Baker, Ore.
This summer they’ll pour into Paris again, eager tourists and American college boys with slickum on their hair, and the first thing they’ll do is head straight for the Rue Scribe, hoping to see Jean Seberg selling the Herald Tribune in front of the American Express. But all they’ll see is Norwegian beatniks with dirty feet. The real Jean Seberg is alive and well and living with a handful of Chinese poker players, 300 extras, a full-blooded Sioux Indian, a 250-man crew, Alan Jay Lerner, Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, a man who bought Laguna Beach for $2.80 and is now being sued for $13 million by the state of California, 250 head of horses from Nevada, 30 water oxen from New England, a bear from Honolulu, an ex-member of the Green Berets, 150 hippies, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. “I’m back,” she smiles, “and I don’t find America very different. Only decadent. When you start bottling peanut butter and jelly in the same jar, that’s decadence.”
The golden sunflower girl from Marshalltown, Iowa, who was a star at 18 and an unemployable has-been at 20, is very much back indeed. She’s living in the wilderness of Oregon as the star (Winning out over 18,000 girls— how’s that for a has-been) of Paint Your Wagon, a Technicolor super-extravaganza $14-million musical directed by Joshua Logan. The location is unbelievable. A sleepy little town near the Powder River (population 9,986) was the stagecoach center during the Oregon early Gold Rush. It is surrounded by ghost towns and porcupines and in the morning hours on her way to the helicopter which flies her to work Jean sees real cowboys get thrown out of real saloons for drinking too much beer for breakfast. There are few diversions and no restaurants. “La Grenouille” the actors tell the Teamsters who drive their cars to dinner; then they all meet at the A & W Root Beer Stand. Roughing it is what it’s called. But somehow, they survive. Alan Jay Lerner jumps elegantly into a private Lear jet and heads down to Hollywood to score new songs for the film with Andre Previn and confer with Katharine Hepburn on Coco. Clint Eastwood rides over the hills on a motorcycle to a ranch where he rises each morning at six to slop the hogs. Joshua Logan takes off his mud boots at night and watches old movies flown in from Los Angeles. And Jean survives because . . . well, because she’s Jean Seberg, for whom the experience is just one more sugary question mark in a career full of unpunctuated sentences.
Elegant and golden as a buttery iceberg, she puts on a Ray Charles record and moves into the kitchen of her little rented green clapboard house to bake a pumpkin pie. “I tried to bake one in Paris once, but I couldn’t find any pumpkin.” She glides through the room like a swan, dressed in pink, munching corn chips, with skin white as winter and blue-gray eyes the color of Park Avenue at dawn. If you expect a jaded bonne vivante who leads philosophical discussions in the innovational film philosophies of Jean-Luc Godard, forget it. She gets handwritten letters from André Malraux, wears Yves St. Laurents to eat hamburgers, beats Francoise Sagan at poker and is married to Romain Gary, but the darling of Breathless is American as a boysenberry. “I’ve lived in France for ten years and I still can’t write a simple thank-you note in French. Life took me there and I just kind of stayed. But I don’t feel French. I still have my passport and I pay American taxes. And I’ve never really made many lasting friendships there. After St. Joan the New Wave boys defended me. They found out I needed money and work. I was their new Jerry Lewis, I suppose. The cahier people were kind to me, but I don’t know them. Truffaut and I have a bizarre relationship. We write to each other two times a year, but we’ve never even had a cup of coffee together. Godard is like a Paul Klee painting, always hiding behind those funny dark glasses. They all live very hermetic lives and none of them sees each other socially. I had fun making Breathless because Godard would arrive each day with the day’s scenes written on little pieces of yellow paper stuffed in his pocket. Belmondo insists he had a mad crush on me, but I was unaware of it at the time. I did another film with him in Marrakesh three years later, playing the same girl I played in Breathless. We shot it in three days and he never even cut it. I also did a film with Philippe De Broca and three for Chabrol. They are all very strange little men, but I don’t pretend to know them well. I like Paris, but I’m tiring of it now. I feel like an American again for the first time this summer, being here near the farm country. There’s a barn outside Baker as beautiful as any cathedral in Europe. It has spires where they store the grain and it changes colors with the sun. I rented a funny little house last winter in Normandy, at Honfleur near Deauville. It had cows and apple trees and farmhouses and it made me homesick for Iowa.
“The most sound advice Otto Preminger ever gave me was to never lose my roots. Josh Logan told me to find someone to model my character in Paint Your Wagon after, so I’m using my 80-year-old grandma. She was an orphan who scrubbed farm floors at 13, a Willa Cather character. She still lives in Marshalltown, an incredible lady. I took her to the Sunset Strip to see the hippies and she loved it. This house I’m living in is just like my parents’ house in Marshalltown. We have a little piano in this corner at home, and pictures on the walls, and the same kind of upholstered sofa. The Christmas tree always goes there. The thing I miss most living in Paris is Christmas. There’s never a Christmas I’m not dissolved in tears halfway through Christmas Eve. We always went ice-skating on the Iowa River and had Santa Claus and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the roof, and everyone sang carols and people asked us in for hot chocolate and then we’d end up at midnight church. My four-year-old son Diego loves it. He gets up three times a night and asks if Pere Noel is here yet. I never get used to these funny European children who speak three languages. Romain hates Christmas. He’s Scrooge. He never gives presents to anybody.
“I go home every chance I get. The people in Marshalltown are very nice, but I’m sure some of them think I’m a lost woman. My family has never changed. My father still makes Seberg’s vitamin pills and great bubble bath and hand cream in his drug store. I’ll send you some. He still regrets I didn’t get a college education. When I did St. Joan his only advice was to take my vitamins and be a good girl. One time a story appeared in Confidential magazine, some scandal about me, and when the magazines came into the drugstore he burned them all. Then he bought up every copy in town so nobody would read it. I’m sure he never doubted for a minute I was pure as the driven snow, but he didn’t want the neighbors to talk. I’m sure I disappointed them when I divorced my first husband, because nobody in our family had ever been divorced. But they have always stayed out of things. My parents sold the house all of us kids grew up in and now going home is not the same. The smells of the rooms and the stairs and the feelings you grew up with for 18 years are just not there any more. It’s the most terrible feeling in the world. I took Romain to Iowa and he said the countryside, the blackness of the earth and the cornstalks reminded him of the Ukraine.”
Romain Gary was not in Oregon. He was finishing a novel in a new house in Majorca, and already divorce rumors were stronger in the Oregon air than the scent of pine trees. “There is no telephone in the house, so I write him letters in English and we send lots of cables,” said Jean, covering up. “Romain sits all day and looks at the ocean. I’ve never seen a man so tied to the sea. He’s going through a terrible human transition now. He’s 53 years old, and despite his service to France and his own war record, he feels he was never properly assimilated by the French. He was born in Russia and has always loved America. Then the recent strikes in France made him even more aware of the validity of the questions raised against De Gaulle. He was De Gaulle’s private secretary during the war and although he has no loyalty to the Gaullist government he is very loyal to the man, even though when he asked to leave for active duty, De Gaulle said ‘OK and I hope you get killed. You won’t of course, only the best get killed.’ Still, De Gaulle has written him a two-page handwritten letter for every book he’s ever written. No one is a friend of De Gaulle’s, I least of all, but I had tea with him once and he was fun to meet—informed on films, not foreboding, beautiful manners, charming with women. He spends all night watching TV and writes his own protest letters to the networks. He’s very vain. Did you know he had a duel once in Poland over a married woman? The Poles still talk about it.”
Who would have thought little Jean Seberg would come to this? When Preminger discovered her for St. Joan, a role she was too young and inexperienced to play (She had once checked out a Stanislavsky book from the Marshalltown library, only to return it the next day because she couldn’t understand it), she was a pretty teenager teaching Sunday school at the Lutheran church and working in her father’s drug store so she could read all the movie magazines. Suddenly she was an international celebrity nobody liked. The critics roasted her and the public almost lynched her. If her parents had their way, she would have quietly retired and become a dental technician. Instead, she ran away to Nice, lived on the beach, cried a lot, and married a young French lawyer named Francois Moreuil. The marriage was a disaster, but it produced two good things: her husband foolishly introduced her to Romain Gary and she became a film idol in Europe. Today she is a mature, scary-bright, firmly footed lady who knows exactly who she is and where it’s at. She has made 21 movies—10 in French, one in Italian—and six of them in the past two years. She has studied mime with Marcel Marceau’s teacher. She has been a member of the NAACP since she was 14 (“My father thought I was a Communist.”). She led the campaign to raise the standards of lower-class Arab workers in France. She has produced two films—one on boxing and one about two Guinean students living in Paris. She’s involved in everything. When she returned to America this year, she went to the Watts ghetto and rang doorbells of white liberals asking for aid to establish jobs for Negroes. She went to a huge party in Hollywood to raise money for Resurrection City and alienated everyone by being the only one to ask where the money was going. On the set of Paint Your Wagon, she is the Mother Superior of the hippies who live in the nearby woods and make their living as extras in the film. She gives them free baths and bakes cakes for their weddings. She may go to jail before the film is completed, because when she arrived in Hollywood she met an old friend who served time as a conscientious objector in Leavenworth and signed his petition volunteering to go to prison if Dr. Spock was convicted. She was with Bobby Kennedy a week before he was killed “at John Frankenheimer’s Malibu beach house—he said he knew he’d lose in Oregon and he didn’t think he had a chance at the nomination. He sat on the floor, windburned in Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, eating lunch with his dog Freckles. It was odd. I was with President Kennedy shortly before his death, too. We had dinner at the White House and he asked Romain a million questions about De Gaulle—he was like an incredible IBM machine, digesting everything. I swiped a menu and wrote Malraux a long letter about it. A few days later, Romain was giving a very unpopular anti-Gaullist speech called ‘Love of America’ and afterward we walked along the boardwalk in Nice and saw the news in the papers.”
Jean’s own career is jumping. She was just finishing Pendulum, a social-comment murder mystery with George Peppard set in Washington, when Paint Your Wagon came along. “It was all an accident, really, but I’ve had one of the most peculiar careers anyway, so nothing really surprises me any more. I was getting ready to leave for Paris when Alan Jay Lerner called me and asked if I could sing. I bluffed and said yes—I’m quite terrible, really—and I did a test with Eydie Gorme’s voice and now Andre Previn has written a new song for me and I’m doing my own singing in the film. It’s a wonderful script, quite different from the play. I play a woman who is deeply and genuinely in love with two different men. She’s sort of a 19th-century flower child in the middle of the Gold Rush. I really dig that idea and believe it to be quite possible. Especially with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, who are totally opposite. Lee is full of chatter and great tales he tells with his whole body—when I first met him I thought I was talking to a Watusi. And Clint is the original quiet man. He stands back and says nothing, but then he comes out with a statement so intelligent you know he is aware of everything that is going on. It has completely blown my family summer, but Romain and I agreed I shouldn’t turn it down.”
Everyone else seems to agree. A few nights later, she stands, lit by the moon, at a fork in the East Eagle Creek near 9,000-ft. high Boulder Peak in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, up to her bootstraps in mud. Corn on the cob by Cartier-Bresson. “I no longer feel the need to prove anything. I used to take myself so seriously I was almost catatonic, which showed in my work. Now I just hang loose and never build up false hopes.” The hippies clap their hands and stop playing poker. The Chinese extras stand up to their knees in mud and watch. Alan Jay Lemer smiles. Joshua Logan nods approvingly. Lee Marvin crosses his fingers. And back in Marshalltown, at Mr. Seberg’s drug store, business has never been better.