Oh Jane, je t’aime!
From being teased for looking like a boy to recording the sexiest song in the world... Birkin’s enchanting diaries reveal how a British girl became a French superstar
When Jane Birkin was born, at the end of 1946, her mother wanted to call her Georgia na, after the famous duchess, but her father thought it sounded a bit snobbish. ‘Why not Jane, like the sexy strip cartoon in the Mirror?’ he suggested.
It clearly had an effect. By the late 1960s, Birkin had become what used to be called a sex symbol, particularly in France, where she lived. ‘Jane Birkin was the Parisian’s ideal of the sweet, toothy, naughty English girl,’ wrote the journalist Ray Connolly, who interviewed her at the time, ‘and she made a succession of French movies in which, like the cartoon character Jane, she inevitably lost her clothes.’
Now in her 70s, she has decided to publish her diaries, which she kept, on and off, from the age of 11. They are called Munkey Diaries because she used to address them (‘Dear Munkey...’) to her favourite toy, a monkey her uncle had won in a tombola. ‘He slept by my side, sharing the sadness of boarding school, hospital beds and my life with John, Serge and Jacques,’ she writes in the preface.
John is her first husband, the film composer John Barry (Born Free, Goldfinger, etc), whom she married when she was only 18 and divorced barely three years later, with little love lost. Serge is Serge Gainsbourg, the dishevelled French superstar, who was her boyfriend throughout the 1970s, and with whom she recorded the scandalous Je T’Aime... Moi Non Plus, and Jacques is Jacques Doillon, the film director for whom she left Gainsbourg in 1980.
Birkin has led an extraordinarily glamorous life, meeting everyone from Bette Davis and Brigitte Bardot to Bertrand Russell and Graham Greene, but her diaries, clearly never intended for publication, more often than not jettison descriptions of film sets and parties in favour of more personal reflections, often in moments of angst. ‘The reader will be surprised, as I was, to see how little I talk about my professional life. I hardly mention the films, the plays – not even the songs. When people die, I talk about it months later – the happy times I was too busy living.’
She has mislaid some of her diaries – for example, the whole of 1969, which was the pivotal year in her life, when she recorded Je T’Aime and became a sex symbol. At such times she provides frank commentaries to fill in the gaps. For instance, when it comes to 1969, she relates how Je T’Aime was banned by the Pope and the BBC, affronted by its heavy breathing, and consequently climbed to No 1 in the charts. ‘Last year, The Guardian elected Je T’Aime... Moi Non Plus as the sexiest song in the world,’ she says, adding, ‘When I played it to my parents I lifted the needle every time I started to breathe and, as they didn’t understand the text, they thought the melody was very sweet. My brother arrived and put on the whole song. My parents were stoic. My father defended me in front of all his friends, and my mother continued to say that it was the prettiest tune in the world.’
From the start, her tone is engaging and endearing and full of insecurities. Aged 12 at boarding school, she mentions that she has been crying in chapel. ‘I have done everything wrong, I have approached everything in the wrong way.’
Like many a schoolgirl, she undergoes extreme swings, from boredom to high jinks to misery, with frequent bouts of self-doubt. One Monday, she makes her friend Sylvia an apple-pie bed. A few days later, she notes, ‘I have been crying again, I am a horrid crybaby.’ The next day, she wonders, ‘Am I really alive? Is this all a dream?... Susan’s dream? Or perhaps God’s?’ On the Saturday, ‘Diana is being beastly’, and the following Wednesday is, ‘Dull dull, very dull.’ Ten days later, ‘Linda was wearing lipstick and powder tonight. I tried to lick a red Smartie to make it look like lipstick but it was no good.’
I love all this sort of thing. Others may find entries like, ‘I came second in the potato race ... Mrs Sanderson has given me two disobedience marks’ a touch pedestrian, but to me they are wonderfully funny and poignant. Aged 14, she is teased by her fellow schoolgirls for being flat-chested. ‘You’re a boy not a girl,’ they say. To remedy this she tries chanting, ‘I must I must improve my bust,’ but all to no avail.
Nonetheless, there are soon signs that she is becoming increasingly attractive to the opposite sex, particularly after she wears a pink checked bikini on the Isle of Wight, ‘trying my hardest to look alluring, like a mermaid’. Accordingly, a boy called John tells her that cider is non-alcoholic and keeps trying to fill her glass. Soon she is being courted by a number of boys, but her heart belongs to Cliff. ‘Cliff Richard to me is perfect ... I would marry him like a shot if he asked me, but he wouldn’t.’
If only fate had taken a different turn, we might have been able to enjoy Jane duetting with Cliff on Je T’Aime. Or perhaps, life being what it is, we would have been condemned to Cliff and Jane’s rendition of Mistletoe And Wine.
Aged 16, still unknown, she is chased down the streets of Paris by paparazzi, who are convinced she is the pin-up star Françoise Hardy (‘I suppose I do look a bit like her’). Aged 17, she gains a West End role as a deafand-dumb girl who, after being seduced by a doctor, is squashed by a bus and left for dead. Soon she is wearing tight jeans and frequenting trendy nightclubs. In the Ad Lib Club she meets John Barry, a 30-year-old who drives an E-Type Jaguar. ‘He’s much older than me,’ she notes in her diary, ‘which is wonderful.’ He asks her to marry him. Her parents try to stop it, but they go ahead with it.
Within a matter of months the marriage is
IT’S A FACT Serge Gainsbourg first recorded Je T’Aime... Moi Non Plus in 1967 with his lover, Brigitte Bardot, but she begged him not to release it in case it harmed her career.
coming apart. ‘I suddenly have energy, and he hasn’t, poor thing, and he tells me to be quiet, and then I cry and I am stupid.’ Soon he has lost interest. ‘I’m 19 and I feel old. One bit of love-making, just one, can make me so happy, but he hasn’t the time.’
But there are plenty of other men who find her gorgeous. At a party, Warren Beatty says he likes her, and then he rings her to tell her that Charlie Chaplin likes her too. The director Michelangelo Antonioni asks her to appear naked in his film Blow-Up, and she says yes.
In 1968 she auditions for Serge Gainsbourg, who she thinks is ‘ cold, distant, but not exactly hostile’. But later, on the dance floor, she realises he is only shy. Brigitte Bardot has just left him, and he still wears her wedding ring, but he takes it off for Jane.
In their bathroom in Saint Tropez, Jane’s mother spots ‘JE T’AIME JE T’AIME JE T’AIME SERGE’ written in steam on the bathroom mirror. Very soon – ‘almost immediately’ – she and Serge become an item. Their lifestyle is almost impossibly risqué and glamorous, taking in Venice, Paris, Kathmandu and Cannes. By 1970, ‘We’re the couple of the year.’ By now, directors are queuing to offer Jane roles in their films, though these parts tend to be much of a muchness. One such film is called Nineteen Girls And A Sailor. ‘Serge, of course, was the sailor, and
I was one of the nurses who, on going for a swim naked in a lake, attracted the attention of all the Nazis, which allowed Serge to rush round the back of them with a machine gun and kill them all.’
They record any number of sexy songs together. In 1973 a magazine praises her small breasts for their sexiness, which is one in the eye for her old tormentors at school. ‘It made my day! How lovely, now no more complexes – much!’
Her relationship with Serge is passionate and tempestuous, though their rows are not only fuelled by sexual jealousy. One day, Serge upbraids her for her messy room, yet ‘He is the one who’s filthy. No bath in four months at least and filthy black feet.’
By 1980, Jane has grown up, and Serge finds it hard to deal with. ‘I’m not the same. I refuse his powerful love, his orders, his superiority.’ She falls in love with Jacques, ‘a boy who I could talk to’. But it is clear that Serge will always have a place in her heart, because though he’s ‘such an egoist, such a silly jealous thing, such a dominating character’, he’s also funny, with ‘his naughty face, his wicked drinking, his sweet charm’.
Serge Gainsbourg died in 1991. Jane placed her beloved toy Munkey beside him in his coffin, ‘where he lay like a pharaoh. My monkey was there to protect him in the afterlife.’