Despite the reassuring results of the fibroadenoma exam, I was in no position to keep the promises I had made myself. I had to oversee the RMC broadcasts and finish my new album. Gabriel, whom I suspected wanted to keep me under his thumb, made me sign with Flarenasch, an independent label, whose CEO, Alain Puglia, held him in awe. I had already asked to record “Tamalou” on my previous album, which included a number of songs that did not suit me at all. This was a fairly pleasant and effective melody by Pierre Groscolas,1 for which I had written some lyrics. Michel Jonasz and Alain Goldstein told me apples could not be mixed with oranges and I was forced to cede to their reasoning. At Flarenasch, I had the benefit of Alain Puglia’s unexpected support. Like me, he was receptive to the melody by Groscolas, and Gabriel grudgingly conceded. I asked Pierre to come to the session to help me get it right. The English style treatment of his demo made the piece absolutely magical, and I was betting on the song as much as its performance. Pierre arrived from the country with his mattress in his car. He was penniless and had just been evicted and his only recourse was to leave his son with his teacher. He stood next to me and we anxiously listened to what the musicians were doing. The more it took shape, the more alarmed I became. What we were hearing was dry, stiff, and mechanical, without an ounce of magic. In a whisper, I begged Pierre to step in, but Gabriel daunted him—so much so that things went from bad to worse. I had to personally tell him that we were straying quite far from the original spirit of the song. Cut to the quick, Gabriel pointed at poor Pierre, who was definitely having a day, and blurted out: “If it’s a demo you want, why don’t you make it with him?”
After an outburst like this, we could only miserably hold our tongues and, as has happened far too often in recording sessions, I despaired about the inadequacy of the performance. Likewise, just as I generally know when a song stands out from the pack, I also have a developed sense of what works musically and what doesn’t, although I am unable to explain it in words. And when I know that the performance of a song is wide of the mark, it genuinely hurts every time I hear the recording, even decades later. In this instance, it could almost be said that the great musician Gabriel had unconsciously sabotaged a song he did not like, even though no one was forcing him to produce it. Despite all, this was the first time since we began recording together that a song was a commercial hit, but this did nothing to soothe my frustration.
Overall, this is one of my least interesting and most hybrid albums, with bad songs or spoiled songs that I sang as poorly as possible. The few pearls—“Voyou, voyou,” “Rêve de starlette” [Starlet’s Dream], “À suivre …” [To Be Continued …]—that appear do not make up for the album as a whole. I do not know if it sold or not because, caring little for numbers, I was never aware of the fate of a record unless it was a hit or a bomb.
When François Mitterrand was elected in 1981, I saw no cause to rejoice as I belong to a generation whose parents and grandparents thought the worst of this man, and I was allergic to communism. To Jacques’ and my surprise, Thomas showed up one day around this time with a bindle. He wanted to leave because he had heard that this election posed a direct threat to private schools. He had become greatly attached to his school in the two years he had been there. In his defense, he was only eight! As happens systematically when power changes hands, the management of the RMC also changed. Pierre Lescure was replaced by Claude Villers, who had no interest whatsoever in astrology, but did not dare fire me. He offered me an awful project that I was in no position to turn down and which generally ruined my life, forcing me to work non-stop even on Sundays. It involved airing three short recorded snippets, of varying duration, every afternoon, taken from six guests I’d interviewed successively on the same day about their books. Because these guests came from the world of the sciences or the parasciences, you can imagine the monumental labor this required. It meant reading six books a week on subjects that were outside my expertise and then asking pointed questions of their authors. Despite the help of Jean-Pierre Nicola, this put me even more on edge than usual.
Luckily, Simon Monceau replaced Claude Villers the following year and he was wise enough to know not to ask chickens to give milk or cows to lay eggs. He asked me what I would like to do. I had been dreaming of doing a show in which I interviewed a figure from the world of song or film using their birth chart, while a graphologist drew up their psychological portrait using their handwriting. For some time, I had been taking graphology courses, thanks to Christian Dulcy—who was then the general secretary of the French Society of Graphology—who I had met in Corsica thanks to our mutual friend Bertrand de Labbey, the new head of Artmedia. Our paths crossed just at the moment when I was contemplating how to supplement my astrological knowledge, whose limitations I was continuously stumbling into, with that of another human science. I had first thought to pursue morpho-psychology, which makes it possible to deduce certain basic character traits through facial observation—its overall shape, profile, proportions, planes, and so forth. Christian convinced me to choose graphology instead and directed me to the dean of graphologists, Germaine Tripier. I would listen to her religiously with a study group consisting of women between the ages of thirty and fifty at her home on Rue Molitor. Thanks to Christian, I later found other teachers who were among the most brilliant of the Graphology Society, and it was absolutely thrilling to hear such eminent authorities as Jacqueline Berthelet, Jacqueline Pinon, or Catherine Colo analyze a piece of handwriting.
Simon Monceau gave me the green light and Anne-Marie Simmond, whose courses I had taken as well, accepted responsibility for the graphology part. She would be given a handwritten document and only told the sex and age of the guest, whose identity she would learn only when she arrived at the broadcast. Her lack of any connection to the world of show business was so profound that she had never even heard of most of the artists. Jean-Pierre Nicola and I would each prepare questions suggested by the guest’s birth chart,2 then I would weave everything together. We would only know of Anne-Marie’s work afterward and all of us were intrigued to find that our approaches, a though completely different, led us onto the same terrain. The broadcast was weekly and called Entre les lignes, entre les signes. The first two shows were made with Lio3 as the debut guest and Daniel Balovine, whose song “La vie ne m’apprend rien” [Life Teaches Me Nothing] bowled me over.
Since his break-up with Jane Birkin at the end of 1980, we had been seeing a lot more of Serge Gainsbourg. He was smitten with Thomas and telephoned me regularly as a distraction from his gloominess. I always more or less managed to lift his spirits although I don’t know how. After a bit of random chatting on one thing and another, I would hear his little short laugh, and the battle was won. Temporarily. His existential angst was an innate part of him and Jane’s departure had multiplied it tenfold.
My small crew was completely flustered and our graphologist over-whelmed the day he stepped into the RMC studio to take part in our show. He had gotten out on the wrong side of the bed that day, but our assistant Nelly, in awe at seeing him in the flesh, recklessly asked him how he was doing. He gave her a long dirty look and then mumbled “terrible.” The tone was set. His ostensible efforts to restrain an underlying aggressiveness throughout the interview made me ill at ease. He expressed himself so curtly and with so much dead air between words that the producer spent hours editing his remarks, bringing each word and phrase closer together to make them capable of being understood. When it came time for Anne-Marie Simond to read his remarkable graphological portrait, Serge vented at her. It was complete carnage. He refuted her statements one by one with his customary bad faith, and in his gem-like, reductive, and destabilizing way. Anne-Marie’s intellectual confidence was temporarily annihilated by the stress this caused and she did not sleep a wink that night.
Pleading exhaustion, Jacques had begged me not to bring Serge to the house. Despite my intention to return right after the broadcast, I felt obliged to accept his pressing invitation to get a drink at the bar of the Plaza, which was right in the neighborhood. His doctor, whose prescriptions he totally ignored, had forbidden him to drink and smoke, but he ordered two Singapore Slings right away. We had hardly settled in when he gazed at me in a most unfriendly way and blurted out: “Jane left me because of my polygamy, how do you deal with it?”
The sky came crashing down on my head again, even though I was clinging to an interview in which several years earlier Serge had said that it was the monogamy they had in common that brought Jacques and he together. I reminded him of it and acted as if I took his insinuation lightly. However, I felt devastated and he did not refrain from driving his point home: what was my secret? How did I manage to tolerate what Jane had never accepted? I only remember drowning in my emotions and not how I defended myself in order to save face. When the time came to bring him back to the Rue de Verneuil, Serge, apparently unaware of the havoc he had just wrought, began talking to me about a recently acquired firearm that Bambou,4 his new companion, had made him get rid of. She had saved his life, he swore, and his mood suddenly softened by this recollection because the temptation to use it was recurring and he would have succumbed to it sooner or later. Obviously, he felt he was in that kind of mood that evening. After mentioning his loneliness and his inability to stand it, he insisted that I stay with him. Moved by his distress, I brought him to Rue Hallé, where, on seeing us, Jacques muttered, “I knew it!” We chose to go out to the restaurant of the Hotel P.L.M. Saint Jacques, where we often went and which has since changed its name.
Once we were there, Serge got it into his head to create a cocktail requiring hard-to-find ingredients that took the sommelier a long time to bring him. When he finally had everything he wanted in the shaker and began shaking it, he dropped it, spilling its contents on the carpet. Thomas had to go to school the next day, and I was already renewing my attempts to speed things along when Serge finally deigned to cast an eye at the menu. But it was only to study the wine list, none of which, of course, he found suitable. After the unfortunate sommelier had managed to get permission to open the cellar, Serge headed there with a delighted Thomas while I was distressed at seeing the time we would actually dine receding further and further away. We left the P.L.M. around eleven o’clock and were packed in the car like sardines, when Serge, whose mood had visibly dropped, asked all at once if he could sleep at the house. Jacques dropped me off with Thomas before going to park the car, and I rushed to prepare a room. While I was moving into action, Jean Luisi, a family friend who had spent the evening with us, told me on the ground floor that Serge could not sleep without sleeping pills and they left to buy some at the drugstore.
During this period, it was impossible for me to go to sleep if Jacques was still out. He came home around five in the morning! This had given me time to ruminate over the revelations on his alleged polygamy and to get angry that he had not bothered to warn me not to wait up for him and Serge, even if it meant inventing some sort of pretext. His customary silence to my criticism exasperated me so much that I ripped the glasses from his face and threw them out the window. Incensed in turn, he swore that he would not be caught doing that again and he would stop seeing Serge. In fact, Serge had managed to drag Jean and Jacques all over the city, including a Corsican restaurant where his thoughtless provocations had aroused the murderous impulses of a customer who was a native of the Isle of Beauty. At their next stop, Castel’s, Serge threw an ashtray at someone’s head and almost started a brawl. We would later learn that he never slept that night and showed up at the scheduled time—nine o’clock in the morning—to film an advertisement. Like Jacques and Johnny, he was a real force of nature, and the saying that “a strong body is a calamity when it has the upper hand” applied to him as well—at least partially.
During the following week, Serge sheepishly invited us to dinner at Vivario, the Corsican restaurant where his lack of tact could have proven costly. His daughter Charlotte’s presence would oblige him to act reasonably, he assured me. Jacques stubbornly wanted no part of it and I don’t remember the miracle that allowed me to change his mind. When Serge showed up at the house, Jacques quickly told him that it was because of their nocturnal excursion that I had thrown his expensive glasses—worth five thousand francs—out the first floor window, which he had not been able to find. Like a true gentleman, Serge immediately wrote a check for this amount, which later became an exasperating subject of dispute. Jacques obstinately maintains that the check was written out to me—which was illogical in its own right—and that I cashed it, even though he knows full well that I am incapable of this kind of dishonesty or carelessness!
The dinner at Vivario ended as poorly as it started off well. Dead drunk, Serge and Jean climbed up on a chair and without caring in the least about the presence of the children, Thomas and Charlotte, performed a perfectly scandalous, obscene pantomime for us. But all of us—me heading the line—admired Serge’s artistic genius so much that we forgave him everything when he was sober again and had once again become a disarmingly courteous little boy.
Among the noteworthy memories left behind by this enfant terrible were his dinner at Rue de Verneuil, to which the two Jacques, Coluche, and I were invited. While Serge was busy in the kitchen, we realized that he fully intended to serve us dinner on the low table around which we were sitting uncomfortably. This was hardly to the taste of my companions, all bon vivants for whom pleasure could not coexist with discomfort. In a matter of seconds they stripped a more suitable table of the art objects cluttered on top of it, knowing full well the sacrilege they were committing: the place of each object had been meticulously thought out by Serge, whose aesthetic sense was stamped by his absolute intransigence. When he came out of the kitchen and saw how greatly we had disturbed his order—in his eyes this amounted to finger painting over the canvas of a master or breaking a precious vase—he turned pale and had to make a visibly superhuman effort to not toss us out into the street. This was fortunate, by the way, as the evening turned out to be a great success.
Was it before or after this dinner that Serge spoke at length and in great detail about his amazing film project, Blackout, for which he had first contacted Robert Mitchum, Alain Delon, Dirk Bogarde, and other prestigious actors? All of them politely turned down his invitation. Out of desperation, he fell back on Jacques, who was then very much in demand. This was a bit thoughtless of him, but Jacques did not take umbrage and was the only one—out of friendship, I suppose—who accepted the role without discussion, simply marking off the time planned for the shoot on his calendar. We learned through the press a short time later that the film was being made with someone else. Jacques the producer, who never joked when it came to friendship, took it worse than Jacques the actor, who was more fatalistic. Soon after Serge called me to sheepishly ask: “Fine, as for Wolfsohn, it’s fucked, I know he’ll never forgive me, but do you think I might still have a little chance with Jacques?” Just to wrap up the story, Blackout was never made.
He telephoned me in Corsica one summer, and spoke excitedly about his brilliant idea of giving Jacques and Charlotte Rampling the lead roles in a new film he was preparing as director. This prospect ruined my vacation. I thought Charlotte Rampling was the most attractive woman in the world, and I could not get rid of the horrible premonition that our relationship would be over and done if she shot a film with Jacques. I did not yet know that attraction was a bit more complicated than simple physical appeal, and that when one woman views another as attractive, the male sex in general, and her partner in particular, do not necessarily share her infatuation. Once again, I had cried before feeling any pain: the film Equateur ended up being made with Francis Huston and Barbara Sukowa.
Jacques received an average share of film offers that never amounted to anything. At the beginning of the 1980s, he got wind that Steven Spielberg was in Paris and that Artmedia was sending him all their actors, from the most minor to the greatest, with an eye to landing the lead role for his next film, The Raiders of the Lost Ark. Jacques was also part of Artmedia, where the likeable Yvette Étiévant, an actress who had reinvented herself as an agent, took care of him. Fairly poorly, actually; being a better artist than a businesswoman, the fees she obtained for his work were often ridiculous and he only dared complain about them in private. During a party where I was present, Yvette mentioned this unusual casting with a hint of irony. She obviously had never remotely considered sending her protégé to this audition. In any case, running after a role by standing around with dozens of other actors was a radically foreign approach to Jacques. One afternoon, Josée Bénabent, Spielberg’s contact in France, telephoned the house. We only had one line and as Jacques never answered the phone, I was the switchboard operator, a task I could have done without, because it usually involved telling someone that I could not find him. They inevitably interpreted it as his refusal to speak to them, which was torture for me.
Josée explained that Steven Spielberg had come to Paris to meet Jacques and nobody else. She had worked with him on Antoine et Sebastién and therefore knew about his distrust of press agents, for whom lies and manipulation were the basic tools of the trade. She knew his indifference to celebrity. Other than being a fervent fan of his films, the prospect of meeting Spielberg left him neither hot nor cold. Despite everything he agreed to speak with Josée. A meeting took place and he was immediately seduced by Spielberg’s courtesy and revisited him a short time later in London, after having learned a few pages of the English dialogue with the help of a coach. But language formed a major barrier and, to complicate matters, the English subsidiary of Artmedia told Spielberg that Jacques was not available on the days scheduled for the shooting. This pure and simple disinformation eventually found its way to the ears of the concerned party. Fortunately, Jacques is not the type of person to vainly regret things that did not work out, and I imagine he happily remembers the privileged moments he spent with the famous American director.
Claude Sahakian was an exceptional sound engineer and Gabriel had made sure to work with him on the first three albums we made together. Because of some quarrel unknown to me, the album À suivre… had to be made without him. As should be expected, its sound quality was quite inferior to what I had experienced with Claude. In the meantime, he was having ear problems that led him to consult two ear, nose, and throat specialists who advised him to change professions. He then bought an old building in the Nineteenth Arrondissement, where he set up one of the best studios in Paris, Studio +XXX, where Gabriel and I endured its birthing pains at the beginning of the 1980s. We recorded the album Quelqu’un qui s’en va there before the renovation work had been completed. Gabriel did compose some sublime melodies for this album.
But nothing is ever perfect. Gabriel fell in love with a young journalist who had her heart set on writing his lyrics. This led him to thoughtlessly give her his melodies. After she had put words to the first one, he forewarned me she was planning to call me and begged me not to discourage her if her lyrics were not suitable. He spoke as someone who had often suffered from my sweeping judgments. Because my sole focus was the song, I gave no thought to sparing his feelings. I also lacked the most elementary tact; he obviously feared that I would wound his new girlfriend and alluded to her delicate nature (just like I unintentionally hurt his feelings) so that I would spare her as much as possible. I reassured him as best I could.
I have forgotten the various ups and downs of this collaboration, but not its culminating point. The young lady’s lyrics were not that bad, but there were simply some passages that did not fit the melody properly. Alas, it seems love is deaf as well as blind, because Gabriel refused to recognize this. So much so that from the first day in the studio I had to put him in the absurd position of going in front of my mike to sing the contentious passages. I later learned that he literally fell to pieces after I left the studio. Thanks to my patchwork, everything turned out amicably. My two favorite songs were “Quelqu’un qui s’en va” [Someone Who Is Going Away] and “Mazurka,” despite the schmaltzy lyrics, which Michel Jonasz criticized to Gabriel while assuring him that he would have loved to write lyrics for such inspired melodies. But it was “Tirez pas sur l’ambulance” [Don’t Shoot at the Ambulance/Don’t Kick Someone When They’re Down] that benefited from the best radio programming. Gabriel was not fond of the fact that Michel Berger remained my major model when it came to both composition and production, and when he gave me this song, he blurted out: “You want Berger, here you go then …” This very successful pastiche also benefited from formidable production values that were full of energy, which contributed to its relative success.
Gabriel asked Alain Souchon5 to write me a song. I knew Alain a little, and his personality was as endearing as you might imagine. I adored and will always adore his songs, but I would never have dared to ask him for something like this.
Like many children, Thomas, while still little, had fallen in love with “Jamais content” [Never Satisfied] and we went to the Olympia together to cheer its author. When we got back home, we had talked of his concert with such overflowing enthusiasm that Jacques started to get annoyed—it is true that whatever its object, excessive enthusiasm has a chilling effect on reserved temperaments.
Alain promised Gabriel he would try something. He telephoned me one day telling me that he was going to hum what he had come up with, while warning me that it was very, very bad. This proved to be “C’est bien moi.” It was so very me, in fact, that despite the insistence of the record company that wanted to make it into a single, singing this song on television was completely impossible for me.6
Around this same time, I fell in love with “Ces petits riens” [Those Little Nothings], a marvelous song of great subtlety that Serge had written and composed in 1964. I wanted to cover it and Gabriel had the audacity to suggest another musical bridge of his own, with different harmonies. Serge balked at this but showed proof of a moving humility by accepting Gabriel’s changes—which truthfully, were welcome ones—when he heard them.
Serge’s superb book of photos of Bambou, which had recently been published, gave me the idea of asking him to take a photo of me for my record jacket. The session took place at Mac Mahon Studio on the Rue des Acacias, where Jean-Marie had toiled for the magazines Salut les copains and Mademoiselle Âge tendre, so I felt right at home. However, the impression that Serge’s assistant was doing nearly everything in his place worried me. My worries were justified, as the slides from this session were distressing. It is not easy for an amateur to master the finer aspects of flash photography. The lighting was poor, as were the photos. Luckily, after examining them carefully, I saw that there was one—only one—that would make a superb record jacket, and I felt an intense relief. How would I have ever told Serge, who was so sensitive to compliments, that nothing of what he and his assistant had done found favor in my eyes. His honor was safe, as was our relationship. No one who sees the elegant front cover of the album Quelqu’un qui s’en va would ever imagine that it was a miraculous accident!
From 1980 to 1984, Jacques made nine films in quick succession. Some of them were shot in Paris or the outlying regions, others in the provinces or abroad. At home, the drudgery of daily life nipped my desires for greater intimacy in the bud. In the evening, Thomas would join Jacques in his room, where they watched the films of Louis de Funès or the broadcasts of Jean-Michel Ribes while I made dinner, which I would then bring up to them on a tray. My first reflex was to rejoice whenever the opportunity came to join Jacques outside the house, although it was quite predictable that I would be disillusioned. A film crew is an almost family-like microcosm in which strangers have no place, and a shoot keeps everyone involved too busy to have time for a visitor, dear as that visitor might be. Furthermore, Jacques always stayed somewhere far from the rest of the crew, so I never saw a lot of people during my rare visits. Except once.
I was feeling very much the third wheel the day of my arrival on the set of Maurice Dugowson’s Sarah. We were in a small village in southern Spain, and I had just sat down with Jacques in an open-air café when out of nowhere, his female co-star—who I had never met before—appeared with a stool that she set down in front of me. She sat down on it, placed her hands on her hips and stared at me provocatively as if to taunt me, then left again before anyone had time to react. You can imagine my surprise and my discomfort—and likely that of Jacques too—as well as the suspicions that leapt to my mind, and which the events that followed did nothing to mitigate, although there were clumsy attempts to convince me that this beautiful young woman sometimes behaved strangely and that I should pay no attention to her.
When filming at outside locations coincided with school vacations, I would bring Thomas. This was how we went to Lodève together, where his father had rented a house in the country during the shooting of Christian de Chalonge’s Malevil. I tried to interest Thomas in Carlos Castaneda, who I had become a diligent reader of thanks to Gabriel, who had urged me to get a copy of Journey to Ixtlan. But he was still young, and the only thing that caught his attention was the section about the farts that were more powerful than thunder. These were the work of the mischievous sorcerers who were trying to drive the author mad in order to deprogram the way he looked at things. This did not prevent a seed from being sown, as he became an enthusiastic reader of this phenomenal author several years later.
Prior to filming, Jacques had begun recording his album Guerre et pets, for which Jacques the producer had thoughtlessly given the same music to Serge and to Jacques Lanzmann, asking both to write the lyrics. I can remember a session in which an unimaginable misunderstanding concerning I don’t remember which song allowed both of them to angrily realize, slowly but surely, Wolfsohn’s tactlessness. Lanzmann wore horrible phosphorescent purple sneakers with yellow laces, and I can see him pressed against the wall in a yoga posture repeating ad libitum between his teeth that he would not lose his cool. In Wolfsohn’s defense, getting either one of them to work was an impossible mission, and he had to shut Lanzmann away in a room many times in the hope of extracting a few words out of him. Serge needed—and this was the least of his requirements—to be strongly motivated to write, and although he had already created some impressive lyrics for Jacques—“La roses fanées” [Faded Roses], “L’amour prison” [The Love Prison], “L’Hymne à l’amour” [Hymn to Love], and so on—he had run out of gas for one of the melodies, probably because of a lack of interest. Wolfsohn wrung the promise from him to turn over the lyrics on the following Saturday, but when Jacques returned from Montpellier where Malevil was shooting solely to record the song in question, Serge had done nothing and was shut away in turn. The lyrics turned out insipid, as shown by the opening phrase: “J’ai pas d’paroles, Gainsbourg s’est “fait la paire…”.7 Because there was a cut-off date looming, Jacques recorded it despite all this.
Barbet Schroeder’s film, Tricheurs [Cheaters], with Bulle Ogier and Jacques, was shot in Madeira, and Thomas and I went to visit. The airport runways in Madeira are the shortest ones in the world and my loving husband was sensitive enough to inform us on the eve of our departure that there had been a crash there with no survivors a few years earlier. We did not like Madeira at all and the day we left, Daniel (a family friend, professional plumber, and recent makeshift secretary), Jacques, Thomas, and I waited until the airplane had taken off in the direction of Lisbon to fully express our joy. Never again would we set foot in this wearisome place—especially when it came to getting there! We stayed for a few days near Sintra in one of the luxurious villas that had been confiscated from their owners by some radical government and transformed into hotels. During the day, I brought Thomas on walks in the enchanted forest that surrounded us and never saw another person. It is one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve seen in my life, a fairytale setting with hundred-year old trees, lush vegetation, luxurious parks, castles perched on high, and ponds swarming with frogs and toads that one almost expects to see transform into Prince Charmings.
We spent one last night in Lisbon with Jacques before returning to Paris without him, and as I know only too well his apparent indifference to whether or not we share the same room or bed, I badgered him regularly to ensure he made the necessary hotel arrangements. When, ceding to my umpteenth prayer, he asked Daniel if the reservations had been made, this lad who was so obliging he had been nicknamed “the Saint Bernard,” came back with this edifying response: “Certainly, but it is not certain…”
Tricheurs came out in 1984. This was an interesting film but it lacked the dimension of L’Important c’est d’aimer [That Most Important Thing: Love], or even that of Malevil. After that, Jacques had made some minor films. This is probably why he got no offers for four long years. Several people who had confidence in his creativity, such as Francis Huster, who had discussed this with me after the RMC broadcast we made together, recommended he write his own script and produce it. Jacques wrote a burlesque script, titled Les Pointus [The Specialists], whose plot took place in Corsica. He asked me to type it for him, which allowed me to appreciate its originality and humor. But his efforts to bring this project to life would become a battle that was all the more difficult and meritorious as it was not in his temperament to be a salesman. Up until this moment, he was always the person in demand and now the position was reversed as he sought support for the project. The various producers he met made him promises they would not keep. One of them told him that because of an expensive film he was still producing, he would not be able to finance the film for two or three years, but he did commit to it. The project was also proposed to the advance on receipts committee of the Centre National du Cinema (CNC), who rejected it twice. One of our connections broke the rules and sent us a list of the lucky chosen ones. Not a single name on it was French and Jacques cheerily concluded that his own name had betrayed him and contemplated changing it.
During these four years, he was most often idle, spending his days and nights stretched out on his bed smoking his expensive cigars while watching television. For me, who always had a thousand things to do at a time and whose returns were as unpredictable and less substantial than his, this was both nerve-racking and irritating. His sixth sense had allowed him, long before they happened, to “see” himself as a musician, a singer, then an actor, but the fact he “saw” nothing after that fed his fear of dying young. This got such a grip on him that he requested I consult a neighborhood psychic. She told me he did not have much time left, two or three years at the most. No matter how wary I am of this kind of person and how much I refuse to take their predictions at face value, I returned home quite shaken. However, I refrained from sharing this dire prediction with the person concerned. I must confess, it did help me show more patience toward the zombie he now seemed to be.
Oddly enough, both of us only recorded one single during these four years. One day when Jacques left for the studio, he told me he had nothing and came back at the end of the evening with “Merde in France,” a minor masterpiece that he sang on every television show imaginable. During his performance his dancers, armed with brooms, flanked him while singing “cacapoum” and waving their elegant props in a hysterical and efficient choreography. He had the hilarious Jean Luisi, an actor of Corsican origin whose ties with Jacques were established when he began his film career, but also Gabriel Freitas, the husband of our maid Elvira—both of them regularly invited us to eat cod in the concierge apartment they lived in facing us—their son Marco, and the mailman Marcel. The song was irresistible, the televised performances exhilarating, and “Merde in France” enjoyed a well-deserved success.
For my part, I had abandoned the idea of making an album on which, as originally agreed, Gabriel would have composed all the melodies and I would have written all the lyrics, for the simple reason that I cannot write if there is no music and Gabriel claimed he could only compose a tune if he had the lyrics. Louis Chedid was astonished by my recording inactivity and, after I told him the reasons why, brought me two excellent melodies. For one of them, I reused some lyrics for which I had given Gabriel the rough draft and adapted them to fit while greatly improving them. When I put the finishing touches on “Moi vouloir toi” [I Want You], I was so excited that it infected Thomas and he began sharing in my little discoveries.
Louis, Marianne, and their children, Matthieu and Émilie, now lived in a house on Rue de la Poterne-des-Peupliers whose cellar had been renovated into a studio. This was where I recorded “Moi vouloir toi” and “Casse pas toute ma maison” [Don’t Wreck My Whole House] under the direction of Louis, with his somewhat cursory arrangements. I had naively imagined that my vocal takes would go much more quickly than with Gabriel, but they needed twice as much time and I left the studio deeply ashamed that I had so much trouble getting my voice right. I had not realized just how much Louis’ snappy melodies were essentially rhythmic, and caused me the kind of problems I most often encounter when the execution has to be entirely spot-on. But Marianne was astonished for the opposite reason: “I know my Louis,” she said, “he’s a slowpoke!”
I believed so strongly in the potential of “Moi vouloir toi” that I managed to obtain the funds from Alain Puglia to expand on Louis’ production, which was too much like a demo. Seasoned musicians, like the super-talented drummer Manu Katché, brought to the song just what it was missing and it benefited from good radio programming.
Like Jacques, I did all the television shows that were offered to me. Whenever possible, I asked for my performance to be shot at one o’clock in the afternoon. First, because I got up quite early, I was at my best during this time of day, and next because I was sure I would not have to wait as long if I was booked for later in the afternoon, by which time the shooting would inevitably be running way behind schedule. Jacques never took something like this into consideration and when we both appeared in one of Michel Drucker’s shows, I witnessed an exasperating situation. The singer before him, Axel Bauer, was not satisfied with any of his takes, and because of his constant demands to start over, he went well over the time he had been allotted, so much so that when Jacques’ turn finally came, there were only twenty minutes left to give him. His song was therefore rushed and this is how the worst performance of “Merde in France” took place right in prime time, while he got better lighting and better shots in other less important and less watched broadcasts.
Over the course of the 1980s, I took some psychology courses in the hope of finding a solution for my angst and discontent. Only the course of initiation into the Tarot of Marseilles by the great master in this subject, Alejandro Jodorowsky, was worth the trouble. For the rest, having to talk to a pillow as if it were my mother or father to publicly express a resentment I did not feel, or to see a bunch of forty-year-olds who had been in analysis for years spontaneously abandoning themselves to this game until they burst out sobbing while shouting “mama” or “papa” disturbed me more than anything else. Also, public life weighs heavily on me. It is hard for me to share a room with other people and it is just as hard for me to eat like everyday folk. I remember an American shrink whose first words were on diet: “You are here for a variety of psychological problems, but if you start eating properly, you would already be doing much better.” He stressed this point because he was as irate as I was from seeing the indigestible meals we were being served, in which not a single green vegetable was to be found. I abandoned these workshops all the more quickly as they raised insoluble problems for me concerning household organization. I read Jean-Georges Lemaire’s Le Couple, sa vie, sa mort [Life and Death of the Couple], as if it were a detective novel. This book extensively analyzes the various ways the couple relationship functions and has helped me far more than any workshop to understand my conjugal problems.
In truth, the gap mentioned earlier between me, working too hard to make things work, and the other, who was not working hard enough—I was doing the work of two!—had caused me decades of suffering. With hindsight, I tell myself that I was much too demanding and not realistic enough to continuously aspire to share more highlights with the man of my life, as if we had only just met, while I made so few efforts to surprise him … Paradoxically, I expected him to love me as I was and feel the same desires, while having no confidence in my ability to seduce. I also acted as if only my way of loving was valid. I did not realize how my dispositions toward him never changed because of the apparent lack of reciprocity between us, and my fear of losing him. My whole approach was intended to reassure him—but it just put him to sleep. It seems that it was around the beginning of the 1980s that I cut my hair short, just to see if Jacques would notice. When Josette Clotis complained to André Malraux about how little time he devoted to her, he replied: “The important thing is who loves you not how you are loved.” Thinking on this helped me view my troubles with greater patience, but too much work, on the one hand, and disappointed hopes, on the other, dampened my mood, causing me to withdraw into myself.
Yet these were very special years! The feeling of love is an extraordinary motor, even if it is kept running by perpetual torment. Without it I would never have written a single song lyric. And there is nothing like watching your child grow up. Thomas was very affectionate, but also very strong-willed: no one could make him do anything he did not want to. But maybe I just did not have the knack of directing his attention toward what I thought was good for him. Despite my urgings, he refused to study music and practice martial arts—I had brought him to an akido class for children. When he was little, I read him a lot of comic books, P if and Mickey especially. After tirelessly reading him the same things, one fine day long before he started school, I saw that he knew how to read without being taught. He always wanted me to play in his games but I had no flair for them, and when I finally had enough time to listen to the rules for the game to which he wanted to introduce me, I was so exhausted that I nodded off after a couple of minutes to his great chagrin.
He worked hard at school and was crazy about his physical sciences teacher, who the children loved because he never hesitated to respond at length to their questions instead of following the lesson plan. I joined the line at a Collège Sévigné parent-student meeting to have my first conversation with this Didier Barbier who inspired so much enthusiasm. “I am Thomas Dutronc’s mother,” I said as I sat down in front of him. He sat up: “What an extraordinary child!” he exclaimed. He began praising all his many talents until a sudden thought crossed his mind: “Do you or your husband work with math?” He felt it was a shame that Thomas’ talents were fading and came to the house to give him private lessons in logic. I sometimes stood on the landing while pricking up my ears to catch a few fragments of Thomas and Didier’s discussion. The little I caught from their animated conversations was an incomprehensible jargon that deeply impressed me.
I brought Thomas to the movies from time to time. When he was ten, he became passionately fond of Hitchcock, and Jimmy Stewart was long his favorite actor. Wim Wenders, who had almost made a film with Jacques, sent him a calendar with photos of this wonderful actor from the United States. If I try to piece together my best memories of these years, oddly enough, the one that first comes to mind is a Sunday afternoon when Thomas and I had gone to see Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner at the Mac Mahon Cinema on the avenue of the same name. This was a delightful comedy full of humor and tenderness, which conjures up a vanished world—did it ever really exist? This was a world without cynicism and violence in which simple and sentimental folk are the heroes … But this time, when I went to the movies with my little boy who clutched my hand without letting go, and when my heart still beat wildly at the thought of seeing his papa when we returned home, is also now long past.
1 Pierre Groscolas (1946) is a French composer and musician who composed one of the first French rock operas (Hamlet by Johnny Hallyday)—Trans.
2 The sky at a person’s birth provides one kind of conditioning and the way the individual realizes it depends on other forms of conditioning, to which all human beings are subject, as well as how organized, intelligent, and moral the individual is.
3 Stage name of singer and actress Vanda Maria Ribeiro Furtado Tavares de Vasconcelos—Trans.
4 Bambou (stage name of Caroline Paulus, born 1959) is a French actress, singer, and fashion model who was married to Serge Gainsbourg from 1981 to 1991 (the year he died)—Trans.
5 Alain Souchon (born 1944) is a French composer, musician, performer, and actor who has sold more than five million albums worldwide—Trans.
6 The song began this way: “Je voudrais qu’il me caresse / Et il me caresse pas / Je veux qu’il me dise qu’il m’aime / Et il me le dit pas / Ça me rend malheureuse, ces différences-là / C’est bien moi d’aimer ce garçon qui m’aime pas” [I would like him to caress me / And he does not caress me / I want him to tell me he loves me / And he does not tell me / These differences make me so unhappy / It is so very me to love this boy who does not love me].
7 “I have no words / Gainsbourg has cleared out …”—Trans.