Inside Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s Storied Home
More than three decades after Serge Gainsbourg’s death, the “love nest for night owls” where he and Jane Birkin raised a family is at last opening to the public.
On March 2, 1991, Serge Gainsbourg went to sleep in his bed on the second floor of his house at 5 bis rue de Verneuil in Paris and never woke up. A second heart attack killed him at age 62. For all of France, his death was both shocking and unsurprising. Who couldn’t recite from memory at least some of the chiseled lyrics—at times playful, at times caustic, often outrageous—he’d written for himself and a string of women he’d worked with and slept with over the years? Gainsbourg bestrode the French cultural landscape like a broken-down colossus. “He was our Apollinaire, our Baudelaire,” wrote French president François Mitterand.
Gainsbourg’s body was discovered the following afternoon by the model and actress Bambou—his last companion, who no longer lived with him. Gainsbourg’s daughter Charlotte heard the news on TV and rushed over to the house. “He was dead, cold, and no one had touched him—I don’t think Bambou dared,” Charlotte remembers. “I didn’t even ask myself any questions, I just lay down next to him, side by side, like we were two small animals. A more sensible person might have said, No, that’s just not done. But I was 19 and no one could tell me what to do. He was my father.”
Charlotte Gainsbourg, 52, said she started dreaming about opening her childhood home to the public soon after her father’s death. It’s taken more than three decades of false starts, changes of heart and high melodrama to make it happen. The first visitors to 5 bis will arrive September 20 in groups of 10 at half-hour intervals. Tickets for the first 30,000 places sold out shortly after the opening date was announced.
She told me this while sitting on a plush velvet banquette in the bar and lounge in a separate Gainsbourg museum to open on the same day just across the street. The lounge will be called Gainsbarre, the name Serge Gainsbourg invented for his demonic alter ego.
Charlotte Gainsbourg looked a little gaunt and careworn as she spoke about what a struggle it’s been for her to get here. On top of that, Jane Birkin, Charlotte’s mother and Serge Gainsbourg’s great love, had been ailing. (She died two weeks later, at age 76.)
“It’s no accident it’s taken 32 years,” she says. “My relationship to my father during those years has been so complicated—not being able to really mourn him, to be in a house that always brings me back to 1991, where I have the feeling that he might come back. I’m not crazy, but I even refused to listen to his music or see photos or videos of him.
“These past few years, I had the feeling I’d become a real-estate agent, taking people up to his bedroom. I went to the limits of my immodesty. I can’t do it anymore. I’ve given whatever I could give.”
Just before arriving at Gainsbarre, I’d taken a guided tour quite unlike anything else. In a wispy narration, Charlotte leads you from overstuffed room to overstuffed room. An object here or there triggers a hushed confession about a memory lodged in her mind, such as the anatomical mannequin that scared the daylights out of her as a child. Charlotte Gainsbourg is an accomplished actress, but her voice is more raw and intimate than you’d expect. “Serge was an exhibitioniste timide, and the whole family is like that,” says Sébastien Merlet, whose exhaustive archival work laid the groundwork for the Gainsbourg museum.
The bric-a-brac of Gainsbourg’s life—police badges, antique medical instruments, bibelots, gold records, press clippings and assorted memorabilia—are laid out exactly as Serge arrayed them with maniacal fastidiousness (if a visitor moved a spoon and left the room, a friend of Gainsbourg’s told me, he would return to find that Serge had put it back where it had been, always on the diagonal). Eventually, the accumulation of tchotchkes got so suffocating that Gainsbourg would pack up his family and move to the Ritz for periodic breathers.
His father found the house at 5 bis in 1967. Joseph Gainsbourg was a classically trained musician who made his living singing and playing piano in the bars of Paris after fleeing the Bolsheviks with Serge’s mother, Olia. Serge was living in a kind of dormitory for artists after separating from his second wife, and had deputized his father to find a suitable dwelling in a proper part of town. Joseph saw an ad in the Figaro newspaper for a small hôtel particulier on the rue de Verneuil in the haut bourgeois 7th arrondissement and called Serge.
Gainsbourg hurried over after Joseph’s breathless phone call. By this time, he was making real money as a chansonnier. “Le Poinçonneur des Lilas,” a wonderful song about a subway ticket-taker who loses it while punching ticket holes all day, had put him on the map 10 years earlier. (“The little holes, the little holes, the little holes!”) It’s why used metro tickets litter Gainsbourg’s grave in the Montparnasse cemetery.
He was also having notable success writing pop hits for an assortment of French starlets. His biggest catch was Brigitte Bardot, who at 34 was at the radiant height of her fame—and quite an erotic balm for someone who, as a Jewish kid with big ears, had always loathed his looks.
As Gainsbourg and Bardot showed up at 5 bis rue de Verneuil, the crowd lining up outside for a walk-through parted to let them through—thanks to her, not him. He fell in love with the place on sight. A short time later, Bardot leaned out of a second-floor window to announce, “It’s sold.”
As a young art student, Gainsbourg had spent a night in Salvador Dalí’s apartment on rue de l’Université and was awed by its studied atmosphere of casual neglect. In the same spirit he set about building a love nest for night owls.
Just as Dalí had, he hung black fabric on the walls at 5 bis. He looked hard to find a fridge with a glass door for the tiny kitchen, and took great pains to order just the right low-slung bathtub, though he almost never took a bath. (A bidet served Gainsbourg’s modest needs for personal hygiene. “Only dirty people wash,” he said.) In the end, he was immensely proud of what he’d wrought. “It looks like disorder,” he wrote, “but in fact, everything is calculated according to very specific rhythms: here diagonals, here curves, never parallel lines. It’s not some nice decorator lady who did this, it’s me!”
The only thing missing when Gainsbourg moved in was Bardot, who had fluttered back to her German playboy husband, Gunter Sachs. Not that you don’t feel her presence all over 5 bis: A life-size photo of Bardot by Sam Levin, her arms shielding her naked breasts, hits the eye just as you walk in. More Bardot photos line the upstairs hallway leading to the bedroom.
During their 86-day idyll—Serge kept count—Gainsbourg wrote Bardot an ode to carnal love that the two recorded and were set to release. The song is called “Je t’aime…moi non plus,” and it’s what many people outside France know of Gainsbourg, if they know anything. The literal translation—“I love you…me neither”—doesn’t make much sense. In France, the phrase is often used as a shorthand for a love-hate relationship.
The title isn’t what caused a fuss. A good part of the song’s roughly four-minute running time was taken up with Bardot faking an orgasm so convincingly that her record company panicked, as did she. She sent Gainsbourg a desperate telegram: “Serge, I beg you to stop the release of Je t’aime.” He did, but the song didn’t die.
“Je t’aime” was released in 1969, sung, if you can call it that, by a doe-eyed English ingénue named Jane Birkin. Gainsbourg had met her on a film set and the two were soon lovers. She performed it an octave higher than Bardot, to “sound like a little boy,” Birkin told the Guardian. People who have heard both versions tend to agree: Birkin had the better orgasm.
The impact was explosive. In the U.K. the song went to No. 1. Meanwhile, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Portugal and Brazil banned it. Even freethinking France didn’t air it on state radio stations. People started asking, Has Gainsbourg gone too far? Gainsbourg liked the sound of that question and worked hard to keep everyone asking it.
“My father lived his provocations,” Charlotte said. “I’m not trying to make excuses, but I think that they lay behind his timidity and his modesty and his unease with life. Sometimes, I have the feeling that it was the revenge of a man who people found, for such a long time, not handsome. He was telling us, ‘I was ugly for so many years. Now the wheel has turned.’ ”
In short order, Birkin, who’d already left her husband, film composer John Barry, took their young daughter, Kate, to live with Gainsbourg at 5 bis. For a few years, the sun shone brightly on Gainsbourg and Birkin. In 1971, he released Histoire de Melody Nelson, a concept album that is arguably his masterpiece: 28 glorious minutes of his velveteen purring—half-sung, half-spoken—atop Jean-Claude Vannier’s astonishing orchestration. By then Jane Birkin was pregnant (on the album cover her jeans are pulled down slightly to hide the bulge). Charlotte arrived not long after to great jubilation.
Meanwhile, Serge and Jane stepped from the glare of Paris nightlife straight into the pantheon of cool: he with his manicured stubble and dangling Gitane and a look that said, Je m’en fous, which can be translated as, I don’t give a hoot; she with her trademark fringe, boyish figure and naughty English innocence. (The French took her instantly into their hearts; hundreds gathered outside the Paris church of Saint Roch in July to watch her funeral on a large screen.)
As the guided tour of the maison passes by Serge’s open closet—pairs of jeans and blue shirts that would never be worn more than half-buttoned—on the floor are a few pairs of white Repetto shoes, which he invariably wore without socks, “even in the snow of Gstaad,” Charlotte tells us. Of such discipline is an immortal uniform constructed. (Birkin has her own indelible style legacy reducible to two words: Birkin bag.)
In the back of the salon at 5 bis sits a bronze man with a cabbage head, a striking life-size statue by Claude Lalanne that Gainsbourg bought in 1976 and put on the cover of his concept album, L’Homme à tête de chou. Like Melody Nelson, L’Homme is a tale of weirdo sex and gruesome death, and it cemented Gainsbourg’s reputation as a genius who seemed also to enjoy beating up on women—at least in rhyme.
On the 30th anniversary of Gainsbourg’s death, French journalist Fabrice Pliskin wrote an article in Le Nouvel Observateur magazine wondering whether he still has the moral right to love Serge Gainsbourg. He cites a song from L’Homme à tête de chou in which the singer bashes his lover, a Black hairdresser, with a fire extinguisher: “I strike, paf! / Marilou starts to whimper / the vermilion blood escapes from her cracked skull.”
You could call it art, but, Pliskin asked, is that enough? “You get nervous. You turn down the sound because the neighbors might hear. You recognize in these words the signs of toxic, murderous masculinity that make the newspaper front pages. You ask yourself whether, by listening to your favorite French singer, you might be obscurely complicit in violence against women.” He concludes that nothing could ever break the spell of Gainsbourg’s voice and lyrics, even if he has to listen while hiding out in his basement.
By the late ’70s, the black clouds had rolled in. Gainsbourg was often dead drunk. He started downing a brand called Pastis 51 in the morning and kept going (when he wanted a double or triple, he’d ask the barman for a 102 or a 153). He later said it was excessive drinking and that he’d “bashed her up” that drove Jane Birkin away. She left him in 1980, taking the kids. Gainsbourg was overcome by guilt and never got over it.
He was making a habit of going too far but was often too out of it to notice where the line was anymore. Gainsbourg played with the taboos of pedophilia and incest in an otherwise fairly harmless song called “Lemon Incest” that he recorded with an adolescent Charlotte in 1985. It caused a predictable ruckus. He went farther down the same road in his 1986 film, Charlotte Forever. This time he was just plain vile. “I really didn’t want to share that with my father,” says Charlotte. “I did it to make him happy.”
His most notorious outrage came during a 1986 TV broadcast when he told Whitney Houston in a slurred French accent exactly what he wanted to do to her. Houston’s shriek is priceless—you can check it out on YouTube—but by this time, Gainsbourg was more pathetic than menacing. He spent a good part of his final years holed up in 5 bis, largely alone. Bambou, the mother of his young son, Lucien, lived elsewhere.
“There were very few people around him; he didn’t have a lot of friends,” says Charlotte. “The people he drank with at the end were mostly strangers—fans he wanted to please or the taxi driver with whom he wanted to finish the night.”
Just before he died, Serge suggested to Charlotte that she move in to 5 bis. She was shattered after a busted love affair. “He picked me up in a thousand pieces. I was not good, but I didn’t know how sick he was. I see from my agenda that we had dinner on February 28. He was going to give me the keys to 5 bis—a huge deal for him because he had chosen to live completely alone. He said we both needed to be repaired. He was offering me a life at his side.” Two days later he was dead.
Gainsbourg’s legacy in the English-speaking world is hard to calibrate. He would have loved to make it big in England—he was a passionate Anglophile—or in the U.S. It never happened, probably because, as catchy as Gainsbourg’s music can be, it’s almost impossible to fully appreciate his artistry in any language other than French.
But the house at 5 bis still beckons. Gainsbourg stands in the grand tradition of what the French call poètes maudits—accursed poets—like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Edgar Allan Poe and Delmore Schwartz, and many others who chewed themselves to bits for their art. To walk through 5 bis now is to feel the faint aftershock from the explosion of a distant star.
Catch all the Business News , Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
Business NewsNewsInside Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s Storied Home
First Published:11 Sep 2023, 09:34 PM IST
- Top Gainers
- Top Losers
- 52 Week High