SERGE GAINSBOURG AND JANE BIRKIN 1974.
I’ve just completed a book of Paris love stories, to be published next year by Museyon. The research involved an illuminating journey through the multitudinous possibilities of relations between the sexes. The following is one of my favourites.
The Christmas 1974 issue of Lui, France’s equivalent of Playboy, avoided the cliché cover of a glamor girl in a Santa hat and a smile. Instead, a languishing young woman stared out in unseasonal despair below the headline “Noël avec Jane Birkin.” Photos within showed her imprisoned in an empty room, wearing only black stockings and high heels, and handcuffed to a bare, battered iron bed.
That Ms. Birkin, an actress of modest gifts and, at least by Lui’s standards, an unremarkable body, should enjoy such celebrity had less to do with talent or beauty than with her personal life, which she shared with one of those individuals the French call monstres sacrés -sacred monsters. In an added attraction, her lover, the singer/songwriter/actor/director and all-round enfant terrible Serge Gainsbourg, not only conceived the photographs but wrote their somewhat gloating captions.
Birkin didn’t protest at being exposed in images which, a few decades before, would have featured on postcards sold only in the alleys of Pigalle. Far from it; she described the project as an act of love, a celebration of the contradictory emotions at the heart of her rapport with Gainsbourg.
Such relationships were familiar to the French, as were men like Gainsbourg - overbearing, unshaven, unwashed, untidy, rude. They met in 1968 on the set of her first French film, Slogan, but there was initially no rapport. At twenty-two, she was the archetypal English “dolly bird,” coltish, skinny, given to nibbling a plump lower lip and tossing hair out of her eyes. Gainsbourg, twenty years older, had a reputation as a tombeur – a seducer. "I found him complicated and arrogant during filming,” Birkin said. “He showed me no kindness; he made me very uncomfortable.” But that impression didn’t last. “In a single evening,” she said, “his character changed radically and I had fallen in love with him." When shooting ended, the two took a hotel room but, instead of having sex, put on a record and danced the night away.
Sex, however, soon took centre stage in their liaison. Gainsbourg had just ended an affair with Brigitte Bardot, with whom he recorded Je t’aime....moi non plus/I Love You....Neither Do I, an imagined dialogue, murmured against a muted musical background, between two people on the brink of mutual orgasm. “You are the wave,” she whispers. “I am the naked island.” He responds “Like the undecided wave/I go, I go and I come....entre vos reins” : literally “between your kidneys.” The English translator tried “into your guts” but compromised on “between your loins.” However even that was too much, so “reins” became the more acceptable “seins” – breasts.
To record it, Bardot and Gainsbourg squeezed into a small glass booth, their closeness amplifying the steaminess of the interpretation, but after her husband, millionaire businessman Gunter Sachs, heard the recording, Bardot begged Gainsbourg not to release it. “This song is yours,” he reassured her. “I will never record it with anyone else." The promise survived only until he met Birkin, with whom he made an even more incendiary version. The first reaction of his record company was “They’ll never let that on the air!” But its commercial possibilities soon persuaded them. "Well, if I am to go to prison,” sighed an executive, “it might as well be for a whole album, not just a single.” The resulting LP, Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg, was a hit.
With Gainsbourg’s encouragement, Birkin blossomed as an actress, her schoolgirl gawkiness a piquant contrast to more voluptuous competitors such as Romy Schneider and Mireille Darc. They never married but lived together until 1980, Birkin initially accommodating Gainsbourg’s heavy smoking and drinking, as well as his aversion to shaving and bathing.
As his alcohol consumption increased, however, he became physically violent. Following a near-fatal heart attack just after the birth of their daughter Charlotte, he periodically assumed the character of an alter ego called Gainsbarre. His public appearances as this individual, unshaven, in dark glasses, usually drunk, with a smoking Gitane in hand, were always scandalous. He offended sensibilities everywhere by recording a reggae version of the Marseillaise, protested his high taxes by burning a 500 franc note on TV and, in his most notorious manifestation, while appearing with singer Whitney Houston on a talk show, announced to the national audience “I want to fuck her.” For Birkin, this was too much. “I could live with Gainsbourg,” she announced as she left their Paris home, “but not Gainsbarre.”
CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG. DADDY’S GIRL….
Gainsbourg repaired their relationship but they never again lived together. When Charlotte was thirteen, however, she and her father made a record that aroused even more controversy than Je t’aime...moi, non plus. For Lemon Incest they whispered and murmured, to the background of a Chopin étude, an intimate conversation that implied a sexual relationship. “The love we'll never make together,” growled Gainsbourg,”is the most beautiful, the most violent, the purest, the most intoxicating.” He called his daughter an “exquisite sketch; delicious child; my flesh and my blood.” Many noticed similarities to the opening sentence of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul...,” particularly since Charlotte was, at the time, almost exactly the age of its “nymphet”. An adult Charlotte, who became a successful actress, called Lemon Incest “an innocent declaration of love from a father to his daughter” but a critic described it as “insanely perverse.” All agreed it was Gainsbarre at his inflamatory best and worst.
When Gainsbourg died in 1991, Birkin, her acting career waning, found a new audience as the guardian of his legacy. She recorded the songs he had written for her and sang them in a series of sold-out concerts. As well as appearing frequently on television, she published her memoirs and diaries, and toured the world, performing his work while Gainsbourg/Gainsbarre joined Svengali and Count Dracula in the pantheon of the unsavory.
Their former home occupies two addresses in the same Paris street: 5 bis and 14 rue de Verneuil, in the seventh arrondissement, both easily identifiable from the graffiti-decorated outer wall. The second now houses a museum, a bookstore and a combined piano bar, restaurant and performance space - called, inevitably, Le Gainsbarre.