Why am I writing about this? I have no idea.
Jean Seberg blew me away in "Breathless" by Jean-Luc Godard, made in 1960. If you had watched nothing but American films until you saw "Breathless", you would feel as though you had been eating meatballs all your life and someone has just brought you a thick, juicy, t-bone steak.
Just one example: Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) casually says to Patricia (Seberg), "I have slept with two girls since you. They weren't very much." This is the hero of the story. Jean Seberg is incandescent, short-hair, bright, naive. She says she'll see him tonight anyway. She isn't sure why. She can't figure out if she likes him or not. He says things about American girls. She says things about the French. She sits on the bed in her striped shirt and makes faces and he keeps asking her to let him sleep with her that night.
No American film of this era could stand this kind adult interaction, or this kind of amorphous waltz of feeling and not feeling and sex and no sex and certainty or doubt. We are spoon-fed our Hollywood romances and we believe Meg Ryan could be a surgeon or not be a surgeon but she will never not be in love with Nicholas Cage.
Have you seen "Breathless"? It's a bizarre film. Very clumsy at times, but ridiculously unconventional, by Hollywood standards. Street scenes are filmed on the streets. There are long, rambling, disconnected conversations in hotel rooms. Dialogue is cut into a million pieces and then stitched together.
Mostly, there is Jean Seberg's entrancing face. The film ends with her gazing into the camera, after committing an inexplicable betrayal, a beautiful, absorbing mystery.
The FBI Kills an Actress.
When I was quite young, I saw an entertaining little satire called "The Mouse That Roared" which starred Peter Sellers as Tully Bascombe, a bumbling but good-hearted soldier who was placed in charge of the army of the ridiculously tiny Grand Duchy of Fenwick when the conniving prime-minister realized that every country ever defeated by the United States became the recipient of scads of foreign aid.
The Grand Duchy of Fenwick thereby declared war on the United States-- hoping and expecting to lose.
Tully led his troupes over to America-- by commercial liner-- dressed in chain mail and armed with long bows, where they inadvertently captured the eccentric scientist in charge of developing a new type of atomic bomb, and his lovely daughter, and working prototype of the bomb. (The scientist figured he was safer working inconspicuously than in a secure compound guarded by conspicuous soldiers.)
There was a funny scene when he returned to Fenwick to announce that he had won, arousing the fury of the Prime Minister.
There was also a scene with the daughter, Helen. For the sake of the safety of the world, her father urged her to try to seduce Tully. Tully was unmoved, mainly because he was quite seasick at the moment. In the end, though, Tully got the girl, and the new bomb went into a dungeon on a bed of straw, for safe-keeping.
The girl was Jean Seberg. Jean Seberg was seventeen and wholly unprepared for Hollywood when she was chosen from among 3,000 girls to play Joan of Arc for Otto Preminger. The movie was a failure and Seberg's performance was panned, but she went on to star in "Breathless", one of the most influential films of the 1960's. She became a kind of icon of the 1960's, as unlike Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and Doris Day as Bob Dylan was unlike Dean Martin. She was the real thing, one of the first post-modern celebrities. She was her own girl. She held strong political views which led her to support the Black Panthers. The FBI took note and spied on her and decided to plant a story about her in the press. They persuaded the L.A. Times and Newsweek to publish the rumour that she was pregnant with the child of an un-named member of the Black Panther party. Seberg, devastated, took an overdose of sleeping pills and lost the baby. She showed the stillborn body to the press, to prove that it was not mixed race.
Every year thereafter, on the anniversary of the baby's stillbirth, she tried to commit suicide, and finally succeeded in September, 1979, with barbiturates and alcohol.
She married and divorced, married and divorced. One of her husbands sold her Paris apartment out from under her and took the money to Spain to open a restaurant. Romain Gary insulted her and told the press he was going to teach this ignorant American girl all about real culture. Almost made me want to shred my "Brothers Karamazov". You look at this guy's washed out, oily face and you look at Seberg's mesmerizing eyes and you think of Bob Dylan's cryptic "The Man in the Long Black Coat":
There are no mistakes in
life some people say
It is true sometimes you can see it that way
But people don't live or die people just float
She went with the man in the long black coat.
or "What's a Sweetheart Like You Doing in a Dump Like This".
In order to deal in this game,
got to make the queen disappear,
It's done with a flick of the wrist.
What's a sweetheart like you
doin' in a dump like this?
Her body was found in the back seat of her car where it had rested for 11 days. Apparently, nobody had missed her. That seems inconceivable, but I read it somewhere: her absence had not been noted.
Her husband, Romain Gary, whom she was divorcing at the time of the rumour, committed suicide himself a year later.
Copyright © 2007 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved.
The FBI admitted their role in Jean Seberg's disintegration, and said they were very, very sorry, and it won't happen again.
I read somewhere that J. Edgar Hoover discouraged the attack on Seberg. I don't know if that's true or not. It seems out of character for the voyeur-in-chief of the nation. He didn't discourage spying on her or prying into the lives of people who held unpopular views-- just this particular attack.
The entrancing mystery girl herself.
What's the word for a Jean Seberg? Naif? (A combination of naive and waif?) A naif is beautiful, talented in something or another, naive, and self-destructive. Everybody wants them but they don't want themselves. They frequently end up living alone. When they die, through suicide or neglect, the first thing you think is, if I had only been there, maybe I could have saved her.
The Other Jean Sebergs:
Edie Sedgewick
Marilyn Monroe
Chan Marshall (Cat Power)
Frances Farmer
Marianne Faithful
Louise Brooks
The Not Jean Sebergs:
Princess Diana (too narcissistic)
Paris Hilton (too ridiculous)
Ally McBeal (too trivial)
Audrey Hepburn (too nice)
