which ended just before filming began] stay at the Hotel Esmeralda,
with a view of Notre-Dame. She meets her brother, Andrew, there
by chance. Getting up early, Jane works on her French and learns
her lines. She complains to her brother. “The first evening, she tells
me: ‘This guy is ghastly, he is so selfish, he treats me like shit,’”
Andrew recalls. “The second: ‘It was even worse today, I’m really
upset.’ The third, she was so emphatic, I said to myself:I smell a rat.”
Grimblat consoles Jane, who has come to cry on his shoulder
because Serge has paid her no attention. To Serge, he repeats:
“She’s the one.” The very first days of a shoot that’s scheduled to go
on for another seven weeks turn sour. Exasperated, Gainsbourg
harasses his partner. “‘But how can you accept a role in France
when you don’t speak a word of French?’” he recalled saying to her.
“And at that, she started to weep. When we get to see the rushes,
I say to Grimblat, ‘Not bad, the little English girl.’”
There is a chink in Gainsbourg’s armour. He can spot a tragedian
when he sees one. The troubled young girl mixes everything up:
life, reality, the script. She declares [her lines] in a shattered voice:
“I have nothing left. I have lost
everything. Not even the wild animals
will want my flesh.” And Gainsbourg
finds her “fabulous”. Is making women
cry what it takes to get attached to them?
In 2017, Jane has had another look at
the screen tests of Slogan. “It’s excruci-
ating that Grimblat managed to see that
I was of use based on this, and that Serge
didn’t kill the project!” Pierre Grimblat
comes up with a ploy. He invites the two
actors to dine at Maxim’s [the famous
Parisian restaurant], to clear the air, on a
Friday evening. “And I didn’t join them,”
he says with a malicious smile.
After dinner, Gainsbourg, charmed
and charming, takes Jane to New Jimmy’s,
the place run by his friend Régine. He shows off, he asks Jane to
dance. When he steps on her feet, Jane figures out that he can’t
dance. Does she reject him? No, she is “absolutely delighted”, and
falls in love with “his shyness, his clumsiness”.
Gainsbourg takes her out to paint the town red — his town.
Accomplices from now on, they take refuge at Raspoutine,
a Russian nightclub where he’s a regular, then in Pigalle, at the
cabaret club Madame Arthur. Great moments, Jane tells me, “with
all these men dressed up as women who came to sit on our knees
like scampering little cockerels. They all knew each other because
he and his father had worked there as pianists. ‘Ah, hi Sergio!’ they
shouted, sending him kisses while putting feathers in my hair.”
His armour melts. So does Jane’s. “I realised that all the things
I had taken for aggressions were nothing more than protection
after all, for someone infinitely too sensitive, someone terribly
romantic, with a tenderness and sentimentality one would never
guess at. One day he said he was a ‘pretend villain’, and that’s true.”
The night ends in a hotel room, at the Hilton. But the recep-
tionist commits a terrible faux pas when allocating room number
642 to the notorious seducer: “The usual, Monsieur Gainsbourg?”
Serge loved telling the story, and its aftermath: “And then nothing
happened, I conked out, I was pissed as a fart.” In the morning, he
said, “She made off, then she stuck this EP I really liked at the time
between my toes. Five days later, same scenario: Hilton, wasted,
beddy-byes. She must have asked herself,But what is this Frenchman
all about? The perfect strategy had been for nothing to happen.”Once the ice is broken, Serge embarks on Jane’s education à la
Gainsbourg. He takes her to the grotty neighbourhood of Barbès,
to the dingy cinemas that screen reruns of the sword-and-sandal
films he had appeared in. He takes her to Maxim’s, where Jane is
refused entry one night on account of her wicker basket. Gainsbourg
flies off the handle — he is fiercely loyal. He protects her and
doesn’t budge. Jane, with hindsight: “He was incredibly handsome,
sexy, perplexing, Slavic.” Serge announces to Jane that he has asked
for all the landmarks of Paris to be illuminated at 8pm, as a mani-
festation of his love. They are lit up, and she believes it.
DuringSlogan’s opening night, at the Colisée cinema, our two
lovebirds are inseparable. A photograph sums up the upheaval that
hits Serge Gainsbourg. He’s in a coat and striped trousers, English
style. She wears an ultra-short black mini dress, completely
see-through, revealing her thighs, her underpants, her navel, and
her breasts since she’s not wearing a bra. She has Serge on one arm
and her woven wicker basket on the other.
Between the beginning of filming and the release ofSlogan,a
year has passed. During that time, they have
publicly become a couple, one that has already
achieved iconic status. They appear on televi-
sion, in the papers, photographed happy, cheer-
fully running on country lanes, the one glued
to the other, he in front, she behind, or vice
versa. Jane and Serge have already created a way
of life; they represent a hope for happiness.
This is an edited extract fromJET’AIME:
The Legendary Love Story of Jane Birkin and Serge
Gainsbourg, by Véronique Mortaigne, translated
by Georg Philipp von Pezold (Icon Books), $23.“He said he was a ‘pretend villain’, and that’s true.”–JANE BIRKIN
BENTLEY ARCHIVE/POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES; PATRICE PICOT/GETTY IMAGES; PAUL POPPER/POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES; JEAN-PIERRE BONNOTTE/GAMMA-RAPHO/GETTY IMAGES. PRICE APPROXIMATE. ADDITIONAL TEXT BY HANNAH JAMES AND ALEXANDRA ENGLISH
On the set of The Swimming
Pool in Saint-Tropez, 1968.
Left: with their daughter,
Charlotte, in London, 1971.