JULIETTE AND MILES

LOVE AND JAZZ ON THE LEFT BANK

Juliette Greco in her element, with the church of St Germain des Pres behind her.

Juliette Gréco was 22 in May 1949 when the Salle Pleyel presented the International Jazz Festival that revived Paris’s jazz scene, moribund since the war. She couldn’t afford a ticket so a friend took her backstage, where she saw and heard Miles Davis for the first time.

 “I saw him in profile,” she said. “An Egyptian god. I had never seen such a handsome man. Like a Giacometti.” After their first meeting, they were inseparable. They moved into the Hotel Louisiane, establishing a tradition that would make the hotel a home-from-home for jazz musicians visiting Paris.  They walked along the Seine, hand in hand, even kissed in public: unthinkable in the United States. “I had never felt like this in my whole life,” Davis wrote. “It was the freedom to be in France and to be treated like a human being.”

Davis could have taken her back with him, but refused to subject her to the racism which he had learned to endure.  When Jean-Paul Sartre asked why they didn’t marry, Davis responded simply “Because I love her.” Years later, Gréco acknowledged the rightness of his perception.  "He knew that black and white didn't go together. He knew I'd be unhappy and treated like a cheap whore in America.”

Gréco became the poster girl for left bank chic. One journalist noted that her "clothes, fringe and unconventional behaviour (which includes walking the boulevards in bare feet and sitting on the kerb to rest) are faithfully copied by girls all over the quarter." With her friend and sometime lover Anne Marie Cazalis, she opened her own jazz club, the Tabou.  From 1947, it occupied a cellar on narrow rue Dauphine, in the heart of the left bank. After a night of hectic jive to the band led by Boris Vian, the unventilated crypt, thick with sweat and cigarette smoke, resembled a railway tunnel through which a steam locomotive had recently passed. Locals, furious at the noise of departing clients, emptied chamber pots onto their heads. 

Sometimes, as the band took a break, the microphone passed to Gréco. "She sang poems by Sartre and Jacques Prévert," said a critic, "in an odd deep voice, infinitely stirring to those under twenty-five and touchingly immature to those over thirty.”  The songs were tailored to her rueful sexuality. Among the most successful was Déshabillez Moi/Undress Me.

Juliette, more personality than singer, drifted into the movies. Cocteau gave her a role in Orphée, where she caught the eye of Darryl F. Zanuck, president of Twentieth Century-Fox. He put her under contract, made her his mistress, and featured her in some of the films Fox produced in France, but when he tried to re-launch  her in Hollywood she bridled at his demands that she submit to the studio publicity and casting regime. “I am a totally wild animal,” she told him. “Do not try to lock me up, even in a golden cage,” and returned to Paris.

Though Juliette and Miles each married three times, Davis remained the love of her life. “Between Miles and me it was a superb love story,” she said. ”We never lost touch with each other. When he was on tour, he sent me little notes from the European countries he visited. ‘I was there,’ they said. ‘Where were you?’ He came to see me at my house a few months before his death. He was sitting in the living room.  As I came in, he didn’t turn around but I heard his laughter… demonic! I asked him the reason: ‘In any place in the world,’ he answered me, ‘even if I couldn’t see you, I would know that it was you.’ ”