Serge gainsbourg a fist.., p.14
Serge Gainsbourg- a Fistful of Gitanes, page 14
“Serge told everybody I’d left because he was so drunk and difficult – which he was. Toward the end, I used to rush off to hotels with the children in the middle of the night because he sort of – he didn’t know what he was doing. But dramatically we were very well-matched. When I got into a rage when he was writing a song for another girl – I was the one who was jealous – and I kicked in a present I’d given him, he kept it and told everyone with relish, ‘Janette did that because she was so jealous’ – but in fact he never went off with anybody else. He was an absolute darling.”
On what was probably the most spectacularly dramatic occasion, after an argument in a nightclub, Jane threw herself in the River Seine. “He had turned my basket upside-down at Chez Castel, the nightclub, which meant that all my tampons and everything fell out. And he had made a slur over my past life with John Barry in front of everybody. I was humiliated. And he wasn’t loved at that time – he wasn’t the saint that he is now for people. He was someone who anybody in the room thought was very lucky to be with a very pretty and very young girl like me – and the posh group that were by the bar couldn’t wait to see me getting my revenge.
“So a few days later when we were back at Castel, and we stayed up in the bar, there was a group of people and they were having a bit of a giggle about Serge. I don’t know what about. And there was a custard tart on the table. I don’t know why, but irresistibly my hand was drawn towards this custard pie, egged on by these stupid, giggling people. I was fairly drunk myself. And in a second I’d thrown it at Serge’s face. Whereupon he stood up – he didn’t do the ridiculous Laurel and Hardy gesture of flicking it off – he went straight towards the front door, tart falling off of his face bit by bit as he walked, totally dignified, all the way back to the Rue de Verneuil. And I was running after him, thinking, what can I do to say sorry to have humiliated him in the most unforgivable way in front of these silly, nightclubby people. And even in my quite drunken state I thought, I know what I can do: I can throw myself into the Seine.
“So I ran past him,” (making sure he had seen where she was going, because she couldn’t swim) “and I flung myself into the Seine. It was very cold, I was out of my depth and there was a terrible current. Whereupon the firemen came out to fetch me. Serge, very kindly, waded in too. My top, a rather pretty St Laurent I remember, had retracted somewhat because these garments were not made for being in water – it said dry cleaning only and I saw that that was perfectly true. And of course Serge forgave me.”
In the end it was, ironically, the banality of their celebrity existence that made Jane decide to leave.
“The monotony of coming back at exactly the same time as the dustmen, having finished a decaf and a croissant first thing in the morning in Pigalle, and the children waking up just as you roll in. After years and years and years you can’t resist pushing them a bit at the front door because they’re so drunk they can’t get their key in the lock. I tapped him on the back of the head and he fell and cut his eyebrow on the door moulding. The next morning he saw the black eye and asked me what had happened – he couldn’t remember anything. I told him he had fallen over and he said, ‘That’s strange, drunks don’t usually hurt themselves when they fall,’ and I thought, ‘Right, unless some evil person gives you a shove.’You get fed up… He was always so clever about tiny things and yet he didn’t see the enormous thing coming.” That she would actually leave.
When Jane told Serge she was depressed, he could not understand it. He wasn’t depressed; his career was going better than ever. “He said ‘Why are you depressed? You have everything, you have money, you have the children, you have this house, you have me’.”
His reaction to Jane’s misery didn’t help; he turned it into a song – ‘Dépressive’. And he got her to sing it on her 1978 album Ex-Fan Des Sixties.
“It wasn’t a very good song,” said Jane, “because it didn’t feel like me. He didn’t understand that the outside me didn’t correspond with the inside at all. Then someone came along who understood how unhappy I was.” Jacques Doillon, an acclaimed young film director whom Jane first met in the summer of 1979 after Anne-Marie Berri, the wife of director-producer Claude Berri, had suggested that the two work together. They did the following year, in Doillon’s fine film La Fille Prodigue (The Prodigal Daughter). First Jane fell in love with his films; then she fell in love with Doillon. He was already in love with her.
In 1980, Jane moved out of the black museum and into a hotel with the filmmaker. “But I was ready to go – I think it didn’t really matter who came by at that moment. I suppose it was my age or something. I was 34, 35, and I had only ever known two men, John Barry and Serge, and he was 20 years older and had known me since I was 19 or 20, practically a child. You’re always expected to be the same and all of a sudden you weren’t. I thought, ‘Nobody’s ever going to understand me. I don’t want to be a doll anymore’.”
Serge’s reaction to her departure was perfectly Sergesque. He wrote a song about the man who had taken her away from him, ‘Vieille Canaille/You Rascal You’. And he showed up at the hotel with a gift for Jane, a silver Porsche convertible – his way of apologising, perhaps, for not having been able to understand. And he took the blame for everything – telling everyone that it had been his shortcomings that had driven her away.
“He told everyone that I’d left because he was so impossible, because he drank so much, because he bashed me up – that’s the sort of mythology he put about. Perhaps it was easier to take it that way. And he then based all the rest on the mythology of a sort of eternal love that he would have for you, and he had me moulded in bronze in his sitting room.”
One afternoon Serge took Jane off to a sculptor’s studio. She was led to a glass booth, like the one where she had sung ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’, and the assistant poured in the material to make the mould.
“I remember very well being stuck in that telephone booth with two little heels that I was supposed to stand on as they shot in a lot of jelly stuff to model my body exactly. They were going to send up compressed air from the heels which was going to liberate the body from it, but I’d slipped off the heels – because the weight of jelly was so violent – which meant that I was stuck in a whole lot of jelly and when they sent the air through it just made a lot of rude noises. Whereupon some inspired person said, ‘Let’s do her head’, and I said, ‘Under no circumstances. You can make the head up later’. Once they’d pulled me out, I was covered everywhere with what looked like love-bites, because the jelly had stuck. And then they filled the mould up with a sort of plastic; I’d been weighed before so it filled it exactly.
“It’s still there, at Serge’s house. He took the head off – it was a very silly head they made later, so he was quite right to do so – and then he cut the arms and legs off because they didn’t look particularly attractive. Then Serge rang me up after I was living in the Rue de la Tour and said, ‘You’ve got blisters – or your statue has. It’s like Dorian Gray! I’m going to file it down and have it dipped into bronze’. And so he did.”
When Jane walked out, Serge called after her, “Jacques will make you into a nobody!” But Serge made her into a flawless, nude, unchangeable work of art, something that time or circumstances could never corrupt. With her legs cut off, the Jane de Milo would have no way of running; without a head, his Perfect Jane could never conceive of such an idea.
In an interview he gave Rock & Folk back in the mid 1970s, Serge had said: “If Jane leaves me, it wouldn’t hold together any more. I am a very cold being, very suppressed, and suppressed passions, when they explode, are the most terrible.”
Initially, Kate had told Jane she wanted to stay with Papa; she didn’t think he could look after himself, and she was probably right. After Jane left, said Philippe Lerichomme, “he changed a lot. Of course he did.” A long pause. “They both made a choice: she decided to leave, but he decided to stay alone as well. He liked that too, to be alone. He had a sad side to him. And to have been abandoned like that – it was somehow heroic for him, to be brave in the face of solitude. I think there was something of that to it – something poetic, something very Slavic, tragic, but a heroic sort of tragedy.
“He once said something that explained everything. If you take a camera and aim it at the sky and the weather’s great, the sky is blue, everything’s wonderful and sunny, you look at the photo and there’s nothing there, it’s just blank. But on a stormy day when there’s lots of clouds, you take a photo then and you’ll have something. And for him it was like that. The fact that Jane left and he missed her gave him the storms and the clouds that allowed him to create something wonderful.”
It also allowed him to create something rather less wonderful: his dissipated, alcoholic alter ego Gainsbarre.
L’enfant
Self portrait
La Revolte Des Esclaves
Serge at work.
Chez Serge
With B.B. on the Bardot Show
Serge and Jane
The Masterpiece
Serge and Jane demonstrate La Décadanse
Serge as crooner
Serge and Jane en famille
call to Armes in Kingston, Jamaica
At the birth of Freggae
Au naturel
With Catherine Deneuve on the set of Je Vous Aime
Serge and Bambou
Serge and Charlotte
With lolycéenne Vanessa Paradis
Chapter 14
THE ART OF FARTING
Jane had gone, Serge was shattered, yet at the same time his star had never shone so brightly. To his record company’s astonishment – and to his own enormous satisfaction – the odd cult artist that they had pretty much left to his own devices since they had no idea how to market him, was suddenly outselling his unquashable label-mate Johnny Hallyday. The success, and subsequent scandal, of Serge’s 1979 album Aux Armes Et Caetera had a knock-on effect on the back catalogue. First to be re-examined and elevated to gold album status were his two concept album masterpieces Histoire De Melody Nelson and L’Homme À Tête De Chou. A live album – Au Théatre Le Palace (At The Palace Theatre) – recorded with his “rastas” in Paris and released in 1980, ensured that the media attention continued. A good time, all in all, to publish his first – and only – novella: a quasi-autobiography set to, as he put it, “a soundtrack of farts”.
Evguénie Sokolov is an erudite, tragi-comic tale of how a young man transcends suffering – in this case violent intestinal gas – by harnessing it to art and becoming in the process a huge success. Being Serge, it operates on a number of levels: an exposure of the often vile depths from which exquisite art can be created, an examination of the duality of the human condition (à la Vu De L’Extérieur), and an astute comment on fame and how successful artists are adulated for producing, quite literally sometimes, shit.
That last thought had become a popular subject with Serge in press interviews. “Records, TV, newspapers, having an impact on millions of kids, it’s hallucinatory,” he told one journalist. “A painting by Raphael will never sell as many tickets as Michael Jackson – never. Hallucinatory – a minor art screwing a major art up the arse.”1
The way his producer Philippe Lerichomme saw it, Serge didn’t really believe that what he was doing was ‘minor’: “It was just a game; when he died on 2nd March and we were going to leave on the 20th March for New Orleans, it wasn’t in order to paint pictures.” Perhaps not, but there was still something about Serge of the painter manqué, the would-be great artist who found himself feted for the lesser – and as he saw it less artistically significant – skill of writing pop songs.
Which is not an uncommon stance. Over the years, this writer has interviewed a number of successful, sometimes brilliant, rockstars who have expressed similar discontentment, and have tried their hand at writing novels, making films, taking photos or painting pictures, usually with unfortunate results. Being natural songwriters, they belittle what comes to them so easily on the presumption that something that takes such little effort can’t be valid art. Although Serge had always made it patently clear that for him the frontiers between audio and visual, music, film and writing, simply did not exist, it was only his music that was lauded. It was a situation that the publication of Evguénie Sokolov, sadly, was not about to alter.
The story opens in a hospital where the narrator, lying in a shit-stained bed surrounded by buzzing flies, looks back over his life and the part played in it by the particularly odiferous and incessant wind he had been stricken with since birth. As a young schoolboy, by dint of an innocent face and a carefully placed, muting finger, he had avoided too many repercussions. But as he grew up, life as a farter had become increasingly more complex. It was not helped by his burgeoning sexuality. At the art school he attended, inflamed by the sight of nude models in the life-drawing class, he was obliged to visit a prostitute for oral relief, then farted at the poor girl as he climaxed. He was called up for military service, where the officers took his flatulence as insubordination and packed him off to military camp; but the rank and file admired his farting skills and he became so popular in the army he was almost sad to return to civilian life,
Back home he tried to distance himself from the vile-smelling gas by getting a bulldog to blame it on. And he continued painting pictures, if none too successfully. He’d had to take a job as a comic-strip artist to make money, an illustrated story about a superhero propelled through the air by his own farts. Then one day, when his body was shaken by a particularly powerful emission, he looked at the canvas and saw that the electrical tremors it had sent down his arm to his paintbrush had produced something magnificent. Just as the surrealists had devised the technique of ‘automatic writing’, Sokolov had invented automatic painting. Constructing a device that controlled the timbre and intensity of the fart, he set about producing a series of what he termed ‘gasograms’, which sold for fortunes and made him a star.
With his new-found wealth he bought a Bentley, hired a black valet, wore the best English jackets and American jeans. When, one terrible day, his farts stopped coming, he read up furiously on all matters intestinal and added so much fibre to his diet that he had to wear a protective mask just to be around himself. Even if fame and art were suffocating him, he needed them both to live.
The critics adored him; “They talked of hyperabstraction, formal mysticism, mathematical certitude, philosophical tension… and certain others mystification, bluff and crap. Three-quarters of my works were sold in two weeks, most of them to Americans, Germans and Japanese.” Women loved him too. He became promiscuous to avoid becoming so close to a woman that she would discover his secret. This only earned him a reputation as a great seducer (though he knew himself to be a misogynist; had been since he first set eyes on the nude art-school models with their varicoloured pubic hair and, on one memorably repugnant occasion, a protruding tampon string). The first time he ever felt love was for an underage deaf-mute girl with an underdeveloped sense of smell. In his dreams he fantasised about recording his farts and turning them into a full symphony.
But eventually his intestinal problems led to hospitalisation: two rectal operations and an attempted suicide (by attaching a rubber hose to his gas mask and the other end up his behind). The third operation killed him. At his funeral two days later, the lid blew off his coffin when a passer-by lit up a cigar, igniting the gas that still orbited his body. “Sokolov had just passed his last anal sigh, his final, poisonous, posthumous flatulence to the memory of man.” (My translation; I have since discovered the existence of a 1998 English-language version by John and Doreen Weightman, which boasts an afterword by Russell Mael of Sparks).
Anyone with an I-Spy Book Of Gainsbourg would have spotted any number of autobiographical moments. Serge himself referred to it in an interview with an art magazine as “an autobiography with distortions – horrific distortions which recall the manner of Francis Bacon”.2 His book – like his house, for that matter – was a fusion of Serge, Dali and Huysmans. The formal, straight-faced writing of Evguénie Sokolov aped the style of the fin de siècle Decadent. And since Dali’s autobiography was appended with a novella-length essay titled ‘The Art Of Farting’, one can’t help but suspect an homage or (like the pocketing of those pictures on his visit to Dali’s apartment with Elisabeth) a shameless, if artistically motivated, theft.
Serge and Dali had always had a good deal in common. Dali, like Serge, had become a connoisseur of Paris’s brothels on one of his first visits to the city. They shared an interest in scatology (something Dali referred to as “a terrorising element”), with Serge’s song about shit-encrusted underwear echoing Dali’s early painting of the figure similarly clad. Both Serge and Dali had a fascination with America, Hitler, films, fame, provocation and porn. (From time to time, Dali would organise an illegal Super 8 porn-film screening at the Meurice Hotel. Serge would go along – with Jane once; she didn’t like it enough to go back a second time; and even Serge admitted to watching with one hand over his eyes.) Book critics, however, failed to pick up on any such artistic or literary references. When Evguénie Sokolov was reviewed at all, it was generally along the lines of Annette Colin Simard’s critique: “It is Gainsbourg’s first novel and, let’s hope, the last one he will write. The grossness of its subject is beyond the imagination. As for talent, absolutely none.”3
