The living icon is gone: France mourns its Elvis,
The living icon is gone: France mourns its Elvis, Johnny Hallyday
France united in mourning yesterday over the death of Johnny Hallyday, a beloved rock’n’roll showman whose songs coloured the lives of three generations of music fans.
Crowds gathered at Hallyday’s home at Marnes-la-Coquette, to the west of Paris near Versailles, where he died of lung cancer shortly before midnight on Tuesday. Parliament stood in salute, broadcasters devoted most of the day to the national treasure and President Macron led tributes to the 74-year-old singer and actor.
The president’s wife, Brigitte, was among those who travelled to Hallyday’s house last night. She offered her condolences to the family of a performer who had played a Gallic version of an American-style rocker since 1960.
The country had been preparing for his demise after his cancer worsened during a summer concert tour. His death still came as a shock because he had been such a fixture in the national landscape.
“Johnny is a monument,” Brigitte Bardot, the cinema siren of the post-war era, said. “He is France.” Mr Macron, 39, saluted the way that Hallyday, little known outside the French-speaking world, “brought a part of America into our national pantheon”.
“We all have something of Johnny Hallyday in us,” Mr Macron said. “He was a living icon for more than 50 years. Across the generations, he marked the lives of the French people.”
The president was making reference to one of Hallyday’s biggest hits, We all have something of Tennessee, a tribute to the playwright Tennessee Williams. The song, released in 1984 and written by Michel Berger, was typical of the power ballads that were Hallyday’s trademark during a career in which he sold more than 110 million albums and conducted 50 tours.
OBITUARY
Crowds gathered at Hallyday’s home at Marnes-la-Coquette, to the west of Paris near Versailles, where he died of lung cancer shortly before midnight on Tuesday. Parliament stood in salute, broadcasters devoted most of the day to the national treasure and President Macron led tributes to the 74-year-old singer and actor.
The president’s wife, Brigitte, was among those who travelled to Hallyday’s house last night. She offered her condolences to the family of a performer who had played a Gallic version of an American-style rocker since 1960.
The country had been preparing for his demise after his cancer worsened during a summer concert tour. His death still came as a shock because he had been such a fixture in the national landscape.
“Johnny is a monument,” Brigitte Bardot, the cinema siren of the post-war era, said. “He is France.” Mr Macron, 39, saluted the way that Hallyday, little known outside the French-speaking world, “brought a part of America into our national pantheon”.
“We all have something of Johnny Hallyday in us,” Mr Macron said. “He was a living icon for more than 50 years. Across the generations, he marked the lives of the French people.”
The president was making reference to one of Hallyday’s biggest hits, We all have something of Tennessee, a tribute to the playwright Tennessee Williams. The song, released in 1984 and written by Michel Berger, was typical of the power ballads that were Hallyday’s trademark during a career in which he sold more than 110 million albums and conducted 50 tours.
OBITUARY
Johnny Hallyday
Known as the French Elvis, he sold 100 million records, hung out with Hendrix and had an appetite for cocaine and teenage girls.
Johnny Hallyday and the actress Catherine Deneuve find a copy of Hallyday’s record Salut les Copains at a record shop in Paris in 1962
A record company employee who took a flight with Johnny Hallyday in 2012 told a story that gave a glimpse of the reverence in which the singer was held in France. Hallyday sat down and lit a cigarette in the airport. An airline official rushed over. Not to berate him, but to bring him an ashtray. “No one is allowed to smoke in an Air France departure lounge,” the record company man said, “except Johnny Hallyday.”
Like one of his heroes, Elvis Presley, Hallyday began his professional life as a rock’n’roller before becoming something of a byword for naffness. Even so, some of rock’s greatest figures were happy to call him their friend. It is widely thought that Jim Morrison died in the bath in his Paris apartment, but Hallyday had a different story.
He had got to know the Doors frontman well and would drink with him at the Rock’n’Roll Circus club. Then, he recalled: “One evening we found him dead in the toilets.” Morrison had clearly succumbed to a drugs overdose, and in order that the club did not attract the wrong kind of attention, the singer’s body was carried out and taken back to Hallyday’s flat.
Hallyday had also been friends with Jimi Hendrix, who had died the previous year. He had met him while having dinner with Otis Redding at Blaises nightclub in London. “We heard Hendrix play in the next room,” he recalled. “We pushed the door open and I saw him — he was eating his guitar, playing with his teeth!”
He immediately signed Hendrix to support him on some French dates, and put him up in Paris. “He slept with his guitar, hugging her,” he recalled. “I said to him, ‘But you do not want to sleep with a girl? You know, you can bring one back here if you want.’ He said, ‘No, I’m better with my guitar.’ ”
Hallyday was an institution and, as is the way with institutions, some adored him, many felt respect or fondness, and others derided him. Yet the statistics spoke for themselves: he sold more than 100 million records.
His career became a series of revivals and reinventions. While never particularly original, he had charisma, a feral stage presence and a belting voice capable of cracking with a kind of wounded emotion. Doing much of his recording in London in the Sixties, he employed top-tier musicians such as Ronnie Lane of the Small Faces and Jimmy Page, later of Led Zeppelin.
He was more than a studio artist, though. Hallyday was at his best as a live performer: the stage was his element. From Olympia to 400,000 spectators around the Eiffel Tower in 2000, via almost every French auditorium and stadium, Hallyday was a master of the crowd. It was estimated that a third of the population of France had seen him perform live.
Although he made gallant efforts to sing in English, Italian and even Turkish, he was never an international phenomenon. Hallyday summed up much about French dreams and contradictions, and especially the country’s importation of American and British popular culture in the Sixties and beyond.
In 1996, aged 53, he made a childhood dream come true by performing in Las Vegas: not to Americans, but to 6,000 French fans who had chartered aircraft specially for the occasion. It was perhaps no surprise that, in the English-speaking world, he was sometimes referred to as “the biggest rock star you’ve never heard of”.
He was born Jean-Philippe Smet in German-occupied Paris in 1943. His mother, Huguette Clerc, worked in a creamery. His father, Léon Smet, was a Belgian singer, dancer and clown who was married to another woman and disappeared eight months after the birth. His mother was soon persuaded to leave the child with Hélène Mar, Léon’s sister, a strong-willed and elegant former actress. Her daughters, Desta and Menen, were professional dancers, and Jean-Philippe learnt ballet from the age of six. He also took violin lessons before switching to the guitar.
While his mother was embarking on a career as a model, Jean-Philippe’s new family took him to London in 1945, where they lived for seven years. Returning to Paris when he was ten, the boy took acting classes, making a fleeting appearance in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic film Les Diaboliques, and within two years was also singing and playing guitar on stage. He went on tour with Desta, her husband — a dancer and singer from Oklahoma, who used the stage name Lee Halliday — and Menen. The trio were known as Les Hallidays. Jean-Philippe sang numbers between their dance routines.
Like many a nascent pop star, his world changed in the mid-Fifties. “I heard Elvis Presley, and almost overnight I was converted to rock’n’roll,” he said. In 1958 Jean-Philippe adopted the family stage name and began hanging out at Le Golf-Drouot, the HQ of Parisian rockers from 1961. He started playing modest gigs and described himself as “an American with a French cultural background”. He brought out his first single, Laisse les filles (Leave the girls alone) in March 1960 when a printer’s mistake on the cover converted Halliday into Hallyday. Eighteen months later, he was a headline act.
Much of the material Hallyday sang at this stage was inane. Although he was no songwriter, he could always attract the better class of writer to offset the dross: in 1961 it was Charles Aznavour with Retiens la nuit (Remember the night). To try to prove that he could do more than produce French imitations of original rock songs, he flew to Nashville to record Johnny Hallyday Sings America’s Rockin’ Hits. The album flopped. After Aznavour had told him, “Stop it, it’s stupid, you’re French”, Hallyday concentrated on his francophone career.
He had his first gold disc in 1962 (for Viens danser le twist), then began a relationship with the singer and actress Sylvie Vartan. They became France’s golden couple, marrying in 1965 — their son, David, went on to become a successful singer and songwriter — and Hallyday became the Gallic answer to Anglo-American pop dominance. Not that Charles de Gaulle appreciated the fact: he suggested that all the youthful energy expended by Hallyday and his fans could be more usefully put into building motorways. Later presidents, including Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, were more sympathetic and, indeed, became his friends.
When he sang American hits, Aznavour said: ‘Stop it, it’s stupid, you’re French’
In 1964 national service interrupted his career, and Hallyday spent 18 months with a naval infantry regiment, but he was soon pulled back into the world of a Sixties pop star: success and pressure, public hysteria, sports cars — he favoured a Lamborghini, until he crashed it at 125mph. He was out of control, with prodigious partying, copious amounts of alcohol and cocaine, and a liking for more than one teenage girl at a time.
“I’ve been like that all my life,” he said. “Girls, girls, girls, girls . . . when I see a nice face, I see a nice body, because most of the time it’s models . . . because they’re great-looking, you know, not much up there, but a lot down there.”
He divorced Vartan in 1980 and after a short-lived second marriage to Babeth Étienne, started a relationship with the actress Nathalie Baye. In 1983 the couple had a daughter, Laura, who became an actress. A year later Hallyday and Baye made the film Détective with Jean-Luc Godard. A talented actor, he appeared in 17 films, including a substantial role in The Man on the Train, a thriller that starred Jean Rochefort.
He had two further marriages, one, short-lived, to the actress Adeline Blondieau, the second, in 1996, to the model Laetitia Boudou, with the wedding on her 21st birthday. This time the marriage lasted.
Whatever sense of edginess Hallyday still had, he did his best to retain. He was one of 200 artists, intellectuals and politicians who signed a petition admitting that they had taken drugs and challenging the French government to prosecute them. He faced an enormous bill for overdue tax, with the French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné reporting that he was being chased for nine million euros (about £8 million). Hallyday took little notice. He was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1997.
Right to the end of his life — to the bemusement of pop fans in Britain and America — he continued to be regarded in France as a bulwark against the cultural domination of the Beatles, the Stones and, yes, the act upon which he shamelessly modelled himself, Elvis.
Johnny Hallyday, singer and actor, was born on June 15, 1943. He died of lung cancer on December 6, 2017, aged 74
Known as the French Elvis, he sold 100 million records, hung out with Hendrix and had an appetite for cocaine and teenage girls.
A record company employee who took a flight with Johnny Hallyday in 2012 told a story that gave a glimpse of the reverence in which the singer was held in France. Hallyday sat down and lit a cigarette in the airport. An airline official rushed over. Not to berate him, but to bring him an ashtray. “No one is allowed to smoke in an Air France departure lounge,” the record company man said, “except Johnny Hallyday.”
Like one of his heroes, Elvis Presley, Hallyday began his professional life as a rock’n’roller before becoming something of a byword for naffness. Even so, some of rock’s greatest figures were happy to call him their friend. It is widely thought that Jim Morrison died in the bath in his Paris apartment, but Hallyday had a different story.
He had got to know the Doors frontman well and would drink with him at the Rock’n’Roll Circus club. Then, he recalled: “One evening we found him dead in the toilets.” Morrison had clearly succumbed to a drugs overdose, and in order that the club did not attract the wrong kind of attention, the singer’s body was carried out and taken back to Hallyday’s flat.
Hallyday had also been friends with Jimi Hendrix, who had died the previous year. He had met him while having dinner with Otis Redding at Blaises nightclub in London. “We heard Hendrix play in the next room,” he recalled. “We pushed the door open and I saw him — he was eating his guitar, playing with his teeth!”
He immediately signed Hendrix to support him on some French dates, and put him up in Paris. “He slept with his guitar, hugging her,” he recalled. “I said to him, ‘But you do not want to sleep with a girl? You know, you can bring one back here if you want.’ He said, ‘No, I’m better with my guitar.’ ”
Hallyday was an institution and, as is the way with institutions, some adored him, many felt respect or fondness, and others derided him. Yet the statistics spoke for themselves: he sold more than 100 million records.
His career became a series of revivals and reinventions. While never particularly original, he had charisma, a feral stage presence and a belting voice capable of cracking with a kind of wounded emotion. Doing much of his recording in London in the Sixties, he employed top-tier musicians such as Ronnie Lane of the Small Faces and Jimmy Page, later of Led Zeppelin.
He was more than a studio artist, though. Hallyday was at his best as a live performer: the stage was his element. From Olympia to 400,000 spectators around the Eiffel Tower in 2000, via almost every French auditorium and stadium, Hallyday was a master of the crowd. It was estimated that a third of the population of France had seen him perform live.
Although he made gallant efforts to sing in English, Italian and even Turkish, he was never an international phenomenon. Hallyday summed up much about French dreams and contradictions, and especially the country’s importation of American and British popular culture in the Sixties and beyond.
In 1996, aged 53, he made a childhood dream come true by performing in Las Vegas: not to Americans, but to 6,000 French fans who had chartered aircraft specially for the occasion. It was perhaps no surprise that, in the English-speaking world, he was sometimes referred to as “the biggest rock star you’ve never heard of”.
He was born Jean-Philippe Smet in German-occupied Paris in 1943. His mother, Huguette Clerc, worked in a creamery. His father, Léon Smet, was a Belgian singer, dancer and clown who was married to another woman and disappeared eight months after the birth. His mother was soon persuaded to leave the child with Hélène Mar, Léon’s sister, a strong-willed and elegant former actress. Her daughters, Desta and Menen, were professional dancers, and Jean-Philippe learnt ballet from the age of six. He also took violin lessons before switching to the guitar.
While his mother was embarking on a career as a model, Jean-Philippe’s new family took him to London in 1945, where they lived for seven years. Returning to Paris when he was ten, the boy took acting classes, making a fleeting appearance in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic film Les Diaboliques, and within two years was also singing and playing guitar on stage. He went on tour with Desta, her husband — a dancer and singer from Oklahoma, who used the stage name Lee Halliday — and Menen. The trio were known as Les Hallidays. Jean-Philippe sang numbers between their dance routines.
Like many a nascent pop star, his world changed in the mid-Fifties. “I heard Elvis Presley, and almost overnight I was converted to rock’n’roll,” he said. In 1958 Jean-Philippe adopted the family stage name and began hanging out at Le Golf-Drouot, the HQ of Parisian rockers from 1961. He started playing modest gigs and described himself as “an American with a French cultural background”. He brought out his first single, Laisse les filles (Leave the girls alone) in March 1960 when a printer’s mistake on the cover converted Halliday into Hallyday. Eighteen months later, he was a headline act.
Much of the material Hallyday sang at this stage was inane. Although he was no songwriter, he could always attract the better class of writer to offset the dross: in 1961 it was Charles Aznavour with Retiens la nuit (Remember the night). To try to prove that he could do more than produce French imitations of original rock songs, he flew to Nashville to record Johnny Hallyday Sings America’s Rockin’ Hits. The album flopped. After Aznavour had told him, “Stop it, it’s stupid, you’re French”, Hallyday concentrated on his francophone career.
He had his first gold disc in 1962 (for Viens danser le twist), then began a relationship with the singer and actress Sylvie Vartan. They became France’s golden couple, marrying in 1965 — their son, David, went on to become a successful singer and songwriter — and Hallyday became the Gallic answer to Anglo-American pop dominance. Not that Charles de Gaulle appreciated the fact: he suggested that all the youthful energy expended by Hallyday and his fans could be more usefully put into building motorways. Later presidents, including Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, were more sympathetic and, indeed, became his friends.
When he sang American hits, Aznavour said: ‘Stop it, it’s stupid, you’re French’
In 1964 national service interrupted his career, and Hallyday spent 18 months with a naval infantry regiment, but he was soon pulled back into the world of a Sixties pop star: success and pressure, public hysteria, sports cars — he favoured a Lamborghini, until he crashed it at 125mph. He was out of control, with prodigious partying, copious amounts of alcohol and cocaine, and a liking for more than one teenage girl at a time.
“I’ve been like that all my life,” he said. “Girls, girls, girls, girls . . . when I see a nice face, I see a nice body, because most of the time it’s models . . . because they’re great-looking, you know, not much up there, but a lot down there.”
He divorced Vartan in 1980 and after a short-lived second marriage to Babeth Étienne, started a relationship with the actress Nathalie Baye. In 1983 the couple had a daughter, Laura, who became an actress. A year later Hallyday and Baye made the film Détective with Jean-Luc Godard. A talented actor, he appeared in 17 films, including a substantial role in The Man on the Train, a thriller that starred Jean Rochefort.
He had two further marriages, one, short-lived, to the actress Adeline Blondieau, the second, in 1996, to the model Laetitia Boudou, with the wedding on her 21st birthday. This time the marriage lasted.
Whatever sense of edginess Hallyday still had, he did his best to retain. He was one of 200 artists, intellectuals and politicians who signed a petition admitting that they had taken drugs and challenging the French government to prosecute them. He faced an enormous bill for overdue tax, with the French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné reporting that he was being chased for nine million euros (about £8 million). Hallyday took little notice. He was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1997.
Right to the end of his life — to the bemusement of pop fans in Britain and America — he continued to be regarded in France as a bulwark against the cultural domination of the Beatles, the Stones and, yes, the act upon which he shamelessly modelled himself, Elvis.
Johnny Hallyday, singer and actor, was born on June 15, 1943. He died of lung cancer on December 6, 2017, aged 74
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