The Pope condemned it,
After Jane Birkin left her husband with their daughter Kate in tow, she met the man who would change her life — French poet and provocateur Serge Gainsbourg. What followed for Jane was an extraordinary life and a tragic death that still haunts her,
and the BBC banned it from the airwaves, but it sold millions of copies. So how did Jane Birkin feel about singing ‘Je t’aime’ — the steamy song that her lover Serge Gainsbourg had originally written for his former girlfriend Brigitte Bardot?
Afew days ago, Jane Birkin was walking through a park near her home in Paris. Her eye was drawn to the hyacinths in bloom. “It’s springtime,” she thought, “those are the flowers I should put on Kate’s grave.” It is now seven years since her eldest daughter’s tragic death at the age of 46, but Jane thinks of her grave every time she sees flowers. And when she visits Montparnasse Cemetery where Kate is buried, her “imagination starts working as to what is underneath the ground”.
Birkin’s new album Oh! Pardon Tu Dormais takes as its subject the death of her daughter. Kate’s body was found in the courtyard 80 feet beneath her fourth-floor Paris apartment on Rue Claude-Chahu on December 11, 2013. Jane lived nearby.
In the song, ‘Catch Me If You Can’, Jane sings of her daughter’s final moments: “I’m falling fast, be aware/Take care.”
After Kate’s death, Jane heard a radio interview with the late Irish artist Francis Bacon. “They were saying to him that his paintings were violent. And he said, ‘Nothing like as violent as real life.’
“And Bacon was right,” she tells the Sunday Independent over Zoom. “In comparison to the day in the morgue where I was there with my daughters and her son — nothing is as violent as what we saw that day in the morgue.
“I have in my mind,” she says, “my brother’s tragedy with his son in 2001. He lost his son in a road accident in Italy. I remember seeing him on his knees in front of his son in the coffin. I was thinking that is the worst thing. To be witness to somebody else’s pain.
“And to see Kate’s son having to go through that was unbearable,” she says, referring to 26-year-old Roman, Kate’s child with Pascal Huon de Kermadec.
“Jane is laced with courage, interlaced with an equal measure of empathy for others,” her brother Andrew tells me. “Where others might have given up the struggle long ago, she boxes on against all odds.”
I ask her how she copes with the grief. “You don’t have to cope with it,” she says. “You have to wait for time just to go on... You don’t really want to get over it. People say, ‘turn over the page.’ You don’t want to. So, I wrote songs about her. Just to describe the mystery of finding her on the ground and not knowing. We’ll never know what happened. The four witnesses who couldn’t talk: the two cats, the dog and the parrot,” referring to Kate’s beloved pets.
Her album recalls happier moments too. ‘Jeux Interdits’ is inspired by memories of Kate and her half-sisters Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon when, as little girls, they played in the small graveyard beside Jane’s house in Normandy.
It was here that, for the sake of fairness, the three girls “swapped everything on the graves: the richest were dispossessed in favour of the more modest graves. To the dismay of the locals.”
You have to wait for time just to go on, you don’t really want to get over it. People say ‘turn over the page’, you don’t want to
In 1964, Jane’s father David Birkin was
dismayed when his 17-year-old daughter said she wanted to get married. The man she loved was John Barry, a film composer 13 years her senior, whose own father originally came from Cork. He would go on to write the film score for 11 Bond movies.
David Birkin, a former British spy in World War II, insisted that Jane should wait until she was 18 to see how the relationship panned out. She agreed and the couple were eventually married in London on October 16, 1965. Newsweek called Barry the man “with the E-type Jag and the E-type wife”.
“I had the flash husband with the flash car,” she laughs.
Jane was not exactly a wallflower. The
next year, she appeared nude in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up. There was uproar in England at the fact that the private-school educated Jane (whose godmother was Winston Churchill’s daughter Sarah) had revealed her pubic hair on film. In response, she sent her mother Judy, an actress, to watch Blow Up and then tell her if she had done “something shameful”.
Her mother returned with good news: “It’s just like children in the swimming pool.”
The following April, Jane gave birth to Kate. By then, her marriage was all but over. Did her pregnancy signal the end of the marriage?
“I can’t really remember,” she says.
She does remember reading her old diary from that time and says it was “plain that I was that housewife who had nothing to say for herself and just waited at home for John Barry to come home... and cook his favourite, Guinea Fowl, or his Turtle soup… to run his bath. And be absolutely heartbroken when he came home late.”
When that occurred more and more frequently, she says she would “make scenes all night long, asking him if he loved me and crying. He must have been so fed up, to have this child bride at home. “
She holds no bitterness towards him. “He was the only thing in my life really. So, of course, I would make terrible scenes and break all the eggs in the sink and scratch my legs... It was sort of hysteria,” she says.
“John was funny in a very sarcastic way. Hurtful but humorous,” she says. “The jokes could sometimes be hurtful.”
That summer, Jane took Kate to Almeria in southeast Spain on a visit to her brother Andrew, a screenwriter who was working on a war movie called Play Dirty. While she was there, her father phoned to say John had gone to Rome. “I said, ‘Did he go alone?’ He said, ‘No.’”
Jane recalls Michael Caine, who starred in the movie, being “terribly sweet with Kate”. Less sweet was the ordeal to get back to London. “I was sick on the coast roads in Spain to the airport, and there were no through flights in those days.” When she finally got home, John was there, sitting in his “grand chair”. He said, “I think the time has come for us to go our separate ways.”
“I just walked out of the front door and never went back again,” says Jane.
He was having an affair?
“He left me for a friend of mine,” she says. “A very pretty girl.”
In 1968, the 21-year-old moved to France (without a word of French) with her baby Kate. She had landed a role in Pierre Grimblat’s Slogan. On the set of the film, she met the man who would change her life.
“He’s horrible!” she initially said of her co-star Serge Gainsbourg, who was 18 years her senior. But she would change her mind after an eventful night out in Paris.
They first had dinner in the legendary club Chez Regine’s, followed by dancing at Rasputine nightclub. Serge paid the musicians hundred Franc notes to play Sibelius’s ‘Valse Triste’ to Jane as they left. “He told them, ‘We’re all prostitutes.’”
Then he took her to Madame Arthur’s, a drag cabaret club. By dawn they were at a food market where Serge gave the butchers, covered in blood, champagne. They finished up at the Hilton hotel where the receptionist at the front desk asked: “Your usual room, Monsieur Gainsbourg?”
Once in the hotel room, Serge passed out on the bed. Jane was too excited to sleep. They were officially a couple and in love.
In February of the next year, they released their famously explicit duet, complete with authentically sexual moans,
‘Je t’aime... moi non plus’. The Pope condemned it, and the BBC banned it from the airwaves, but it sold millions of copies.
How did Jane feel singing the steamy song that Serge had originally written for his former lover Brigitte Bardot? “I didn’t want anyone else to sing it. I didn’t want
anyone else to get so close to him.”
What did her mother think of it? Judy famously once turned down a play because the word “f**k” was in the script.
“It was a Joe Orton play at the Royal Court [Theatre]. She turned it down because she didn’t want to let down my father’s family,” she says. “I played ‘Je t’aime...’ to my parents before it came out. I took it off before there was the heavy breathing part.
“But my parents stuck up for me because they were rather eccentric themselves. And what they thought of ‘Je t’aime...’ I have no idea, except that they were crazy about Serge, because after the disastrous marriage with John Barry, I think they were so relieved that somebody adored me.”
From the moment ‘Je t’aime...’ was
released, Jane and Serge were inextricably linked. Theirs was a bohemian love affair, one that placed Jane in the role of “beauty” to Serge’s “beast”. They were France’s Burton and Taylor, and a symbol of the hedonistic 1970s.
It was a fiery relationship. One drinkfuelled argument at Castel nightclub on the Left Bank started when Serge tipped Jane’s basket upside down — she didn’t carry a handbag until Hermes later created the Birkin bag for her. Furious, she threw a custard tart in his face. Even more furious, he got up and walked out.
Then, Jane says, she had “quite a dramatic idea”. She ran past Serge to the Seine nearby and down to the water’s edge. “I wasn’t going to jump in the water if he wasn’t going to come down the steps. It would have been a waste of time. So, as I saw him coming down, I darted out from behind a tree and just leapt into the Seine. The patrol police fished me out. I got him back. It was well worth it.”
Is it also true that Mick Jagger once threw a flaming liquor into her basket at a Paris nightclub?
“Yes. It must’ve been a lighted Sambuca.” Did her basket catch fire? “I really can’t remember, because we were all very pissed. It might have been Crème de Menthe or something really sticky.”
The stories would stretch credibility if you read them in a novel. But to hear Jane tell them in her cut-glass English accent makes them absolutely believeable.
Did the architect Albert Speer — a high-ranking Nazi who was part of Hitler’s inner circle — really ask for an autographed copy of ‘Je t’aime...’? “I think he did. And I think Serge did one [for him] as well. I was shocked.”
Is it also true that Serge wrote “Up yours!” or “F**k you!” in French on his copy?
“I have no idea.”
Andrew, who conducted 50 hours of interviews with Speers for a movie that never got made, confirms the story about the autograph. In his 2013 book Jane & Serge: A Family Album, he includes the story, saying that Serge — who was of Russian Jewish origin and was forced to wear the yellow star during the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940 — “delighted” in the perverse “irony”
I played ‘Je t’aime...’ to my parents before it came out. I took it off before there was the heavy breathing part
of Speer wanting him to sign something.
In 1969, Serge and Jane moved into a
house at 5 bis Rue de Verneuil in the 6th Arrondissement. Its design was an homage to artist Salvador Dali’s apartment which Serge had once visited in Montmartre.
“He saw that his walls were made of black astrakhan. So that’s what Serge used,” she says. “Dali’s bath was also very low. Serge had a bath made very low. The decor was sumptuous. It was like a museum. He had an 18th-century anatomical skeleton model. There was a viewfinder around its neck which Brigitte Bardot had given Serge.”
The house became as famous as its occupants. Serge and Jane would boast in interviews of coming home at dawn. He would sometimes get a lift home in the back of a police car before inviting the officers in to taste his English wife’s Lancashire Hotpot.
It was into this world that the couple’s daughter Charlotte was born in July, 1971, and that Kate was effectively brought up as Serge’s own daughter.
In the late 1970s, as Serge’s fondness for Pernod and other women became almost intolerable to Jane, she became involved with film director Jacques Doillon.
“If I left, I would always regret my exceptional life next to an exceptional man. But is it possible to live as a threesome?” she was quoted as saying. But she finally did leave Serge in 1981 while pregnant with Doillon’s child, though their connection continued — Lou was born in September 1981 and Serge became her godfather.
Charlotte and Kate had a difficult time at school because of their parents’ notoriety. One day, Jane recalls, someone threw a rock at Kate “because she had thrown one at them… because they had said that I was a prostitute.”
Jane was filming a movie with Jacques Doillon at the time and, “luckily, the lighting cameraman lived on the same floor as a plastic surgeon. So, I took Kate there so that she could have stitches that would not show on her forehead.”
It was years before Kate told Jane what the bullies had called her that day. “Children don’t say. They want to defend you.“
Kate’s youth was more difficult in some ways than Charlotte’s, says Jane. “Charlotte had the best of both worlds in that she had me on my own with Jacques Doillon, living in a family when I had Lou. And then she had her father to herself, going off in private airplanes... And the one that was left out was Kate, because she didn’t go off in the private airplanes. But she discovered John Barry.”
Her father John Barry came into her life late, says Jane. “When she was 12. She said she had ‘a father’, meaning John, and ‘a passion’ meaning Serge. With Kate, I think it was hard with John Barry to not be in his will. That was painful for her.”
Barry died in January 2011. Serge died in March 1991. Over his lifetime, he became one of France’s most-celebrated singer-songwriters and released over 30 albums. He might have been a provocateur who in 1986 on a live French chat show told Whitney Houston he wanted to ““f**k her”, but he “embodied a certain ideal of freedom”, as French culture mininster Jack Lang said on the night Gainsbourg died.
When Kate died in 2013, the light went
out of Jane’s life. Charlotte once said her mother was “gone for years. If you told her to come over, she would, but she didn’t talk, not to my children or to anyone.”
Perhaps her new album is a way of breaking that silence. The lyrics on ‘Catch Me If You Can’ refer to the last time she saw her daughter alive, two days before her death. It was at a soiree after a concert Jane had given at the Théâtre du Châtele.
“I have that image of her at the piano at the party,” she says. “She was there as delicate as always, smiling as always. She was a little wan, I thought, because she had done her demenagement... she had just moved out from her boyfriend.”
Jane invited her on “a little tour” she was doing. “It will be more fun with two people. She said no, she had rendezvous.”
Kate, says her mother, was an “exceptionally funny woman. She was a wonderful clown, with a great melancholy. Very Irish, I would think. Very like her father,” she says. “She was very up and very down.
“She also was a very compassionate person. So many people wrote to me: ‘She looked after me. She took me to the drug centre.’ An hour outside Paris, there is a drug centre and an alcoholic centre where you don’t have to pay — Kate set that up,” she says of Aid and Prevention for Addicts by Mutual Help. “So that drug addicts and people with alcohol problems could be helped like she had been helped in England.” Kate had undergone treatment for drug and alcohol addiction in London when she was 17.
“She was the most generous of souls.” When Jane was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2002, Kate sought out doctors for her. “She was terribly thorough for other people, and thoughtful. Another time when my mother broke her legs, Kate was there to help me get her to hospital. She came in [with] the jokes and the foam mattress so I could sleep on the ground in the hospital. She was a love of a girl.”
In her last exhibition, Kate — a photographer who had worked for Paris Match and Vogue and created campaigns for Dior — recorded a video. There was a close-up of Jane filmed that summer in which she had started to cry. “She used that, of me crying, along with her father John Barry’s film music. And I realised that children never get over their parents,” she says. “It’s a thing that was obviously the most important for her — as well as having Serge [as a stepfather]. Serge was also in the video.
“And after Kate died, I never dared watch it again.” However, the video stirred Jane to write ‘Catch Me If You Can’ — with “the idea”, she explains, “of coming back to your parents, to be safe again.” One line from the song was inspired by a Post-it note Kate had stuck in her diary. It read: “Happy like Ulysses between his parents.”
Jane is turning 75 this December, and
has lived in Paris now for over half a century: ever since 1968 when she found the courage to make a new life in a new country with a new baby.
“It didn’t take courage,” she says. “I got a kick in the bum. Thank goodness that I did because it changed my life. Had I gone on with John Barry — and had he stuck with me, but played around a bit, and we just stuck together — then I would never have come to France. I would never have met Serge. I would never have had the career that I’ve had for 50 years here. It’s extraordinary for somebody who was so unambitious and wanted to just be somebody’s wife.”
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