lm director Pierre Grimblat
as the master of happen-
tance in the lives of Jane
irkin and Serge Gainsbourg.
s the director ofSlogan,he
rought together the English
be-fashion-icon and noto-
rious French musician.Without this man:
no Serge, no Charlotte, no Lou. Jane
knows this well, but all of a sudden, one
spring day in 2017, when I am facing her,
she once again becomes conscious of that
fact. Jane is 70 and ravishing. In the kitchen
of her Paris home, she glances at me above
her college-style glasses with a surprised
look. Abruptly she realises the value of that debt. “But yes, of
course,” she exclaims, “it’s enormous!” She is so grateful!Slogan
gave the girl the time that was needed to seduce the love of her life.
Let’s go back to the end of winter in 1968. An unusual spring is
in the air. Serge Gainsbourg is wearing a purple shirt. He is
sulking. His ego has taken a knock. ForSlogan, he was going to be
playing opposite the exquisite American model Marisa Berenson.
But Pierre Grimblat prefers an unknown young Englishwoman he
wants to introduce to him. Gainsbourg broods: this new partner
does not measure up to his stature as poet and polygamous seducer.
He is furious, a mess. Brigitte Bardot has dumped him. At his
newly-acquired house, in the rue de Verneuil, he has the walls
painted black, the colour of mourning. After “eighty-six days of
passion”, she’d ditched the lover and kept the husband, German
billionaire Gunter Sachs. Inconsolable, Gainsbourg displays life-
size photos of her taken by Sam Lévin, showing her by turns
lascivious, a sex bomb, a model of physical perfection.
In this disheartened state of mind, Serge, 40 years of age,
receives the “little English girl”, who is 21. She’s not aware at the
time of the talents of the creator of songs such as “La Javanaise”.
She thinks his name is Serge Bourguignon: the only thing she
knows of French culture is the eponymous beef dish.
Jane Birkin already has her own style: eyes as blue as the North
Sea, the college-girl fringe, the slender body. She wears little ‘pop
art’ outfits, very tailored frilly silk blouses, and no bra. Her smile
reveals a charming gap between the front teeth, known asdents du
bonheur[‘teeth of happiness’]. Aristocratic, elegant, she exudes an
explosive sensitivity. If Jane had carried a hippie bag made of
patchwork and beads, things would have turned out differently.
For a long time, she appeared with a covered woven wicker
basket. She got it for one or two pounds. She was 17, hanging out
in the West End of London, in Theatreland, where she came
across a Portuguese basket stall. Jane turned thiscestinho—a
little round rustic basket of migrant origins — into a symbol of
bohemian freedom for the jet set.
In May 1968, Pierre Grimblat presents the miniskirt-wearing
Englishwoman to a perfect specimen of French history: a singer
of immigrant parentage, a Russian Jew, ambivalent in his tastes.
Everything got off to a bad start. “She was no Lady Chatterley, no
more than a Blanche DuBois fromA Streetcar Named Desire.She
inspired no desire in me, none at all,” he
confided to a friend.
For the time being, Serge Gainsbourg
listens endlessly to “Je T’aime ... Moi
Non Plus”, a song written for [Bardot], of
which they have recorded an unpublished
smoky, erotic and intense version.
Following their breakup, he has been in a
filthy mood for quite a while. Just arrived
in Paris, Jane Birkin tags along to the
home of the Ginsburg parents [Serge was
born Lucien Ginsburg], where Serge has
taken refuge during the refurbishment of
the house at rue de Verneuil. “He was
surrounded by his posters of Bardot. He
gave an interview and made the journalist
listen, at full blast, to the version of “Je
T’aime ... Moi Non Plus” he had recorded
with Brigitte. I didn’t know where to go. I
said to myself,Who on earth is this poseur?”
How will Birkin and Gainsbourg go
about finding common ground? A bit
old-fashioned, he takes a nuanced posi-
tion when it comes to the miniskirt that Jane wears like a banner.
As a voyeur and an aesthete, he has nothing against the object as
such. But he also exposes himself as a conservative. In 1968, he
says on Swiss Radio, just as Jane is eroding his convictions: “The
woman of 1967–68 has a problem. In 1930, they had modesty in
public, and now the miniskirts hardly cover half their thighs,
when they enter a taxi they ride up to the waist, and that! A young
girl in a get-up like that cannot be as rigorous as she ought to be at
that age. I have a charming little daughter [Natacha, from his
marriage to Françoise Pancrazzi, born in 1964] and I think, for her
— I think that this era is dangerous, this liberty.”
The Paris shoot ofSloganstarts at the beginning of June. Jane
Birkin and her daughter Kate [from her marriage to John Barry,At home, with their bull terrier,
Nana, in 1973. Left: at the Paris
premiere of Slogan, 1969.124 HARPERSBAZAAR.COM.AU April 2019