Serge Gainsbourg- a Fistful of Gitanes Page 2
The photos show a tiny baby with a bar-code of black hair and dark, sleepily hooded eyes; a miniature of his father, who was still out playing piano in Parisian theatres and clubs by night, and by day playing the upright that had pride of place in the apartment. Lulu and Liliane really had no choice but to suck in the music that surrounded them as if it were just another flavour of milk. And there was quite a selection: up-to-the minute stuff, like American-in-Paris Cole Porter, and American Russian-Jew George Gershwin (Joseph would play ‘Rhapsody In Blue’ by heart), as well as the classics – Bach, Scarlatti, Vivaldi and, always, Joseph’s beloved Chopin. Lulu absorbed it all, and started playing piano, rudimentarily, himself, even before Joseph imposed the same mandatory lessons on the twins when they reached the age of four that their older sister had endured. The lessons continued when the pair started school – every day, an hour a day, as soon as they got home and before they started their homework.
He was a strict father, Serge would recall later, and quite the disciplinarian, which counterbalanced Olia’s obvious doting on her little boy. (“My mother adores me, idolises me” he told French magazine Actuel).1 When Lulu misbehaved, he’d get a belt across his bare buttocks from Joseph, who would always apologise afterwards, sentimentally, extravagantly, unable to bear that the boy would think him cruel. It was one of several things Lucien inherited from his father, along with his easy flair for music and a talent for art. But there was no murmur of rebellion: Lucien was a good boy and, like Jacqueline, very smart, good at his studies. He loved school, even if he was a shy timid child, small for his age and sometimes mistaken for a girl. Easily scared, Lucien would not go to sleep unless his big sister looked behind the curtains to check no-one was hiding.
The steady improvement in income from Joseph’s work spurred a move in the mid 1930s to a bigger flat on Rue Caulaincourt in the 18th arondissement. They were now a stone’s throw from music business mecca S.A.C.E.M (Société Des Auteurs-Compositeurs, the Writers-Composers Society ) and a convenient ten minutes walk from the marché des musiciens (musician’s market) in the Pigalle. Every evening at around five or six o’clock, Joseph would join the other musicians who gathered there in the hope of being hired for the night – a negative-image of the Mexican labourers in Los Angeles who’d congregate at the same hour of morning in search of a day’s work. The improved lifestyle also brought Joseph and his wife the means to more easily indulge their profound love of Art. Art, wrote Joseph in his memoirs, for him had a capital A. Back in Russia, before he had become a musician, Joseph had planned to be an artist. He would paint all the time, until a fateful day when, travelling on the Trans-Siberian railway, the portrait he carried with him of a girl he had once loved passionately from afar, was stolen. In dramatic Slav fashion he swore he would not touch a paintbrush again, and he never did. Instead the couple went to every exhibition they could, hung framed art prints on the apartment wall, and took pride in their son’s burgeoning artistic abilities.
Musical, artistic, intelligent – the one missing element separating Lucien Ginsburg and Serge Gainsbourg was girls. But patience, he was getting there. It was the summer of 1936 and the family were on a seaside holiday. Lucien was eight years old. Playing in the sand, humming along to the music playing over the tannoy – which he recognised as Charles Trenet, whose irrepressible, ebullient varieté songs (‘Boum’, for instance, which cineastes might recognise from Toto The Hero) were wildly popular in the optimistic period before the Second World War – he looked up and saw a pretty girl walking across the beach. The combination of the girl’s beauty, the warmth of the sun shot through with the breeze off the sea, and the musical accompaniment fused in him like a nuclear reaction. At that very moment, he would later claim, he acquired a taste for female beauty that would remain tattooed inside him, inextricably linked with sensuality, visual image, and the sound of music. This seaside aesthetics lesson would develop further over the coming years, especially when his father performed in increasingly upmarket resort areas like Deauville and Biarritz. Lucien, getting his first real visions of luxury, witnessed what wealth could add to taste.
It was a secure, structured childhood – remarkably so for an immigrant family with a musician as head of the household – and, as he often told Jane, a happy one. “When I came over to Paris to do my first film and met Serge, he used to take me to all these incredible places in Pigalle where the men were all dressed up as women and he said, ‘It’s where my father used to play’. And he always used to say that the big fête in the house was on the first of January because on New Year’s Eve his father would play all those joints until three in the morning and he would come back – in a marvellous mood, because people gave him big tips – with paper hats and confetti and blowers and the children would wake up to that.”
For some years now, Joseph had fronted his own orchestra, Les Blue Star Boys. But before long, it would be a yellow star that had the biggest impact on the Ginsburg family’s life.
✽ ✽ ✽ ✽ ✽ ✽
When France declared war on Germany in the summer of 1939, Lucien did not really notice. He was 11 years old, and the family had left Paris to live in Dinard on the Normandy coast, a resort where Joseph had landed a long residency. For Lulu it was one big summer holiday – not as exciting as when his father had a six-month assignment in Algiers and took his wife and children to be with him, perhaps – but Dinard had the bonus of a huge bonfire and fireworks display. Or that’s how the sight of British troops setting fire to the coastal petrol reserves appeared to the boy at the time. But back in Paris by the following summer, things were very different. The Germans had taken the city. Government-sanctioned anti-semitism was officially launched. A law was passed requiring all Jews to register. The practical Olia hadn’t wanted to, but Joseph insisted that since they were now French – which despite their strong Russian accents and taste for borscht and vodka he considered them to be – they should respect their adoptive country’s laws. There were murmurs among the Jewish community of disappearances; work – especially in the more visible jobs like journalism, art, theatre – was becoming harder for Jews to get as graffiti appeared across the city accusing them of stealing Frenchmen’s jobs. The Ginsburgs didn’t live in a Jewish community, they didn’t keep a kosher house or go to synagogue; for a while at least, Joseph must have thought he was immune. Certainly life went on for the family with some semblance of normality. Joseph was still being paid to play piano at the Cabane Cubaine, and was earning enough to encourage his son’s growing interest in painting by enrolling him in an art school in Montmartre.
Lulu’s first year at the Academy coincidentally encouraged another of his growing interests. At the age of 13, he was too young to attend the nude life-drawing class but, passing by an open door one day, he saw the female model taking off her clothes. Hiding behind it he gazed, open-mouthed, at what he called her “striptease”. It was absolutely overwhelming – whatever ‘it’ was. “I told myself, ‘Something must happen with a girl, I just don’t know what it is’,” he told Bayon – the French author and journalist who published a book of two extraordinary interviews he did with Gainsbourg on the subjet of sex and death, Mort Ou Vices.2 He was still a complete sexual innocent, he said. His father hadn’t told him anything about the facts of life; the nearest to anything of a personal nature he’d imparted had been instructions on how to aim when pissing by keeping a firm grip on his zizi. When Joseph caught his son using the technique to different effect, aided by the airbrushed photos of women in the tame men’s mag of the time, Paris-Hollywood, he merely ordered him to stop at once without any explanation why.
It was lucky Joseph hadn’t told his son that wanking made you ill, otherwise the future érotomane might have turned out very differently. Because, not long after, Lulu was struck with a mystery illness, wasting away to a bag of bones. For a while it looked like he would go the way of his brother, until France’s leading paediatrician – Olia was not going to settle for anything less for her darling boy – said that his only hope was to leave Paris and take the cure in the countryside. Not easy when the latest round of anti-semitic measures had banned Jews from travelling in trains (although, within the city limits, the last carriage of every metro had considerately been reserved for their exclusive use) or leaving town. But somehow the Ginsburgs managed, setting up temporary home on a farm in Courgenard – without Joseph, who was in Paris, earning the money to keep them there.
But while Lulu got better, Paris got worse. In 1942 the government issued the directive that all Jews over the age of six had to wear a yellow star – the size of a hand with ‘Juif ’ written on it in black – clearly visible on their outer garments whenever they left the house. “His father would make them iron them so that they would look clean and proper for the French government,” said Jane. “Serge would say that wearing the Jewish star was like being the sheriff and that he’d grown up under a good star, yellow.” He might have joked about it later, but in truth it cut the sensitive adolescent to the core. “For me,” he said in an interview more than 30 years later, “it is indelible. A young boy wearing the star – it was like you were a bull, branded with a red-hot iron.”3 It was a humiliation; a sign to everyone to see that you were part of a powerless group, officially despised, increasingly vilified in the press and open to physical attack from strangers. “Even at 13, 14 years old, I had already become an outsider, because the tough guy thing wasn’t me.” He fled into a smoky fantasy world of literature and cheap cigarettes (a heavy adolescent P4 habit – the French equivalent of Players No 6). “By reading the great story-tellers, Perrault, Grimm, Anderson, Hoffman”, he said, “I had already escaped.”
In Serge’s memory of the sheriff ’s badge years, the French were worse than the Germans. At least, he
reasoned, les Boches were only acting under orders. He remembered that day at the Art Academy – a safe haven of sanity in all the madness going on around it – and sitting in a classroom, drawing, right next to a German officer. Despite the yellow star, his fellow student gave him no trouble – quite the opposite, there was a sense of camaraderie, until they left the building and he stiffened back up into a German officer. And he spoke with bitterness of the way some of his father’s fellow-musicians had begun to treat him, telling him, “‘You, you’ve no right to be in this orchestra – you’re a Jew, get lost.’ They just wanted to take his place.”4 In the end they had their way. When an 8pm curfew was imposed on Jews, working as a nightclub pianist in Paris was impossible for Joseph. In desperation, he and another Jewish musician decided to illicitly make for the free zone in the South West.
After a long and dangerous journey, Joseph eventually made it to Limoges. He started working with a five-piece orchestra and sent money home via a network of friends and supporters. For almost eighteen months the family lived their separate lives, until one day a package arrived with false papers. The Guimbards, as they would now have to call themselves, should take the train, like any good gentile French family, and join him at his apartment on the Rue des Combes in the centre of Limoges.
Despite the risk of being caught, Olia was delighted to be leaving Paris. The food shortages were getting so bad that she had hidden her star in order to take a train to the countryside to get provisions for the children, and was very nearly arrested in the process. “She had worked out a way of putting little pins in the star so that she would pull a thread underneath her coat and all the pins would fall out so that she could go to the opera”, said Jane, “because otherwise Jews weren’t allowed in. She tried it when she was going out to buy food and a French policeman caught her and said, ‘The next time you do that you’re going to go straight into the train’.” Olia’s brother – the children’s Uncle Michel – had gone into the train, winding up in Auschwitz, where he died. The deportations had increased, with Jacqueline very nearly among them.
Their journey to the South West, it turned out, was quite uneventful. There was an ecstatic reunion, and once again the family adjusted to a temporary new home. But even there they had to be careful what they did and who they spoke to. The Gestapo turned up at the apartment one day to check their papers and, knowing that the forgeries wouldn’t stand up under close inspection, Olia had slipped them under the oilskin kitchen tablecloth where she sat on them, brazening it out and inviting them to search the place. Jacqueline’s declaration that she wanted to join the Resistance didn’t help matters – “much to their mother’s horror”, said Jane. “If it wasn’t already dangerous enough being Jewish, to have her rush off and very possibly fall in love with someone from the Resistance – but she was the right age. So that was clamped down on immediately.” Jacqueline and Liliane were sent off to a convent, while Lulu was packed off to a small free-school a dozen miles from Limoges.
One day, Lucien’s headmaster learned that the military were coming back to make checks. He gave the boy an axe and sent him off to hide in the woods, telling him that if anyone should find him he should say he was the woodsman’s son. “He said it was most exciting, like playing Robin Hood,” said Jane. “He used to tell me he was hiding up this tree for a week, and I would imagine him up there with the children coming by with little food hampers for Serge, pretending they were going off on a picnic, but then Jacqueline said ‘Oh, he was only up there for one night’. He romanticised many things.”
Then, as every biographer knows, truth is an all too malleable concept, and doubly so with celebrities with a public history and image. Memory accidentally rearranges events; interviews often do it deliberately, and artists raised on fairy-tales do it better than anybody. So this is as good a place as any for an authorial declaration that any attempt, however sincere, however painstaking the detective work, to paint a completely faithful portrait of someone else’s life is bound to end up more like a clumsy line-drawing, complete with spattered ink.
In 1944, the City of Lights was liberated and the Ginsburgs returned, slotting back as much as possible into their old way of life. But things had changed irrevocably for 16-year-old Lucien, when he went back to his old high school. Bad grades. Bad attitude. He had become a loner; he no longer felt part of the system. When he was in infant school they had given him a medal for being top of the class; he had worn it in the streets with pride; when he was at the lycée and equally good, they had given him a yellow star, which could have sent him to the camps.
It would be 30 years before he revisited the sherrif ’s badge era on Rock Around The Bunker. And, when he did, his approach was not pained or tortured but mischievous, scatological and caustically ironic. Nazibilly songs about Hitler, Eva and the Stormtroopers set to 50s American rock ’n’ roll – wonderfully adolescent, a throwback to the age he was when he wore the yellow star. But the jokes were balanced with a black cover that bore a scrawled self-portrait. “I have never forgotten,” he said, “that I ought to have died in 1941, ’42, ’43 or ’44.”5
But he had survived: the war, tuberculosis, the near-abortion. Life was a precarious business, and too short to waste in school. So he quit, just before his final exams (in later versions he would say they expelled him for bad behaviour). He was going, he announced to his family, to be an artist.
Chapter Two
DEATH OF A HAIRDRESSER
In 1945, the same year that he declared his intention to devote his life to art, Lucien lost his virginity. Alighting the metro at Barbès, he set off nervously to look for a prostitute. In addition to his natural shyness and timidity was an added element of guilt from having cadged the money from his unsuspecting mother. “The first ones he approached laughed at him and told to come back when he was old enough,” said Jane. “Well he was old enough.” Seventeen, but looking years younger, with not even the merest hint that he might one day need to shave.
The next group of women intimidated him so badly that he wound up picking the ugliest one who, on a grubby bed in a grubby room, chewed gum through the entire transaction. He found the experience so disgusting that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, climax, waiting until he was home to take the matter in hand. Hardly surprising that he should later describe sex as “onanisme, par personne interposée”.1
And yet there was something about paying for sex that appealed to Lucien and over the coming years he would continue to visit prostitutes, claiming to have had an affectionate relationship with several, even if only one of them had ever told him he was any good. “They mocked him,” said Jane, “and he suffered terribly from that. So his vengeance later was to have the most beautiful girls in France.”
There were plenty of beautiful women at the École Supérieure Des Beaux-Arts, the prestigious art school in which his father had enrolled him. (Although his decision to quit high school had horrified Olia, who saw her darling boy’s future as a doctor or lawyer at the very least, it appeared to have stirred some latent painterly gene in Joseph.) If Lucien was slow on the uptake – by his own words a ‘late starter’, guaranteed by an almost puritanical attitude towards his body and a firm conviction of his ugliness – by 1947, two years into his studies, he had found a personne interposée that he didn’t have to pay.
Although his attempts at an affair with an 18-year-old Russian aristocrat classmate – Olga Tolstoy, granddaughter of the celebrated writer – had ended in dismal failure, Lucien somehow found the confidence to approach another Russian aristocrat who was two years older than him (the same age difference that separated Joseph and the older Olia). Elisabeth Levitsky, a part-time model, was not only beautiful, thus answering Lucien’s strict aesthetic requirements (“Painting has always been inextricably mixed into my sexual life,” he said. “I’ve always had an eye”),2 she was also more sexually forthcoming than La Tolstoy (of which, more later).
Elisabeth worked as secretary to the French surrealist poet Georges Hugnet, a friend of Salvador Dali. Dali’s apartment on the Rue De L’Université was left unoccupied while the artist and his wife Gala were back at their home in Spain, and Hugnet had been given a set of keys to keep an eye on the place. Somehow Lucien and Elisabeth appropriated the keys and, on one delirious night that stayed tattooed in his memory, fucked in Dali’s all-black living-room – its walls and ceiling covered in astrakhan, the curly black material used on old-fashioned coat collars – on a pile of priceless artworks by Miro, Ernst, Picasso and their unwitting host, scattered on the floor. Lucien left the apartment with a Gitane clamped between his lips, a future wife, a firm idea of the ideal in decor, a small black-and-white picture stolen from Dali’s porn collection of two young girls eating each other out, and a reinforced belief that surrealism was the finest artistic movement there ever was.