Serge Gainsbourg by Leeor Wild

SERGE GAINS BOURG

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GAINS B

BOURG

LULU3 LE TWISTEUR14 BARDOT42 BIRKIN50 JE T’AIME81 MOI NON PLUS96 FISTFUL OF GITANES110 STARS AND STRIPES132 AFTERLIFE155

B INFLUENCED BARDOT HAS

MY DESTINY, SHE IS THE

ROLLS OF MY LIF

here’s a trilogy in my life,” said Serge in Mort Ou Vices, “an equilateral triangle, shall we say, of Gitanes, – alcoholism and girls – and I didn’t say isosceles, I said equilateral. But it all comes from the background of a man whose initiation in beauty was art.” Brigitte Bardot – or ‘B.B.’, as the French call her; pronounced bebe, translation ‘baby’ – was the actress for whom the term ‘sex-kitten’ was invented. Playful, unselfconsciously sensual and dangerously beautiful, Bardot, since her 1952 screen debut in Girl In A Bikini, had become an international superstar -- though more as a result of her appearance.

BKI RNI

ane 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 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 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 suspicious. “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 Englnd 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 whatsoever, 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 – an 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 has started out, quite successfully all things considered, as a quest for an entęnte contiale 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 be tween his toes. Still he didn’t move – and when 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. After that night, Serge and Jane were inseperable. “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.