Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin in 1969.
Jane Birkin got invited to test for a role in Slogan. That was the good news. The bad news was she had taken an instant dislike to the film’s star. Serge Gainsbourg was a multi-threat musician, songwriter, producer, director, and actor who embodied a certain French national spirit and whose collaborations with other artists were the stuff of legend. “He’s meant to be my lover, but he’s so arrogant and snobbish — he absolutely despises me,” Birkin said on the telephone to her brother, Andrew. His own memory was, “She described him as this ghastly man who was arrogant and made her feel like a worm.”
Slogan was about a French director of commercials for consumer goods named Serge Fabergé (Gainsbourg, for whom the role was written) who meets a British woman, Evelyne (Birkin, who plays basically herself, basket bag and all), while he’s in Venice receiving an award. The two fall in love, but there’s a problem: The director has a wife, a child (played by Birkin’s daughter, Kate), and another baby on the way. Serge’s wife leaves him, but Evelyne also ends up leaving the director for an Italian dandy. Emotional pain ensues. It was a farce about the world of advertising and the sex lives of adults based on the director Pierre Gramblat’s life.
The chemistry read with Gainsbourg did not go smoothly. Birkin’s French was bad — her accent was strong and she learned her lines phonetically without understanding what they meant. When they read together, Gainsbourg told her, in a backhanded compliment, that he would have never had the nerve to attempt a film in a language that wasn’t his own. At one point during the audition, she cried. She was still adrift and emotionally bereft in the wake of her divorce from the composer John Barry. She returned to London not knowing whether she got the part. Birkin assumed she was not right for the role because she wasn’t right for France. But, in spite of his initial sneer, Gainsbourg hadn’t vetoed her.
By then Gainsbourg was so famous as a singer, songwriter, and occasional actor that he was roughly the French equivalent of Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, and Phil Spector put together. He was famous for his looks. Or lack of them. The French have a term, jolie laide, for “ugly-pretty;” Gainsbourg was perhaps more accurately ugly-sexy. A journalist for Marie Claire asked him in 1968 why pretty girls liked to pair themselves up with ugly men. “They adore me. I don’t even have to lift a finger and my phone never stops ringing. Every day there are more love letters in the mail,” he said to the reporter. He had been twice divorced when he began a monthslong affair with Brigitte Bardot, with whom he released the duet “Bonnie and Clyde,” an instant hit and one of the most famous songs either of them made. But Bardot dumped him to return to the German playboy Gunter Sachs, and Gainsbourg was gutted. “Serge wanted to blow his brains out. He was really in love with her, but his pride was also shattered,” his friend the producer Claude Dejacques said. “Going out with her was an enormous boost to his ego because it was like he was triumphing over his own ugliness.”
Such was Gainsbourg’s emotional state when he met Birkin, who, melancholy from her divorce, was desperate to reclaim her life. Grimblat suspected that Gainsbourg was being particularly rude to his scene partner because he was simply reacting out of ego and misogyny, annoyed that this British unknown was going to be cast as his co-star. But what neither man could deny was that Birkin and Gainsbourg had chemistry, and that’s what the movie needed.
When Birkin arrived back in London, she got the call that the role was hers. But she had to wait to return to Paris. Before she and Gainsbourg could get to know each other, or even start filming, everything in France came to a halt for a student-led revolution.
Culturally and politically, the students and children of what was known as “May ’68” were forever changed by a society that gradually opened up to social issues like feminism and workers’ rights and embraced a youth culture that Birkin and Gainsbourg would benefit from.
By June, the tension in Paris had settled enough so that filming could resume. Birkin flew into Le Bourget airport with a nanny for her daughter and checked in to the Hotel Esmeralda, a former 17th-century mansion on Rue Saint-Julien-Le-Pauvre in the Latin Quarter. Andrew was also staying there while location scouting as an assistant for the director Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey for a potential Kubrick project on Napoleon. He was just a year older than Jane — 22 to her 21 in the summer of 1968 — and they had always been close, but he was particularly a balm for her as she was navigating her largest film role to date, a divorce, and a baby. Andrew was sometimes tasked to watch Kate, taking her on scouting trips and photographing his young niece perched atop Napoleon’s throne. Shortly after the beginning of shooting, Birkin returned home from a day on set and complained to Andrew about Gainsbourg for showing up to the set with dozens of notes on the manuscript. When he looked at her, she said, he always seemed like he was about to say something sarcastic at her expense.
After three nights of her complaining, Birkin was on the phone with Gainsbourg, “struggling with her nemesis.” Andrew was the closest person to Birkin in the world, and he had a sense that the pair needed to talk through this clash of personalities. But there was a heightened tone to her voice on the phone and a self-satisfied expression that stopped him, so much that he took out his camera to capture the moment. He snapped a few photos of her on the hotel bed with flocked headboard and matching wallpaper, cradling the big white phone receiver in her left hand. She had a hint of a smile on her face, as if animosity was not the only emotion between her and Gainsbourg.
Andrew thought that, under all his sister’s frustration with her co-star, there was a flirtatious note to her voice as well. Grimblat suggested to his stars that they all go to the beloved Belle Epoque restaurant Maxim’s for dinner to get to know each other in a less high-pressure environment than a film set. He left after the meal, and Gainsbourg and Birkin continued the night. Gainsbourg took Birkin to Régine’s, a club owned by a plump woman with a wild backstory involving orphanhood and claims that Warren Beatty, Robert Mitchum, Björn Borg, Steve McQueen, Gene Kelly, and Françoise Sagan were all former lovers. Her Paris club had a similar celebrity-friendly, anything-goes-for-the-beautiful-people policy as Studio 54 would later have. Gainsbourg and Bardot had gone there frequently during their affair because Régine had a reputation for protecting her guests from leaked gossip. That night, Gainsbourg and Birkin found themselves under the lights.
Birkin and Gainsbourg in 1970 after the release of their song, “Je t’aime… moi non plus.”
Birkin took a turn dancing to the novelty hit “Yummy Yummy Yummy … (I’ve Got Love in My Tummy).” Gainsbourg asked her to dance, but asked to wait for something slow. It turned out that Gainsbourg was not a very good dancer, which Birkin found rather delightful. She liked how awkward and shy he seemed away from the tension of the Slogan set. “I understood that all these things I had seen as aggression were really just defense mechanisms of someone infinitely too sensitive, terribly romantic, with a tenderness and sentimentality that no one could imagine existed,” she wrote. “One day he told me that he was a ‘phony villain,’ which is true.”
She softened to him more and more over the course of the night. They went to another club called La Calvados to watch a group of Mexican singers. Once they arrived, Gainsbourg sat at the piano and did a four-hander with the other pianist on duty. Then he and Birkin went to Raspoutine, a Russian nightclub Gainsbourg frequented. Everywhere they went, Gainsbourg handed out money for tips he kept in cash in a briefcase, saying, “We are all prostitutes.” They ended the night at Madame Arthur, a drag cabaret, where Gainsbourg’s father once played the piano and where Gainsbourg still knew many of the old-timers. Birkin was charmed by the atmosphere. “They would shout ‘Oh, hi, Serge!’ and shower him with kisses, the feathers from their hair sticking into my face the whole time,” she wrote.
As they left, he asked musicians at the club to play Jean Sibelius’s “Valse Triste” on the pavement while they got into a taxi to go to Pigalle. The market there opened at dawn, and Gainsbourg seemed to know everyone at the market as he passed around glasses of Champagne he poured for workers.
By then it was morning, but Birkin didn’t want the night to end. Gainsbourg asked her if she wanted to be dropped off back at the hotel, but she said “no,” surprising herself at her own candor. But she wasn’t sure where they were headed. “I thought he was going to take me home to his parents, but to my horror, he brought me to the Hilton, where they said at the desk, ‘Same room as usual, Mr. Gainsbourg?’” she said. “I thought, Oh, no!” Barry was still the only person she had slept with. She wasn’t looking for a drunken one-night stand with her co-star. When the two of them got to the hotel room, she excused herself to go to the bathroom to buy herself time to think. When she came out, he was asleep. So she left and walked to buy a copy of “Yummy Yummy Yummy” as a souvenir for the night. She returned and carefully placed the record between Gainsbourg’s toes and went back to the Hotel Esmeralda.
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People who knew Birkin and Gainsbourg often say that their love was instant; that after that first night at Maxim’s and Régine’s, they were inseparable. The pair did not take things slowly, despite their fresh divorces and small children. Gainsbourg was older than Birkin, an even greater age difference than the 13 years between her and Barry. But unlike her ex-husband, Gainsbourg was wildly energetic and wanted to spend all his time with her. He went out every night, and instead of assuming Birkin would stay home with her baby, he brought Kate out, too.
The couple thrived on grand, romantic gestures. Early in their courtship, at 8 o’clock at night, Gainsbourg turned to Birkin and told her that he loved her so much that he had asked for all the monuments in the city to be illuminated at the same time. The truth was all the monuments lit up at 8 p.m. anyway, but Birkin either fell for it or was so smitten that she found the whole ruse endearing.
Meanwhile, they were finishing shooting Slogan in Paris and Venice. Birkin and Gainsbourg no longer had friction on set — just the opposite. The movie was getting in the way, or was just a background, for their burgeoning relationship. The couple gave off a feeling that nothing else existed outside of the two of them, and it came across on the screen. Grimblat was a good sport, claiming in his journals that he loved them as a couple. He was also a savvy marketer; he knew that a relationship between the stars of his movie could also be good fodder for promoting Slogan when it would be released the following year.
Birkin sensed that she should get her brother acquainted with her new love and invited Andrew to join her and Gainsbourg for dinner. She was relieved that the two men took an instant shine to each other. “For my part, it was love at first sight. Serge was so utterly different from anyone I’d ever met: shy and flamboyant by turns, with a boylike lust for fun and a scabrous sense of humor. I’d already had several mentors, not least Stanley Kubrick, but unique among them, Serge treated me as an equal. He could speak little English and my French was no better than Jane’s, yet we managed to have a lively debate about Napoleon, communism, and the student riots,” Andrew said.
Birkin was not only relieved that she had his stamp of approval, but that it could help establish a family dynamic. Gainsbourg’s son Paul was just a few months old when he and Birkin met; Kate Barry was 1. Accounts of how much Gainsbourg wanted to be involved with his two eldest children vary, but he appeared to be largely absent from their lives. Instead, he was Kate’s stand-in papa, as Barry was absent from her life. But, the truth was, Gainsbourg and Birkin spent most of their free time while not filming either out in Paris together or locked up in a bedroom. The role of day-to-day father figure was occupied cheerfully by Andrew.
Judy Campbell, Birkin’s mother, remembered the first time she heard about Birkin and Gainsbourg as a couple. “My daughter came home and declared: “I have to tell you something. You know that horrible Frenchman I told you about? Well, I think I’m in love with him. I believe he loves me too.” Birkin worried that her parents might not approve of this older man, but she didn’t need to. They were relieved that she was recovering from the shambles of her marriage to Barry. And Birkin found his family to be warm and old-world in their manners. All of it felt like this relationship was marking the end of her turbulent adolescent years.
The relationship benefited Gainsbourg as well. Like Birkin, he was a romantic who fell in love easily and hard. Birkin was different from the French women he had been coupled with: goofy, eccentric, full of excitement. But there were other perks to dating her. He did not have much subcultural capital; he was always mainstream, a hitmaker. He was a 40-year-old who could be aging out of relevance at any time, particularly in the new cultural scene post-May ’68 Paris. Having a gorgeous, extremely young girl from London on his arm gave him some cachet. Birkin was such an unknown in France that no one was reporting on her yet. The jet-set social scene that they came from saw them out in the clubs or at Brasserie Lipp having dinner and were well aware that Gainsbourg had rebounded from his affair with Bardot with John Barry’s ex, who had been in the edgy hit Blow-Up. But neither paparazzi nor the tabloid press had discovered them by mid-1968.
Gainsbourg moved in with Birkin in August 1968 to the L’Hôtel on Rue des Beaux-Arts, a neighborhood hotel with just 20 rooms where Oscar Wilde lived out his last days in Paris before his death.
Their physical attraction was electric. Birkin was his type, more so than Bardot had been. He had drawn girls like her when he had been an art student, and he took her to the Louvre to show her paintings by the German Renaissance–era artist Lucas Cranach the Elder. He said that she was a Cranach, with tiny breasts, a small waist, and narrow hips. After being teased about her body at boarding school, she felt beautiful, even erotic, in his gaze. And while the never-ending remark about Gainsbourg and how ugly he was pervaded the culture, she found him deeply sexy. “When you’ve known a face like that, others seem bland,” she said.
It was the first time Birkin felt real intimacy with a man, both emotionally and physically. That ease allowed her to go outside of her comfort zone, not in some way to impress her new lover but to test out her own desires. Birkin and Gainsbourg took to egging each other on in a game of erotic one-upmanship as she came into a newfound confidence in her sexuality. Gainsbourg loved to ask Birkin, “What have you never done?” Birkin asked Gainsbourg to take her to a sex hotel.
Her fantasy was to go to the most sordid and decrepit one that they could find in Paris and ask for a room for her to play-act as a sex worker. They found one in Pigalle, near where Gainsbourg had grown up and Paris’s red-light district. She and Gainsbourg drank two cognacs to work up the nerve before asking the man at the front desk for a room. The man asked how old Birkin was, referring to her as ”the little one.” Gainsbourg said she was of age — which was true; she was in her early 20s, and the age of sexual maturity in France, la majorité sexuelle, was set at 15 years old — and after some discerning looks, they were handed a key. Off they went to their dingy room. It was brightly lit, with plastic flowers as décor, a bed that was damp, and a bidet with a tap that dripped. Before they could decide if the fantasy even turned them on anymore, the door to the room was broken down by four men who were convinced she was underage and being taken advantage of. She and Gainsbourg were shaken and left for home. In their upscale hotel in the bourgeois Left Bank neighborhood, no one noticed, was suspicious, or cared about what they were up to.
That summer, Birkin sent her friend Gabrielle Crawford a postcard that read, “I have fallen madly in love. John no longer exists.” Much of the initial connection between Birkin and Gainsbourg was based around finding a sense of belonging within each other. He was much more up front about his emotions than Barry; he was unafraid to cry, and Birkin felt connected to that sensitivity.
But another, perhaps more intangible side of their relationship was that he represented Paris, and Paris was part of the allure of her new life: stopping along the used-book sellers who lined the river, sitting outside drinking wine with friends without much caring about the time. Gainsbourg took her to dinner parties at Régine’s apartment, where the cultural minister and novelist André Malraux would be discussing ghosts with the Bonjour Tristesse novelist Françoise Sagan and a newspaper gossip columnist. She was falling in love with Gainsbourg at the same time she was falling in love with a city. Birkin delighted in it all; Paris and its people and her new boyfriend were all intertwined in a heady mix of pleasure and relief from a very rough beginning to her adult years. London may have been a cultural center, but she was having more fun in Paris.
On what was supposed to be Birkin’s last night in Paris, she had dinner with Grimblat. Despite the rocky beginning of the shoot, he was happy with the film and thought Birkin had a lot of promise. He told another director, Jacques Deray, that he should consider Birkin for his next movie, La Piscine, which was about to start shooting in a few months in the south of France. Deray came to the restaurant that night to spy on her, and, voilà, charmed by her presence, he later offered her the part. It was a major turning point for Birkin. Instead of going back to her home country to try out independence, Birkin made the decision to choose her career, choose France, and choose Gainsbourg.
Copyright © 2025 by Marisa Meltzer. From the forthcoming book IT GIRL by Marisa Meltzer to be published by Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.
