For more than twenty years, the emblematic singer-songwriter had suffered from cancer of the lymphatic system and pharynx, whose side effects from radio and immunotherapy caused her days to be “hell.”
Melancholic teenager. Successful singer. Muse of the 60s. In love, jealous, disappointed. Broken. Fascinated by strange things. Happy mother. Cancer sufferer, presumed dead, survivor and grieving. Defender of euthanasia.Françoise Hardy It was all of that although many of us identify it with a sad song from the happy Yeyes years: “Tous les garçons et les filles.”
It was 1962. “All the boys and girls my age/ walk down the street two by two/ all the boys and girls my age/ know what it means to be happy/ and looking into each other’s eyes and hand in hand/ they go in love without fear of tomorrow…”, Hardy, who had just turned 18 and went “alone through the streets, my soul in pain, yes I go alone because no one loves me,” sang with her melancholic French voice.
The song was the last of a vinyl EP album with other yeyés songs that then its author would hate for “too bad.” The only one who told what she really felt was this one, reluctantly included by the record company that she didn’t see as danceable. The singer, disappointed, defends her wherever she goes. For example, in a public television broadcast about the referendum that she must approve that France elect its president by universal suffrage. De Gaulle, in power, will impose the differential element of the Fifth Republic. The TV has a black and white channel. But, in this unusual area of promotion, The sweet voice of the sad and beautiful young woman who sings naively about her lovesickness conquers the audience.
A ball. Two million records sold the first year. Hardy sings it in German, Italian and English. Cover of Paris Match. Film with Monica Vitti by Rover Vadim. She will be a hippie in love with a driver in John Frankenheimer’s ‘Grand Prix’. The madness.
All English-speaking singers want to meet her (and Brigitte Bardot). We are in May of ’66. Bob Dylan sings at the Olympia Hall. She suddenly stops the concert and leaves the stage. Minutes pass, the angry audience whistles. He demands that she come see him in the dressing room. Dylan, guitar in hand, sings “I want you” but Hardy does not notice the double meaning.
Jean Marie Perier, photographer and Hardy’s first partner says they went to dinner with the Rolling Stones to a restaurant near Notre Dame. Back home she said: “Your friend Mick [Jagger] He’s very nice but he hasn’t stopped playing with me all night.” Périer recalled the anecdote and added: “Françoise was a very reserved girl. What I loved about her is that He was not at all aware of his attractiveness. He only thought about writing his songs day and night, often in the bathroom. He said that the bathroom walls improved the sound of his guitar.”
“My entire childhood I was crushed between a grandmother who kept belittling me and a mother who thought she was perfect. And that marks. “I never saw myself as pretty,” declared to Elena López Ávila in ‘Telva’.
“I didn’t see myself as interesting at all. As a child, I was ashamed of my origins. I believed that my parents were divorced, which was very frowned upon in the religious school where my father had wanted to put my sister and me. Then I understood that my mother was a single mother which, at the time, was much worse. I adored my mother but she never saw anyone and I was not educated either,” she declared on ‘Paris Match’ in March 2021.
“I felt ugly and thought I was going to end up as a nun,” he recalled in the weekly. Her mother, without consulting her, enrolled her in Sciences Po, Politics, the crème de la crème. “I realized right away that she was not up to par with those elegant and brilliant students. That impression of getting the grade has stayed with me all my life.”
To the self-conscious girl They had given him a guitar for passing high school. And that redeemed her. Her mother, who had signed the contract with the record company because she was a minor, could stop working after the best-selling success of that first album.
“It is the time of love/ time of friends/ and adventure (…) the time of love, so long and so short/ That lasts forever/ we remember it. It is said that at twenty years old/ we are the kings of the world/ and that eternally/ in our eyes we will have/ the entire blue sky…” (Le temps de l’amour).
We are in May 1968 and The ugly duckling arrives at the Paris Opera square with a mini dress made of nine kilos of gold and 300 carats of diamonds signed by Paco Rabanne. Spectacular. The dress, the model’s legs, the hair. When Paris is filled with barricades, she and her partner escape to Corsica.
Yes, a year before she had met the man who was going to be the love of her life, the singer Jacques Dutronc. “A relationship that immediately proved painful due to my insecure, anxious, overly demanding personality and its harshness, its need to feel free, to have fun out there.”
According to Hardy (‘Paris Match’), “most men cheat on their women without this diminishing the love they inspire in them. They dissociate what is from the waist up from what is from the waist down. I, like many Women of my generation I don’t dissociate at all. “I cannot desire if I do not love.”
“However, in 2015 when everyone thought I was dying, they told me that Jacques told the person he lived with that I was the woman of his life. I was moved. It was reciprocal. He is the man of my life, we lived the best years together. Love consists of making an effort to understand the other, behaving with dignity towards them and accepting their difference. Knowing how to love is very difficult. “One life is not enough.”
Before that fateful year, there is his last concert (London, 1968), a son (now also a singer Thomas Dutronc -who has confirmed the death of his mother on social networks-), withdrawals and returns and a certain ease in getting into all the puddles. “I prefer the label of lesbian or sadomaso to the also aberrant one of anti-Semite or lepenist that was hanged on me as a result of some unfortunate statements I made in favor of the death penalty for child murderers and against the abusive use of racism as an electoral hook. They were distorted. I deny everything. Although as far as Lesvos is concerned, only men endowed with a sufficient dose of femininity can disturb me,” she told Libération in 1996. She had just released a pessimistic album that included three songs inspired by Marguerite Duras, Claude Sautet and Luis Buñuel.
2015, Malt’s lymphoma to which he adds a fall in the shower with several fractures. Three weeks in a coma. Two months in the hospital. 45 sessions of radiotherapy, breathing problems, endless nosebleeds, she is left without saliva and deaf in one ear. “The doctors said I was finished. I don’t know what happened but suddenly, when he was two fingers away from going to the other side, he started to come back little by little,” said his son Thomas Dutronc in ‘Le Figaro’.
In this reprieve that life gave him, Hardy produced a book of memoirs: “The Desperation of the Apes and Other Trifles”; a compilation of all the lyrics of his songs since ’62, “Songs about you and us”; And one last album!, which makes number 24 of his studio recordings: “Personne d’autre” (Nobody else).
The third track that gives the album its title is, in the author’s words, “a summary of what she experienced with Jacques.” The key to the relationship is in the fourth verse: “A sign like a call that seems timeless/ no one but you to hear it/ sky-colored eyes somewhat unreal/ and I’m still there waiting for you…”.
Hardy in 2018, with her delicate voice melancholy singing the wait for love, just like in 1964, when she walked “alone through the streets, her soul in pain” while everyone her age walked already paired up.
Shortly after the singer will reveal that he fights cancer again, of the pharynx this time. “I’m 75 years old, I think I’ve sung enough.” In June 2021, without a voice, she responded by mail to ‘Femme actuelle’. She felt “close to the end.” She detailed her ailments and the nightmare of the treatment’s side effects.
He recalled that his mother “suffered from Charcot’s disease was very lucky to find a doctor who would euthanize her.” He demanded the same shortcut for her, “although given my small notoriety, no one will want to run the risk of being expelled from the medical school.” And she appealed to President Macron to legalize it.
“I know that death is nothing more than that of the body that by giving the soul frees it, allowing it to return to the mysterious dimension from which it came, enriched by everything learned in its last reincarnation.” Let’s hope that in the next one, it will have more luck in love. “Comment te dire adieu” the song plays by Serge Gainsbourg that Françoise Hardy took to the top in ’69 with her rhymes in ex.
