Françoise Hardy she passed away at the age of 80, an age that today is much easier to overcome than in 1944, the year in which she came to light in Paris under the bombing of the Germans. Her life was longer than many other 80-year-olds, because she became famous at a very young age. An intense life, with love stories that filled the pages of French newspapers, and which she inevitably talked about again after her death. Because it’s curious that she, at 18, sang a romantic and depressive song like All boys and girls, in which he narrates the eternal adolescent drama of feeling ugly and undesirable, that “Yes, but I go alone / Through the streets, a soul in pain / Because no one likes me”, has then bewitched many hearts of celebrities who don’t always she gave in, as any girl her age would have done. Musicians, especially hers, but there were also rumors of a crush that Christian Barnard, the South African surgeon famous for having performed the first heart transplant in history, but also for being such a tombeur de femmes to be nicknamed “the king of hearts”. Except this one, from femme, who reportedly didn’t fall. That young Parisian singer-songwriter didn’t let herself be distracted more than necessary by the whirlwind of her feelings.
The famous first love of Françoise Hardy it was the photographer and director Jean-Marie Périer, who, more than 60 years after their story, still talks about it with emotion. Hardy and Périer met in 1962, he was 22 years old, she was only 18 and he had recently signed a contract with her first record company. “I had never seen anything more attractive, and I immediately fell madly in love with it,” Périer said in a 2013 interview. At the time, he was a young photographer from Paris Match and had been commissioned to photograph it. At that first impact they found each other cute, but unpleasant. However, he didn’t trust that impression and asked the record company to be able to photograph her again. It is granted to her, and she receives it in the modest house where she lives with her mother, who is present all the time and watches over her. Périer is troubled and moved by the simplicity of that home. He was born rich, he is the son of the actress Jacqueline Porel, who in turn is the nephew of Réjane, a great diva of the second half of the 19th century. Her father is officially the actor François Périer, but over time her mother had understood that in reality that child was the son of the musician Henri Salvador, with whom she had had a relationship before marrying Périer without knowing she was pregnant. It was then the head of the record company, Jean Georgieff, who confided to Françoise that the photographer had been impressed by her and who told her about the trauma I had experienced at 16 in discovering who her real father was. The very young singer-songwriter, illegitimate daughter of a married man, changed her opinion about Périer, she felt he was closer to her. They fall in love with her, but also when she bought her first house in Paris, they will never move in together. Their relationship didn’t last long, it didn’t work for the most banal of reasons: with their diaries full of their respective work commitments, they never saw each other. But he, for decades, will continue to declare: “I will love her forever”.
Françoise Hardy and Jacques Dutronc in 1984
The one with the singer Jacques Dutronc instead it was the most important bond for Françoise Hardy. They met in the 60s frequenting the same environments, but this time too it wasn’t love at first sight. He was enchanted by her, obviously, like most of her men. But she didn’t find anything interesting in that somewhat existentialist and rumpled guy, with that Proust-like allure also due to the illness that during adolescence had forced him to remain confined to his home, allowing him to start making music to pass the time. . A few years later, when she was no longer a ye-ye singer and she was changing tastes, she felt more attracted to intellectuals and contacted him. She invited him to the villa she had built in Corsica, and a great love was born. In 1973 they had a son, Thomas, and in 1981, after almost ten years together, they married. They separated in 1987, but despite this they continued to call each other every morning to find out how they were doing. 60 years after their first meeting, she still said in interviews “We write to each other every day, she tells me very touching things that would have been nice to hear when we were together”. Their son, Thomas Dutronc, says they somehow continued to honor their promise to “love each other through thick and thin.”
Meanwhile, however, when Françoise Hardy was living her story with Jacques Dutronc and had now become an international celebrity, many other musicians began to take her as a reference. Some of these have literally lost their heads for her, and among these there was also Bob Dylan. It seems that the American singer-songwriter fell in love with Françoise just by seeing photos of her, when he was not yet famous and worked in a bar in Greenwich Village. He wrote her love letters, but he never sent them. Then, he would dedicate a poem to her on the back of his 1964 album, Another Side Of Bob Dylan. It’s a small world and the two musicians eventually met. Even if someone tries to fantasize about it, it is unlikely that anything ever happened between them because she was definitely not attracted. However, it is known that those letters remained in the place where Dylan worked and that the owner kept them until his death in 2018. Then, the heirs made sure that they reached Françoise Hardy. It seems that she felt very embarrassed by what was written there.
Mick Jagger tries to win over Françoise Hardy at a party, 1967
Another musician bewitched by the charm of Françoise Hardy was Mick Jagger, someone not used to the two of spades. For him too, love at first sight was when, in 1965, in the music charts of Great Britain, he was competing for the first three places together with the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan from the United States, and then that little girl in her early twenties from France who had hypnotized British kids with the single in English All Over the World. It seems that a dispute also broke out within the Stones between him and Brian Jones, the other founding member of the band, who had an equally sensational crush on the French singer-songwriter. From the outside, however, loomed the threat of another British musician, the handsome and dark Nick Drake. It was a race to see who would reach her first, regardless of what she thought. Drake almost managed to record a song with Françoise. He met her behind the scenes of a BBC program in the late 1960s and he invited her to dinner “to talk about work”. Françoise graciously declined, but since she was one of her admirers, she didn’t object too much to her proposal, which she sent her days later, to sing a song written by him for her. In reality, Drake was becoming obsessed with Françoise, he flew to Paris to meet her and talk about it. During the meeting, at which the respective agents and record companies were also present, he made a silent scene, as tired as he was. Then, however, in the pub he frequented he dispensed stories in which he implied that he had hit the mark. They met again in the London studios where she was recording an album, he continually showed up without warning. He then he started knocking on her door in Paris. A few times she accepted dinner invitations, but she told her friends she found it all a little creepy. In fact, nothing happened to the album. However, Drake like Brian Jones who had already died in 1969, dropped out of the competition when at the age of 26, in 1974, he was overcome by an overdose of antidepressants. Jagger was the only suitor/competitor left and did everything he could to win over Françoise Hardy. But it seems that things really went badly for him.
He took it much better David Bowie. He too found Françoise Hardy irresistible. As already mentioned, the young Frenchwoman frequented London to record her records, at the time the best studios were there. She was filmed at tourist sites, on the tube, near Tower Bridge, in pubs while she sipped a beer, or while she caught the double-decker bus in Piccadilly wearing her pajamas. In Swinging London nothing was surprising, but Bowie had understood before she herself what was behind the carefree and somewhat forced French pop style with which she had made her debut. Bowie and Hardy were the two icons of androgyny, he who remained sexy and virile even when she wore women’s clothes, she who could have been a boy with that same face, and still be beautiful. Years later, he would confess that he had fallen madly in love with her. From her, however, never a word, very reserved. They would have been the perfect couple and no one knows if there ever was anything between them, although Françoise certainly found David Bowie more attractive than Bob Dylan. The only thing that is certain is that they remained friends until his death in 2016. Now that she is no longer here, perhaps we will never know.
