Kendall asked me a few months back would I be interested in a day trip to the City of Light while he was here as he wanted to finally see where Jean Seberg was buried. Coming from Iowa, the same US state as Seberg and being a lifelong fan of the talented but tragic actress, he wanted to pay his respects. Always one for the Dramatic Gesture, I agreed!The 9:09 (To Owen's surprise I woke up early) Eurostar on Monday whisked us
away beyond the Channel and we arrived at Gard du Nord at 12:56 (Paris time). We set off from the station in search of the Rex Cinema which Kendall wished to visit, a towering 1930s picture palace which is still in use. After that it was only a small stroll to the delightful Passage Joufrey on Boulevard de Montmartre. Built in 1835 it is one of several remaining shopping arcades from the time when this was THE way to shop before the advent of the first ever department store Bon Marche. The Passage Jouffrey's big selling point was the fact it had underfloor heating!Apart from all that it's where Cine-Doc the film
memorabilia bookshop is! Kendall broke the purchasing duck first buying a few posters and, not wishing to let the British side down I bought a few nice postcards of Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in A BOUT DE SOUFFLE, a small French poster for ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER and a larger French poster for CARRINGTON. A cramped but delightful shop.After walking down the Rue de Richelieu passing the Biblioteque Nationale and the
Comedie Francais we found ourself in the grand sweep of the entrance to the Louvre. Even as the heaven's opened and the obligatory rain fell nothing could dampen the epic majesty of the former palace of Louis XIV and the glass pyramid. Turning to take a picture of the arch I saw the Eiffel Tower appearing through the clouds.We walked over the Seine and
deceided we would make a fist of walking as far as we could before possibly having to jump on a Metro. We set off down the Rue de Saintes Pere past an enormous medical unversity disgorging students - luckily not rioting - hung a right into Sevres which brought us out to the Boulevard Raspail - at the end of which was our point of destination, Montparnasse cemetery, We bought some flowers along the way from an enormous florist which was crammed with - you guessed - flaars.We arrived at the cemetery at 4.30 just as the rain tailed off. O had
asked me to say hello to Simone de Beauvoir and I remembered where her resting place was, just down from the gateway by the wall where she is buried with Jean-Paul Sartre. I left a flower there for him and then took Kendall the short distance to where Jean Seberg is buried. Montparnasse is still a working cemetary and there was a funeral in place a few down from Jean so we were circumspect while there.Ah Jean. Discovered at 19 by Otto Preminger after a nationwide search, she won the title role in his film SAINT JOAN. Despite bad reviews he bullied her through the filming of BONJOUR TRISTESSE with David Niven and Deborah Kerr, another critical no-no. Considered a has-been at 20, she was re-born in France as Patricia, the American femme-fatale in Jean-Luc Godard's A BOUT DE SOUFFLE with Jean-Paul Belmondo. She continued to work mostly in Europe, occasionally finding roles in off-beat American films including her finest performance in the title role as the disturbed and
disturbing LILITH with Warren Beatty. Despite a Golden Globe Best Actress nomination, the film's poor business again meant a return to Europe including two films for Claude Chabrol. She was back in the US for two major films PAINT YOUR WAGON and AIRPORT but these had negligable impact on her career and she drifted into unworthy film roles. However there were darker agencies at work. Always a liberal, she espoused the rights of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s which brought her to the attention of the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover who launched a covert operation to 'neutralize' her. A story was placed in the LA Times and Newsweek that her unborn child was by a black lover and not her 2nd husband Romain Gary. The upset this caused her resulted in the child being stillborn and she even went so far as to open the coffin at the funeral to prove the child was white.
Her depression after this was compounded by attracting hangers-on and men who used her as well as addictions to alcohol and prescriptive drugs and several attempts at suicide. Eventually in 1979 at the ridiculously young age of 41 her partly decomposed body was found lying wrapped in a blanket on the back seat of her car 11 days after she was reported missing. An autopsy revealed massive doses of Barbiturate and alcohol and a ruling of suicide was given. However her death has never been fully explained and it remains a troubling ending to this troubled woman.
Knowing all this it is moving to stand at her grave thinking
that in that quiet well-tended cemetery she is finally beyond the reach of the bullying men she was used by personally and professionally, from the Black Panthers who used her money and celebrity then accused her of being a racist after attempting to prove her dead daughter was white, from the government agencies of her own country who did so much to ruin her and finally from her own unnameable demons. My roses are by the name tablet, Kendall's is the single one.Appropriately enough, like a bad Hollywood movie, as we left the cemetery the rain
started again. We walked back the way we came finally stopping for a much needed pizza, salad, and red wine around 6pm. A slow meander back, taking in the Virgin Megastore - where Kendall set off the theft alarm! - and walked past our first port-of-call again, the Rex Cinema now brightly illuminated for what appeared to be a premiere. We made it back to Gard du Nord in good time then chuffed wearily back to Waterloo to arrive dead (to the world) on 10:30. A slightly sad but very enjoyable day. Once back home, I opened the guide book and did some serious figuring out... we had walked 8.2 miles!! No wonder my blood sugar was remarkably low
*makes mental note about a walk around Paris' arrondissements being good for high blood sugar*
