Serge Gainsbourg- a Fistful of Gitanes, page 7
“Ugly-beautiful is what it’s called, I believe,” said Marianne Faithfull. “Serge was incredibly attractive, in a Mick Jagger kind of way. He was also very sexual. This is a man that you know – I always knew – that if you did go to bed with him you would come out of that room well-pleased. Seriously well-pleased.”
Years later, asked by inteviewer Bayon to analyse his attraction for women, Serge came up with “a cocktail of nonchalance in my gestures, and the aura of celebrity of course, plus a sense of movement in space, a sort of – I would say – class.”2 At the time, though, he simply gave a Gallic shrug; after all, he was going out with the most beautiful woman in the world and they weren’t. And he was in love. His liner-notes to their joint 1968 album Bonnie And Clyde declared, “These songs of Brigitte’s and mine are, above all, love songs – combat love, passionate love, physical love, fictional love. Amoral or immoral, it doesn’t matter, they are all totally and utterly sincere.”3
The title track was one of two songs that Serge had written in the space of a night following a disastrous early date with Bardot. Either struck dumb with nerves, or alcohol, depending on whose story one believes, his usual wit deserted him, the evening was a flop and he thought he had blown it for good. But she phoned the next day and demanded as a penance he write her “the most beautiful love song you can imagine”. ‘Bonnie And Clyde’ was one of them. The other was ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’.
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Late one night in the winter of 1967, Serge and Bardot went into a dimly lit Barclay studio in Paris and recorded Michel Colombier’s arrangement of ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’ in an intimate two-hour session, the two singers squashed into the same small, steamy glass booth. Very intimate, apparently; what engineer William Flageollet described to Verlant as “heavy petting”. Word leaked to the press that it was an audio verité recording, with Sunday newspaper France-Dimanche reporting that the four minutes 35 seconds of “groans, sighs, and Bardot’s little cries of pleasure” set to almost church-like organ music gave “the impression you’re listening to two people making love.” Being journalists, of course, the next thing they did was call up Bardot’s husband and ask him what he thought of it. His reply made the next day’s headlines: Furious Gunter Sachs Demands The Single Be Withdrawn – something which Bardot’s agent was adding her voice to less publicly, behind the scenes. Bardot was about to star with Sean Connery in an international film and it was not a good time for a scandal. And, apart from that, Bardot hated scandals. She wrote Serge a letter pleading with him not to release it.
Serge protested: “The music is very pure. For the first time in my life I write a love song and it’s taken badly.” But he had witnessed the thin line between love and hate that the press and public so evidently had for her and put the tapes away in a drawer. They would stay there until 1986 when, six years after her last record release, ‘Toutes Les Betes Sont À Aimer (All Animals Are For Being Loved), recorded to raise money for the French equivalent of the RSPCA, she finally gave permission for their “sublime” version of ‘Je T’Aime…’, as Serge described it, to come out.
“Well we all know Bardot is an idiot,” grunted Marianne Faithfull of the original decision to proscribe the song. “Of course when Serge had her she was in peak condition, tip-top form – but always very conformist.” Serge had later asked Marianne to do the song with him. “Hah! He asked everybody,” – including actress-singers Valérie Lagrange (the former pin-up) and the beautiful Mireille Darc (Alain Delon’s ex-wife), the latter very nearly coming to fruition.
“I don’t know why I turned him down,” mused Marianne. “I would say, to my shame, that I was wrapped up in the beginning of my affair with Mick Jagger and he wouldn’t have liked it either. Maybe I was too young, maybe I was just embarrassed. I’m sexual, but in a very different way. I would accept now, but at the time being the ‘angel’ I was… Actually that would have made it even funnier. I wish I’d done it, actually.” But Serge, quite frankly, had other things on his mind, chief among them trying desperately to hold onto Bardot, who was physically away in Spain making a movie and emotionally drifting back to Gunther Sachs. During their brief separation, while Serge stayed in Paris writing the album he had promised to actress Jeanne Moreau, she decided to give her marriage another chance. The love affair was over.
Serge was desolate. He had always “believed deeply and absolutely in an ideal love” he told Bayon. “And I searched for it.” This third time he thought he had found it but she had abandoned him. Not only that, she had taken with her his opportunity to have a big hit record with his name blazoned across the top. Being a Frenchman there were two options open to him – throw himself in the Seine, which he announced to everyone that he would do, or be seen out with as many beautiful women as he could find. He opted for plan B. Thanks to the tabloid attention that came courtesy of B.B., he was not only one of France’s most popular songwriters but one its best known séducteurs as well. (“I have known many women horizontally,” said Serge, adding gallantly, “but I cannot tell who they are.”)4
While the Bardot Show was broadcast in the States (a promo album was pressed in its honour, Special Bardot, featuring duets on English language versions of ‘Bonnie And Clyde’ and ‘Comic Strip’) Serge was in London, where only a single, ‘Harley Davidson’, was released, to make the album homage to his lost love, Initials B.B.
Scribbling furiously on the ferry-ride to England, to finish the songs, Serge recorded four new numbers with Arthur Greenslade and his orchestra (plus heavenly choir) to add to familiar tracks like ‘Torrey Canyon’, ‘Shu Ba Du Ba Loo Ba’ and ‘Docteur Jekyll Et Monsieur Hyde’. The resulting album was a mix of bright, brittle pop-art pop, rich orchestral-pop and soulful rock.
Back in Paris, he resumed the frenetic working pace that had marked his post-Eurovision career; at one point in 1968 he had two studios on the go at the same time, a different female singer in each of them, while he ran back and forth between the two. He had songs in the shops sung by old-school nightclub singers – like Régine and revue star Zizi Jeanmaire (a kind of French Liza Minelli with more sequins and feathers) – and by more contemporary artistes like Françoise Hardy, who sang his lovely ‘Comment Te Dire Adieu/ It Hurts To Say Goodbye’, a song one might have thought to have been inspired by the Bardot affair, but which Françoise Hardy said was written for her. “It was an American instrumental I stumbled upon by chance and which I liked a lot. It was my manager’s idea to ask Serge to write lyrics for it. I thought he would refuse, since he only wrote words for his own songs, but he accepted and telephoned me with the lyrics at the Savoy Hotel, where I was staying in London.” Serge also composed three more film soundtracks: Le Pacha, Manon 70 (starring Catherine Deneuve and containing ‘Manon’, the song he once claimed was one of the best he’d ever written) and Mister Freedom, a satirical superhero film in which he played the part of Mr Drugstore.
Now aged 40, he was still living at his parents’ home. His father was doing his best to change this situation. Ever since Serge had moved out of the artists’ dwellings, Joseph had been following his instructions to look for a place for him as Serge didn’t have time to do it himself. But, since his son was as particular in his domicile requirements as he was in just about everything else, it wasn’t proving an easy task.
“Serge was very snobbish,” said Jane. “He wanted nowhere else but the Rue de Verneuil, so he had his father look in the Figaro every day.” He finally found a “sweet tiny house”. Serge agreed to take it right away and a team of leading decorators and designers were hired to turn the interior of the former stables on the narrow street in Saint-Germain into a masterpiece.
Serge, meanwhile, had his time taken up working through the list of films that demanded his acting and compositional skills: Érotissimo, Paris N’Existe Pas (Paris Doesn’t Exist) and his latest, Slogan. Director Pierre Grimblat’s semi-autobiographical film had Serge in the starring role, as a director of commercials, who meets a woman at a film festival, falls in love and leaves his pregnant wife for her, only for his new love to find another man and abandon him in turn. Grimblat had initially favoured the elegant actress Marisa Berenson for the part of the love interest – a choice that appealed to Serge considerably, since it held out the possibility of an off-screen relationship as well. But at the last minute Grimblat changed his mind and decided that he wanted an English girl. A casting trip across the channel threw up the perfect candidate – a young actress with that perfect ’60s Swinging London look: long, ironed hair, big eyes and coltish body shoehorned into a belt-sized miniskirt. Her name was Jane Birkin.
Chapter 7
INITIALS J.B.
“When I heard here was a film test going on in the Kings Road and they were looking for a girl to be in a French film,” said Jane Birkin, “I went along with the Charlotte Ramplings and the Jacqueline Bissets and everybody else, and apparently someone told Pierre Grimblat, ‘That girl you are looking for is upstairs’.” The director had seen Jane in Blow Up, Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s seminal 1966 film set in England; hard to miss her really when, still a teenager, she was the first full-frontal nude to appear on a U.K. cinema screen.
Jane had been a stage actress since the age of 17, as had her mother before her (Judy Campbell, who also laid claim to being the first to sing ‘A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square’). Taken up by photographer David Bailey, whose penchant for doe-eyed, mini-skirted, colt-like girls was legendary, she landed a role in Beatles director Richard Lester’s The Knack and in Wonderwall, the film featuring music by George Harrison – a cinematic C.V. that as good as stood for ’60s Swinging London. At 17 she had also got married – to John Barry, the celebrated composer who wrote the James Bond theme. He was 13 years older than her, “and with a reputation for being mad, bad and dangerous to know. And of course three years later he left me.” With a baby daughter, Kate. “That’s why I so readily accepted to do a film test in France – to get away and do anything to make some money, since he had gone off leaving one with nothing – and try to make a life for Kate and me.”
Two days after the audition, Jane was in a Paris taxi, heading for her first French screen-test. “I couldn’t speak French – I had about two hours to learn it with Grimblat’s Chinese valet – and I remember on the taxi-ride to the studio thinking, if I could just have a tiny accident, break a leg or finger or something, just something so that I wouldn’t have to go through this film test in a language I didn’t understand. And while I was waiting for my turn, I heard another girl saying all the lines absolutely beautifully and I thought, ‘She’s perfect’. It was Marisa Berenson. But Pierre Grimblat wanted me for the part.”
Her first meeting with her co-star Serge was not auspicious. “Marisa Berenson was beautiful and aristocratic so of course Serge, being very snobbish, wanted her, and when I turned up, gawky and awkward wearing, I think, my sister’s dress, all he saw was a girl who’d turned up from England with her big teeth and short dress and not knowing a word of French. And he was so arrogant and sarcastic and snobbish! I think I said something stupid like ‘Why don’t you ask how I am?’ and he said ‘Parce que ça m’est égal’ – ‘because I really couldn’t care’ – which at least was more elegant than ‘je m’en fous’ (‘I don’t give a fuck’), so he was a gentleman. And then I started to cry, because I mixed up my private life and the movie script. He had to admit that I could cry rather well, but he was also vaguely disgusted – and yet he didn’t sabotage the fact that Pierre Grimblat wanted me, although he probably did have a veto. After all, he was infinitely well-known.” In France, anyway. Jane, being British, naturally had never heard of the celebrated Gainsbourg, “and he was rather put out when I called him Serge Bourguignon. I suppose it was the only French name I knew, from French cooking.” Not a great start.
And so things went on, until the Paris street riots of May 1968. The celebrated student revolution, which helped change French social and cultural attitudes – as well as pushing disposable pop music aside to make way for the new progressive rock and ponderous singer-songwriters – also put a temporary halt to the filming of Slogan.
“When Grimblat’s Porsche was blown up on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, I had to go back home. Finally, after about three or four weeks they let me come back to France.” During her absence, Jane had been doing her homework, reading – with the help of an enormous dictionary – a book of Gainsbourg lyrics that she’d bought before leaving Paris. “They were wonderful; extremely witty and clever, but very cruel and cynical.” She started to thaw towards him.
But when she met him the next time, conducting a press interview at his parents’ apartment on Avenue Bugeaud (work to achieve decor perfection was still going on at 5 Rue De Verneuil ), he, evidently hadn’t. “The whole walls of his room, I remember, were covered in enormous pictures of Brigitte Bardot. Serge – who was wearing a mauve shirt, a complete dandy – was playing them ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’, which made me feel slightly awkward, because I got the point. And I got my hand stuck in a tin of Chinese biscuits and I was bleeding somewhat, to which he paid no attention whatsoever, he went on with his interview.”
On the set, things went from bad to worse.
“We started off a scene in the film where I had to be naked, sitting on the edge of the bath. Serge, somewhat satisfactorily, was in the bath and allowed to wear an immense pair of red, white and blue-striped swimming trunks; I remember thinking, gosh, men are lucky, and where he’s looking up from I hate to think what he can see. And I felt extremely awkward under the circumstances, because it seemed to me that he had no pleasant feelings towards me whatsover, and by this point in the film one was supposed to be madly in love. So I said to Grimblat, ‘Could you fix a dinner where we could just talk about it? Because if he would rather have had Marisa Berenson or somebody else, I quite understand, but it’s very difficult to do scenes with someone who seems to find you so positively unattractive’.”
So an evening for three was arranged at Régine’s, from which Grimblat discreetly absented himself to leave them alone. “We were there for a long time,” recalls Jane, “and I asked Serge to dance.” (Serge had actually been waiting for ‘un slow’ so that he could ask Jane the exact same thing). “And he stepped on my feet! I was so surprised. I thought, ‘So this sophisticated, arrogant, seemingly confident man doesn’t know how to dance’ – and I realised it was because he’s in fact shy. He seemed so worldly-wise but at the same time he was very childlike.
“From there he took me to another nightclub – to every nightclub in Paris until six o’ clock in the morning. We went to Madame Arthur, where his father used to play the piano for the transvestites, who all came up kissing Serge and saying ‘Ooh chéri, how are you?’ And he took me to the Russian nightclubs where the Russian violin players played until we got into the taxi on the street and Serge stuffed 100F notes into their violins – he loved them and they loved him – and he told them ‘Nous sommes des putes’ – ‘we’re all prostitutes’ – and asked them to play the ‘Valse Triste’, that terribly melancholic slow waltz of Sibelius, which they played right up to the taxi, and which ever since he always called ‘Jane’s song’. Afterwards, I thought he was going to take me to his parents’ house, like all good boys do, but no, he took me straight to the Hilton – where they asked him if he wanted his usual room!”
Jane was horrified. What had started out, quite successfully all things considered, as a quest for an entente cordiale was heading towards becoming another notch on his rented bedpost.
“In the lift as we were going up, I was pulling faces to myself thinking, gosh, how could I have got myself into such a mess. I had only known John Barry in all my life; I hadn’t known anybody else ever and suddenly here I was with someone who had only taken me out for one night.”
Once in his room she pleaded necessity to use the bathroom, where she hid out as long as she could “and tried to tidy myself up and try to look as if I was used to this sort of thing. By the time I got back into the bedroom he was asleep. There he was, he’d drunk so much that he was out cold. And I was so relieved! It meant I could nip out to the drug store and pick up a little 45 record of this song we had been listening to all evening which was ‘Yummy yummy yummy I’ve got love in my tummy’ by God knows who,” – The Ohio Express, actually – “and I stuck it between his toes. Still he didn’t move – and I went back to my hotel with Kate and her nappies – which were flying in the wind outside so that the hotel looked like the outskirts of Naples – and my honour was saved.” As, to Grimblat’s relief, was the film.
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After that night, Serge and Jane were inseparable. “We went off to Venice together and I wrote to my best friend Gabrielle, he’s just perfect and funny and completely original and the first man I’ve ever met who actually cared about whether things were nice for me. He cared a terrible lot about whether you liked this or that, and whether you felt good when he would fill a room full of white flowers.
“When we got back to Paris – we were staying at L’Hôtel Des Beaux-Arts, in Oscar Wilde’s bedroom – I said, ‘I’ve got to leave and go back to London. I can’t stay on – because it will happen like it happened with John Barry; I will become a clinging person, and then slowly they’ll become disgusted and I’ll become –’ I think I said something stupid like ‘a cauliflower’.
“After having waited for John Barry to come home and run his bath and cook his turtle soup and be – as a journalist from Newsweek put it so well – ‘John Barry and his E-Type Jaguar and his E-type wife’, which is exactly what I was, I never wanted to be in that situation again. And Serge, sat in front of the window all night long with a candle, crying. It was most melodramatic and very Russian, very Jewish.”
