The American director John Frankenheimer saw me as I was leaving a London club and thought I would be perfect as one of the characters in a film he was preparing about Formula 1 Grand Prix. He wanted to learn who I was. To find out, he contacted Gérard Lebovici, a famous impresario who would soon create Artmedia,1 the largest French cinema agency. Realizing that Frankenheimer was dead-set on having me in his film, Lebovici asked for the maximum and got it. Being a well-brought-up young woman, all I could do was go with the flow. The shooting was expected to last five months and take place entirely outside on various European racetracks. But my personal life had become so confused that working helped me recover better than usual from the wrenching feelings that found me whenever I left home.
Yves Montand played the male lead. He and Simone Signoret recommended the Bergman actress Harriet Andersson. She did not work out, and was sent packing after shooting several scenes. Eva Marie Saint, an American actress with little charisma and already fading although she was only forty-two years old, replaced her at the last minute. I had not yet seen her in Elia Kazan’s mythic On the Waterfront, in which she played opposite the no-less-mythic Marlon Brando. I did not know then that she had acted with legends like Cary Grant, Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, and Gregory Peck, and that she had worked under the direction of such prestigious directors as Hitchcock and Preminger. Had I known any of this I would never have dared approach her. She was also extremely discreet and only appeared when her presence was required for a scene, and we never had any scenes together.
My insipid lines could have been counted on the fingers of one hand, but John Frankenheimer always wanted me on hand in case bad weather forced him to alter his schedule. One of my favorite singers, Bob Dylan, whose songs “She Belongs to Me” and “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” I listened to over and over, was performing at the Olympia on May 24, his birthday, and I had been hoping for months to attend. However, I needed Frankenheimer’s permission to leave for one evening. We were in the principality of Monaco, where shooting had just begun, when I got the green light at the very last minute. When I got to Paris I learned that Jean-Marie’s brother, Jean-Pierre, had thrown himself out a window. Recently married to a venomous beauty, Babette, he had threatened to jump out the window, and she had done nothing to prevent him. This was his umpteenth threat of suicide and his entourage had stopped paying any attention to his ultimatums. I should have stayed with Jean-Marie and his family, but my desire to see Bob Dylan was overpowering. I still become upset with myself when I think about it. The concert was disappointing, besides. After a chilly reaction to the first half, which was frankly not up to his usual standards, the public started hissing when the intermission dragged on. To my huge stupefaction, someone came and whispered in my ear that Dylan would not go back on stage unless I went to his dressing room. Once in his presence, I was frightened by how thin he was, his cadaverous face, and his overlong fingernails. He was obviously heading for trouble, and almost died a short time later in a motorcycle accident from which he took months to recover.
Despite my brief visit, the second half was no better than the first. I next found myself in the company of some other singers in a suite at the George V, wondering what I was doing there and feeling increasingly guilty for having abandoned Jean-Marie. While we were stupidly standing around in his suite waiting for him to show up, Dylan cracked open his bedroom door and invited me to join him. His latest album had not yet been released in France and he offered me the first pressing of his sublime “Just Like a Woman,” which became one of my bedside songs, as well as “I Want You.” I was told that the only two people he wanted to see in Paris were Brigitte Bardot and me. I also knew that he had dedicated a poem to me, but the thought that he might be sending me a message via his song never crossed my mind. We never saw each other again.
At the end of August 1969, Georges Moustaki and I took the train and boat together to attend the Isle of Wight Festival starring Dylan. There were so many people that I abandoned any thought of trying to force my way through the numerous barriers to say hi. He asked a journalist for news of me during one of his recent performances in Paris, which I found both surprising and touching. Like Trenet, Brassens, Gainsbourg, Lennon, McCartney, and a few others, Dylan belongs to the category of genius songwriters whose stage performances have only a relative interest in comparison to their work. It often makes me wonder if there might not be a conflict between the creativity that primarily appeals to the mind and the animal nature that the mind often seeks to curb or sublimate. With a few rare exceptions, the most inspired writer-composers have rarely been great showmen.
I was much less bored on Grand Prix than during my earlier film shoots. The crew numbered 250 people, and I got along well with a couple of them, the casting director in particular. Automobile racing interests me no more than any other sport, but when circumstances force you to rub shoulders with the drivers every day, bonds are formed, and you can be carried away by the activity, hoping for the victory of this or that person, and fearing for his life. The film followed the various stages of the 1966 Formula 1 season, which started with the Monaco Grand Prix and continued at Francorchamps in Belgium, Brands Hatch in Great Britain, and Zandvoort in Holland, before ending at Monza in Italy. The director skillfully blended the bogus tracks driven on by the actors, who had taken an intensive driving course for a month at a specialized English school, with the authentic tracks on which the legends like Jackie Stewart, Graham Hill, Jack Brabham, and Jim Clark were driving. I got along especially well with Lorenzo Bandini, who died the following year, burned alive in his Ferrari.
But I got along best with Yves Montand. He was so warm and natural that my shyness vanished when I was with him. I was enchanted by his humor and the distance he maintained with himself; he took his work very seriously, but nothing else. It was only when the shooting was over that he told me about what an ordeal the obligation of learning to drive had been for him. He also confessed, with his usual clowning, that he had definitely had it up to here with auto racing and racetracks.
With a recklessness that stupefies me in hindsight, I attempted to drive by myself the whole way between Clermont-Ferrand, whose track had been used for the film, and Milan. Yves had asked me to bring his tape recorder, to which he had added a hilarious letter with a bunch of little drawings including a sun, a palm tree, and a face entirely crossed off by the caption: “This is you on a rainy day.” He called me his “pretty little rascal” and told me to be careful, to not think about him too much, to not stick my tongue out at drivers going in the other direction—in short, he concluded, to drive like a true artist, in a word, like France Gall.
He was the indirect cause of an important turning point in my life. We were in London when, at the last minute, he canceled his invitation to dinner with me. Hardly thrilled at the idea of staying in my hotel room alone, I called a vague acquaintance who was always available, a fairly unsettling Chinese man with the name of Calvin Lee, who I would only turn to as a last resort. He took me to a trendy little restaurant, La Casserole. The first person I saw on entering was a young English actor I had just admired in a film I saw the night before in Paris. I spontaneously went over to congratulate him, and told him that his film was a hit in France. Everything could have simply ended there, but on leaving the restaurant he came over to say goodbye and suggested that we see each other again. My relationship with Jean-Marie had not been the same for some time, but it was the one I started with this very attractive young man that sounded its death knell.
After this cursed evening, I went through unimaginable torment. My Englishman wasn’t free and there was no hope of any long-term relationship, but I was determined to savor the precious moments he granted me—down to the last drop. He was charm, mystery, and ambiguity personified and a master at the art of sneaking away. He showed up without warning at the Brands Hatch track—where between two takes several oddballs wearing a motor on their back managed to soar one hundred feet above the ground, which I found hilarious—and he left again the same way, just like at my hotel. To make matters worse, although it had not been planned for me to go with the rest of the crew to Holland, Frankenheimer, who’d caught wind of my whirlwind romance, suddenly claimed he needed me over there. I desperately tried to convince him otherwise, but he was inflexible and I headed for Zandvoort for a silent, superfluous close-up, whose sole purpose was to keep me under his thumb.
When we were staying in Milan for the shots of Monza, I learned that the source of my torment was at the festival of Venice and went there on a sudden impulse. I only saw him once, but my escapade was worth it for an event with no connection to what had motivated my trip. Having nothing better to do, I was wandering the tiny Venetian streets at random. My steps took me one evening to a brightly lit palace whose doors were wide open. I went in. Numerous paintings by Max Ernst were displayed there, each more fascinating than the last. These exceptional paintings dazzled me so much that, combined with the wondrous frame provided by the setting in which I had discovered them, I had the impression of being in a waking dream.
The rupture with Jean-Marie was confirmed by the decisive words of an infinitely sad telephone call from Clermont-Ferrand. Jean-Marie had asked me to spell out how things were between us. This was the first time I went through the ordeal of causing an individual who I’d been most close to for several years to suffer, and I realized that it is less painful to leave someone than to have someone leave you.
When I returned to Paris, I learned that my producer and artistic director, Jacques Wolfsohn, was in the middle of a divorce. He had just signed up Jacques Dutronc, whose song “Et moi et moi et moi…” was bombarding the airwaves. He was not a complete stranger to me as I had covered a song of his in 1963 that I liked a lot, “Le temps de l’amour.” I also knew who he was because he had composed the melody for “Va pas prendre un tambour” [Don’t Use a Drum] at the request of our mutual producer. This song was ruined, alas, by a dreadful arrangement. I next ran into him in Wolfsohn’s office, where he had been hired as an assistant when he got out of the army. His close-cropped hair, pimply skin, and enormous glasses at this time were hardly flattering. He was next mentioned to me as a possible guitar player for a concert tour. I was at the wheel of my little Austin Cooper when I saw him crossing Rue Mogador in front of the Printemps department store. I took advantage of the red light to ask him if I could count on him but he remained evasive—I did not yet know that he rarely answered questions. I was told he did not want to be far away from his fiancée, which he partially denied years later by claiming that the way he saw me was incompatible with becoming one of my musicians.
He had not yet recorded a record, much less become a celebrity, when he canceled his wedding several days before it was to be celebrated. The pretext he gave later, not without reluctance, was the bourgeois formality of his future in-laws, who had more or less engineered this marriage without his knowing although they regarded his artistic activities with a very dim eye and were pressuring him to find a more reliable profession. With hindsight, I wonder if the deeper reason for this last-minute cancelation, which should have aroused my suspicions, might have instead revolved around a reflexive need to flee from any form of commitment.
Whatever the case may be, both Jacques and I became single at the same time. We often went out together starting in the fall of 1966. Jacques the producer was always alone, but Jacques the singer was usually flanked by “babes” who were so nondescript that I wondered what he really saw in them. For my part I was still desperately in love with my Englishman, who, sorry to see me so unhappy on his account and having seen our trio at Castel’s, tried to convince me that Dutronc was a thousand times more attractive than he was, and that we made a very handsome couple.
It has to be acknowledged that the more impossible love affairs are, the more they intensify the illusion that the individual on whom we have crystallized our needs and hopes is the only lovable person in the world, the only person we will ever love. The suffering this causes is quite real, and can be as destructive as it is energizing. Although it was far from my main source of inspiration, I have often wondered if I would have been better off if I had been balanced enough to put satisfying my own needs ahead of satisfying those of my partners, rather than spending my life compensating for my ridiculous frustrations by creating songs. I tell myself I may have been better off mooning about alone with my guitar and my idealizations (which probably owed more to my needs than to what inspired them) than following my attraction to its bitter end. This attraction was not one that could long stand up to reality and I squandered a lot of my time and energy pursuing it. But it is impossible to fight our unconscious mind. With the precision of the most sophisticated radar, it stubbornly guides us toward that one individual whose flaws sufficiently complement our own, in order to actualize the problem that imprisons us until, by means of setbacks and suffering, we end up seeing it clearly enough to attempt to free ourselves from it.
The producers of Grand Prix invited me to the United States, where I went with Jacques the producer2 as my chaperone as if I were ten years old. “Early to rise and early to bed, makes you healthy and handsome,” he retorted when I complained about dining at the hotel every night and never seeing anyone. That is except for Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, who Jacques knew well and whose manager, Albert Grossman, was also the manager of Bob Dylan, who had recently dropped out of circulation since his accident. He did bring me to a large nightclub where Duke Ellington was performing. He was much less interesting to me than Elvis Presley. We also went to Greenwich Village in the middle of the day and entered a jazz club, which was open to all and sundry at this time and has since become mythical—the Village Vanguard—where Miles Davis, who I had never heard of, was playing. Then there was the Thanksgiving Day Parade in which I wore a costume and smiled at all the spectators from the top of a float. I would have totally forgotten this if Jacques Wolfsohn had not kept the Super 8 film he shot of it safe and sound in his archives. Media people, especially Americans and Germans, have no scruples whatsoever about using you like an object, and I was not yet savvy enough to categorically refuse grotesque situations like this one. They did delight my producer though, and he would never lift a finger to save me.
There were not a lot of requests for me and the production company was talking about shortening my stay. The actress Jessica Walters, who had been in Grand Prix and made me promise to contact her if I came to New York, thoughtfully invited me to some very trendy spot. After that, the telephone never stopped ringing. One of the greatest photographers of that time, Richard Avedon, asked me to pose for him. While I am a hopelessly stationary individual, he managed to make me leap and jump with legs outspread while wearing colorful dresses and extensions that made my already long hair even longer. The photos—which are superb—were published in the American edition of Vogue. Other vague and scattered memories come back to me in bits and pieces; I remember a television broadcast which was marked by a stage fright that broke all previous records because I met the mythic Everly Brothers, whose “So Sad,” “Don’t Blame Me,” and “Up in Mabel’s Room” I continue to listen to with the same emotion I felt forty years ago.
A Belgian-born director, Jean-Claude Tramont, who ten years later directed Jacques Dutronc and Annie Girardot in Point de Mire (Focal Point) invited me to lunch with Salvador Dali, whose imagination enthralled me. I saw him several times again, at the Hotel Meurice, of course, but also in his extraordinary home in Cadaquès. I had the rare privilege of dining one-on-one with him and his wife Gala there. She ate nothing but boiled rice, looked like a mummy, and never showed herself in public, in contrast to her famous husband, who nevertheless behaved much more sedately in private, where he did not feel obliged to put on his customary, brilliant theatrics.
Once Jacques Wolfsohn returned to Paris, I went out to the New York nightclubs whenever I liked. Aaron Neville’s “Tell It Like It Is” was playing constantly, and is still one of my favorite songs. I bought the record and listened to it over and over while unreservedly indulging in my feeling of loneliness. Jean-Marie had taken Jacques the singer with him on an assignment to Mexico and I found myself thinking about him, especially as I was also listening to his songs quite a bit.
Except for our ritual running contest on Rue Princess every time we left Castel’s around two in the morning, where the sight of the small, well-rounded Wolfsohn charging off at top speed like a cannonball made me laugh until I cried and inevitably lost the race, the end of 1966 and the first half of 1967 were not times of fun and high spirits. My chronic digestive problems had been aggravated by travel and were ruining my life more than usual. I can still see myself several minutes before going on stage, sprawled out on the dirt of what I was using for a dressing room in the open air of Juan-les-Pins, with my agent-secretary forcing me to gulp down Fernet-Branca, a vile Italian liquor with belladonna, which was supposed to soothe my stomach ache. Above all, I had the beginnings of a nervous breakdown for the first and last time in my life. It had started with blurred vision that made objects waver and split in two. This was followed by a horribly frightening complete absence of desire. On top of all this, I would sometimes burst out weeping for no reason. When I was on the Riviera, I again had one of those crises in which I was indifferent to everything. Nothing excited me, but I had no inhibitions either. This made it possible for me to telephone Jacques Dutronc, confusedly viewing him as my life preserver. His mother answered and told me with great kindness that he was away. Ironically, I felt a great relief when I heard this, as I had no idea what I wanted to say to him. He was in Morocco, which he often visited, and from where he had sent me a postcard signed “your future fiancée,” or something like that. I did not take this at all seriously given his facetious nature and the total absence of any signals from him when we went out in groups of three or more.
The television shows, the photo shoots, the galas, the outings followed one after the other, and I wrote songs whenever I had a break. Because Jacques and I were on the same record company and were often seen together in public, the scandal sheets soon had us engaged, and the media got into the habit of not calling on one without calling on the other. We were scheduled on the same prime time shows. Jacques took part in the show that Averty devoted to me, Hardy’s Blues, and we gave in to the wishes of the hip TV show Dim Dam Dom, which combined fashion and pop culture. What should have happened, happened: little by little I fell under the spell of not only his pale blue eyes but of his disconcerting personal style—provocative, sometimes cynical, always mysterious—behind which I liked to imagine lurked a great sensitivity as well as a great fragility. He had a hard side to his tender heart, raw and refined at the same time. He was also very French—and a pure Parisian. His contrasts intrigued and attracted me even more for, as my handsome Englishman had noticed earlier, Jacques Dutronc was uncommonly charismatic.
I felt at an impasse again, because nothing gave me grounds to assume even an ounce of reciprocity for my growing attraction. The more or less pretty and crude young girls who the new object of my torment paraded around with, as well as those who fluttered around him or waited for hours on his landing, showed me what not to do. At the same time, those who seemed to win his favors were quite different from me, and I concluded that I must not have suited his tastes. In short, I felt more inhibited than ever about expressing my feelings.
One day when Jacques and I were singing at the same gala in Belgium my car decided to break down. There was no other solution but to go back to Paris with him and I hoped deep down that he would take advantage of the situation. We were sitting in the back of his Citroen DS with three good hours of night driving before us. But he was imperturbable and though I pretended to sleep so I could take advantage of some of the curves to rub against him slightly, nothing happened. He likely was accustomed to people falling obviously into his arms, but I would have been incapable of that kind of behavior, unless I was given some sort of encouragement. I was also halted by the vague fear that this kind of attitude, with which he was all too familiar, would only diminish me in his eyes. He was so secret and discreet about his personal life, and confided to me years later that one his film colleagues, who was as famous as she was gorgeous, had invited him to dinner at the restaurant of a hotel one Sunday, having reserved a room so they could end the afternoon on a high note. That someone would make such arrangements for him riled him, and the young woman got nothing for her trouble.
It is said that many men like it when the woman takes the initiative. If it is a one-night stand, why not? But if you imagine a long-term relationship with that person, you’ll avoid risking annoying them with premature fixations of love. Taking the first step presumes great trust in your power of seduction, and an equal measure of confidence, and even recklessness sometimes! And when you are exclusively drawn to men with thick protective armor like me, the fear of giving oneself away at an inopportune moment, or of getting bogged down in the quicksand of their ambiguity, also blocks momentum. I was not yet mature enough to be aware of the complementary nature of neuroses that is the basis of attractions; I could not imagine that the crippling flaws I ascribed to myself had their equivalent in the other person, but contributed to what I found attractive in him. I only sensed that absence, as well as too much distance, risked fulfilling the budding desire I wished to inspire. How to find the happy medium? Overcoming the real or imaginary obstacles that stand between an attraction and its fulfillment is definitely no easy task. Talk about mission impossible! But it is the only one that has ever attracted me …
Was it a little before or after this period of uncertainty, in fall or winter, that one of the nephews of the Shah (who had a French mother) invited me to Tehran? When his father died, the seven-year-old boy was taken straight from the hard life he was living with his mother in Paris to the luxury of the Iranian court, where the Shah had summoned him with the intention of making him his heir. The Shah eventually decided to repudiate the woman of his heart, Soraya, who could not have children, and remarry Farah Diba, who gave him four. Although this turn of events had made him somewhat useless, Ali Patrick Pahlavi—the name of the boy with this strange destiny—remained at the court. Ill at ease with himself, he compensated for his obvious isolation by worshipping the singers of his age.
The official pretext for my visit was the inauguration of a discotheque baptized Tous les garcons et les filles. In reality, my host hoped to forge bonds between us by virtue of his largesse. He did not yet know that friendship, like love, cannot be bought. Vaguely worried about Iranian mores, I had asked my mother to accompany me. Our movements were restricted, as we could not talk to anyone at all without an interpreter. I am a little ashamed to admit that the guided tours of monuments, museums, places of worship, and other things bored me. The way people conducted themselves, the framework of their lives, the shops, the markets interested me much more. During the time of year I was there, everything was the color of mud, which depressed me. We flew over the legendary city of Ispahan in a private aircraft, but it was not rose season, and in this city, like Tehran, I do not remember seeing even the smallest patch of vegetation. I missed the beautiful tonic of trees and flowers and I began dreaming of Cairo where, two springs earlier, I had by chance walked into a residential suburb whose houses and gardens were weighed down beneath a luxurious growth of magnificent red hibiscuses. It was the first time I ever saw them and they amazed me.
The prince saw that we were served breakfast every morning with blinis and Iranian caviar (which was barely salted), with its large, clear-gray eggs. This was the first time my mother and I had eaten it, and we returned to Paris with a large number of tins certain each was worth a fortune. I did not keep a caviar diet for very long because I had a raging upset stomach that put me off sturgeon eggs once and for all, especially as the high-quality caviar from the Tehran palace was and remains unobtainable. In any case, I had eaten so much in two weeks that it more than equaled my lifetime allotment! Before I returned to France, Patrick offered to give me a camel, a harebrained idea that I categorically refused. In its place he gave me a Persian carpet that my mother kept at her house the entire time I owned cats. It ended up being stolen by the merchant I had hired to refurbish it as his shop on the Boulevard Malesherbes vanished between one day and the next before I could recover my property.
A dozen years after this Iranian escapade, I saw Patrick Pahlavi again in a group meeting organized by the psychotherapist Arthur Janov, whose revolutionary book The Primal Scream had opened unsuspected vistas to me. He came toward me with his hand held out, but he was unrecognizable—affable, thin, and his face miraculously rid of the unsightly blemishes that had afflicted him earlier. After he identified himself, I asked him the secret of his transformation and he joyfully answered: “It’s the therapy!” Primal therapy consists of isolating the patient for several weeks in an empty room of a clinic, with only a telephone at hand to call the therapist if necessary. The removal of all imaginable releases—of which writing and speaking are not the least—allows the repressed pain to rise back up until the patient feels it in every fiber of her being, the condition sine qua non for beginning to find freedom. You really need to be in bad place, and have equal amounts of faith and courage to undertake this shock therapy, but its effectiveness can’t be denied. I’ve since lost all trace of Patrick Pahlavi. It seems he started a family and found his path in writing. Therapy, no doubt.
I am a born homebody. It is lucky that circumstances forced me to travel, because my natural tendencies would prompt me to never leave Paris, despite my keen awareness that doing nothing causes ossification. However, it is also true that a person can live a full life even if they never step outside their home. Constant traveling can just be another means of running away from life. Too much verticality dries a person out; too much horizontality scatters or dilutes them. As for the rest, it is a question of the happy medium.
I prefer the less restrictive, more magical journeys to inner space made possible by books, movies, and television to voyages in the outside world. Having to pack your bags without knowing if you will need this or that, without being able to bring your library … having to carve your way through the middle of a packed, uninviting crowd in a train station or airport … arriving worn out and lost in an unknown land … all situations that I dread so much as, despite my increased vigilance, they never fail to cause misfortunes that are always more upsetting and comical than the last. Recently, in order to avoid the indigestible food of the French train system, I brought little jars of baby food, which I was unable to open, to the great amusement of my neighbors in the compartment. Because the cars of the TGV3 and other trains follow each other on the same track after several minutes, I am prone to boarding the wrong train and talking at cross-purposes with the passenger I think is sitting in my reserved seat, until I realize to my consternation that every turn of the wheels is taking me farther from my destination. I have missed flights because I went to the wrong airport, or I arrived too early for fear of missing it then lost track of the time. I can’t even begin to keep track of the times when, against all expectations, I have gotten to where I intended to go, then was forced to wander distraught and infuriated looking for the person who was supposed to meet me and who was nowhere to be found.
My airplane phobia, intensified by a forecast of bad weather, is not the least of my worries. On the days before a flight, I stop listening to the weather for fear of learning that violent storms will burst out the day of my departure or that the wind will be blowing more than one hundred miles an hour. There are also all the little problems inherent to physical fragility that time makes worse and which makes train travel more and more problematic. Whatever happened to the happy days of porters? When we were not desperately obliged to start looking, as soon as the train enters the station, for a traveler that was a priori strong enough, as well as receptive and sympathetic, to take our baggage down from the luggage rack first, and then down from the train car? The mishaps of several friends, who are as helpless as I am in certain circumstances, make me laugh until I cry because they are only equaled by my own fiascos. I don’t know who is more clumsy or absent-minded, Étienne Daho4 or me—we are most likely equal—but I can still see him at Orly, anxiously scrutinizing the conveyor belt. He eventually turned to me, in the grip of a confusion I know only too well. “My suitcase has been lost,” he stammered in a panic, before seeing it had already gone around several times right under his nose. The flip side of introversion is often a pronounced inability to adapt to the outside world. I proclaim it as much as I regret it.
My sedentary lifestyle goes hand in hand with a taste for solitude, without which there is no freedom. I need a refuge where I can unreservedly abandon myself to my solitary occupations—reading, writing, surfing on the Net, and watching the films or shows that interest me (and help me forget the ones that don’t). This has always been my number one priority. Even if I did not have the financial means, I would have managed to work out a way to find some peaceful haven. Real estate pages of magazines always call out to me and if I am not worried about attracting attention, I will park myself for long minutes in front of realtors’ offices for the pleasure of studying the properties and examining the photos. My luck in this area, incidentally, has been incredible. The construction of my house in Corsica, for example, was completed almost without any efforts by me, and without any major problem. When I saw it almost finished in 1967, it was already more beautiful than in my wildest dreams and I felt infinite gratitude toward those who built it, but also to the invisible protective forces that had put them on my path.
The two Jacques came to Corsica in the summer of 1967, on the symbolic pretext of throwing a housewarming party. They arrived at the end of August. Jacques the producer came by himself, as was his custom. Jacques the singer came with several of his buddies who I liked a lot: Hadi Kalafate, his endearing and amusing bass player with the Pinocchio profile, and Claude Puterflam,5 who sang with a castrato’s voice and had a devastating sense of humor that I adored. There were several others who I have forgotten …. To my chagrin, I saw that the Jacques I was most interested in also had by his side the so-so wife of another singer, who had been chasing him for some time and who I was positive had gotten what she was after. Despite all lack of clues, I had instinctively known for months that my attraction was shared. Yet we kept stupidly bypassing each other because of our mutual paralysis, and now he showed up with this bleached blonde!
To my relief, she left as quickly as she got there. Perhaps she was just curious to see the house and meet me. Perhaps he had been unable to tell her no? Or maybe, mischievous as I would gradually discover he was, he was trying to test me, to make me hit the roof? I was so embroiled in my own complexes and frustrations that I could not imagine for a second that the woman I looked on as an intruder might also be feeling deeply distressed. And yet, Jacques Dutronc seemed to me—and was objectively—so irresistible that in all logic she had to be in love with him and feeling horribly cast aside. I had everything she didn’t have, but I did not realize it as I was obsessed by the thought that she and those like her had everything I did not have: the qualities he liked. When I think about it again, I almost want to ask forgiveness of this woman for giving her the cold shoulder.
The party animals took over the place and I took on the duty of feeding them while they sat on the terrace sunbathing, talking in slang, and exchanging jokes whose meaning escaped me. Mentioning these moments of grace makes me suddenly realize that I was the sole feminine element, and that an enormous gulf separated me from all these boys who were as cynical as I was naïve—a gap made deeper by a recent celebrity that was still so foreign to me. Perhaps their antics gave them a means to mask a discomfort that I, in my own self-consciousness, never realized they felt.
Except for the thrilling confections I baked around the time I was twelve—chocolate marble cake, clafoutis with cherries, pure-butter shortbread cookies—I had never cooked in my life, so I threw myself confidently into this diverting activity. I made whatever came into my head: crepes, omelets, spaghetti carbonara, soufflés, cakes…. Everything succeeded magically, a little like those people who go to the casino the first time and hit the jackpot. The milkshakes made from peaches and bananas were a huge success. Because of a faulty connection, the blender exploded one morning in the hands of Jacques Wolfsohn, who remained petrified for several minutes with such a dazed expression that instead of coming to his aid, I began laughing helplessly. But it was my alcohol blends that left the most indelible memory. I poured a little of whatever bottle came to hand at random into a cocktail shaker. The results seemed to please everyone, as I was unanimously crowned “queen of the cocktail.” It is true that we were in a weird state, one that was incompatible with even the minimum amount of discernment necessary to keep one’s sense of proportion.
While the days were hardly sorrowful and went by like lightning, it was a different story when I was alone in my room despairing a little more each evening over the prospect that something would finally happen between Jacques and me. As paralyzed as Buridan’s ass, I remained torn between the violent desire to go to the other end of the house and knock at the door of his room and the insurmountable fear of making things worse than they already were. Jacques the producer had the feeling that something was going on between his two protegés and immediately warned me with his succinct catchphrase: “If you talk about horrible things, horrible things will end up happening.” According to him, a boy who had multiple love affairs, like Dutronc, could only make me unhappy, but I paid no attention to his warnings.
One night after dinner, as if by magic and never imagining he was in league with them, his buddies disappeared, and I found myself alone with my heart’s desire. We were so scared of each other that I got drunk for the first time in my life. He did, too, except he was much more accustomed to overindulging in hard liquor. The man who hardly ever spoke talked to me for hours and we ended up in bed, but I was so drunk that to my great regret I cannot remember a thing. A story has made the rounds that the next day he wore a red shirt to signal to his accomplices that the operation was a success. At first I was shocked when, years later, someone put me wise to this little conspiracy, but then I realized that without it he would never have summoned up the nerve to lay siege to the person he likely viewed as an impregnable castle.
1 Gérard Lebovici also created the subversive Éditions Champ Libre. He had many disreputable friendships and was killed in 1984 by four bullets in the back of the neck at point blank range while in his car, which was parked in the lot on Avenue Foch. The reasons for his murder remain a mystery to this day, although it seems obvious that it was a paid hit.
2 The author often referred to Jacques Dutronc as “Jacques the singer” and Jacques Wolfsohn as “Jacques the producer” at this time.—Trans.
3 France’s intercity high-speed rail service.—Trans
4 Étienne Daho is a French singer, songwriter, and producer born in 1956 (Oran, Algeria)—Trans.
5 After recording several records, Claude Puterflam, whom we nicknamed “Balaflum,” acquired the Gang Studio, which he has occupied for decades.