlami di te,” “Il ragazzo della via Gluck.” I fell in love with it at once. Italians are hot-blooded as everyone knows, but I was stunned to learn that Celentano, in despair after his elimination, had driven into a wall with his car, which luckily was more damaged than he was. Once I was back in Paris, I moved heaven and earth to record his song in French. “La maison où j’ai grandi” [The House Where I Grew Up] had as much success in France as, with due respect to the San Remo jury, “Il ragazzo della via Gluck” in Italy.
My one-time association with Edoardo Vianello earned us the opportunity for a photo essay, a genre that was really popular in Italy during those years. The usual pressures prompted me to accept what proved to be a tragicomic ordeal—partly because the shots were taken in the middle of winter on a beach, where it was so cold our teeth were chattering, and partly because Edoardo, who was much shorter than I, had to climb onto a crate to be my height. And, finally, because we were forewarned that we would have to embrace like lovers. Although this prospect had tormented me to the nth degree for days and nights, the kiss in question left no memory.
My Italian period was also marked by a series of disastrously organized galas. For example, my musicians and I sedately arrived at the end of the afternoon in a border town, at the gates of which we were surprised to see lots of people making exaggerated, incomprehensible gestures at us. Incomprehensible until we found out that I was scheduled for that morning when we thought we were performing that evening. In a panic we rushed to the theater where an indescribable commotion was going on. The spectators, who had been waiting for hours, were standing and left as one after I sang my first song. At least they saw me in the flesh for three minutes! The misadventure I experienced the next summer at the Colmar festival was just as bad. I had sung the night before in southern Italy—right at the tip of the boot—and made most of the trip by plane. However, my musicians had to drive with the equipment right after the performance. I was dismayed to learn in Colmar that my performance was scheduled much earlier than the time the road map indicated was the normal driving time. I had to show up in front of ten thousand people without a sound system and only my pianist, as the rest of my little band had not yet reached their destination.
The Italian public customarily shows its enthusiasm by applauding at least once during the song, which is as disconcerting as it is stimulating. In contrast, the German audience remains silent and respectful to an impressive degree. I was doing a tour in Germany whose organizer was so debt-ridden that there were bailiffs at the entrance to every hall where I was scheduled. My sound engineer, who did not speak a word of German, had been given the instructions to get payment before the performance. His leitmotif was therefore: “Nix money, nix show,” and we had to wait until he gave the green light before we went on stage. The introduction of my opening song, “Je n’attends plus personne” [I No Longer Wait for Anyone]—a poor adaptation of an Italian song—could play in a continuous loop. One evening when the green light was late in coming, the audience began showing signs of impatience, and we sent the musicians on stage to calm them down. They had to play this nightmarish introduction for a good quarter of an hour before I was allowed to join them.
I became famous overnight in Germany thanks to a television director, Truck Branss, who when it came to avant-garde was the equivalent of our Jean-Christophe Averty. He invited me to his fief in Sarrbrücken to show me his hour-long portrayal of Hildegard Knef, whom I knew by reputation: an actress whose face radiated beauty and character. The framing, the lights, the work on the black-and-white contrasts, all displayed a gripping aestheticism and inventiveness. Truck Branss proposed to do the same kind of portrait of me, so I spent fifteen days in Sarrbrücken. I had to be in makeup at six in the morning so I could unwillingly lend myself to the director’s wishes, which included his insistence that I have fake breasts, false eyelashes, lipstick, and curls. Afterward, he acknowledged that he had been wrong to transform me this way and apologized. I still have a detailed memory of the unusual staging of certain songs. For “Le premier bonheur du jour,” [The Day’s First Pleasure], for example, I was on a white horse, wearing a long robe of the same color with a transparent skirt, and we were shooting in the woods that allowed him to use the filtered sunlight for backlighting. Everything was designed to work with black and white, and my outfits, custom-made by the production, were black or white depending on the décor. Among other things, I was filmed lying down on black and white cushions in an abandoned factory on the ceiling of which were hung crystal chandeliers and tulle curtains. There was also a giant game of Skittles7 in a studio, in which my silhouette—dressed head-to-foot sometimes in black and sometimes in white—handled one of the pieces. In this blessed era, some television directors were far more creative artists than the singers they invited onto their shows.
Jean-Christophe Averty invited me often onto his shows. It was a joy to see him at his Buttes-Chaumont studio, where he worked tirelessly. People never knew what to expect, as his personality was as puzzling as his creativity. He meticulously dreamed up his creations with numerous drawings and intensive special effects that pushed the limits of the available technology. The essential part of his work took place outside the filming; the song simply served as fuel for his imagination, which recast it into a larger vision that no one but he knew of before the actual broadcast. Averty had a lisp, and I can still hear him saying “thake yourthelf” with such a blend of tenderness and humor in the depths of his eyes that butter wouldn’t have melted in his mouth. His legendary fits of rage, which exploded out of nowhere due to some technical problem or another, stood in stark contrast with the angelic patience he showed singers. They could be heard from a long ways off but never scared anyone. A few years ago I ran into him by chance on the elevator of the Maison de la Radio. “How are you doing?” I cried out spontaneously, delighted to see him again. His eyes immediately filled with tears. Our meeting likely revived the memory of his glory days and exacerbated, by the same token, the pain of no longer being able to use his wild ideas in works worthy of his great talent.
The condescension of certain French journalists toward the singers of my generation, all from humble backgrounds, shocks me much more today than at the time I had to deal with it. Denise Glaser, whose affectation was like a caricature, gave herself superior airs and made no effort to come down to your level; she was always trying to insidiously snare you. I have a vague memory of the content of one interview with Pierre Dumayet, but the impression it left remains all too clear: he made me undergo a kind of humiliating exam intended to reveal my lack of a literary education. When I was invited on the show Radioscopie with Jacques Chancel, which was broadcast live on France Inter, the first question he asked me was: “How would you define yourself?” I had just left my family cocoon, knew nothing about the world or life, and my self-awareness was more than fuzzy. Once the first moment of panic had passed, I still had the presence of mind to answer that I measured 4 feet tall and weighed 220 pounds. He had it in for me for years!
Recently I heard an eminent radio announcer mention an interview with Johnny Hallyday during his first show at the Olympia, during which the announcer tried to catch him out by asking who the Prime Minister of France was. The announcer scoffed that Bruno Coquatrix had whispered the answer to Johnny because he did not know. Isn’t it incredible that forty years later, he continues to harp on something so inappropriate and hasn’t yet realized that he is the only ridiculous and questionable person in the story? I would blush for my narrow-mindedness if I were in his place. The teenagers of that era, especially those who were not middle class, took much less of an interest in politics, because the media we know today was still in development. Everyone knows that Johnny Hallyday is an authentic person born in the profession, abandoned by his parents as an infant and taken in by acrobat cousins who lugged him around from one theater to the next. It is easy to see that he did not have much opportunity to go to school. The overweening journalists who could not resist the temptation to make fun of him because of his alleged or real gaps (who doesn’t have them?) in the realm of language and culture only dragged themselves down. Is a politician criticized for singing out of tune and not knowing who the hot singers of the time are?
Two songs I composed—“Et meme…” [And Even …] and “Dans le monde entier” [In the Whole World]—were adapted into English8 and made it onto the Top of the Pops. They obtained the same success in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. The English-language press was much less interested in me as a singer than they were as an ambassadress of French style. We were a long way from the low-cut, Vichy Rose dresses that Brigitte Bardot had worn with such infinite grace several years earlier and in which I would have looked ridiculous. I was lucky that my rangy, androgynous build, which gave me so many complexes, matched the style André Courrèges was radically revolutionizing with the clean lines of his designs, which were as original as they were timeless. I needed a stage outfit and had my heart set on one of his creations, an immaculate ensemble of form-fitting pants and tunic with matching white ankle boots. This outfit, with its rare combination of elegance and simplicity, looked like no other. It could be seen from a mile away and gave me an extra-terrestrial silhouette. I have always felt as much affection for André Courrèges and his wife Coqueline as admiration. Because they kept their distance from the social whirl and show business, and because of their disarming simplicity, human warmth, and normalcy, they were quite different from the usual great couturiers. The partially unconscious reasoning that led me directly to them and not to Dior or Saint Laurent strikes me today as glaringly obvious.
My first recordings filled me and still fill me with shame. In contrast, those of Richard Anthony were remarkably well-produced, so I followed his advice to work with English musicians like he did. I had a bit of a problem convincing Jacques Wolfsohn, who operated on the principle that there was no reason to change a formula that worked, but he eventually gave in. So I often traveled to London, either to record under the guidance of the talented Charles Blackwell, whose orchestrations finally brought the best out of my songs, or to perform in the prestigious cabaret at the Savoy Hotel where the record crowds had already earned me three three-week engagements in two years—quite a rarity. As I was incapable of eating anything before my performances, I would eat after in the trendy clubs, as they were the only places that guaranteed even a minimum service late at night. There I would see a parade of swinging London: Eric Burdon—the singer for The Animals—Georgie Fame, David Bailey—the great fashion photographer who would become the first and last husband of the beautiful and talented Catherine Deneuve—the Rolling Stones. Their strange behavior perplexed me. As I had been totally ignorant of drugs—soft or hard—until this time, I didn’t realize they were all pretty much high. They, on the other hand, seeing me most often without a boyfriend, thought I was a lesbian.
Despite my exclusive feelings for Jean-Marie, Mick Jagger’s charismatic beauty fascinated me. Perhaps to please the young readers of Mademoiselle Âge tendre, he had told them I was his ideal woman. One day when I went by myself to the London neighborhood where boots were sold, I came face to face with him. He was also alone. Time stopped and my memory has recorded that moment like a slow-motion sequence from a film. Was he as shy and intimidated as me? He gave me a bewitching smile and went on his way, leaving me in the state of someone who has had a heavenly vision and wonders if they will ever get over it.
I was not at all attracted to Brian Jones, but he came to see me several times at the Westbury Hotel where I was staying. I was flattered by the interest he showed in me but could barely understand why, as his music and world were poles apart from mine. One evening, Brian invited me to his place, where he received me with his fiancée of the time, the statuesque Anita Pallenberg—future companion of Keith Richards. I have a confused memory of my discomfiture, not only because of the language barrier but also because of the strangely watchful attitude of the couple, who first offered me a smoke that I turned down, never imagining for a second that it was not an ordinary cigarette. I no longer remember how I learned later that they were also lost in conjecture about me, trying to figure out if I had come there for drugs or because of sexual attraction for her, him, or both together. At no time did it ever cross their minds that I was a fan of the group and the thought of getting to know one of its musicians a little better constituted a sufficiently powerful motivation to spend an evening with him.
The Beatles had written a lot more hits than the Stones, but none of them had the ravishing charm of Mick Jagger. Jean-Marie photographed both groups regularly. One day, George Harrison and Paul McCartney invited us to dinner at their favorite club. Because he was the most sentimental and introverted of the four, I felt close to George, whose melancholy songs never failed to carry me away whenever I heard them. He came with the gorgeous Patti Boyd, whom he married a short time later—and who left him for Eric Clapton. I remember nothing of this particular time I would like to recall, just a few subjective fragments of no interest to anybody, not even personally, as a person’s priorities, like their interests, are not the same at sixty as they were at twenty. However, it is not out of the question that nothing memorable was said this evening, as its intrinsic importance would only appear to me in retrospect. My only noteworthy memory concerns the indescribable nerve-racking state we got ourselves in trying to find a tie for Jean-Marie as quickly as possible so we could get into the club where George and Paul were waiting for us. The English formality of that era was incredibly strict. Among other things, sharing a hotel room with a member of the opposite sex was absolutely forbidden if you were not married, which led to some crafty maneuvers. It was also the cause of an absurd situation at the Savoy Hotel cabaret. After my set, I got ready to join Burt Bacharach,9 who had invited me to join him at his table in the room. As I did not have anything “dressy,” I hadn’t changed, thinking that the sublime Courrèges outfit I had just sung in was appropriate and elegant enough. I was not allowed to enter. I then learned that a woman was not allowed to wear pants in a public place, even when the pants were the creation of one of the greatest couturiers of the century, and even when the person wearing them had just occupied the stage of the same premises for an hour in front of all the high society types who were there simply to see her.
Every time I release a new album, the many journalists who have never taken the time to listen to me want to talk about everything except my songs. After they have tried to extract any information they can on my relationship with Jacques Dutronc and made me repeat for the umpteenth time my brief encounter with Bob Dylan, they never fail to ask me: “And the movies?” It is as if all it took was to lift a little finger, as if being an actress was not an extraordinarily difficult profession involving personal qualities, a very distinctive kind of talent, and a fire in the belly. My insignificant forays into cinema took place at an age—nineteen, twenty, and twenty-two—when, although I had no vocation as an actress, I could never say no. That was in part because my mother’s pushy personality had conditioned me to obey any figure embodying authority without question. It was also because the sacrosanct reality principle compelled me to follow the advice of Jean-Marie, who I trusted completely.
This was how, despite my obvious reservations, I allowed Roger Vadim to convince me to play the role of Ophelia in Château en Suède.10 This is also when I first experienced the long, deadly waiting around that is built-in to the shooting of any film. The movie was shot in the Boulogne-Billancourt Studios and, except for my transistor radio permanently glued to my ear, nothing managed to distract me from the boredom of being on call for hours just to say three words. Not the nickname of “Canard impérial” [Duck Imperial] that Vadim gave me, nor the teasing of Jean-Claude Brialy, who played my fiancé in the film and threatened to kiss me for real in our love scene—which he did to my great displeasure—nor a lightning-quick encounter with Jean-Paul Belmondo, who I was amazed to discover was even shyer than me.
Jean-Daniel Pollet presented his proposal with such verve that Jean-Marie, who had first been skeptical, ended up believing in it and encouraged me to throw myself into this new venture. Pollet belonged to that typically French category of intellectual directors who handle words better than a camera, and whose hypertrophied mind went hand in hand with a more or less deficient sensory perception. The result is a disembodied cinema of great visual mediocrity. Through the course of my experience, I have noted that the trailblazers are better at putting things into images than intellectuals. The intrusive cerebral quality of the latter makes them prone to using images to support their ideas without caring one way or the other if they are cinematographic. Just like those songwriters who view the melody as a prop for their texts, when it should be the other way around, as in this instance melody has the right of way. A film is not a book; a song is not a poem. Because words do not come easily to me, I have always been dazzled by fine speakers, but because their talent often ends there, I have learned to distrust them.
The shooting of Une balle au Coeur [A Bullet to the Heart] took place on a Greek island that was hard to get to. It was necessary to fly to Athens, then spend hours in the car to reach the small port from where the old tub to the island in question set sail. We stayed in a ramshackle hotel, and there was nothing to eat but tomatoes and farmer’s cheese, which didn’t work for me. I felt like I was at the other end of the world and my morale sank below zero when, after a day or two, I realized that the director was hopelessly bad and his film was a disaster. To make matters worse, the telephone worked poorly, and the repeated disappointment from not being able to reach Jean-Marie kept me weeping half the time. Sami Frey11 had also been dragged out to this hell. Did he realize as quickly as I did that he had left, for less than nothing, the beautiful young woman he loved—left her open to temptation and her own devices? His reserve being on par with mine, we did not exchange a single word about our respective torments nor about anything else, which, in hindsight, appears as incomprehensible as it is regrettable to me now. One lone image remains: that of the beard hairs the makeup artist glued on one at a time to Sami’s clean-shaven chin, while we were dripping with sweat from the oppressive heat.
And then there was that two-month shoot with Hugues Aufray that I accepted with a heavy heart. My sole consolation was Jean-Marie’s promise to come see me. I liked Hugues but I lived only for the moment when I would see Jean-Marie again. The night before the long-awaited day, while I was in the car that took me from one city to the next, I heard on the radio that Claude François had been in an accident. The plate that covered the hole of the prompter on stage where he was rehearsing his choreography had given way beneath his weight and he had fallen through. This kind of incident normally makes you want to laugh, especially when it involves an individual as crotchety, short-tempered, and lacking all hindsight as Claude François. It must have been hilarious to see him coming out of the hole, mad with rage, with the jagged sheet metal plate around him. Alas, Jean-Marie was there on an assignment, and I was immediately distressed at the thought that he would not be able to come as planned. This turned out to be the case, and this unintentional mishap may have constituted the final straw that, without our knowing, broke the camel’s back. Absence ended up extinguishing the fire it had first kindled. So, while I felt lonelier and worse than ever, my need for love gradually turned toward a charming young man who was part of the shoot. This was nothing other than a gasp of life, but it triggered the deterioration of my relationship with Jean-Marie and the end of our love.
1 The author is referring to Freud’s concept that dictates the desires of the ego must be diagnosed and analyzed in accordance with reality—any course of action taken to satisfy this desire must be realistic and socially appropriate—Trans.
2 Jean Billon was the first husband of the singer Patachou. Together they created the cabaret Chez Patachou in Montmartre, where she caused a sensation by cutting off the ties of the gentlemen who came to hear her sing.
3 This amounts to around fifty dollars, out of which I was expected to pay my musicians!
4 Lucien Morisse was the director of Europe n° 1 as well as the mentor of Delida, who left him for someone else on the very day of their wedding.
5 Regine’s nightclub.
6 Cloclo was the stage name for French pop singer Claude François, whose life was tragically cut short by an accident at the age of 39—Trans.
7 Skittles is a game much like bowling, except that it is often played outdoors—Trans.
8 Under the titles of “All Over the World” and “However Much.”
9 He was one of the best songwriters of the decade and had composed some of Dionne Warwick’s greatest hits: “Don’t Make Me Over,” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” among others, as well as “Trains and Boats and Planes.”
10 Released with the English title Nutty, Naughty Chateau in 1963—Trans.
11 Actor and director Sami Frey [Samuel Frey] was born in Paris in 1937. He is best known for his roles in New Wave films such as Godard’s Band of Outsiders and Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7.