Affaire David Hamilton: It’s no rock ‘n’ roll show (Looking back at the dark side of rock music’s magnetism)

Si quelqu’un scandalisait un de ces petits qui croient en moi, il vaudrait mieux pour lui qu’on suspendît à son cou une meule de moulin et qu’on le jetât au fond de la mer. Jésus (Matthieu 18: 6)

Il faut peut-être entendre par démocratie les vices de quelques-uns à la portée du plus grand nombre. Henry Becque

Il nous arriverait, si nous savions mieux analyser nos amours, de voir que souvent les femmes ne nous plaisent qu’à cause du contrepoids d’hommes à qui nous avons à les disputer (…) ce contrepoids supprimé, le charme de la femme tombe. Proust

L’idée que Playboy transforme les femmes en objets sexuels est ridicule. Les femmes sont des objets sexuels… C’est l’attraction entre les sexes qui fait tourner le monde. C’est pourquoi les femmes portent du rouge à lèvres et des jupes courtes. Hugh Hefner (2010)

Ces nanas sont notre ennemi naturel. Il est temps de se battre contre elles. Il est temps de se battre contre elles… Ce que je veux, c’est un article dévastateur qui démonte les féministes militantes. Hugh Hefner

Playboy traite les femmes – et les hommes aussi, d’ailleurs – comme des êtres sexuels et non comme des objets sexuels. En ce sens, je pense que Playboy a été une force efficace dans la cause de l’émancipation féminine. Hugh Hefner

Il est difficile d’imaginer que quelqu’un aurait pu savoir ce que cela aurait pu devenir. Les parents qui grandissent aujourd’hui se battent pour que leurs enfants restent purs. Les époux se battent pour garder leur mariage intact. Et de nombreuses personnes asservies et piégées dans l’industrie du divertissement pour adultes ont été dépouillées, au sens figuré et au sens propre, non seulement de leurs vêtements, mais aussi de leur valeur même en tant que personnes créées à l’image de Dieu. Si cela ne nous préoccupe pas, qu’est-ce qui va nous préoccuper ? Ed Stetzer

Il aurait été amusant de débattre de la question de savoir si un homme qui procurait, sollicitait et tirait profit de femmes vendant des services sexuels pouvait être qualifié de proxénète. Bien entendu, l’idéologie de Playboy repose sur l’idée que les femmes font ce genre de choses de leur plein gré ; qu’à 23 ans, elles ne veulent rien d’autre que sauter des octogénaires. Maintenant qu’il est mort, on parle de ce vieux dégoûtant en smoking comme d’une sorte de libérateur des femmes. Kim Kardashian est honorée d’y avoir participé. C’est vrai. Je ne sais pas vraiment quelles femmes ont été libérées par les fantasmes de Hefner. Je suppose que si vous aspiriez à être une Barbie vivante, c’était aussi fabuleux que de faire partie de l’entourage de Donald Trump. Si nous étions allés au tribunal, j’aurais aimé entendre certaines des anciennes camarades de jeu et lapins s’exprimer devant la cour – parce qu’au fil des ans, ils l’ont fait. Les récits des « quelques privilégiées » qui ont pu pénétrer dans le sanctuaire du manoir Playboy de 29 pièces en tant qu’épouses/petites amies/lapins sont assez étonnants. Dans le zoo, le harem et le bordel de Hefner, ces blondes interchangeables étaient soumises à un couvre-feu. Elles n’étaient pas autorisées à recevoir la visite d’amis. Et certainement pas de petits amis. Elles recevaient une « allocation ». Les grandes grilles métalliques du manoir, dont tout le monde prétendait qu’elles empêchaient les gens d’entrer dans ce « nirvana », ont été décrites par Holly Madison, ancienne « petite amie » de Hefner, dans son autobiographie : « J’ai fini par penser que c’était fait pour m’enfermer ». Le fantasme vendu par Hefner n’était pas un fantasme de liberté pour les femmes, mais pour les hommes. Les femmes devaient être étrangement chastes mais toujours disponibles pour un bon prix. Habiller des femmes adultes en lapins – autrefois considéré comme le summum de la sophistication – est aujourd’hui perçu comme une attitude grotesque et ironique. Certains veulent aujourd’hui célébrer la contribution de Hefner au journalisme de magazine, et je ne conteste pas le fait que Playboy a fait appel à des écrivains fantastiques. Une partie du sens des affaires de Hefner a consisté à rendre la vente de chair féminine respectable et branchée, à rendre le porno doux acceptable. Le rêve de tout homme était d’avoir le style de vie de Hefner. Apparemment. Toutes les photos de lui, jusqu’à la fin, le montrent avec son sourire de lézard entouré de clones blondes. Tous les crétins de Twitter se demandent si Hefner ira au paradis alors qu’il y a déjà vécu. Mais écoutez ce que les femmes disent de ce paradis. Chaque semaine, se souvient Izabella St James, elles devaient se rendre dans sa chambre et « attendre qu’il ramasse la crotte de chien sur le tapis – puis demander notre argent de poche ». Un millier de dollars comptés en billets de cent dollars craquants provenant d’un coffre-fort situé dans l’une de ses bibliothèques ». Si l’une d’entre elles quittait le manoir et n’était pas disponible pour les soirées du club où elle était exhibée, elle ne recevait pas son argent de poche. Les draps du manoir étaient tachés. Les petites amies ne devaient pas se chamailler. Aucun préservatif ne pouvait être utilisé. Une infirmière devait parfois être appelée dans la « grotte » de Hefner s’il avait fait une chute. Néanmoins, ces jeunes femmes devaient s’exécuter. Hefner – décrit à plusieurs reprises comme une icône de la libération sexuelle – était allongé là, avec, je suppose, une érection emblématique, bourré de Viagra jusqu’aux yeux. La petite amie principale était ensuite appelée pour lui faire une fellation. Il n’y avait ni protection ni test. Il s’en fichait, écrit Jill Ann Spaulding. Ensuite, les autres femmes se mettaient à tour de rôle sur lui pendant deux minutes, tandis que les filles en arrière-plan jouaient des scénarios lesbiens pour maintenir l’excitation de « papa ». Y a-t-il une fin à ce glamour ? Aujourd’hui, oui, bien sûr. Mais cet homme est encore célébré par des personnes qui devraient être mieux informées. On peut parler de glamour, d’oreilles de lapin et de résilles, on peut évoquer sa contribution au journalisme gonzo, on peut contextualiser sa volonté de libérer le sexe dans le cadre de la révolution sexuelle. Mais si l’on fait abstraction de tout cela, on s’aperçoit qu’il était un homme qui achetait et vendait des femmes à d’autres hommes. N’est-ce pas là la définition d’un proxénète ? Je ne saurais le dire. Suzanne Moore

En apprenant la mort du proxénète et pornographe Hugh Hefner ce matin, j’ai souhaité croire à l’enfer. (…) C’est à Hefner que l’on doit la transformation du porno en industrie. Comme l’écrit Gail Dines dans ses virulantes révélations sur l’industrie pornographique, il l’a fait passer des arrières-cours à Wall Street et, en grande partie grâce à lui, c’est aujourd’hui une industrie de plusieurs milliards de dollars par an. Hefner a opéré dans un pays où, si l’on filme un acte d’humiliation ou de torture – et si la victime est une femme – le film est à la fois un divertissement et un discours protégé. Il a causé des dommages incommensurables en faisant du porno – et donc de l’achat et de la vente du corps des femmes – un commerce légitime. Hefner détestait les femmes et les traitait de « chiennes ». En 1963, Gloria Steinem (alors journaliste indépendante) a décidé de se faire passer pour une Bunny Girl et de passer deux semaines à la Playboy Mansion. Steinem a découvert que les femmes qui y travaillaient étaient traitées comme des moins que rien. Les Bunny devaient porter des talons d’au moins cinq centimètres de haut et des corsets trop petits d’au moins cinq centimètres partout, sauf au niveau du buste, qui ne comportait que des bonnets D. Steinem a décrit cette situation comme une forme d’injustice. Steinem l’a décrit comme une forme de torture. Un éternuement pouvait faire sauter la fermeture éclair, et lorsqu’elles l’enlevaient, leur poitrine était écarlate et enflée. Steinem a constaté une misogynie grotesque à l’égard des femmes et a commenté qu’elles étaient « déshumanisées » par les clients – qui, après tout, suivaient l’exemple de Hefner. « Ces gonzesses [les féministes] sont nos ennemies naturelles. Il est temps de se battre contre elles », a écrit Hefner dans une note secrète transmise aux féministes par des secrétaires de Playboy. « Il est temps que nous nous battions contre elles… Ce que je veux, c’est un article dévastateur qui démonte les féministes militantes ». En réaction, des féministes ont commencé à dresser des piquets de grève devant ses commerces. Avouant qu’il ne pouvait avoir d’orgasme qu’en se masturbant devant de la pornographie, Hefner était un prédateur sexuel. Les jeunes femmes qui travaillaient au manoir Playboy parlaient du dégoût qu’elles éprouvaient à avoir des relations sexuelles avec lui, mais elles ajoutaient que cela « faisait partie des règles tacites ». « C’était presque comme si nous devions le faire en échange de tout ce que nous avions », avait déclaré l’une d’entre elles. Les jumelles britanniques Carla et Melissa Howe, qui ont vécu à la Playboy Mansion pendant un certain temps, ont déclaré à un journal en 2015 que la sécurité était si stricte qu’on avait l’impression d’être en prison. Elles ont également déclaré à propos des hommes qui visitaient le manoir : « C’était vraiment des tordus; toutes les filles se battaient pour s’enfuir ». Décrit comme « moderne, digne de confiance, propre et respectable » par le magazine Time en mars 1963, Hefner était régulièrement présenté comme une sorte d’attaché culturel plutôt que comme le salaud qui haïssait les femmes qu’il était. Prétendre que Hefner était un libérateur sexuel ou une idole de la liberté d’expression, c’est comme suggérer que Roman Polanski a contribué à la protection de l’enfance. J’imagine que les fabricants de pyjamas en soie pleurent Hefner, mais aucune féministe ne versera une larme à sa mort. Et les gauchistes progressistes qui expliquent avec lyrisme que Hefner soutenait les luttes antiracistes devraient peut-être se demander comment un tel champion des droits civiques a pu concilier cela avec les millions qu’il a gagnés en vendant le racisme le plus vil dans une grande partie de sa pornographie. Au moment où j’écrivais ces lignes, une émission d’information reconnue m’a demandé si j’accepterais de participer ce soir à un sujet sur l’héritage de Hefner. « Nous cherchons à savoir s’il a été une force pour le bien ou pour le mal. Hefner a-t-il révolutionné la sexualité féminine ou encouragé la dégradation des femmes en les considérant comme de simples objets de désir ? Maintenant qu’il est mort, j’imagine que les dizaines de femmes qu’il a abusées vont se manifester et forcer ses partisans progressistes à voir en lui ce qu’il était vraiment : une ordure sexiste de la plus basse espèce. Julie Bindel

Je me trouvais devant la célèbre Playboy Mansion, un magnifique château en pierre devenu synonyme de bacchanales orgiaques (est-ce une redondance ?) organisées par son propriétaire, Hugh Hefner (…) Ces fêtes – décorées par des jeunes femmes légèrement vêtues – étaient de véritables rites de passage pour des dizaines de types d’Hollywood et d’athlètes professionnels en rut. En me garant, je me suis rendu compte que quelque chose n’allait pas. Une balançoire en plastique brillant était suspendue à un arbre gracieux près de l’imposante porte d’entrée du manoir. Des jouets d’enfants étaient éparpillés. Hefner était marié à Kimberly Conrad, une ancienne Playmate de l’année. Leur fils, Marston, était tout petit. Le magazine People avait traité leur mariage de 1989 comme un miracle des temps modernes : « La semaine prochaine, l’enfer gèle », avait-il déclaré. Après sa brève incursion dans la vie domestique, Hefner est revenu à son ancien libertinage sexuel. Il a souvent été photographié avec un trio évolutif de jeunes femmes blondes et plantureuses. Je suis sûr qu’il n’y a rien de plus sexy que d’être traité de manière interchangeable par un homme qui a au moins un demi-siècle d’avance sur vous. Hefner s’est remarié en 2012 avec une femme de 60 ans sa cadette, qui est maintenant devenue sa veuve (…) J’étais venu au manoir pour interviewer Wendy Hamilton, une jeune femme de 23 ans originaire de Detroit qui avait été choisie pour être la Miss Décembre 1991 du magazine Playboy. Les responsables du magazine m’ont dit que j’étais le premier journaliste qu’ils avaient autorisé à assister à une séance de photos de la page centrale, que j’avais réalisée quelques jours plus tôt dans les studios de l’immeuble Playboy sur Sunset Boulevard. C’était la séance photo la moins sexy que j’aie jamais vue, mais c’était l’aboutissement d’un rêve de petite fille pour Hamilton. À l’âge de 10 ans, elle a vu le calendrier Playboy de son père dans le garage et lui a dit solennellement : « Un jour, papa, je serai l’une de ces filles ». Qui sait combien d’autres petites filles ont été contaminées par l’idée que se déshabiller pour des hommes serait le summum de la réussite ? Par-dessus tout, Hugh Hefner était dans le domaine des fantasmes. Des fantasmes d’hommes, bien sûr. Mais aussi les fantasmes des femmes. Pas leurs fantasmes sexuels, bien sûr. Leurs fantasmes concernant l’attention masculine, l’estime de soi et le succès. Je trouve toujours ironique que Hefner, qui prônait ce qu’il appelait une version « saine » de la sexualité féminine dans les pages de son magazine (jolis visages, gros seins, pas de pubis), ait probablement fait plus pour généraliser l’exploitation du corps des femmes que n’importe quel autre personnage de l’histoire des États-Unis. En réalité, il a réussi l’une des plus grandes escroqueries de tous les temps : Au cours des décennies où les femmes américaines se libéraient à la maison et sur le lieu de travail – et forçaient en fait la création de nouveaux concepts juridiques tels que le harcèlement sexuel et le viol par une connaissance – il a réussi à convaincre de nombreuses femmes que se déshabiller pour le plaisir des hommes n’était pas seulement une source d’autonomie, mais aussi un objectif valable en soi. La tromperie a également été extrêmement rentable ; Hefner est devenu multimillionnaire en cours de route. Il n’a pas inventé l’expression « regard masculin » (le mérite en revient à un critique de cinéma féministe), mais il en a certainement incarné l’idée. C’était la séance photo la moins sexy que j’aie jamais vue, mais c’était l’aboutissement d’un rêve de petite fille pour Hamilton. À l’âge de 10 ans, elle a vu le calendrier Playboy de son père dans le garage et lui a dit solennellement : « Un jour, papa, je serai l’une de ces filles ». Qui sait combien d’autres petites filles ont été contaminées par l’idée que se déshabiller pour des hommes serait le summum de la réussite ? Par-dessus tout, Hugh Hefner était dans le domaine des fantasmes. Des fantasmes d’hommes, bien sûr. Mais aussi les fantasmes des femmes. Pas leurs fantasmes sexuels, bien sûr. Leurs fantasmes concernant l’attention masculine, l’estime de soi et le succès. Je trouve toujours ironique que Hefner, qui prônait ce qu’il appelait une version « saine » de la sexualité féminine dans les pages de son magazine (jolis visages, gros seins, pas de pubis), ait probablement fait plus pour généraliser l’exploitation du corps des femmes que n’importe quel autre personnage de l’histoire des États-Unis. En réalité, il a réussi l’une des plus grandes escroqueries de tous les temps : Au cours des décennies où les femmes américaines se libéraient à la maison et sur le lieu de travail – et forçaient en fait la création de nouveaux concepts juridiques tels que le harcèlement sexuel et le viol par une connaissance – il a réussi à convaincre de nombreuses femmes que se déshabiller pour le plaisir des hommes n’était pas seulement une source d’autonomie, mais aussi un objectif valable en soi. La tromperie a également été extrêmement rentable ; Hefner est devenu multimillionnaire en cours de route. Il n’a pas inventé l’expression « regard masculin » (le mérite en revient à un critique de cinéma féministe), mais il en a certainement incarné l’idée. Il n’a pas inventé l’expression « le regard masculin » (le mérite en revient à une critique de cinéma féministe), mais il a certainement incarné la notion esthétique selon laquelle les images des femmes – et les femmes elles-mêmes – existent pour plaire aux hommes. « Playboy », a-t-il déclaré un jour, « traite les femmes – et les hommes aussi, d’ailleurs – comme des êtres sexuels, et non comme des objets sexuels. En ce sens, je pense que Playboy a été une force efficace dans la cause de l’émancipation féminine ». Il s’agit là d’un déni de la plus haute importance. S’il s’était vraiment engagé en faveur de « l’émancipation féminine », il aurait accepté l’idée que les femmes, et pas seulement les hommes, peuvent être sexuelles toute leur vie. Au lieu de cela, comme le montrent son mariage, ses fréquentations et les pages de son magazine, les femmes ont une durée de vie bien définie. Après, disons, l’âge de 30 ans, non seulement elles expirent, mais elles cessent également d’exister, qu’elles soient nues ou non. Hefner, vêtu d’un pyjama et fumant la pipe, restera une figure paradoxale de la culture américaine. Son magazine était le dépositaire d’un journalisme intelligent. Et dans le passé, la Fondation Playboy a soutenu des organisations vouées à des objectifs louables tels que les droits en matière de reproduction et les libertés civiles. Certes, Hefner a mené une bataille indispensable contre les forces du puritanisme américain du XXe siècle, mais malheureusement d’une manière qui a libéré les hommes (ou du moins leurs fantasmes masturbatoires) en réduisant les femmes à l’état d’objet. Finalement, comme cela devait arriver, la culture a oublié Playboy. L’internet et le téléphone portable ont contribué à rendre désuète la nudité à la Playboy. EEn 2015, le magazine a annoncé qu’il ne publierait plus de photos de femmes entièrement nues, mais seulement des photos suggestives. À ce moment-là, qui s’en soucie ? L’influence de Playboy sur la façon dont les jeunes femmes sont perçues et traitées est irrévocablement ancrée dans la culture. Ne cherchez pas plus loin que l’occupant agrippé du bureau ovale. Je voulais avoir le point de vue d’un homme sur le décès de Hefner, alors je suis allé chez mon père. À 88 ans, il est professeur d’anglais à la retraite à Cal State Northridge et est devenu lui-même un célibataire échangiste après le divorce de mes parents à la fin des années 1970. « Qu’est-ce que tu pensais de lui, papa ? demandai-je. Mon père s’est adossé à sa chaise et a regardé le plafond pendant un moment. « Eh bien », a-t-il dit, « c’était vraiment un sexiste ». Bien dit, papa. Robin Abcarian

En rendant hommage à Hugh Hefner, décédé à l’âge de 91 ans, nombreux sont ceux qui évoquent sa contribution à la culture américaine. Il convient d’ajouter que, si ces contributions sont importantes, elles jettent également une ombre considérable. Le fondateur de la marque Playboy était un pionnier des médias et une icône de la gauche, un défenseur précoce et très actif de la liberté d’expression, des droits civiques et de la libération sexuelle. Cela ne fait aucun doute : En tant que militant, « Hef » a ouvert la voie à une discussion ouverte sur le sexe et la sexualité, donnant aux gens la permission d’admettre qu’ils étaient eux aussi des êtres sexuels et qu’ils aimaient – ou du moins voulaient aimer – le sexe. Dans les clubs Playboy qu’il a ouverts dans les années 1960, il a embauché des humoristes noirs à une époque où de nombreux clubs pratiquaient une ségrégation de fait. Parallèlement, en tant qu’éditeur, il a repoussé les limites en publiant des articles (oui, les fameux « articles » que les hommes disaient rechercher dans Playboy) qui étaient révolutionnaires : des enquêtes menées par des écrivains comme Hunter S. Thompson et des entretiens avec des personnalités de premier plan comme Martin Luther King. Il était également un bel exemple du rêve américain, ayant lancé le magazine avec 600 dollars de sa poche et 1 000 dollars empruntés à sa mère. Mais il convient également de souligner, dans l’esprit du dialogue culturel ouvert qu’il a encouragé toute sa vie, que la société égalitaire de Hefner était largement envisagée et créée pour les hommes. Les termes de sa rébellion dépendaient indéniablement du fait que les femmes étaient reléguées au second plan. Après tout, ce sont les femmes dont la sexualité étaient exposée sur les couvertures et dans les pages centrales de son magazine, sans parler du fait qu’elles sont restées accrochées à son épaule, pratiquement jusqu’à sa mort. La notion de liberté d’expression de la sexualité de Hef se traduisait largement par la liberté d’exprimer le désir des hommes pour les femmes, et par le fantasme que ces femmes seraient toujours prêtes et désireuses de s’y conformer. Et il ne s’agissait pas seulement d’affaires : Hefner lui-même s’est vanté d’avoir couché avec plus d’un millier de femmes. Dans ses mémoires de 2015, « Down the Rabbit Hole », Holly Madison, ancienne playmate et petite amie de Hef, décrit le manoir Playboy comme un lieu où Hef encourageait la compétition – et les problèmes d’image corporelle – entre ses multiples petites amies. L’héritage de Hef est rempli de preuves de l’exploitation des femmes à des fins professionnelles. En créant Playboy et en maintenant sa marque pendant six décennies, Hef a défendu un monde dans lequel les femmes servent à séduire et à divertir les hommes, où leur corps est un objet, où les modifications visant à attirer les sens masculins priment souvent sur le confort (parce que qui veut vraiment des DDD ?). Les femmes sont des lapins – les « chanceuses », en tout cas. Les articles intelligents rédigés par des journalistes de renom qu’il publiait dans son magazine – même des journalistes femmes, comme Margaret Atwood – étaient destinés à enrichir l’intellect des lecteurs masculins du magazine. Même lorsque, il y a quelques années, le magazine s’est rebaptisé avec un éditorial « fini la nudité » comme moyen d’augmenter l’attrait du magazine pour les lecteurs de 20 et 30 ans (qui voulaient probablement le lire pour les articles), il est resté un endroit pour les hommes. Et, bien sûr, même si Playboy a supprimé la nudité intégrale pendant au moins un certain temps, en 2015, et a présenté pendant un certain temps des actrices et des mannequins en sous-vêtements, cela n’a rien changé au principe fondamental de l’entreprise : l’objectivation des femmes. (C’est un autre héritage de Hefner : aiguiser l’appétit pour le sexe facilement accessible, ce que l’internet fournit maintenant à profusion. Tout cela ne veut pas dire que la vie de Hefner ne doit pas être célébrée, d’une manière ou d’une autre. C’était un homme aux multiples facettes, qui a certainement marqué la société américaine. Mais nous devons reconnaître que son héritage n’est pas irréprochable. Le moins que l’on puisse dire, c’est qu’il est complexe. Hefner était-il féministe ? Il a pu penser qu’il l’était. Mais peut-être que, comme beaucoup d’hommes d’un certain âge, sa définition de la féminité avait sûrement – et cruellement – besoin d’une révision. Peggy Drexler

Nous ne sommes que trois dans ce métier. Nabokov l’a écrit, Balthus l’a peint et moi, je l’ai photographié. David Hamilton

Avais-je fait à Dolly, peut-être, ce que Frank Lasalle, un mécanicien de cinquante ans, avait fait à Sally Horner, une fillette de onze ans, en 1948 ? Vladimir Nabokov

Je me retrouve plongé dans une civilisation qui permet à un homme de vingt-cinq ans de courtiser une fille de seize ans mais pas une fille de douze ans. Humbert Humbert (Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955)

 Est-ce qu’on va toujours vivre comme çà en faisant toutes sortes de choses dégoûtantes dans des lits d’auberges ? (…)  Le mot juste est inceste. (…) Je devrais appeler la police et leur dire que tu m’as violée. Dolly (Lolita, Nabokov)

Lolita n’est pas une jeune fille perverse, c’est une pauvre enfant que l’on débauche, dont les sens ne s’éveillent jamais sous les caresses de l’immonde monsieur Humbert. (…) il est assez intéressant de se pencher comme disent les journalistes, sur le problème de la dégradation inepte que le personnage de la nymphette que j’ai inventé en cinquante cinq a subi dans l’esprit du gros public. Non seulement la perversité de cette pauvre enfant a été grotesquement exagérée, mais son aspect physique, son âge, tout a été modifié par des illustrations dans des publications étrangères. Des filles de vingt ans, ou davantage, de grandes dindes, des chattes de trottoir, des modèles bon marché, que sais-je ou des simples criminelles aux longues jambes sont baptisées nymphettes ou Lolita dans des reportages de magazines italiens, français, allemand etc.… et les couvertures des traductions turques, arabes atteignent le comble de l’ineptie. (…) ils représentent une jeune femme aux contours opulents comme on disait dans le temps et à la crinière blonde, imaginées par des nigauds qui n’ont jamais lu mon livre. En réalité, Lolita, je le répète, est une jeune fille de 12 ans, tandis que monsieur Humbert est un homme mûr, et c’est l’abîme entre son âge et celui de la fillette qui produit le vide, ce vertige, la séduction, l’attrait d’un danger mortel. En second lieu, c’est l’imagination du triste satyre qui fait une créature magique de cette petite écolière américaine aussi banale et normale dans son genre que le poète manqué Humbert dans le sien. En dehors du regard maniaque de monsieur Humbert, il n’y a pas de nymphette, Lolita la nymphette n’existe qu’à travers la hantise qui détruit Humbert. Et voici un aspect essentiel d’un livre singulier qui a été faussé par une popularité factice. Nabokov

Ici, on vous met en prison si vous couchez avec une fille de 12 ans alors qu’en Orient, on vous marie avec une gamine de 11 ans. C’est incompréhensible! Klaus Kinski (1977)

Did you hear about the midnight rambler Well, honey, it’s no rock ‘n’ roll show (…) Well you heard about the Boston… It’s not one of those Well, talkin’ ’bout the midnight…sh… The one that closed the bedroom door  I’m called the hit-and-run raper in anger  The knife-sharpened tippie-toe…  Or just the shoot ’em dead, brainbell jangler  You know, the one you never seen before. Mick Jagger

Young teacher, the subject of schoolgirl fantasy She wants him so badly Knows what she wants to be Inside her there’s longing This girl’s an open page Book marking – she’s so close now This girl is half his age (…) Don’t stand so close to me (…) Strong words in the staffroom The accusations fly It’s no use, he sees her He starts to shake and cough Just like the old man in That book by Nabokov. Sting

Sweet Little Sixteen. She’s got the grown-up blues tight dresses and lipstick. She’s sportin’ high-heel shoes. Oh but tomorrow morning, she’ll have to change her trend and be sweet sixteen. And back in class again. Chuck Berry (“Sweet Little Sixteen”)

I slept with Sable when she was 13. Her parents were too rich to do anything, She rocked her way around L.A., ‘Til a New York Doll carried her away. Iggy Pop (Look away)

I can see that you’re fifteen years old No I don’t want your I.D. And I can see that you’re so far from home But it’s no hanging matter It’s no capital crime Oh yeah, you’re a strange stray cat. Mick Jagger-Keith Richards

Long ago, and, oh, so far away I fell in love with you before the second show Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear But you’re not really here, it’s just the radio Don’t you remember, you told me you loved me baby? You said you’d be coming back this way again baby Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh baby I love you, I really do Loneliness is such a sad affair And I can hardly wait to be with you again. Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlet

From the window of your rented limousine, I saw your pretty blue eyes One day soon you’re gonna reach sixteen, Painted lady in the city of lies. (…) Lips like cherries and the brow of a queen, Come on, flash it in my eyes Said you dug me since you were thirteen, then you giggle as you heave and sigh. Robert Plant-Jimmy Page (Sick again, Led Zeppelin)

It’s a shame to see these young chicks bungle their lives away in a flurry and rush to compete with what was in the old days the goodtime relationships we had with the GTOs and people like that. When it came to looning, they could give us as much of a looning as we could give them. It’s a shame, really. If you listen to ‘Sick Again,’ a track from Physical Graffiti, the words show I feel a bit sorry for them. ‘Clutching pages from your teenage dream in the lobby of the Hotel Paradise/Through the circus of the L.A. queen how fast you learn the downhill slide.’ One minute she’s 12 and the next minute she’s 13 and over the top. Such a shame. They haven’t got the style that they had in the old days… way back in ’68. Robert Plant

Tomorrow brings another town, another girl like you. Have you time before you leave to greet another man. Richard Wright

Yeah! You’re a star fucker (…) Yeah, I heard about your Polaroids Now that’s what I call obscene Your tricks with fruit was kind a cute I bet you keep your pussy clean (…) Yeah, Ali McGraw got mad with you For givin’ head to Steve McQueen, Yeah, and me we made a pretty pair Fallin’ through the Silver Screen Yeah, I’m makin’ bets that you gonna get John Wayne before he dies. Mick Jagger

People always give me this bit about us being a macho band, and I always ask them to give me examples. « Under My Thumb »… Yes, but they always say Starf–ker, and that just happened to be about someone I knew. There’s really no reason to have women on tour, unless they’ve got a job to do. The only other reason is to f–k. Otherwise they get bored, they just sit around and moan. It would be different if they did everything for you, like answer the phones, make the breakfast, look after your clothes and your packing, see if the car was ready, and f–k. Sort of a combination of what (road manager) Alan Dunn does and a beautiful chick. Mick Jagger

Some girls take my money Some girls take my clothes Some girls get the shirt off my back And leave me with a lethal dose French girls they want Cartier Italian girls want cars American girls want everything in the world You can possibly imagine English girls they’re so prissy I can’t stand them on the telephone Sometimes I take the receiver off the hook I don’t want them to ever call at all White girls they’re pretty funny Sometimes they drive me mad Black girls just wanna get fucked all night I just don’t have that much jam Chinese girls are so gentle They’re really such a tease You never know quite what they’re cookin’ Inside those silky sleeves  (…) Some girls they’re so pure Some girls so corrupt Some girls give me children I only made love to her once Give me half your money Give me half your car Give me half of everything I’ll make you world’s biggest star So gimme all your money Give me all your gold Let’s go back to Zuma beach I’ll give you half of everything I own. Mick Jagger

Goodbye Ruby Tuesday Who could hang a name on you? When you change with every new day Still I’m gonna miss you. Brian Jones

She’s my little rock ‘n’ roll My tits and ass with soul baby Keith Richards

The plaster’s gettin’ harder and my love is perfection A token of my love for her collection, her collection Plaster caster, grab a hold of me faster And if you wanna see my love, just ask her And my love is the plaster And yeah, she’s the collector. Gene Simmons

Come on, babe on the round about, ride on the merry-go-round We all know what your name is, so you better lay your money down. Led Zeppelin

Like to tell ya about my baby You know she comes around She about five feet four A-from her head to the ground. Van Morrison

Well, she was standing by my dressing room after the show Asking for my autograph and asked if she could go Back to my motel room But the rest is just a tragic tale Because five short minutes of lovin’ Done brought me twenty long years in jail Well, like a fool in a hurry I took her to my room She casted me in plaster while I sang her a tune. Jim Croce

This girl is easy meat I seen her on the street See-through blouse an’ a tiny little dress Her manner indiscreet…i knew she was Easy, easy, easy meat (…) She wanna take me home Make me sweat and moan Rub my head and beat me off With a copy of rollin’ stone Frank Zappa

Hey all you girls in these Industrial towns I know you’re prob’ly gettin’ tired Of all the local clowns They never give you no respect They never treat you nice So perhaps you oughta try A little friendly advice And be a CREW SLUT Hey, you ‘ll love it Be a CREW SLUT It’s a way of life Be a CREW SLUT See the world Don’t make a fuss, just get on the bus CREW SLUT Add water, makes its own sauce Be a CREW SLUT So you don’t forget, call before midnite tonite The boys in the crew Are fust waiting for you. Frank Zappa

I was an innocent girl, but the way it happened was so beautiful. I remember him looking like God and having me over a table. Who wouldn’t want to lose their virginity to David Bowie? Lorie Maddox

It’s not about being physically mature. It’s emotional maturity that matters. I don’t think most 16-year-olds are ready. I think the age of consent should be raised to 18 at a minimum, and some girls aren’t even ready then. I know, I know. People will find that odd, coming from me. But I think I do know what I’m talking about here. You are still a child, even at 16. You can never get that part of your life, your childhood, back. I never could. Mandy Smith

What happened was I got this class assignment from my college art teacher on the same weekend that a bunch of rock bands were due to come into town for a big ‘Dick Clark Caravan’ show. Back then, I was just a teen-age virgin dying to meet rock stars. When the teacher suggested we go out and make a plaster cast of something hard, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. What started out as a way to meet rock bands ended up turning into a pop art form. I mean, you really ought to see these casts all lined up together in a row. Seriously, it looks like some amazing chorus line. Cynthia Plaster Caster

They had groupies too, just like rock stars and movie stars. they were world heroes, and there wer women – especially down at the Cape – who chased them. I was at a party one night in Houston. A woman standing behind me, who had no idea who I was, said ‘I’ve slept with every astronaut who has been to the Moon.’ … I said ‘Pardon me, but I don’t think so. Joan Roosa

The Bible loves a good redemption story, but forgiveness only goes so far. These religious leaders who fell from grace shocked the world when their crimes and scandals became public. The fallen pastors and leaders include famous men like Ted Haggard, one of many anti-gay activitists caught being gay, and Tony Alamo, who was sentenced to 175 years in prison for pedophilia and marrying an eight-year-old girl. The pastors who have fallen into sin have all kinds of excuses: it wasn’t technically illegal, it was a youthful mistake, it was a conspiracy orchestrated by the Vatican. But none of that excuses the hypocrisy of religious « authorities » preaching one standard for their flock and then flaunting those rules in their private lives. The names of fallen pastors are famous, from Bill Gothard to Jim Bakker. And don’t forget Josh Duggar––apparently molesting his own sisters isn’t one of the things the Duggars can’t do. Genevieve Carlton

They’re known in rugby social circles as « jersey pullers ». Unabashed about their targets and dismissive of other halves, they are the stuff of which WAGs’ nightmares are made. The new phenomenon, which has spawned a range of T-shirts, mugs and social networking sites, is defined in the urban dictionary as girls who attach themselves to a member of a team. And they’re stalking a player near you. Their maxim? « If she can’t keep him – she shouldn’t have him. » And they’re not about to let a little stumbling block such as a girlfriend – or even a wife – get in their way. (…) Lions coach Warren Gatland was the first in the camp to acknowledge the issue publicly during the recent tour of Australia. He baulked at how a group of girls – dolled up to the nines – would « happen to be passing through » a restaurant or pub every time one of the players made the mistake of tweeting their location. « It’s crazy, » he said, wide-eyed at the phenomenon. The jersey pullers have even followed players to far-flung destinations, jetting thousands of miles for the chance to hang out by the pool or in a nightclub while the stars are in holiday mood. And far away from the prying eyes of home. Such was the intense interest in the Lions rugby players that Gatland was moved to hire a team of burly security guards for the tour in order to « control » the situation. The Independent

Sable Starr(born Sable Hay Shields; August 15, 1957 – April 18, 2009^{) was a noted American groupie, often described as the « queen of the groupie scene » in Los Angeles during the early 1970s. She admitted during an interview published in the June 1973 edition of Star Magazine that she was closely acquainted with Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and Marc Bolan. Starr first attended concerts around Los Angeles with older friends who had dropped out of school in late 1968. She lost her virginity at age 12 with Spirit guitarist Randy California after a gig at Topanga, California. She had a younger sister, Corel Shields (born 1959), who was involved with Iggy Pop at age 11, although he was also acquainted with Starr. Iggy Pop later immortalized his own involvement with Starr, in the 1996 song « Look Away » (…) Starr became one of the first « baby groupies » who in the early 1970s frequented the Rainbow Bar and Grill, the Whiskey A Go Go, and Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco; these were trendy nightclubs on West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. The girls were named as such because of their young age. She got started after a friend invited her to the Whiskey A Go Go at the age of 14. (…) In 1973 she gave a candid interview for the short-lived Los Angeles-based Star Magazine, and boasted to the journalist that she considered herself to be « the best » of all the local groupies. She also claimed that she was closely acquainted with some of rock music’s leading musicians such as Jeff Beck, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Marc Bolan, and Alice Cooper, adding that her favorite rock star acquaintance was Led Zeppelin’s lead singer, Robert Plant. When asked how she attracted the attention of the musicians, she maintained it was because of the outrageous glam rock clothing she habitually wore. She was often photographed alongside well-known rock musicians; these photos appeared in American rock magazines such as Creem and Rock Scene. (…) She ran away from home when she was 16 after meeting Johnny Thunders, guitarist in the glam rock band the New York Dolls.} Wikipedia

Pamela Des Barres, connue comme groupie des groupes rock dans les années 1960 et 1970, est une femme de lettres, née Pamela Ann Miller à Reseda, Californie le 9 septembre 1948. (…) Lorsqu’elle était encore enfant, elle idolâtrait les Beatles et Elvis Presley, et fantasmait à l’idée de rencontrer son Beatle favori, Paul McCartney. Un amie du secondaire a introduit Des Barres auprès de Don Van Vliet, mieux connu sous le pseudonyme de Captain Beefheart, un musicien et ami de Frank Zappa. Vliet l’a, à son tour, introduite auprès de Charlie Watts et Bill Wyman des Rolling Stones, qui l’ont conduite à la scène rock au Sunset Strip de Los Angeles. Pamela a donc ensuite commencé à passer son temps avec The Byrds et quelques autres groupes. Quand elle est diplômée du secondaire, en 1966, elle multiplie les petits boulots qui lui permettent d’habiter près du Sunset Strip et d’entretenir plus de relations avec des musiciens rock : Nick St. Nicholas, Mick Jagger, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, Jimmy Page, Chris Hillman, Noel Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Ray Davies, Frank Zappa et l’acteur Don Johnson. Membre des GTO’s (Girls Together Outrageously), un groupe uniquement constitué de chanteuses, formé par Frank Zappa. Le groupe a commencé sous le nom de Laurel Canyon Ballet Company, et a commencé par des premières parties des concerts de Zappa et des Mothers of Invention. Le spectacle était principalement constitué par des « performances », mélange de musique et de paroles parlées, puisqu’aucun de ses membres ne savait chanter ou jouer correctement d’un instrument. Elles ont sorti un album, Permanent Damage en 1969, couvertes par Zappa et Jeff Beck. Le groupe a été dissous par Zappa un mois après le lancement de l’album parce que quelques-uns de ses membres avaient été arrêtés pour possession de drogue. Elle se marie avec Michael Des Barres, chanteur principal de Power Station et de Detective, le 29 octobre 1977. Ils ont un enfant, Nicholas Dean Des Barres, né le 30 septembre 1978. Le couple divorce en 1991, en raison des infidélités répétées de Michael Des Barres. Des Barres a écrit deux livres à propos de son expérience de groupie : I’m With The Band (1987) (publié en Allemagne sous le titre anglophone Light my fire) et Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (1993), ainsi qu’un autre livre, Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music Babylon.Wikipedia

Si je ne l’ai pas présentée à mes parents, c’est parce qu’elle n’a que quinze ans. Antoine (1966)

Quatorze automnes et quinze étés un petit animal, que cette Melody Nelson,une adorable garçonne et si délicieuse enfant. Serge Gainsbourg (1971)

Tu as treize ans, j’en ai trente qui sonnent. Georges Brassens (1972)

Viens, donne tes seize ans au bonheur qui prend forme pour que ton corps d’enfant peu à peu se transforme. Charles Aznavour (1974)

Je voudrais aimer une enfant.  Michel Sardou (1974)

Une femme de seize ans, ce n’est guère qu’une enfant (…)  Il paraît que c’est un délit. Georges Moustaki (1979)

20 ans, 18, 17 ans à la limite, je ressuscite, Sea, sex and sun, toi petite, tu es d’la dynamite. Serge Gainsbourg (1978)

Des gamines? affirmatif, de quel âge? ooh, ooh, ooh.  Serge Gainsbourg (1984)

Inceste de citron, Lemon incest, Je t’aime t’aime, je t’aime plus que tout, Papapappa, Naïve comme une toile du Nierdoi Sseaurou, Tes baisers sont si doux, Inceste de citron, Lemon incest,  Je t’aime t’aime, je t’aime plus que tout, Papapappa, L’amour que nous ne ferons jamais ensemble, Est le plus rare le plus troublant, Le plus pur le plus enivrant, Exquise esquisse…Inceste de citron… Serge Gainsbourg

Annie aime les sucettes Les sucett’s à l’anis Les sucett’s à l’anis D’Annie Donn’nt à ses baisers Un goût ani-Sé lorsque le sucre d’orge Parfumé à l’anis Coule dans la gorge d’Annie Elle est au paradis Pour quelques pennies Annie A ses sucettes à L’anis Ell’s ont la couleur de ses grands yeux La couleur des jours heureux … Serge Gainsbourg (Les Sucettes, 1966)

Les Sucettes est une chanson écrite par Serge Gainsbourg pour France Gall en 1966. Cette chanson est principalement connue pour ses deux niveaux de lecture : l’un décrit la scène innocente d’une fillette, Annie, friande de sucettes qu’elle va acheter au drugstore, l’autre décrit implicitement une fellation. Wikipedia

Je n’en compre­nais pas le sens et je peux vous certi­fier qu’à l’époque personne ne compre­nait le double sens. (…) Avant chaque disque (…), Serge me deman­dait de lui racon­ter ma vie (…) ce que vous avez fait pendant les vacances. Alors, je lui ai dit que j’avais été à Noir­mou­tier chez mes parents. Là-bas, il n’y a pas grand-chose à faire, sauf que, tous les jours, j’al­lais m’ache­ter une sucette à l’anis…(….) Et quand il a écrit la petite chan­son, je me voyais aller ache­ter ma sucette. C’était l’his­toire d’une petite fille qui allait ache­ter ses sucettes à l’anis, et quand elle n’en avait plus, elle allait retourner en acheter… Mais en même temps, je sentais que ce n’était pas clair… C’était Gainsbourg quand même !  (…) Mais (…) il me l’a jouée au piano, comme ça, et je l’ai tout de suite trou­vée très jolie, je lui ai dit : Serge, j’adore ta chanson !  (…) Et puis, je pars au Japon et là j’apprends qu’il y a tout un truc là-dessus, c’était horrible. (…) Ça a changé mon rapport aux garçons. (…) Ça m’a humiliée, en fait. France Gall

La mort a pour moi le visage d’une enfant Au regard transparent Son corps habile au raffinement de l’amour Me prendra pour toujours Elle m’appelle par mon nom Quand soudain je perds la raison Est-ce un maléfice Ou l’effet subtil du cannabis? (…) La mort ouvrant sous moi ses jambes et ses bras S’est refermée sur moi Son corps m’arrache enfin les râles du plaisir Et mon dernier soupir. Serge Gainsbourg (Cannabis, 1970)

Avoir pour premier grand amour un tel homme fait que le retour à la réalité est terrible. A seize ans je découvrais des sommets et ne pouvais ensuite que tomber de ce piédestal. Constance Meyer

Pendant les cinq dernières années de sa vie, de 1985 à 1991, Serge Gains­bourg a fréquenté une jeune femme alors qu’il vivait avec Bambou. Elle s’ap­pelle Cons­tance Meyer, avait à l’époque 16 ans, soit quarante-et-un de moins que le chan­teur, et raconte tout dans un livre qui paraît demain, La Jeune Fille Et Gains­bourg, aux éditions de L’Ar­chi­pel.En 1985, cette fan de l’homme à la tête de chou se pointe comme de nombreux, et surtout nombreuses, fans au domi­cile du chan­teur pour y dépo­ser une lettre accom­pa­gnée de son numéro de télé­phone. Visi­ble­ment touché, Gains­bourg appelle la jeune fille et l’in­vite à dîner. Suivront cinq années d’une histoire d’amour qui durera presque jusqu’au décès de l’ar­tiste en 1991. Cons­tance Meyer précise que Bambou, qui parta­geait la vie de Gains­bourg à l’époque, était au courant de la situa­tion et s’en accom­mo­dait : à elle les week-ends, à Cons­tance le reste de la semaine. Gala (2010)

Les temps ont changé : ce n’est plus avec leurs femmes que l’on trompe aujourd’hui les copains, mais avec leurs filles. Le Monde (1977)

Pourquoi une adolescente de quatorze ans ne pourrait-elle aimer un monsieur de trente-six ans son aîné ? Cent fois, j’avais retourné cette question dans mon esprit. Sans voir qu’elle était mal posée, dès le départ. Ce n’est pas mon attirance à moi qu’il fallait interroger, mais la sienne. Vanessa Springora

La conversation autour de #MeToo en France a été indéniablement intense. Mais lorsque des Françaises se sont élevées contre des réalisateurs (Luc Besson, Roman Polanski) et des intellectuels (Tariq Ramadan), elles ont toujours été confrontées à l’habituel blâme de la victime. D’où des avis partagés, des poursuites avortées et des méditations sur l’art français de la séduction. Il semble toutefois que quelque chose se soit passé avec l’affaire concernant le célèbre écrivain Gabriel Matzneff, dont le goût pour les adolescentes françaises et les jeunes garçons asiatiques n’est pas un secret – il a beaucoup écrit sur cette habitude pendant des années – mais qui, depuis ce mois-ci, est finalement inculpé pour avoir encouragé l’abus sexuel d’enfants. Cette inculpation intervient peu après la publication du livre de Vanessa Springora, directrice d’une maison d’édition parisienne, dont les mémoires sur sa relation abusive avec M. Matzneff semblent avoir enfin fait sauter le barrage. La force de cette histoire tient à la différence d’âge des protagonistes : Mme Springora a eu une relation sexuelle avec M. Matzneff au milieu des années 80, alors qu’elle avait 14 ans et lui 50. (…) Un jour, je l’espère, nous regarderons ces mois et nous verrons qu’ils ont marqué la fin d’une longue confusion autour de l’adolescente française, la « jeune fille », cette créature libérée, audacieuse, lettrée. (…) Un jour, je l’espère, nous regarderons ces mois et nous verrons qu’ils ont marqué la fin d’une longue confusion autour de l’adolescente française, la « jeune fille », cette créature libérée, audacieuse, lettrée. Ma mère, qui avait 18 ans lors de la révolution de mai 1968, m’a raconté qu’un homme qui passait dans la rue lui a demandé si elle voulait coucher avec lui. Non, lui a-t-elle dit, elle ne voulait pas. « L’homme lui a craché dessus : « Sale bourgeoise ! On imagine les difficultés auxquelles ont dû faire face les jeunes filles prises entre la joie d’être libérées sexuellement et l’injonction de l’être. Et, à l’horizon, l’exigence de ne pas trop se libérer. A l’époque, une femme ne pouvait voter ou hériter de biens qu’à 21 ans, mais pouvait se marier à 15 ans : il y avait de quoi être dérouté. (…) L’histoire de Matzneff m’a rappelé le procès en pédophilie d’une petite élite intellectuelle qui jouait avec la transgression sexuelle jusqu’à la folie en 1968. (…) [comme] Maurice Pialat, Éric Rohmer, Claude Miller, Benoît Jacquot, tous des réalisateurs fascinés par les adolescentes et cherchant à les comprendre, dans des efforts tantôt généreux et délicats, tantôt dérangeants. Leurs personnages de filles étaient intelligents, profonds et précoces, et leurs tourments étaient pris au sérieux. Les parents sont souvent absents, les hommes, plus ou moins rassurants, ne sont jamais loin. Il ne s’agissait pas de films d’adolescents édifiants, mais de films pour adultes dépeignant les filles d’une manière qui a probablement façonné celles d’entre nous qui les regardaient en retour. Mon mari, qui est américain, est scandalisé par le film de Rohmer « Pauline à la plage », dans lequel un petit groupe de jeunes adultes partage des sujets de cœur avec une jeune fille de 15 ans. Je suis presque offensée par son indignation, car j’aimerais penser que mon adolescente était Pauline, plus clairvoyante dans ses propres désirs que les adultes qui l’entouraient. L’étais-je ? Je lui épargnerai « Noce Blanche », dans lequel Vanessa Paradis, 16 ans, a une liaison avec son professeur de philosophie d’âge mûr, ou « Beau Père », qui raconte l’histoire d’une liaison entre une adolescente de 14 ans et son beau-père presque comme s’il s’agissait d’une comédie, ou « Un moment d’égarement » – réalisé à l’origine en 1977, puis remanié en 2015 – dans lequel une adolescente couche avec le meilleur ami de son père. « Les temps ont changé : ce n’est plus avec leurs femmes que les gens trompent leurs amis, mais avec leurs filles », avait déclaré le critique du Monde lors de la sortie du film original. Mais que voulaient vraiment les filles de la vraie vie ? Le réalisateur de « Noce Blanche », qui a connu un grand succès en France, a finalement été condamné pour harcèlement sexuel sur deux actrices. Mais nous l’apprendrons plus tard. Il est facile d’imaginer que l’histoire de Vanessa Springora et Gabriel Matzneff aurait pu faire un film typiquement français des années 80 : l’adolescente parisienne lettrée et l’écrivain scandaleux, une liaison fascinante et dangereuse dans le quartier arty de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Il y aurait eu un rôle de soutien ambigu pour la mère, un peu confuse, un peu jalouse. Le film se serait terminé par leur rupture. Nous aurions peut-être secrètement envié cette fille qui avait vécu une telle aventure interdite. Un écrivain que je connais, qui a le même âge que Mme Springora et qui a grandi à St-Germain-des-Prés, m’a dit : « J’ai eu la chance de ne jamais rencontrer Matzneff, parce que j’étais complètement fascinée par lui ». Dans son livre, Mme Springora ne nie pas avoir consenti à cette liaison. Pourtant, il ne fait aucun doute pour le lecteur qu’elle est une victime. Suite à la publication de son livre, le philosophe Alain Finkielkraut a répété, avec la même passion que lorsqu’il a défendu M. Polanski, qu' »un adolescent et un enfant, ce n’est pas la même chose » et qu’il s’agissait d’une autre époque. Le livre de Mme Springora démontre que ces deux affirmations sont peut-être vraies, mais qu’elles ne constituent en aucun cas un argument. Comme l’a dit Nabokov, « en dehors du regard maniaque de M. Humbert, il n’y a pas de nymphette ». La grande contribution de Mme Springora est d’exposer les ravages d’une relation qui aurait pu être désirée. Elle renvoie la responsabilité à l’adulte par une simple phrase : « Ce n’est pas mon attirance qu’il faut remettre en question, c’est la sienne ». Quelque chose a changé au royaume de la jeune fille. Quelques semaines avant la sortie du livre, l’actrice Adèle Haenel a choqué le public français en accordant une interview capitale au magazine en ligne Mediapart, dans laquelle elle raconte avoir été abusée entre 12 et 15 ans par un réalisateur de 36 ans, Christophe Ruggia, qui pensait qu’ils étaient « amoureux ». On imagine la stupéfaction du vaniteux M. Matzneff lorsqu’il réalise qu’on se souvient de lui et que les jeunes filles ne disparaissent pas en grandissant. Elles vieillissent, elles deviennent des femmes capables de parler au nom des très jeunes filles qu’elles ont été et qui se sont laissées piéger par les rêves des autres. Valentine Faure

La suggestion que j’avais couché avec Tony Leung sur le plateau était une allégation dégoûtante. Jean-Jacques Annaud y était pour beaucoup – il essayait de promouvoir le film. Aujourd’hui, je réagirais très différemment, mais à l’époque – quand j’étais en plein milieu de l’affaire et que j’étais une enfant – c’était très, très dur. Je me suis sentie exploitée par lui. Il n’a jamais dissipé les rumeurs. Il entrait dans une pièce et se montrait ambigu, ce qui mettait le feu aux poudres. Partout où j’allais dans le monde, la rumeur me suivait. Jane March

L’Indochine, dans les années 1930. Une Française de 15 ans et demi vit avec sa mère, une institutrice besogneuse, et ses deux frères, pour lesquels elle éprouve un étrange mélange de tendresse et de mépris. Sur le bac qui la conduit vers Saïgon et son pensionnat, elle fait la connaissance d’un élégant Chinois au physique de jeune premier. L’homme a l’air sensible à son charme et le lui fait courtoisement savoir. Elle accepte de le revoir régulièrement. Dans sa garçonnière, elle découvre le vertige des sens. Il est follement épris, elle prétend n’en vouloir qu’à son argent. La mère de la jeune fille tolère tant bien que mal cette liaison… Télérama

She was only 18 when she made the movie, after being spotted by Annaud on the cover of Just Seventeen. He said he was captivated by ‘this little girl with a faintly bored air and the look of revolt in her eyes’. It was a look he set out to exploit. Within days of the film’s release in 1992, rumours abounded that Jane had actually made love on the set with her co-star Tony Leung during steamy scenes. To add fuel to the fire, Annaud suggested that his young star had been a virgin, but had gained experience before filming began. Jane was pursued on a worldwide promotional tour by the question: ‘Did she or didn’t she?’ Annaud did absolutely nothing to put an end to the speculation and Jane was dubbed ‘the Sinner from Pinner’, after the rather dreary London suburb in which she grew up. Meanwhile, those who had known her in Pinner became rich on stories sold to tabloid newspapers and Annaud grew in stature on the back of Jane’s ignominy, which generated huge publicity for the film. Jane says she felt violated, prostituted and abandoned by Annaud. She sobbed herself into a nervous breakdown and couldn’t bring herself to speak to the director for ten years. The Daily Mail

The elements in the story are the basic stuff of common erotic fantasies: Sex between strangers separated by age, race and social convention, and conducted as a physical exercise without much personal communication. (…) Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film treats them in much the same spirit as « Emmanuelle » or the Playboy and Penthouse erotic videos, in which beautiful actors and elegant photography provide a soft-core sensuality. As an entry in that genre, « The Lover » is more than capable, and the movie is likely to have a long life on video as the sort of sexy entertainment that arouses but does not embarrass. (…) Annaud and his collaborators have got all of the physical details just right, but there is a failure of the imagination here; we do not sense the presence of real people behind the attractive facades of the two main actors. (…) Like classic pornography, it can isolate them in a room, in a bed: They are bodies that have come together for our reveries. Roger Ebert

Smooth, hard and satiny-brown, the two bodies mesh with color-coordinated seamlessness, like a pants-shirt combo purchased at the Gap. The camera looks on from a respectful middle distance, lingering with discreet languor over the puddingy smoothness of breasts, buttocks, and bellies, the whole scene bathed in a late-afternoon haze of sunlight and shadow. Sex! Passion! Voluptuous calendar-art photography! It’s time, once again, for the highfalutin cinema tease — for one of those slow-moving European-flavored specials that promise to be not merely sexy but ”erotic,” that keep trying to turn us on (but tastefully, so tastefully), that feature two beautiful and inexpressive actors doing their best to look tortured, romantic, obsessed. (…) The Lover isn’t exactly Emmanuelle — the characters do appear to be awake when they’re coupling — yet it’s one more movie that titillates us with the prospect of taking sex seriously and then dampens our interest by taking it too seriously. Why do so many filmmakers insist on staging erotic encounters as if they were some sort of hushed religious ritual? The answer, of course, is that they’re trying to dignify sex. But sex isn’t dignified — it’s messy and playful and abandoned. In The Lover, director Jean-Jacques Annaud gives us the sweating and writhing without the spontaneity and surprise. (…) In The Lover, these two are meant to be burning their way through a thicket of taboos. Yet as characters, they’re so thinly drawn that it’s hard to see anything forbidden in what they’re doing. We’re just watching two perfect bodies intertwine in solemn, Calvin Klein rapture (which, admittedly, has its charm). Owen Gleiberman

Sur un sujet dérangeant – la prostitution d’une lycéenne des beaux quartiers –, le réalisateur signe un film élégant qui s’appuie sur le talent de Marine Vacth. La Croix (2013)

François Ozon’s new film is a luxurious fantasy of a young girl’s flowering: a very French and very male fantasy, like the pilot episode of the world’s classiest soap opera. There’s some softcore eroticism and an entirely, if enjoyably, absurd final scene with Charlotte Rampling, whose cameo lends a grandmotherly seal of approval to the drama’s sexual adventure. The Guardian

Palme d’Or à Cannes, le cinquième film d’Abdellatif Kechiche, secoué par plusieurs polémiques, évoque le devenir de deux jeunes femmes traversées par une passion amoureuse. (…) Au début du récit, Emma est étudiante aux Beaux-Arts, désireuse de s’inventer un avenir d’artiste-peintre ; Adèle, lycéenne, se rêve institutrice. L’une a les cheveux bleus, de l’assurance, de l’ambition et assume son orientation sexuelle. L’autre, plus jeune, plus terrienne, moins égocentrée, se découvre, reçoit de plein fouet cette passion « hors norme » qui la plonge dans un indicible trouble, au milieu de ses amis comme de sa famille.  La quête de jouissance qui accompagne cette relation donne lieu à deux longues scènes particulièrement explicites qui, elles aussi, ont suscité et susciteront la discussion. On peut les trouver crues, extrêmement appuyées, choquantes (le film, en salles, est interdit aux moins de 12 ans). Il en va ainsi du cinéma – aussi intransigeant que dérangeant – d’Abdellatif Kechiche, expérience émotionnelle, sensorielle, travail d’imprégnation progressive du spectateur, plutôt que de suggestion ou de démonstration. La Croix (2013)

Quand on a vu le film mercredi en public, quand on a découvert les scènes de sexe sur grand écran, on a été… choquées. On les a pourtant tournées. Mais, j’avoue, c’était gênant. (…) [Les conditions de tournage] C’était horrible. Léa Seydoux

C’était… bestial ! Il y a un truc électrique, un abandon… c’est chaud franchement ! (…) Je ne savais pas que la scène de cul allait durer 7 minutes, qu’il n’y aurait pas de musique. Là, il n’y a que nos respirations et le claquement de nos mains sur nos fesses ». (…) Il y avait parfois une sorte de manipulation, qu’il était difficile de gérer. Mais c’était une bonne expérience d’apprentissage, en tant qu’actrice. Adèle Exarchopoulos

Léa: The thing is, in France, it’s not like in the States. The director has all the power. When you’re an actor on a film in France and you sign the contract, you have to give yourself, and in a way you’re trapped.
Adèle: He warned us that we had to trust him—blind trust—and give a lot of ourselves. He was making a movie about passion, so he wanted to have sex scenes, but without choreography—more like special sex scenes. He told us he didn’t want to hide the character’s sexuality because it’s an important part of every relationship. So he asked me if I was ready to make it, and I said, “Yeah, of course!” because I’m young and pretty new to cinema. But once we were on the shoot, I realized that he really wanted us to give him everything. Most people don’t even dare to ask the things that he did, and they’re more respectful—you get reassured during sex scenes, and they’re choreographed, which desexualizes the act.
Léa: For us, it’s very embarrassing.
Adèle: At Cannes, all of our families were there in the theater so during the sex scenes I’d close my eyes. [Kechiche] told me to imagine it’s not me, but it’s me, so I’d close my eyes and imagined I was on an island far away, but I couldn’t help but listen, so I didn’t succeed in escaping. The scene is a little too long.
Léa: No, we had fake pussies that were molds of our real pussies. It was weird to have a fake mold of your pussy and then put it over your real one. We spent 10 days on just that one scene. It wasn’t like, “OK, today we’re going to shoot the sex scene!” It was 10 days.
Adèle: One day you know that you’re going to be naked all day and doing different sexual positions, and it’s hard because I’m not that familiar with lesbian sex.
Léa: The first day we shot together, I had to masturbate you, I think?
Adèle: [Laughs] After the walk-by, it’s the first scene that we really shot together, so it was, “Hello!” But after that, we made lots of different sex scenes. And he wanted the sexuality to evolve over the course of the film as well, so that she’s learning at the beginning, and then becomes more and more comfortable. It’s really a film about sexual passion—about skin, and about flesh, because Kechiche shot very close-up. You get the sense that they want to eat each other, to devour each other.
Adèle: (…) And the shoot was very long in general.
Léa: Five-and-a-half months. What was terrible on this film was that we couldn’t see the ending. It was supposed to only be two months, then three, then four, then it became five-and-a-half. By the end, we were just so tired.
Adèle: For me, I was so exhausted that I think the emotions came out more freely. And there was no makeup artist, stylist, or costume designer. After a while, you can see that their faces are started to get more marked. We shot the film chronologically, so it helped that I grew up with the experiences my character had.
Léa: It was horrible.
Adèle: In every shoot, there are things that you can’t plan for, but every genius has his own complexity. [Kechiche] is a genius, but he’s tortured. We wanted to give everything we have, but sometimes there was a kind of manipulation, which was hard to handle. But it was a good learning experience for me, as an actor.
Marlowe Stern: Would you ever work with Kechiche again?
Léa: Never.
Adèle: I don’t think so.
Adèle: Yeah, because you can see that we were really suffering. With the fight scene, it was horrible. She was hitting me so many times, and [Kechiche] was screaming, “Hit her! Hit her again!”
Léa: In America, we’d all be in jail.Adèle: (…) She was really hitting me. And once she was hitting me, there were people there screaming, “Hit her!” and she didn’t want to hit me, so she’d say sorry with her eyes and then hit me really hard.
Léa: [Kechiche] shot with three cameras, so the fight scene was a one-hour continuous take. And during the shooting, I had to push her out of a glass door and scream, “Now go away!” and [Adèle] slapped the door and cut herself and was bleeding everywhere and crying with her nose running, and then after, [Kechiche] said, “No, we’re not finished. We’re doing it again.”
Adèle: She was trying to calm me, because we shot so many intense scenes and he only kept like 10 percent of the film. It’s nothing compared to what we did. And in that scene, she tried to stop my nose from running and [Kechiche] screamed, “No! Kiss her! Lick her snot!” The Daily Beast

Nous devrions, a priori, nous réjouir (…) Hélas, et indépendamment de la qualité artistique du film, nous ne pourrons pas participer de cet enthousiasme : nos collègues ayant travaillé sur ce film nous ont rapporté des faits révoltants et inacceptables. La majorité d’entre eux, initialement motivés, à la fois par leur métier et le projet du film en sont revenus écœurés, voire déprimés. (…)  Certains ont abandonné « en cours de route », « soit parce qu’ils étaient exténués, soit qu’ils étaient poussés à bout par la production, ou usés moralement par des comportements qui dans d’autres secteurs d’activités relèveraient sans ambiguïté du harcèlement moral ». Le Spiac-CGT

On ne vient pas faire la promo à L.A quand on a un problème avec le réalisateur. Si Léa n’était pas née dans le coton, elle n’aurait jamais dit cela. Léa n’était pas capable d’entrer dans le rôle. J’ai rallongé le tournage pour elle. Léa Seydoux fait partie d’un système qui ne veut pas de moi, car je dérange. Abdellatif Kechiche

Je n’ai pas critiqué Abdel Kechiche, j’ai parlé de son approche. On ne travaillera plus ensemble. Léa Seydoux

Muet puisque absent des César du Cinéma 2014 d’où son film La Vie d’Adèle n’est reparti qu’avec un seul prix, soulevant bien des interrogations, Abdellatif Kechiche était en revanche tout sourire, en chair et en os, du côté de Las Vegas où se déroule actuellement le salon AVN, le rendez-vous incontournable de la planète porno. (…) Abdellatif Kechiche n’aurait pas tiré un trait sur un biopic immortalisant à l’écran Marylin Chambers. En septembre dernier, on apprenait en effet que Kechiche voulait adapter à l’écran « l’histoire de Marilyn Chambers, une star du porno américain des années 1970 qui a fait scandale en couchant à l’écran avec un Noir et qui est morte l’année de l’élection d’Obama ». Au salon de Las Vegas, Carla Cat résume sa rencontre avec le réalisateur : « Il s’intéresse beaucoup au porno. Il aurait apparemment un projet. » Pour Kechiche, comme il l’avait déclaré dans Télérama, l’histoire de Marylin Chambers est « une histoire magnifique, qui raconte l’Amérique moderne et montre comment des hommes et des femmes exerçant un métier que tout le monde regarde de travers ont fait bouger les mentalités ». Pure people

I think working with actors is a little bit how a chef would work with a potato or a piece of meat. You have to kind of have a look at the potato or the piece of meat and see what kind of possibilities are in the ingredient. I know I’m using the wrong metaphor. I think my job is to see what potato is there and from there, just work under their conditions. I don’t think I have forced anybody. Bjork I may have forced here and there. For the good of the film, I just need to give them what they need. Lars von Trier

Les cinéastes et auteurs français, européens, américains et du monde entier, tiennent à affirmer leur consternation. Il leur semble inadmissible qu’une manifestation culturelle internationale, rendant hommage à l’un des plus grands cinéastes contemporains, puisse être transformée en traquenard policier. Forts de leur extraterritorialité, les festivals de cinéma du monde entier ont toujours permis aux œuvres d’être montrées et de circuler et aux cinéastes de les présenter librement et en toute sécurité, même quand certains États voulaient s’y opposer. L’arrestation de Roman Polanski dans un pays neutre où il circulait et croyait pouvoir circuler librement jusqu’à ce jour, est une atteinte à cette tradition: elle ouvre la porte à des dérives dont nul aujourd’hui ne peut prévoir les effets. Pétition pour Romain Polanski (28.09.09)

Il m’était arrivé plusieurs fois que certains gosses ouvrent ma braguette et commencent à me chatouiller. Je réagissais de manière différente selon les circonstances, mais leur désir me posait un problème. Je leur demandais : « Pourquoi ne jouez-vous pas ensemble, pourquoi m’avez-vous choisi, moi, et pas d’autres gosses? » Mais s’ils insistaient, je les caressais quand même. Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Grand Bazar, 1975)

La profusion de jeunes garçons très attrayants et immédiatement disponibles me met dans un état de désir que je n’ai plus besoin de réfréner ou d’occulter. (…) Je n’ai pas d’autre compte à régler que d’aligner mes bahts, et je suis libre, absolument libre de jouer avec mon désir et de choisir. La morale occidentale, la culpabilité de toujours, la honte que je traîne volent en éclats ; et que le monde aille à sa perte, comme dirait l’autre. Frédéric Mitterrand (”La mauvaise vie”, 2005)

J’étais chaque fois avec des gens de mon âge ou de cinq ans de moins. (…) Que vienne me jeter la première pierre celui qui n’a pas commis ce genre d’erreur. Parmi tous les gens qui nous regardent ce soir, quel est celui qui n’aurait pas commis ce genre d’erreur au moins une seule fois ? (…) Ce n’est ni un roman, ni des Mémoires. J’ai préféré laissé les choses dans le vague. C’est un récit, mais au fond, pour moi, c’est un tract : une manière de raconter une vie qui ressemble à la mienne, mais aussi à celles de beaucoup d’autres gens. Frédéric Mitterrand

C’est pas vrai. Quand les gens disent les garçons, on imagine alors les petits garçons. Ça fait partie de ce puritanisme général qui nous envahit qui fait que l’on veut toujours noircir le tableau, ça n’a aucun rapport. (…) Evidemment, je cours le risque de ce genre d’amalgame. Je le cours d’autant plus facilement ce risque-là puisqu’il ne me concerne pas. (…) Il faudrait que les gens lisent le livre et ils se rendraient compte qu’en vérité c’est très clair. Frédéric Mitterrand (émission « Culture et dépendances », le 6 avril 2005)

J’aurai raconté des histoires avec des filles, personne n’aurait rien remarqué. Frédéric Mitterrand

En tant que ministre de la Culture, il s’illustre en prenant la défense d’un cinéaste accusé de viol sur mineure et il écrit un livre où il dit avoir profité du tourisme sexuel, je trouve ça a minima choquant (…) On ne peut pas prendre la défense d’un cinéaste violeur au motif que c’est de l’histoire ancienne et qu’il est un grand artiste et appartenir à un gouvernement impitoyable avec les Français dès lors qu’ils mordent le trait. (…) Au moment où la France s’est engagée avec la Thaïlande pour lutter contre ce fléau qu’est le tourisme sexuel, voilà un ministre du gouvernement qui explique qu’il est lui-même consommateur. Benoît Hamon (porte-parole du Parti socialiste)

On ne peut pas donner le sentiment qu’on protège les plus forts, les connus, les notables, alors qu’il y a les petits qui subissent la justice tous les jours. Ce sentiment qu’il y a deux justices est insupportable.Manuel Valls (député-maire PS)

Qu’est-ce qu’on peut dire aux délinquants sexuels quand Frédéric Mitterrand est encore ministre de la Culture? Marine Le Pen (vice-présidente du FN)

A ce propos d’ailleurs, nous n’avons rien contre les homosexuels à Rue89 mais nous aimerions savoir comment Frédéric Mitterrand a pu adopter trois enfants, alors qu’il est homosexuel et qu’il le revendique, à l’heure où l’on refuse toujours le droit d’adopter aux couples homosexuels ? Pourquoi cette différence de traitement? Rue 89

C’est une affaire très française, ou en tout cas sud-européenne, parce que dans les cultures politiques protestantes du nord, Mitterrand, âgé de 62 ans, n’aurait jamais décroché son travail. Son autobiographie sulphureuse, publiée en 2005, l’aurait rendu impensable. (…) Si un ministre confessait avoir fréquenté des prostituées par le passé, peu de gens en France s’en offusquerait. C’est la suspicion de pédophilie qui fait toute la différence. (…) Sarkozy, qui a lu livre en juin [et] l’avait trouvé  » courageux et talentueux » (…) s’est conformé à une tradition bien française selon laquelle la vie privée des personnes publiques n’est généralement pas matière à discussion. Il aurait dû se douter, compte tenu de la médiatisation de sa vie sentimentale, que cette vieille règle qui protège les élites avait volé en éclats. Charles Bremmer (The Times)

David Bowie was a musical genius. He was also involved in child sexual exploitation. In the 1970s, David Bowie, along with Iggy Pop, Jimmy Page, Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger and others, were part of the ‘Baby Groupies’ scene in LA. The ‘Baby Groupies’ were 13 to 15 year old girls who were raped by male rock stars. The names of these girls are easily searchable online but I will not share them here as all victims of rape deserve anonymity. The ‘Baby Groupie‘ scene was about young girls being prepared for sexual exploitation (commonly refereed to as grooming) and then sexually assaulted and raped. Even articles which make it clear that the music industry ” ignor(ed), and worse enabl(ed), a culture that still allows powerful men to target young girls” celebrate that culture and minimise the choices of adult men to rape children and those who chose to look away. This is what male entitlement to sexual access to the bodies of female children and adults looks like. It is rape culture. David Bowie is listed publicly as the man that one teenage girl ‘lost her virginity’ too.* We need to be absolutely clear about this, adult men do not ‘have sex’ with 13 to 15 year old girls. It is rape. Children cannot consent to sex with adult men – even famous rock stars. Suggesting this is due to the ‘context’ of 70s LA culture is to wilfully ignore the history of children being sexually exploited by powerful men. The only difference to the context here was that the men were musicians and not politicians, religious leaders, or fathers. David Bowie was an incredible musician who inspired generations. He also participated in a culture where children were sexually exploited and raped. This is as much a part of his legacy as his music. Louise Pennington

When we treat public figures like gods, we enable the dangerous dynamic in which famous men prey on women and girls. Bowie is part of a long line of male stars who have used their fame to take advantage of vulnerable women. Among the many celebrities who have allegedly slept with girls under the age of consent are Elvis Presley (Priscilla Beaulieu, 14), Marvin Gaye (Denise Gordy, 15), Iggy Pop (Sable Starr, 13) and Chuck Berry (Janice Escalanti, 14). R. Kelly, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, have all been accused or convicted of sexually assaulting minors, which differs from statutory rape in that it involves force. And of course, celebrities’ sexual crimes are not limited to teenagers. The cases of Bill Cosby and Jian Ghomeshi, who both allegedly used their high profiles to sexually abuse women, are currently before the legal system. Obviously, Bowie is not in the same league as Bill Cosby, if only because Mattix, known as one of the famous “baby groupies,” doesn’t seem remotely unhappy about her experiences with Bowie. They were both part of the ‘70s rock star scene on L.A’s Sunset Strip, where blowjobs and quaaludes were given out like handshakes. Mattix looks back fondly on the experience, calling it “beautiful” in a recent interview with Thrillist. She looks back less fondly on her relationship with Jimmy Page, who allegedly kidnapped and locked her up in a hotel room. But it’s still important to acknowledge that what Bowie did was illegal. Consent laws are in place because, unlike Mattix, too many underage girls end up traumatized by the sexual experiences they have with older men. Many of those who “consented” as teens realize later that they were exploited and controlled by their older lovers. It’s incredibly hard for any victim of sexual assault to come forward, but when your perpetrator is a beloved public figure, your story becomes even more unbelievable. We know rapists don’t fit one mould, yet we’re incredulous when a person’s crimes don’t match our image of them. This phenomenon is particularly heightened with celebrities. (…) You can both write a catchy pop song and like underage sex. But too often we mistake a person’s talent for who they are as people. Celebrities know this and take advantage of the protection that comes with being a beloved public figure. As a result, their victims suffer in silence. We should acknowledge that Bowie slept with an underage woman to acknowledge his humanity. Yes, his talent was exceptional. No, he was not a monster. But we should never glorify celebrities to the point that we refuse to acknowledge that they’re capable of ugly acts. Otherwise, we send a message to the alleged victims of Roman Polanski, R. Kelly and Jian Ghomeshi that entertainment is more valuable than justice. Angelina Chapin

Since the death of David Bowie on January 10^th, fans and media have dissected much of his musical and cultural legacy. Bowie stands as a towering figure over the last 45 years of music, and as a celebrity famous for an ever-changing, enigmatic approach to his life and art, there is much to be analyzed in the wake of his passing. But not all of it is pleasant or even musical. One uncomfortable facet of the iconic rocker’s past has suddenly been thrust into the center of the dialogue, and it’s raised questions about both Bowie and the world that has enabled him and so many others. The high-profile controversies surrounding contemporary stars like R. Kelly (who was famously accused of statutory rape and taken to court on child pornography charges in the early 2000s) and the backlash against rapper Tyga (following his relationship with a then-underage Kylie Jenner) have led to a broader discussion surrounding legal consent and adult male stars who engage in predatory behavior. And since his death, more fans and commentators have had to question Bowie’s own past with teen girls as well. (…) Rock star escapades from that period have been glamorized for decades with no regard for how disturbing or illegal the behavior was. It became a part of the mythos—a disgusting testament to how little the writers documenting the happenings of the day cared about taking their heroes to task. And it was right there in the music itself: The Rolling Stones sang about underage girls in “Stray Cat Blues” and Chuck Berry glorified the teenage “groupie” in “Sweet Little Sixteen” a decade earlier. But we can’t look at it with those same eyes today—not if we are sincere about protecting victims and holding celebrities accountable. It’s convenient to go after Tyga and R. Kelly when we see hashtags or trending stories, and their behavior warrants every bit of scrutiny and criticism it’s gotten. But we cannot write off the alarming behavior of superstars past just because they’re now older, greyer or in the case of Bowie, newly-departed. Because this behavior didn’t start with contemporary hip-hop and R&B acts. In addition to her time with Bowie, Mattix was also statutory raped by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. In the book Hammer Of the Gods, former Zeppelin road manager Richard Cole claimed that the rocker tasked him with kidnapping the teen girl. He allegedly escorted her from a nightclub and thrust her into the back of Page’s limo with the warning of stay put or “I’ll have your head.” Page kept Mattix hidden for three years to avoid legal trouble. Mattix still romanticizes her experiences with these very adult men (“It was magnificent. Can you believe it? It was just like right out of a story! Kidnapped, man, at 14!” she stated in Hammer Of the Gods) but there is no doubt that what both Page and Bowie did was unacceptable. That it was glamorized in magazines like Creem and glossed over in films like Almost Famous speaks to cultural irresponsibility. So much of our culture turns a blind eye or gleefully endorses the hypersexualizing of teen girls. And when the stories are anecdotal as opposed to ripped from the headlines, it can be easy to dismiss and minimize the acts of artists like Bowie and Page as something “of the time.” But statutory rape laws existed even in the coke-fueled hedonism of the 1970s—because someone had to be protective of young girls who were susceptible to predators with big hair and loud guitars. But as it turns out, no one cared about protecting these girls; they were too busy mythologizing the rockers who were abusing them. Early rock ‘n’ rollers Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis both saw their careers sullied by headlines involving underage girls: Lewis revealed that he was married to his 13-year-old cousin in 1958 and was subsequently blacklisted from radio, while Berry was arrested and found guilty of transporting an underage girl across state lines for immoral purposes, spending two years in jail in 1960. Eagles drummer and vocalist Don Henley was arrested in 1980 in Los Angeles and charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor after paramedics were called to his home to save a naked 16-year-old girl who was overdosing on cocaine and Quaaludes. He was fined $2,000, given two years’ probation, and ordered into a drug counseling program. Rocker turned right-wing caricature Ted Nugent sought out underage girls, going so far as to become the legal guardian of Pele Massa when she was 17 just to be able to duck kidnapping charges. Prince kept Anna Garcia, aka “Anna Fantastic,” with him at his Paisley Park compound when she was a teenager. She would ultimately become the subject of several of his late ‘80s/early ‘90s works, like “Vicki Waiting” and “Pink Cashmere,” which he wrote for Anna on her 18^th birthday. (…) Prince dated Mayte Garcia shortly thereafter, a dancer he met when she was 16. “When we met I was a virgin and had never been with anybody,” she told The Mirror last year. The two would marry in 1996, when Mayte was 22. Unlike Anna, Mayte insists Prince didn’t pursue her seriously until she was 18. (…) There have been varying stories surrounding the relationship between a young Aretha Franklin and the late Sam Cooke. She has indicated in interviews that things between them became romantic, but in his unauthorized biography, David Ritz indicated that their first encounter occurred when she was only 12 years old and visited Cooke in his motel room in Atlanta. In the Sam Cooke Legends television documentary, Aretha recalled an incident involving her being in Cooke’s room, but indicated that her father interrupted what was likely going to be a sexual encounter. (…) Marvin Gaye met Janis Hunter around the time of her 17^th birthday, and the still-married Motown star pursued the teenager immediately. According to Hunter’s 2015 memoir After The Dance, Gaye took her to an Italian restaurant in Hollywood and bribed the waiter $20 to bring the underage girl apricot sours. He had sex with her shortly thereafter, and the two began a relationship, despite a 17-year age difference and the fact that Marvin was still legally married to his first wife, Anna Gordy. Gaye would famously write “Let’s Get It On” in tribute to his lust for Jan. Shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Nona, Jan and Marvin were featured in a November 1974 issue of Ebony when she was 18. They would marry in 1977, after Marvin’s divorce from Anna was finalized; but Janis would leave the singer in 1981. We can dismiss all of this as just the “way things were back then.” We can pretend that we haven’t heard countless songs about young “Lolitas” who were “just seventeen—you know what I mean.” We can ignore the racial implications in the mainstream media’s relative silence on rockers’ histories of statutory rape and its glorification. But the next time you watch Almost Famous, take note of how much younger most of the Band Aids seem compared to the world-weary rockers that are repeatedly shown taking them to bed (Kate Hudson’s Penny Lane says she’s 16 in the film). Note how the movie casually nods to Page and Mattix in a scene at the infamous Hyatt “Riot House” on Sunset Strip. And think about how many girls would’ve been better off had someone given a damn way back when, as opposed to just fawning over a guitarist with some hit songs. Former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman infamously began seeing 13-year-old Mandy Smith in 1983. According to Smith, Wyman had sex with her when she was 14. They married when she turned 18 in 1989; they divorced in 1991. She spoke about her time with the ex-Stone in an interview with The Daily Mail in 2010. “It’s not about being physically mature. It’s emotional maturity that matters,” she stated, after making it clear that she regrets what happened to her. “I don’t think most 16-year-olds are ready. I think the age of consent should be raised to 18 at a minimum, and some girls aren’t even ready then.” The Daily Beast

While the UK in 2015 inexplicably draws a line at girlhood sexuality on screen, it’s San Francisco in the 1970s that provides the film’s own context – with all the temptation for nostalgic glaze that this could offer a contemporary mindset. But elsewhere in California in those years, certain teenage girls went way beyond a cut-out-and-keep relationship to the frenzied rock scene’s most desirable. They hung out on Sunset Boulevard, L.A. There you’d find the self-dubbed foxy ladies, better known in the backstage of our cultural consciousness as baby groupies: the group of teenage high schoolers who ruled over a particular mile of Sunset Boulevard in the early 70s. The queens of the scene were close confidantes Sable Starr and Lori Lightning, who, along with other teen-aged names like Shray Mecham and Queenie Glam, slept with and dated the likes of David Bowie, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger, Jeff Beck, Marc Bolan, Alice Cooper, Robert Plant and Iggy Pop. They were, in news that will destroy your idols, very young: Starr was 14 years old when she started hanging out on the Strip, with a 13 year old Lori Lightning (real name Mattix) joining the now established gang soon afterwards. The hangouts of choice were spots like the Rainbow Bar and Grill, Whiskey a Go Go and the E Club ­– later renamed Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco. The latter club was the preferred enclave for the era’s strange new musical breed – where, as Bowie would later enthuse to Details magazine, glam rock stars and their devotees could parade their “sounds of tomorrow” dressed in “clothes of derision.” The scene was documented by the controversial, short-lived publication Star, a tome that took teenage magazine tropes to their extreme: inside, you’ll find all the usual short stories, style guides and “How to approach your crush” articles, except in this case the stories tell of romantic backstage fantasies, how to dress to catch your “superfox”, and even a step-by-step nose-job diary (in the mag’s own words, “no dream is too far-out”). Beloved by adolescent aficionados everywhere, it wasn’t long, of course, before concerned parents were knocking the publisher’s door down – five issues long, in fact. Thanks to dedicated archive digger Ryan Richardson you can gape at every single issue online – including an interview with Starr and Queenie, in the final issue, that records for posterity the startling, angsty conviction of these ultimate mean girls. (…) But even more striking than the magazine’s laugh out loud, irreverent take on the scene – in its own words, “relief from all that moral-spiritual-ethical-medical-advice” – are the clothes. (…) Star was, needless to say, a heavily glamorised chronicle of the teenage groupie girls who frequented its pages – wilfully ignoring, and worse enabling, a culture that still allows powerful men to target young girls. But like any history that plays out in the margins – in the backstage of rock music’s mythmaking – there are conflicting accounts as to how well or badly off the girls were. Lori Lightning, who claims to have fallen in love with Jimmy Page aged 14, has no regrets. As she tells fellow ex-groupie Pamela des Barres in the latter’s book, “It was such a different time – there was no AIDS – and you were free to experiment.” Nobody can ask Starr, now – the ballsy queen of the babies eventually got clean and had kids, but died aged 51 in 2009. Even now, there’s a kind of power to be found somewhere amid the gushing interviews and romanticised editorials of Star. Addressing its teen readers without patronising them, Star cut straight to the heart of the sexual desires of girlhood like no other magazine would dare. Sexually forward in their dress and their attitude, the groupies adopted acceptable male traits to go out and get what they wanted. By channelling the stars of the Sunset Strip, the magazine empowered readers to approach humdrum high school life with the same fearlessness. Though not exactly feminist in its boy-getting tips – “I’d scratch any girl’s eyes out for a guy I want” – the message that boys shouldn’t have all the fun is loud and clear. As one reader writes in of the frustrating sexual double standard, “Guys can take their going steady rings and rules and shove it up their noses!” (…) Iggy Pop (…) slept with Starr when she was just 13, and, horribly, later wrote a song about it. His words are worryingly relevant to our own fetish for history’s visuals without their story – style divorced from context, worth a fleeting Instagram like and then on to the next. Our preference for rose-tinted glasses – especially de rigour heart-shaped ones, fit for a foxy lady – is hugely problematic. But flicking through Star magazine, you begin to see its role as a link between the innocent teenyboppers of the 60s, and the rise of badass female frontwomen in the 70s and beyond. Joan Jett was first spotted on the Boulevard, outside the Rainbow Grill. Later on, Grace Jones and Courtney Love are just two examples of powerful artists who were sexually upfront in their fashion, and did things entirely on their own terms. Dazed (Aug. 10, 2015)

The dregs of the sexual revolution were what remained, and it was really sort of a counterrevolution (guys arguing that since sex was beautiful and everyone should have lots everything goes and they could go at anyone; young women and girls with no way to say no and no one to help them stay out of harmful dudes’ way). The culture was sort of snickeringly approving of the pursuit of underage girls (and the illegal argument doesn’t carry that much weight; smoking pot is also illegal; it’s about the immorality of power imbalance and rape culture). It was completely normalized. Like child marriage in some times and places. Which doesn’t make it okay, but means that, unlike a man engaged in the pursuit of a minor today, there was virtually no discourse about why this might be wrong. It’s also the context for what’s widely regarded as the anti-sex feminism of the 1980s: those women were finally formulating a post-sexual-revolution ideology of sex as another arena of power and power as liable to be abused; we owe them so much. Lori Maddox

For San Francisco in particular and for California generally, 1978 was a notably terrible year, the year in which the fiddler had to be paid for all the tunes to which the counterculture had danced. The sexual revolution had deteriorated into a sort of free-market free-trade ideology in which all should have access to sex and none should deny access. I grew up north of San Francisco in an atmosphere where once you were twelve or so hippie dudes in their thirties wanted to give you drugs and neck rubs that were clearly only the beginning, and it was immensely hard to say no to them. There were no grounds. Sex was good; everyone should have it all the time; anything could be construed as consent; and almost nothing meant no, including “no.” “It was the culture,” she wrote. “Rock stars were open about their liaisons with underage groupies.” It doesn’t excuse these men to note that there was an overwhelming, meaningful, non-dismissible sense in this decade that sex with young female teenagers was if not explicitly desirable then certainly OK. Louis Malle released “Pretty Baby” in 1978, in which an 11-year-old and sometimes unclothed Brooke Shields played a child prostitute; in Manhattan, released the following year, director Woody Allen paired his middle-aged character with a 17-year old; color photographer David Hamilton’s prettily prurient photographs of half-undressed pubescent girls were everywhere…at the end of the decade Playboy attempted to release nude photographs of a painted, vamping Shields at the age of 10 in a book titled Sugar and Spice. […] In 1977, Roman Polanski’s implicit excuse for raping a 13-year-old girl he had plied with champagne and quaaludes was that everyone was doing it. Polanski had sequestered his victim at Jack Nicholson’s Bel Air house on the grounds that he was going to take pictures of her for French Vogue. Polanski’s victim pretended she had asthma to try to get out of his clutches. It didn’t work. Afterward, he delivered the dazed, glassy-eyed child to her home, he upbraided her big sister for being unkind to the family dog. Some defended him on the grounds that the girl looked 14. Reading Solnit on this, you can understand how Lori Maddox could have possibly developed not just a sincere desire to fuck adult men but the channels to do it basically in public; why an entire scene encouraged her, photographed her, gave her drugs that made all of it feel better, loved her for it, celebrated her for it, for years. (…) It is Maddox who interests me, in the end, not Bowie. But if there’s an argument for labeling Bowie a rapist that gets me, it’s how much I owe to the inflexible spirit that calls for it. Look, what a miracle; we are talking about this, when out of all the interviews Bowie gave in his life, he seems to never have been asked on the record about Maddox or any of the other “baby groupies,” or to have said a thing about Wanda Nichols after the case was dismissed. Jezabel

Attention, un scandale peut en cacher bien d’autres  !

En ces temps étranges …

Où l’on dénonce d’un côté comme le plus rétrograde les mutilations sexuelles que l’on prône de l’autre comme summum du progrès …

Où l’on fustige chez certains les mariages forcés d’enfants tout en imposant par la loi à d’autres le mensonge et l’aberration de l’imposition de « parents de même sexe » …

Où le long silence coupable sur la pédophilie que l’on condamne dans l’Eglise catholique se mue en complaisance douteuse pour les relations proprement incestueuses de certains de nos happy few, responsables politiques compris  …

Où l’irresponsabilité la plus débridée dans l’habillement comme dans le comportement ou le langage cotoie la pudibonderie la plus rétrograde dans les relations hommes-femmes …

Et à l’heure où la vérité semble enfin sortir sur les pratiques supposées du photographe David Hamilton …

Alors que dans la plupart des pays les plus problématiques de ses oeuvres continuent à être publiées …

Qui rappelle …

Dans le climat général qui a permis de tels actes …

Et notamment dans la tant célébrée révolution sexuelle des années 60 …

Sans parler du « Général » de ladite révolution sexuelle Hugh Hefner lui-même …

Qui ayant réussi, dans l’une des plus grandes escroqueries de l’histoire, à faire de l’achat et de la vente du corps des femmes un commerce légitime et une industrie de plusieurs milliards de dollars par an…

Est à présent salué comme icone de la gauche, libérateur sexuel, champion des droits civiques et idole de la liberté d’expression …

La part de la musique et du cinéma qui l’ont si fièrement portée …

De ces Rolling Stones ou Bowie (ou notre propre Gainsbourg), Woodie Allen ou Malle, De Niro,  Kinski, Annaud ou Jacquot…

Qu’oubliant leurs multiples Lorie Maddox ou Sheryl Brookes, l’on continue de fêter ou d’enterrer royalement …

Et surtout derrière l’inévitable phénomène de « groupies » que produit, sport, politique, religion et conquête spatiale compris, toute adulation des foules …

La vérité suggérée dans tant de chansons …

Mais explicitée dans le célèbre « Midnight rambler » des Rolling Stones …

Et d’ailleurs déjà envisagée dans le non moins célèbre « Lolita » de Nabokov …

Derrière le rock ‘n’ roll show …

A savoir, outre l’évidente apologie de la pédophilie, la violence sexuelle, voire le viol ?

Chapin: David Bowie’s magnetism had a dark side

Angelina Chapin
Ottawa Citizen

January 15, 2016

The Internet lit up with tributes when David Bowie passed away Sunday. Fans — and really, who wasn’t a fan? — posted favourite tracks, iconic photos of Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane, think pieces about his influence on music, fashion and the LGBT community and personal reflections: “As a weird kid, Bowie helped me accept myself.”

But if you listen closely, amidst the loud celebration, are whispers about Bowie’s sexual history. Some rebellious souls have pointed out that, ahem, this cultural icon also devirginized a 15-year-old girl named Lori Mattix in the early 1970s. If that doesn’t seem like a big deal to you, under the law, it’s statutory rape (In California, where Bowie was living at the time, the age of consent was and still is 18. In Canada, the age is 16).

You probably didn’t know about these incidents. Neither did I.

It may seem in bad taste to raise this contentious bit of Bowie’s sexual past so shortly after his passing. In fact, a Facebook friend who initially brought up the underage sex replaced that post with “Sorry everyone,” after the blowback he received. But while we celebrate Bowie’s brilliance, we should also acknowledge the ways in which he and many other male celebrities abuse their power. When we treat public figures like gods, we enable the dangerous dynamic in which famous men prey on women and girls.

Bowie is part of a long line of male stars who have used their fame to take advantage of vulnerable women. Among the many celebrities who have allegedly slept with girls under the age of consent are Elvis Presley (Priscilla Beaulieu, 14), Marvin Gaye (Denise Gordy, 15), Iggy Pop (Sable Starr, 13) and Chuck Berry (Janice Escalanti, 14). R. Kelly, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, have all been accused or convicted of sexually assaulting minors, which differs from statutory rape in that it involves force. And of course, celebrities’ sexual crimes are not limited to teenagers. The cases of Bill Cosby and Jian Ghomeshi, who both allegedly used their high profiles to sexually abuse women, are currently before the legal system.

Obviously, Bowie is not in the same league as Bill Cosby, if only because Mattix, known as one of the famous “baby groupies,” doesn’t seem remotely unhappy about her experiences with Bowie. They were both part of the ‘70s rock star scene on L.A’s Sunset Strip, where blowjobs and quaaludes were given out like handshakes. Mattix looks back fondly on the experience, calling it “beautiful” in a recent interview with Thrillist. She looks back less fondly on her relationship with Jimmy Page, who allegedly kidnapped and locked her up in a hotel room.

But it’s still important to acknowledge that what Bowie did was illegal. Consent laws are in place because, unlike Mattix, too many underage girls end up traumatized by the sexual experiences they have with older men. Many of those who “consented” as teens realize later that they were exploited and controlled by their older lovers. It’s incredibly hard for any victim of sexual assault to come forward, but when your perpetrator is a beloved public figure, your story becomes even more unbelievable.

We know rapists don’t fit one mould, yet we’re incredulous when a person’s crimes don’t match our image of them. This phenomenon is particularly heightened with celebrities. How could America’s dad, Canada’s most progressive radio host and a revolutionary filmmaker all allegedly commit sexual assault? Real talk: You can both write a catchy pop song and like underage sex. But too often we mistake a person’s talent for who they are as people. Celebrities know this and take advantage of the protection that comes with being a beloved public figure. As a result, their victims suffer in silence.

We should acknowledge that Bowie slept with an underage woman to acknowledge his humanity. Yes, his talent was exceptional. No, he was not a monster. But we should never glorify celebrities to the point that we refuse to acknowledge that they’re capable of ugly acts. Otherwise, we send a message to the alleged victims of Roman Polanski, R. Kelly and Jian Ghomeshi that entertainment is more valuable than justice.

Angelina Chapin is an editor for Huffington Post.

Voir aussi:

NOT ABOVE THE LAW

David Bowie and Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Statutory Rape Problem

The late music legend famously deflowered a 14-year-old groupie—before she was stolen away by Jimmy Page. Why it’s important for us to take our heroes to task for their predatory behavior.
Stereo Williams
The Daily Beast
01.17.16

Since the death of David Bowie on January 10^th, fans and media have dissected much of his musical and cultural legacy. Bowie stands as a towering figure over the last 45 years of music, and as a celebrity famous for an ever-changing, enigmatic approach to his life and art, there is much to be analyzed in the wake of his passing. But not all of it is pleasant or even musical. One uncomfortable facet of the iconic rocker’s past has suddenly been thrust into the center of the dialogue, and it’s raised questions about both Bowie and the world that has enabled him and so many others.

The high-profile controversies surrounding contemporary stars like R. Kelly (who was famously accused of statutory rape and taken to court on child pornography charges in the early 2000s) and the backlash against rapper Tyga (following his relationship with a then-underage Kylie Jenner) have led to a broader discussion surrounding legal consent and adult male stars who engage in predatory behavior. And since his death, more fans and commentators have had to question Bowie’s own past with teen girls as well. In a Thrillist piece entitled, I Lost My Virginity To David Bowie: Confessions of a ‘70s Groupie, Lori Mattix recalls a sexual encounter with Bowie when she was only 14 years old.

“He focused his famously two-colored eyes on me and said, ‘Lori, darling, can you come with me?’” Mattix recalled. “He walked me through his bedroom and into the bathroom, where he dropped his kimono. He got into the tub, already filled with water, and asked me to wash him. Of course I did. Then he escorted me into the bedroom, gently took off my clothes, and de-virginized me.

Rock star escapades from that period have been glamorized for decades with no regard for how disturbing or illegal the behavior was. It became a part of the mythos—a disgusting testament to how little the writers documenting the happenings of the day cared about taking their heroes to task. And it was right there in the music itself: The Rolling Stones sang about underage girls in “Stray Cat Blues” and Chuck Berry glorified the teenage “groupie” in “Sweet Little Sixteen” a decade earlier. But we can’t look at it with those same eyes today—not if we are sincere about protecting victims and holding celebrities accountable.

It’s convenient to go after Tyga and R. Kelly when we see hashtags or trending stories, and their behavior warrants every bit of scrutiny and criticism it’s gotten. But we cannot write off the alarming behavior of superstars past just because they’re now older, greyer or in the case of Bowie, newly-departed. Because this behavior didn’t start with contemporary hip-hop and R&B acts.

In addition to her time with Bowie, Mattix was also statutory raped by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. In the book Hammer Of the Gods, former Zeppelin road manager Richard Cole claimed that the rocker tasked him with kidnapping the teen girl. He allegedly escorted her from a nightclub and thrust her into the back of Page’s limo with the warning of stay put or “I’ll have your head.” Page kept Mattix hidden for three years to avoid legal trouble

Mattix still romanticizes her experiences with these very adult men (“It was magnificent. Can you believe it? It was just like right out of a story! Kidnapped, man, at 14!” she stated in Hammer Of the Gods) but there is no doubt that what both Page and Bowie did was unacceptable. That it was glamorized in magazines like Creem and glossed over in films like Almost Famous speaks to cultural irresponsibility.

“Sweet Little Sixteen / She’s got the grown-up blues / Tight dresses and lipstick / She’s sportin’ high-heel shoes / Oh but tomorrow morning / She’ll have to change her trend / And be sweet sixteen / And back in class again.” – Chuck Berry (“Sweet Little Sixteen”)

So much of our culture turns a blind eye or gleefully endorses the hypersexualizing of teen girls. And when the stories are anecdotal as opposed to ripped from the headlines, it can be easy to dismiss and minimize the acts of artists like Bowie and Page as something “of the time.” But statutory rape laws existed even in the coke-fueled hedonism of the 1970s—because someone had to be protective of young girls who were susceptible to predators with big hair and loud guitars. But as it turns out, no one cared about protecting these girls; they were too busy mythologizing the rockers who were abusing them.

Early rock ‘n’ rollers Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis both saw their careers sullied by headlines involving underage girls: Lewis revealed that he was married to his 13-year-old cousin in 1958 and was subsequently blacklisted from radio, while Berry was arrested and found guilty of transporting an underage girl across state lines for immoral purposes, spending two years in jail in 1960.

Eagles drummer and vocalist Don Henley was arrested in 1980 in Los Angeles and charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor after paramedics were called to his home to save a naked 16-year-old girl who was overdosing on cocaine and Quaaludes. He was fined $2,000, given two years’ probation, and ordered into a drug counseling program. Rocker turned right-wing caricature Ted Nugent sought out underage girls, going so far as to become the legal guardian of Pele Massa when she was 17 just to be able to duck kidnapping charges.

Prince kept Anna Garcia, aka “Anna Fantastic,” with him at his Paisley Park compound when she was a teenager. She would ultimately become the subject of several of his late ‘80s/early ‘90s works, like “Vicki Waiting” and “Pink Cashmere,” which he wrote for Anna on her 18^th birthday.

“I met him when I was 15, that was the first time I met him. And we just spoke and had a nice conversation and nothing else,” she told a Dutch interviewer in the ‘90s. “And then when I was 17, I bumped into him and that’s when we started a relationship, which was almost two years. I guess it’s kind of a dream to a young girl of 17. You can be influenced very easily and stuff like that because he’s 12-13 years older than me.”

Prince dated Mayte Garcia shortly thereafter, a dancer he met when she was 16. “When we met I was a virgin and had never been with anybody,” she told The Mirror last year. The two would marry in 1996, when Mayte was 22. Unlike Anna, Mayte insists Prince didn’t pursue her seriously until she was 18.

“I’d always been a very focused dancer and very protected,” she said. “Prince was my first crush, and my first love, but we didn’t start to get serious until I turned 18. He was very respectful.”

There have been varying stories surrounding the relationship between a young Aretha Franklin and the late Sam Cooke. She has indicated in interviews that things between them became romantic, but in his unauthorized biography, David Ritz indicated that their first encounter occurred when she was only 12 years old and visited Cooke in his motel room in Atlanta. In the Sam Cooke Legends television documentary, Aretha recalled an incident involving her being in Cooke’s room, but indicated that her father interrupted what was likely going to be a sexual encounter.

“We did run into Sam on the road. And one time in particular, we were all there in the hotel. And his room was only two doors away from my room. And the Staple Singers were right across the hall from him,” she said in the late ‘90s. “So I got dressed and went down and knocked on his door and sat there—he was not married at this time—I sat there on the side of the bed very innocuously. And we were just talking about the music industry and other artists and whatever else we were talking about and the door was closed. While we were talking, the conversation took another turn. [smirks] Read between the lines. And my dad was looking for me…at the same time, just as it took this ‘other turn.’ And we hear [him] ‘Aretha, I know you’re in there!’”

Marvin Gaye met Janis Hunter around the time of her 17^th birthday, and the still-married Motown star pursued the teenager immediately. According to Hunter’s 2015 memoir After The Dance, Gaye took her to an Italian restaurant in Hollywood and bribed the waiter $20 to bring the underage girl apricot sours. He had sex with her shortly thereafter, and the two began a relationship, despite a 17-year age difference and the fact that Marvin was still legally married to his first wife, Anna Gordy. Gaye would famously write “Let’s Get It On” in tribute to his lust for Jan. Shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Nona, Jan and Marvin were featured in a November 1974 issue of Ebony when she was 18. They would marry in 1977, after Marvin’s divorce from Anna was finalized; but Janis would leave the singer in 1981.

We can dismiss all of this as just the “way things were back then.” We can pretend that we haven’t heard countless songs about young “Lolitas” who were “just seventeen—you know what I mean.” We can ignore the racial implications in the mainstream media’s relative silence on rockers’ histories of statutory rape and its glorification. But the next time you watch Almost Famous, take note of how much younger most of the Band Aids seem compared to the world-weary rockers that are repeatedly shown taking them to bed (Kate Hudson’s Penny Lane says she’s 16 in the film). Note how the movie casually nods to Page and Mattix in a scene at the infamous Hyatt “Riot House” on Sunset Strip. And think about how many girls would’ve been better off had someone given a damn way back when, as opposed to just fawning over a guitarist with some hit songs.

Former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman infamously began seeing 13-year-old Mandy Smith in 1983. According to Smith, Wyman had sex with her when she was 14. They married when she turned 18 in 1989; they divorced in 1991. She spoke about her time with the ex-Stone in an interview with The Daily Mail in 2010.

“It’s not about being physically mature. It’s emotional maturity that matters,” she stated, after making it clear that she regrets what happened to her. “I don’t think most 16-year-olds are ready. I think the age of consent should be raised to 18 at a minimum, and some girls aren’t even ready then.”

“I know, I know. People will find that odd, coming from me,” she added. “But I think I do know what I’m talking about here. You are still a child, even at 16.”

“You can never get that part of your life, your childhood, back. I never could.”

Voir également:

What Should We Say About David Bowie and Lori Maddox?

Jia Tolentino

Jezabel

2/16/16

David Bowie died on January 10, 2016, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of Blackstar, his 25th album. The news came meteorically; we were dazed and flattened, looking at the world through debris and glitter that suddenly it seemed we’d borrowed from him. Lady Gaga paid extended, exhaustive tribute to him at the Grammys on Monday night; in the week following his death, there was a second line for him in New Orleans, a shrine outside his apartment in Tribeca, a series of farewells from his musical echelon, a million Instagrams, a segment on SNL. Bowie was that rare thing, a revolutionary who was also near-universally beloved. He gave off an uncanny combination of generosity and brilliance, in which he seemed to give everything to and ask nothing of the people who idolized him—except for, I guess, the bodies of the young teenage girls he fucked.

Word choice is hard here. Should we say “raped” automatically if a grown man has sex with a teenager? Does it matter at all if the 15-year-old, now much older, describes their encounter as one of the best nights of her life? What is our word for a “yes” given on a plane that’s almost vertically unequal? Does contemporary morality dictate that we trust a young woman when she says she consented freely, or believe that she couldn’t have, no matter what she says?

These questions became prominent on the day of Bowie’s death, which was—as with all celebrity deaths now—a day in which people all over the internet tried to marry a dead celebrity to something which is important to them, which is easy enough to ignore when that something is a brand of novelty koozies (“Jezebel, today we celebrate individuality”) or Twitter stances about how grief is best packaged for public consumption (“badly,” seems to be what people say), but impossible to ignore when the thing is present-day decency and David Bowie violated it, likely night after night.

The story widely recirculated after Bowie’s death was that he’d had sex with a 13-year-old, specifically the famous “child groupie” Lori Maddox (who was, by her account, 15 at the time of the encounter, and told Thrillist her story last fall). As the piece recirculated, people emailed us, saying that it was our political obligation to write that David Bowie had been a rapist, even a pedophile, too.

The facts are not debatable. Bowie was accused of rape in 1987 by a 30-year-old woman named Wanda Nichols (though never indicted, due to a lack of evidence; through a spokesperson, he called the accusation “ridiculous”), and he participated in a groupie scene that normalized and valorized statutory rape. The usual first line of defense in these arguments is “separating the art from the artist,” which is in many cases a necessary coping mechanism for women to be able to enjoy anything produced before men began to be held accountable for their behavior—but in this case, it doesn’t apply. Bowie’s artistic life was tied up in an ethos of seeing, validating and inducing intimacy with anyone in front of him; the fact that this ethos turned sexual in the case of painfully young teenagers is inseparable from his art.

On the day of his death, we considered posting his first reply to a fan letter:

In answer to your questions, my real name is David Jones and I don’t have to tell you why I changed it. “Nobody’s going to make a monkey out of you” said my manager. My birthday is January 8th and I guess I’m 5’10”. There is a Fan Club here in England, but if things go well in the States then we’ll have one there I suppose. It’s a little early to even think about it.

Written in 1967, the letter was sweet and generous and easy, closing with: “Thank you for being so kind as to write to me and do please write again and let me know some more about yourself. Yours sincerely, David Bowie.” It’s incredible, and also, he wrote it to a 14-year-old girl.

Lori Maddox, according to her as-told-to Thrillist piece, was also 14 when she met Bowie. “He wanted to take me to a hotel room,” she wrote.

I was still a virgin and terrified. He had hair the color of carrots, no eyebrows, and the whitest skin imaginable. I grabbed on to [DJ and club co-owner] Rodney Bingenheimer and said I was with him. So we all just hung out and talked. I had probably kissed boys by that point, but I wasn’t ready for David Bowie.

Next time Bowie was in town, though, maybe five months later, I got a call at home from his bodyguard, a huge black guy named Stuey.

Maddox had implicitly declined the encounter at age 14, and notes no pushback in her account. At age 15, she was less afraid.

We got to the Beverly Hilton and all went up to Bowie’s enormous suite…He was beautiful and clever and poised. I was incredibly turned on. Bowie excused himself and left us in this big living room with white shag carpeting and floor-to-ceiling windows. Stuey brought out Champagne and hash. We were getting stoned when, all of a sudden, the bedroom door opens and there is Bowie in this fucking beautiful red and orange and yellow kimono.

He focused his famously two-colored eyes on me and said, “Lori, darling, can you come with me?” Sable looked like she wanted to murder me. He walked me through his bedroom and into the bathroom, where he dropped his kimono. He got into the tub, already filled with water, and asked me to wash him. Of course I did. Then he escorted me into the bedroom, gently took off my clothes, and de-virginized me.

Two hours later, I went to check on Sable. She was all fucked up in the living room, walking around, fogging up windows and writing, “I want to fuck David.” I told him what she was doing and that I felt so bad. Bowie said, “Well, darling, bring her in.” That night I lost my virginity and had my first threesome.

Maddox, enthusiastic and starry-eyed a full 43 years later, does not recount her encounter as rape; legally, however, it would have been in the state of California, and a strong subset of today’s moral vocabulary dictates that it was, qualitatively, regardless of what Maddox says, an act of coercion—that he was an abuser and a predator no matter what.

There’s a sense right now of a watershed: because of new language, newly open channels, and new consensus on what constitutes abuse, once-beloved men are being exposed on what feels like a weekly basis for having taken sexual advantage of less powerful women. These incidents are brought to light as exceptions, but they’re beginning to feel like the norm—particularly for industries in which women are expected to be both easygoing and sexual to variously exaggerated degrees: comedy, music, acting, porn.

And the “separate the art from the artist” argument has been permanently changed by Bill Cosby, who will be remembered as a serial rapist, as he deserves. For Bowie, the same idea has started to foment—that this encounter with Maddox (and the others it implies) should be, as with Cosby, his major legacy. “RIP a child rapist,” said a tipster. On Twitter, a search for “David Bowie rapist” pulls up hundreds of people expressing combinations of anger, smugness, contrarianism, righteousness, and sincere conviction that the Grammys should not be celebrating him, that Tavi Gevinson should not be writing about him, the “rapist” description is primary and exactly right.

There are two underlying assumptions here that I question: first, that we either have to write off David Bowie in deference to the women, or write off the women in deference to David Bowie—that we can’t value one without devaluing the other. The second is that it’s a critical dodge to even bring up the fact that we’re talking about the 1970s. Erin Keane makes this point at Salon:

And wasn’t it, as she says, “a different world”? Oh, the ‘70s. Things were different then. But they were not, really, no matter how many times we all collectively wish that to be true. If you can say with a straight face “men don’t have sex with young girls anymore” — well, good luck to you with that. What changes is this, only — which girls, which men, how and where it is allowed.

But “which girls, which men, how and where it is allowed”—those changes do matter. If they don’t, neither does any of the political and cultural movement that distances now from then. Outside a courtroom, it is impossible to overvalue the role of context (which includes but certainly is not limited to age) in a sexual encounter; acknowledging the landscape of a few decades ago doesn’t vanish the blame but enlarge it. It is important, not incidental, that Bowie was part of the norm.

On the day of Bowie’s death, Kate Harding started a thread of discussion on her public Facebook page. The perpetually wise Rebecca Solnit wrote in. “Speaking as someone who actually lived through the 1970s as a teenage girl in the Bay Area,” she wrote, “I want to interject that mores were really really REALLY different.”

She went on (and we asked if we could excerpt this):

The dregs of the sexual revolution were what remained, and it was really sort of a counterrevolution (guys arguing that since sex was beautiful and everyone should have lots everything goes and they could go at anyone; young women and girls with no way to say no and no one to help them stay out of harmful dudes’ way). The culture was sort of snickeringly approving of the pursuit of underage girls (and the illegal argument doesn’t carry that much weight; smoking pot is also illegal; it’s about the immorality of power imbalance and rape culture). It was completely normalized. Like child marriage in some times and places. Which doesn’t make it okay, but means that, unlike a man engaged in the pursuit of a minor today, there was virtually no discourse about why this might be wrong. It’s also the context for what’s widely regarded as the anti-sex feminism of the 1980s: those women were finally formulating a post-sexual-revolution ideology of sex as another arena of power and power as liable to be abused; we owe them so much.

Solnit has written about this time and place before. From an essay collected in 2014’s The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness:

For San Francisco in particular and for California generally, 1978 was a notably terrible year, the year in which the fiddler had to be paid for all the tunes to which the counterculture had danced. The sexual revolution had deteriorated into a sort of free-market free-trade ideology in which all should have access to sex and none should deny access. I grew up north of San Francisco in an atmosphere where once you were twelve or so hippie dudes in their thirties wanted to give you drugs and neck rubs that were clearly only the beginning, and it was immensely hard to say no to them. There were no grounds. Sex was good; everyone should have it all the time; anything could be construed as consent; and almost nothing meant no, including “no.”

“It was the culture,” she wrote. “Rock stars were open about their liaisons with underage groupies.” It doesn’t excuse these men to note that there was an overwhelming, meaningful, non-dismissible sense in this decade that sex with young female teenagers was if not explicitly desirable then certainly OK.

Louis Malle released “Pretty Baby” in 1978, in which an 11-year-old and sometimes unclothed Brooke Shields played a child prostitute; in Manhattan, released the following year, director Woody Allen paired his middle-aged character with a 17-year old; color photographer David Hamilton’s prettily prurient photographs of half-undressed pubescent girls were everywhere…at the end of the decade Playboy attempted to release nude photographs of a painted, vamping Shields at the age of 10 in a book titled Sugar and Spice.

[…] In 1977, Roman Polanski’s implicit excuse for raping a 13-year-old girl he had plied with champagne and quaaludes was that everyone was doing it. Polanski had sequestered his victim at Jack Nicholson’s Bel Air house on the grounds that he was going to take pictures of her for French Vogue. Polanski’s victim pretended she had asthma to try to get out of his clutches. It didn’t work. Afterward, he delivered the dazed, glassy-eyed child to her home, he upbraided her big sister for being unkind to the family dog. Some defended him on the grounds that the girl looked 14.

Reading Solnit on this, you can understand how Lori Maddox could have possibly developed not just a sincere desire to fuck adult men but the channels to do it basically in public; why an entire scene encouraged her, photographed her, gave her drugs that made all of it feel better, loved her for it, celebrated her for it, for years. You can understand that the way she consented to the loss of her virginity could have been the way women have consented throughout history—under implicit duress and formative coercion, and yet as wholeheartedly as we could understand.

There are no precise enough words or satisfying enough conclusions to fully account for her story, or any like it. It’s easy to see what Bowie represents here: a sexual norm that has always appallingly favored men, and the abuse that stems from and surpasses even that. It is easy to denounce the part Bowie played in this, even with any number of purportedly mitigating factors: the political context, Maddox’s story, the fact that he lived with generosity and openness, the less generous fact that his synapses were perpetually blitzed with cocaine. It is less easy to turn over what Maddox evinces in this narrative, from the late 1970s to her account of it now—which is that women have developed the vastly unfair, nonetheless remarkable, and still essential ability to find pleasure and freedom in a system that oppresses them.

The persistence of that reality—that we learn to have sex not in a utopia but within and around whatever norms we are presented with—is why it matters that things were different in the ’70s. It is possible to say that there don’t ever need to be any other Lori Maddoxes without saying that there never were. It is possible for me to read all the rape stories in my inbox and still know with certainty that something enormous is different—and, that acknowledging that is the only way to credit the second-wave women who forced that change with rhetorical fervor that girls now would find insane. It’s because of them that we have both the words to identify power and, now, the freedom to do so more ambivalently. It’s their stringency that spared me from having to know how I would have played it if I’d grown up at a time when there was no vocabulary to separate a party girl from a body for the taking, when grown men said fair game at the age of 13.

It is Maddox who interests me, in the end, not Bowie. But if there’s an argument for labeling Bowie a rapist that gets me, it’s how much I owe to the inflexible spirit that calls for it. Look, what a miracle; we are talking about this, when out of all the interviews Bowie gave in his life, he seems to never have been asked on the record about Maddox or any of the other “baby groupies,” or to have said a thing about Wanda Nichols after the case was dismissed.

Voir encore:

Groupie lifts the lid on the excesses of the Beatles and Rolling Stones
A groupie who was granted access to the inner sanctums of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones has lifted the lid on their hedonistic lifestyles in a new memoir.
Anita Singh
The Telegraph
30 Oct 2009

 Chris O’Dell had affairs with Sir Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan during the 1960s and 1970s while working as a personal assistant in the music business.

Now 62, she has written an autobiography in which she charts her years as a rock and roll hanger-on, which she describes as « like being given the keys to Disneyland ».

O’Dell was pictured on the back of the Rolling Stones album Exile on Main Street, was immortalised by George Harrison in the song Miss O’Dell and sang backing vocals on Hey Jude.

She gained her first entry into the music world aged 20, after arriving in London from her home in Tuscon, Arizona with $100 in her pocket. She landed a job as an office assistant at Apple Records, at the height of Beatlemania.

Within months, O’Dell had hit it off so well with George Harrison that she moved in with him and his wife, Pattie Boyd, at their home in Henley-on-Thames.

In her book, she recalls the day that Harrison admitted he had been sleeping with Starr’s wife, Maureen. « You know, Ringo, I’m in love with your wife, » Harrison said as they sat at Starr’s kitchen table. « Better you than someone we don’t know, » Starr shrugged.

O’Dell had her own three-month affair with Starr and claims that the band lived a drug-fuelled lifestyle. « We all drank and took coke, pot, amphetamines all the time, » she said.

On one occasion, she shared a plane journey with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

« The plane started hitting some turbulence and then John and Yoko started singing the Hari Krishna chant. So we just chanted our way to the earth, basically, until we landed. And I thought, well, if I die here at least I’ll be on the front page. »

After the Beatles broke up, O’Dell became a personal assistant to the Rolling Stones and joined them on their infamous 1972 tour. Of her fling with Jagger, she said: « If there had been a job description being employed by the Stones back then, I’m pretty sure it would have included a proviso that went something like this: sleep with Mick whenever he asks. »

Two years later she was hired as a tour manager for Dylan and began an affair with him. She went on to marry the Hon Anthony Russell, son of the fourth Baron Ampthill. Starr is godfather to their son. Now married for a second time, O’Dell has retrained as a drugs counsellor.

The book is entitled Miss O’Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved. O’Dell kept diaries of her rock star days but waited until Harrison’s death in 2001 before beginning work on it.

She claims that Starr has given the book his blessing.

« We’re in our sixties now, some of us are even creeping towards our seventies, » she said. « Everybody is grown up enough to realise this is what happened. We’re well past it. Ringo’s attitude today is, fine, as long as you tell the truth. »

 The 70s groupies who broke the rules of style and sexuality

Voir de plus:

As ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’ deconstructs teen sex in the decade, we look at the L.A. girls who had a lot more to them than just their taboo relationships

FashionExtreme Adolescents

Claire Marie Healy

How does fashion shape adolescence? Every month, Claire Marie Healy deconstructs the ways that style culture has contributed to the idea of the teenager in new series Extreme Adolescents.

In a scene from the 1970s-set Diary of a Teenage Girl, 15 year-old Minnie and her friend gleefully jump around on a bed, blasting out The Stooges – Down on the Street – and taking turns to lick Iggy Pop’s dick. It’s a poster, of course, but that’s just one of the tamer scenes in a film that depicts a teenage girl’s coming-of-age with an exhilarating frankness. Portraying a teenagers’ discovery of her sexuality after she has sex with her mother’s 35 year-old boyfriend, Marielle Heller’s adaptation has been inexplicably branded with an 18+ rating, preventing actual teenage girls from seeing it (Bel Powley’s advice: grab a fake ID). While the UK in 2015 inexplicably draws a line at girlhood sexuality on screen, it’s San Francisco in the 1970s that provides the film’s own context – with all the temptation for nostalgic glaze that this could offer a contemporary mindset. But elsewhere in California in those years, certain teenage girls went way beyond a cut-out-and-keep relationship to the frenzied rock scene’s most desirable. They hung out on Sunset Boulevard, L.A.

There you’d find the self-dubbed foxy ladies, better known in the backstage of our cultural consciousness as baby groupies: the group of teenage high schoolers who ruled over a particular mile of Sunset Boulevard in the early 70s. The queens of the scene were close confidantes Sable Starr and Lori Lightning, who, along with other teen-aged names like Shray Mecham and Queenie Glam, slept with and dated the likes of David Bowie, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger, Jeff Beck, Marc Bolan, Alice Cooper, Robert Plant and Iggy Pop. They were, in news that will destroy your idols, very young: Starr was 14 years old when she started hanging out on the Strip, with a 13 year old Lori Lightning (real name Mattix) joining the now established gang soon afterwards. The hangouts of choice were spots like the Rainbow Bar and Grill, Whiskey a Go Go and the E Club ­– later renamed Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco. The latter club was the preferred enclave for the era’s strange new musical breed – where, as Bowie would later enthuse to Details magazine, glam rock stars and their devotees could parade their “sounds of tomorrow” dressed in “clothes of derision.”

The scene was documented by the controversial, short-lived publication Star, a tome that took teenage magazine tropes to their extreme: inside, you’ll find all the usual short stories, style guides and “How to approach your crush” articles, except in this case the stories tell of romantic backstage fantasies, how to dress to catch your “superfox”, and even a step-by-step nose-job diary (in the mag’s own words, “no dream is too far-out”). Beloved by adolescent aficionados everywhere, it wasn’t long, of course, before concerned parents were knocking the publisher’s door down – five issues long, in fact. Thanks to dedicated archive digger Ryan Richardson you can gape at every single issue online – including an interview with Starr and Queenie, in the final issue, that records for posterity the startling, angsty conviction of these ultimate mean girls. Do they consider being a groupie a career? No. Have they ever got into a fight with another groupie? Yes, if throwing a gin gimlet in a girl’s face counts. On their predecessor groupies, like Pamela des Barres and her GTOs: “They’re too old. As soon as we walk in, they might as well jump out the window.”

But even more striking than the magazine’s laugh out loud, irreverent take on the scene – in its own words, “relief from all that moral-spiritual-ethical-medical-advice” – are the clothes. If Sable Starr and Lori Lightning were band-aides to rock’s greatest musos, their style has stuck in the minds of fashion visionaries. As Tim Blanks reveals in Spring/Summer’s Another Man, he’s had plenty of conversations with Anna Sui as to Star’s impact on them as teenagers. Today, fashion’s greatest girl gangs are just one A.A.A short of head-to-toe groupie status. At Saint Laurent, Hedi Slimane has sexed up brand codes with a younger, messier muse: fishnet tights, towering platforms and breast-baring mini dresses clearly channel the give-a-fuck, freewheeling attitude of the original groupie gangs. Stuart Vevers has also shaken up an established brand with the girl cliques of a bygone era: Coach’s SS15 heralded the label’s new rebellion, with girls looking like glammed up groupies hitching a ride to the next show. And just last month, Miu Miu’s resort show and party transported a little bit of the English Disco to Paris: the plush seating areas and mirrored surfaces were straight out of the Strip’s neon-lit VIP zones.

While the retrospective gaze wants to box up groupie style into neat parts – because hey, weren’t those towering platforms with a hole in the heel just fantastic? – the reality was a little more off-kilter. The baby groupies’ style was as messy and unabashed as their love lives: faded kimonos over halter bikini-tops; netted pillbox hats with lame hotpants; liberated nipples with a velvet scarf, as topped with a wide brimmed hat. Style guides in Star magazine were more about breaking rules than keeping them, with tongue-in-cheek guides to thrifting and how to mix vintage clothes with new bearing a greater resemblance to Cheap Date than Teen Vogue. Queenie placed the look in an interview as somewhere “in-between the New York Street and the English feminine look […] the 40s and 50s have a great deal to do with how we dress.” Star’s emphasis lay with outstanding personal style, not identikit fashions. Girls who were merely attractive and popular were sent to the sidelines in favour of girls who, though “average-looking”, possessed amazing personal style. Cos in the end, that’s the girl who really “knows the Foxy Ways.”

Star was, needless to say, a heavily glamorised chronicle of the teenage groupie girls who frequented its pages – wilfully ignoring, and worse enabling, a culture that still allows powerful men to target young girls. But like any history that plays out in the margins – in the backstage of rock music’s mythmaking – there are conflicting accounts as to how well or badly off the girls were. Lori Lightning, who claims to have fallen in love with Jimmy Page aged 14, has no regrets. As she tells fellow ex-groupie Pamela des Barres in the latter’s book, “It was such a different time – there was no AIDS – and you were free to experiment.” Nobody can ask Starr, now – the ballsy queen of the babies eventually got clean and had kids, but died aged 51 in 2009.

Even now, there’s a kind of power to be found somewhere amid the gushing interviews and romanticised editorials of Star. Addressing its teen readers without patronising them, Star cut straight to the heart of the sexual desires of girlhood like no other magazine would dare. Sexually forward in their dress and their attitude, the groupies adopted acceptable male traits to go out and get what they wanted. By channelling the stars of the Sunset Strip, the magazine empowered readers to approach humdrum high school life with the same fearlessness. Though not exactly feminist in its boy-getting tips – “I’d scratch any girl’s eyes out for a guy I want” – the message that boys shouldn’t have all the fun is loud and clear. As one reader writes in of the frustrating sexual double standard, “Guys can take their going steady rings and rules and shove it up their noses!”

“Addressing its teen readers without patronising them, Star cut straight to the heart of the sexual desires of girlhood like no other magazine would dare”

“Do you like distortion? I do.” That’s Iggy Pop, intro-ing his BBC Radio 6 show last week in his ninth life as a primetime slot DJ. He slept with Starr when she was just 13, and, horribly, later wrote a song about it. His words are worryingly relevant to our own fetish for history’s visuals without their story – style divorced from context, worth a fleeting Instagram like and then on to the next. Our preference for rose-tinted glasses – especially de rigour heart-shaped ones, fit for a foxy lady – is hugely problematic. But flicking through Star magazine, you begin to see its role as a link between the innocent teenyboppers of the 60s, and the rise of badass female frontwomen in the 70s and beyond. Joan Jett was first spotted on the Boulevard, outside the Rainbow Grill. Later on, Grace Jones and Courtney Love are just two examples of powerful artists who were sexually upfront in their fashion, and did things entirely on their own terms.

There are some great photos of Sable Starr and Debbie Harry, floating around the internet. Their legs are hitched up high, like so many other groupie snaps. Except this time the sweaty, ‘luded up men are missing. Here she goofily grins in a sweater, pulling “sexy” poses for the camera like any girl and her friend would. How I’d love to know what they talked about.

Voir de même:

Groupies, past and present: the muses behind the music

Leah Pickett

WBEZ Blogs

August 2, 2013

In a pivotal early scene from Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical ’70s rock film Almost Famous, Crowe’s teenage alter-ego William (Patrick Fugit) is approached by a group of nubile young women lingering outside of a concert venue. Their leader is Penny Lane, played by the free-spirited, gold-ringleted Kate Hudson as the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

« We are not groupies, » she assures young William, just in case he had the wrong idea, « Groupies sleep with rockstars because they want to be near someone famous. We are here because of the music, we inspire the music. We are Band Aids. »

Indeed, this was the mindset of many rock ‘n’ roll groupies throughout the ’60s and ’70s; allegiance to their favorite bands was more about giving themselves completely to the music—mind, heart and soul— rather than just exploiting their bodies for sex. And although Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones is credited with coining the term « groupie » in 1965 to describe the tally of female fans he ravished while on tour, the general definiton is not overtly sexual: just « a fan of a rock group, who usually follows the group around on concert tours. » A superfan, if you will, who by this token could also be a man or a woman.

So, when did « groupie » become such a dirty word? Plenty of young people follow their favorite bands around the country in hopes of meeting them (and yes, possibly sleeping with them as well) but refuse to call themselves groupies or even Penny Lane-esque « Band Aids » for fear of slut-shaming. No groupie girl wants to end up like Nancy Spungen, but the insatiable desire to fall in love with the music and the musician at once is certainly tempting, and practically universal.

File: ’60s super-groupie Chris O’Dell with Keith Richards. She also counts Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr among her lovers. (AP Photo)

In her provocative 1987 memoir I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, former groupie Pamela Des Barres recounts a life full of glamour and fun (she even started a « groupie group » called the GTOs in the 1960s), while also acknowledging the darker side. For example: the emergence of « groupie babies » in the 1970s, as rock stars like David Bowie and Mick Jagger began regularly bedding girls as young as 13.

Of course, promiscious and often illegal sexual encounters still run troubingly rampant in rock star culture today; but in the Internet age, groupies actually have more power to protect themselves than ever before. Superfans can share their experiences via online forums, cautioning others about STDs or specific jerks/abusers/predators to avoid. A level-headed approach to the groupie lifestyle is also key: being a free spirit is one thing, expecting a famous musician to leave his girlfriend for you is another.

If a devoted superfan is of age, confident in herself, sex-positive yet also cautious and aware of all the potential consequences of a one night stand, then she should feel no shame in sleeping with anyone, let alone her favorite singer or guitarist. Instead of slut-shaming these women, modern day groupies (or whatever label or non-label they may choose to describe themselves) should support one another in owning their desires, since the decision to sleep with a rock star does not automatically cancel one’s membership as a card-carrying feminist, nor is it always in direct opposition to feminist ideals.

« Free love » is now « Y.O.L.O, » but the sentiment remains the same. Obviously, safety and self-care come first; but if the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity arises to rub shoulders with your favorite band or artist, why not allow yourself to experience it? The encounter may only last for one night—or, a la Almost Famous, an entire unforgettable summer—but at least you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren some amazing stories one day; and, best case scenario, look back on your life with no regrets.

Leah Pickett is a pop culture writer for WBEZ and co-host of Changing Channels, a podcast about the future of television. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. 

Voir enfin:

I was the ultimate rock chick! She had affairs with Jagger, Dylan and Ringo and faced death with John and Yoko

David Gardner
The Daily Mail

31 October 2009

She has never been in the limelight herself, though she knows more about the attractions and pitfalls of fame than almost anyone alive.

Chris O’Dell has been a groupie, friend and – in a surprising number of cases – lover to some of the best known rock stars on the planet.

She had affairs with Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr. George Harrison wrote a song about her, and she was there at Abbey Road singing backing vocals on Hey Jude.

Groupie love: Chris O’Dell and Keith Richards backstage on the tour in Nashville in the 1960s. She slept with Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr, and Bob Dylan, and hung out with Eric Clapton. George Harrison’s song ‘Miss O’Dell’ was written for her and she’s the ‘Mystery Woman’ pictured on the Stones’ album Exile on Main Street

She is the mystery woman pictured with her arms draped around a clearly attentive Keith Richards on the Rolling Stones album Exile On Main Street  –  perhaps it was around the time she used to do cocaine runs for the Stones guitarist?

And she is the girlfriend to whom Bob Dylan turned when he forgot his harmonica just before he was due on stage  –  he sent her out to buy a new one.

But, until now, this blonde American who bewitched so many with her beauty in the heady drug-addled days of the Sixties and early Seventies, has remained in the shadows, keeping the secrets she learned as the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll insider.

Now she can tell all: Chris O’Dell, now 62, in New York’s Central Park

Now, aged 62, she has decided to tell all in an extraordinary biography packed with rivetting detail about the affairs, the drugs, the backstage tensions and the extraordinary people she came to know so well.

She has called the book Miss O’Dell: My Hard Days And Long Nights With The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton And The Women They Loved.

Chris O’Dell’s introduction to rock royalty came through a chance meeting with Derek Taylor, press officer to The Beatles, in Los Angeles.

He invited her to London to work for the band’s Apple label. She was 20 years old when she arrived in the swinging capital and had just £60 in her purse.

Whether it was her infectious personality, her enthusiasm or her sheer good looks is unclear, but she suddenly found herself in the group’s inner circle at the height of Beatlemania.

‘It was like being let go at Disneyland,’ she said.

What an extraordinary transformation in lifestyle it was for the homespun girl brought up in a conservative family in Oklahoma.

O’Dell suddenly found herself backstage with the biggest icons in music history.

‘The Beatles were my idols, their sound was like nothing else,’ she remembers. ‘I fell in love with it and the whole idea of being in London.

She was the office girl who looked after them. ‘I used to get their lunch, answer phones, cut out press clippings and drive people to the airport.’

But she was soon seduced by the darker side of the music business.

‘Where there is rock music and drugs the sex just follows automatically,’ she says, by way of explanation.

Initially, the Beatle wives were frosty towards the pretty American interloper. ‘When I first started out I had a terrible crush on Paul, but I kinda got debunked by Linda,’ she recalls.

But she soon became friends with both Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd and Ringo Starr’s wife Maureen Starkey.

Indeed, so friendly did she become with the Harrisons that she eventually moved in with George and Pattie – who remains a close friend to this day – at Friar Park, their 120-room mansion in Henley-on-Thames.

‘We used to laugh and goof around together a lot. He was a big flirt and we were very similar,’ she said, although she says she never had an affair with George.

Too much: Chris O’Dell at the height of her alcohol and drug addiction in the 1970’s

She remembers that Eric Clapton would visit Friar Park. He used to say that he was there to see O’Dell when, in reality, he was infatuated with Pattie, Harrison’s wife, who was the inspiration for his heartfelt love song ‘Layla’.

O’Dell writes that she soon found herself in the middle of an extraordinary sex triangle involving George Harrison, Ringo Starr and the drummer’s wife, Maureen.

O’Dell was sitting at Ringo Starr’s kitchen table when Harrison admitted he was sleeping with Starr’s wife Maureen. ‘You Ringo, I’m in love with your wife,’ Harrison told the Beatles drummer.

‘Better you than someone we don’t Know,’ Starr responded with a shrug. know,’ Starr Before long , O’Dell was herself involved in a steamy three-month affair with Ringo.

As she explains, Ringo was depressed over the state of his marriage. We started  hanging out together and, you know, you find an attraction and you kind of go with it. But it wasn’t a very comfortable attraction,’ she said in a recent interview.

While O’Dell  was sleeping with Starr, she was crippled with guilt about his wife  – even though Maureen had been cheating on Starr with Harrison.

Meanwhile, the drink and drugs were flowing.

‘My drinking was getting really out of hand,’ says O’Dell. ‘We all drank and took coke, pot and amphetamines all the time.’

All her lovers: While with the Beatles, O’Dell had affairs with George Harrison, left, and Ringo Starr, right

Maureen eventually confronted O’Dell about the affair. ‘She asked me outright,’ says O’Dell. ‘She said « Are you sleeping with my husband? » ‘

O’Dell came clean and the pair managed to remain friends until Maureen’s death in 1994 from leukaemia. She said she was with Harrison when he heard The Beatles were finished.

‘I was living at George’s house and we found out through the newspaper. That’s how he found out,’ she said. ‘When Paul left it was kind of like they all felt a little disappointed that he hadn’t told them.’

She also writes about how she thought she was about to die in a plane with John and Yoko after meeting with them when she went shopping for harmonicas for Bob Dylan, who had forgotten to bring them to the Isle of Wight Festival.

She then had affairs with Mick Jagger, left, and Bob Dylan, right

‘We got on their little plane and flew back to London. We smoked some very good hashish and we were kind of passing this joint around and suddenly I got very paranoid and thought for sure the pilot was getting as high as I was and that for some reason my imagination was that his idea would be to just fly straight up.

So I was convinced he was going to fly straight up into the sky. And while that was happening the plane started actually hitting some turbulence and then John and Yoko started singing the Hari Krishna chant and then I thought « Oh now we are in trouble. »

‘So we just chanted our way to the earth basically until we landed and it was like oh, OK. And I thought « Well, if I die here at least I’ll be on the front page ».’

O’Dell’s relationship with Starr fizzled out, but he is the godfather of her 23-year-old son, William, who was born after she married her first husband, the Honourable Anthony John Mark Russell, the son of the fourth Baron Ampthill, a member of the House of Lords.

‘I went from rock stars to aristocracy,’ laughs O’Dell who is now married to an addiction counsellor, Morrise Lucky, 61.

Looking back, she says it is hard for people to understand that, in those days, the rock ‘n’ roll world consisted of a very tight circle of people.

‘The Beatles’s world was very small. Eric came into that circle because he and George were friends. And then the relationships started happening.’

Part of rock and roll history: The Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. Chris O’Dell said they were her ‘idol’

Pattie Boyd asked her friend not to sleep with Harrison and she complied. ‘That was sort of the condition of our friendship,’ says O’Dell.

She may not have had an affair with Harrison but she became the subject of his playful song ‘Miss O’Dell’, which ends with the lyric: ‘Won’t you call me Miss O’Dell,

‘I had no idea he had done it,’ she claims today, ‘but one day he said « Chris I’ve got a surprise for you. » Then he got out his guitar and said « I’m going to make you famous. » ‘

436922.’

BEFORE long, O’Dell ended up working for the Rolling Stones as a PA  –  and from there it was a very short journey into Mick Jagger’s bed. She started sleeping with him on the group’s famously debauched 1972 summer tour.

‘I guess it was part of the job,’ she said. ‘I spent every day at his house probably seven days a week. I was the person he turned to. I went to parties with him and everything.

‘If there had been a job description being employed by the Stones back then, I’m pretty sure it would have included a proviso that went something like this: Sleep with Mick whenever he asks.’

The Rolling Stones in 2007. O’Dell toured with the band 35 years earlier, during their infamous 1972 summer tour

As for Mick’s marriage, O’Dell explains: ‘He was married to Bianca and she was pretty independent. She spent a lot of time doing other things.’

It was while working for the Stones, she says, that her drug and alcohol problem ‘got really out of control’. Apart from having sex with Jagger, her job description included picking up drugs for Richards.

‘I think it was cocaine because I believe that we had some when I got back to the tour, you know? Keith once said to me « You can do this just like a guy », and I thought that was such a compliment.’

Two years later, she worked for Bob Dylan as a tour manager and the two flirted and partied together before starting an affair after he had parted from his wife, Sara.

‘He’s a very intense, private person. He doesn’t share a lot of himself  –  in many ways he’s very guarded  –  at least that’s the way I found him at that time,’ she says. ‘I loved working with him,’ O’Dell adds.

‘But he can be confusing. He can sit there and have a conversation with you, and look you straight in the eye and be totally engaged, and then an hour later, he’ll look through you like he doesn’t know you.’

Although she worked with other superstars, O’Dell’s heart was always with The Beatles. She even described working for the Stones as ‘climbing down the ladder.’

‘The first thing people ask about me is, « Oh, were you a groupie? » That’s the first place they go. But I was not into the adoration of the musicians, as much as I was into the working.’

O’Dell’s rock ‘n’ roll credentials are certainly impressive. She worked as a tour manager for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Linda Ronstadt; Santana; Phil Collins, Earth, Wind and Fire; Fleetwood Mac; Queen; Electric Light Orchestra and Jennifer Warnes, many of whom she still considers friends.

But eventually the drugs, the drink, the casual sex and the non-stop touring got the better of her and she decided to quit the business.

Her dependency on drugs is over. She has been clean for 20 years and lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she works as a substance-abuse counsellor. She married her husband Morrise in May this year.

She says she still stays in touch with her famous friends and claims both Pattie Boyd and Ringo Starr gave O’Dell’s book their blessing.

‘We’re all in our 60s now,’ she says, somewhat ruefully. ‘Some of us are even creeping towards our 70s. We’re well past it, but everybody is grown up enough to realise this is how it happened.’

•MISS O’DELL: My Hard Days And Long Nights With The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton And The Women They Loved by Chris O’Dell and Katherine Ketcham is published by Simon Spotlight at £16.99. To order a copy at £15.30 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.

Voir encore:

Plaster Caster Lawsuit Set for Court Wednesday

Chuck Philips

The LA Times

April 13, 1993

Cynthia Plaster Caster had no idea in 1966 that her bizarre art concept would turn her into a rock ‘n’ roll legend–much less cause her to end up in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday.

At the time, the 19-year-old University of Illinois student was just trying to complete a homework assignment.

Plaster Caster–that’s the name she prefers to go by–had an artistic vision to make plaster moldings of the penises of rock stars.

Delegating the job of arousing her models to a crew of female companions, she honed her craft on scores of musicians during the psychedelic ’60s including members of the Who, the Monkees, the Buffalo Springfield, the Jeff Beck Group and the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Now, 25 of those casts–including « anatomically precise » statues of guitar hero Jimi Hendrix, Young Rascals lead singer Eddie Brigati, MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer and Broadway singer and songwriter Anthony Newley–are the target of a $1-million lawsuit.

The suit, filed by Plaster Caster in 1991, seeks to recover the casts from veteran Los Angeles music figure Herb Cohen, who has maintained possession of them for more than 20 years. The action alleges that she asked Cohen to store the statues after her home was burglarized during the early ’70s and that he has since refused to return them.

« What’s going on here isn’t just a fight over art, » Plaster Caster, who refuses to disclose her family name, said. « It’s more like a child custody battle. These things aren’t just pieces of plaster to me–they’re like my children. Each one holds precious memories for me. This man has no right whatsoever to them. They’re mine–and he knows it. »

Cohen declined to be interviewed.

In a $2-million countersuit, however, the businessman maintained that Plaster Caster relinquished ownership of the casts when she went to work for rock composer and entrepreneur Frank Zappa in 1969 and signed a contract with Bizarre Productions, a company Cohen once operated with Zappa.

In that suit, Cohen says that he acquired ownership rights to the casts sometime in the ’70s following a legal dispute with Zappa. The suit also maintains that the original plaster casts were « lost, stolen or destroyed » sometime after Cohen mounted bronze and silver copies of them on wooden pedestals in 1971.

Plaster Caster’s sexually explicit artistic exploits have been recounted in movies, magazine articles and most recently « I’m With the Band, » a 1990 book about groupie life in the « free love » ’60s written by Pamela Des Barres, a Los Angeles author and founding member of Zappa’s girl rock group GTOs.

« What Cynthia did is as much a part of rock lore as what any record producer or engineer or manager did, » said Des Barres, who is scheduled to testify on Plaster Caster’s behalf. « Cynthia came up with an idea that no artist before her had ever considered. Herb Cohen didn’t create these casts and they don’t belong to him. A hundred years from now when people look back on the ’60s, Cynthia will be remembered as an important pop artist. »

Plaster Caster, now 46, is not sure how history will rate her casts, but believes that what she does is art.

« What happened was I got this class assignment from my college art teacher on the same weekend that a bunch of rock bands were due to come into town for a big ‘Dick Clark Caravan’ show, » Plaster Caster recalled. « Back then, I was just a teen-age virgin dying to meet rock stars. When the teacher suggested we go out and make a plaster cast of something hard, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. »

Rock’s most intimate archivist maintains that it took many years of trial and error to perfect the proper medium and technique to immortalize her subjects. In the beginning, she cast her subjects in plaster of Paris, then switched to a combination of tin foil and hot wax before finally settling upon an alginate dental product used for tooth and jaw molds.

« What started out as a way to meet rock bands ended up turning into a pop art form, » she said. « I mean, you really ought to see these casts all lined up together in a row. Seriously, it looks like some amazing chorus line. »

Voir aussi:

Jersey pullers on the hunt for stray playersNabbing a rugby star for the night has become a sport in itself

Niamh Horan

The Independent

August 4 2013

THEY’RE known in rugby social circles as « jersey pullers ». Unabashed about their targets and dismissive of other halves, they are the stuff of which WAGs’ nightmares are made.

The new phenomenon, which has spawned a range of T-shirts, mugs and social networking sites, is defined in the urban dictionary as girls who attach themselves to a member of a team.

And they’re stalking a player near you. Their maxim?

« If she can’t keep him – she shouldn’t have him. » And they’re not about to let a little stumbling block such as a girlfriend – or even a wife – get in their way.

Stealth-like in their pinpointing, tracking and snaring of Ireland’s top sporting alpha-males, their number one weapon of choice is Twitter.

It is the modern-day, social-networking equivalent of Israeli military radar.

Lions coach Warren Gatland was the first in the camp to acknowledge the issue publicly during the recent tour of Australia.

He baulked at how a group of girls – dolled up to the nines – would « happen to be passing through » a restaurant or pub every time one of the players made the mistake of tweeting their location.

« It’s crazy, » he said, wide-eyed at the phenomenon.

The jersey pullers have even followed players to far-flung destinations, jetting thousands of miles for the chance to hang out by the pool or in a nightclub while the stars are in holiday mood. And far away from the prying eyes of home.

Such was the intense interest in the Lions rugby players that Gatland was moved to hire a team of burly security guards for the tour in order to « control » the situation.

In the aftermath of the 2011 Rugby World Cup, England rugby captain Mike Tindall – who is married to British Queen Elizabeth’s granddaughter, Zara Philips – was infamously captured on CCTV in a clinch with a blonde.

Footage of the steamy incident leaked online, sparking a tabloid scandal which helped destabilise the England team’s World Cup campaign beyond repair.

Back home, Holly Carpenter, Ireland’s top model and other half of Irish rugby ace Cian Healy, admits she regularly spots the jersey puller troop.

« I have been up in the VIP section of Krystle on lots of occasions and I’ve seen girls just spending their entire night standing by the barrier hoping to get spotted and asked in by one of the guys, » she told the Sunday Independent.

« When I met Cian I didn’t know who he was. In comparison to what he was used to – I think it was really refreshing, » she said.

Voir par ailleurs:

What Happened to Sally Horner?:A Real-Life Source of Nabokov’s Lolita
Alexander Dolinin

PSU libraries

In his preface to The Annotated Lolita Alfred Appel writes: “Lolita is surely the most allusive and linguistically playful novel in English since Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939)” (xi).1 Ever since Lolita was published fifty years ago, critics have spent much effort trying to explicate hundreds of allusions, identify concealed quotations and parodic echoes, and pinpoint possible sources for Nabokov’s novel. This exciting and productive paper-chase very rarely, however, goes beyond literature to the real world, which Nabokov explored no less attentively than fiction and poetry. In an interview he once said:A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the unborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world. Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art… (Strong Opinions, 32).
Working on Lolita, Nabokov, as his biographer Brian Boyd writes, “undertook research of all kinds” and, in particular,noted newspaper reports of accidents, sex crimes and killings: “a middle-aged morals offender” who abducted fifteen-year-old Sally Horner from New Jersey and kept her for twenty-one months as his “cross-country slave,” until she was found in a southern California motel; G. Edward Grammar’s ineptly staged murder of his wife in a poorly faked motor accident… (American Years, 211).
But what Boyd seems to overlook is that Nabokov not only noted these newspaper reports in search of details but implanted them into Lolita in a most peculiar way.

Humbert Humbert actually refers to the two cases mentioned by Boyd in the same chapter in which he describes his visit to Ramsdale after having met pregnant Dolly Schiller. First, near Charlotte’s grave, he makes reference to G. Edward Grammar,  a thirty-five year old New York office manager who had just been arrayed [sic!] on a charge of murdering his thirty-three-year-old wife, Dorothy. Bidding for the perfect crime, Ed had bludgeoned his wife and put her into a car. The case came to light when two county policemen on patrol saw Mrs. Grammar’s new big blue Chrysler, an anniversary present from her husband, speeding crazily down a hill, just inside their jurisdiction (God bless our good cops!). The car sideswiped a pole, ran up an embankment covered with beard grass, wild strawberry and cinquefoil, and overturned. The wheels were still gently spinning in the mellow sunlight when the officers removed Mrs. G’s body. It appeared to be a routine highway accident at first. Alas, the woman’s battered body did not match up with only minor damage suffered by the car. I did better (287—288).

This reproduces, with the changes and additions given in boldface, an Associated Press report published in The New York Times on September 2, 1952, under the headline “Charge Is Due Today in ‘Perfect Murder’.” In using the plain newspaper account of a real crime as the basis for his own paragraph, Nabokov, to use a phrase of the Russian Formalists, is baring his devices. Humbert Humbert’s gleeful comments subjectify the narrative, while the added details (the color and make of Grammar’s car, the names of plants, etc.) suggest the interference of a superior authorial agency. Humbert’s slip—the substitution of “array” for “arraign”—obliquely reveals a design: the implied author (hidden under the mask of John Ray) actually arrays the story of the real murderer, that is, dresses it up and places it in the desired order.

The insertion of this real, albeit “arrayed” report into the text leads up to another, much more important allusion to an actual crime, in the same episode. Soon after his visit to the Ramsdale cemetery, Humbert encounters Mrs. Chatfield, an old acquaintance whose daughter Phyllis was Lolita’s class mate:She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?) (289).
The phrase in parentheses (where it is usual to find the most meaningful clues in Nabokov’s prose) is a deliberately planted riddle that invites the reader to do some research in old newspaper files. However, the necessary information is difficult to find, because major American media didn’t cover the La Salle case, which made the news at the end of March, 1950. A that time, Many local newspapers published unsigned reports from Associated Press and International News Service. Some examples of headlines will suffice:

Rescued after two-year captivityKidnapper held on Federal Charge; Girl Tells Story

Sex Criminal Held for New Jersey Court

Girl, 13, Held After Travels With Man, 52

13-Year Old Spent 2 Years With LaSalle

Girl Accuses Man of Ruse. Two-Year Tour Made by Pair
Headlines like these would have caught Nabokov’s extraordinarily keen eye. By that time, “beset with technical difficulties and doubts” (Strong Opinions, 105), he had almost halted work on his new novel and would not have missed an interesting prompt provided by the “given world.” The very consonance of the names of the kidnapped girl and her abductor—Sally and La Salle—sounded as if they had been invented by a bilingual punster playing upon the French adjective sale (dirty or sordid); their story reads as a rough outline for the second part of Lolita. Here are some of the reports Nabokov apparently knew:

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 22 (AP)—A hawk-faced New Jersey sex criminal was held for the FBI today, accused of forcing a 13-year-old schoolgirl to flee from her family, having sexual relations with him and travel across the country with him.
The girl—missing for nearly two years—said she did all these things because she feared the 52-year-old man would expose her theft of a five cent notebook. <…>
The girl was chubby brown haired Florence Sally Horner of Camden.
Sheriff Howard Hornbuckle said the girl told him La Salle compelled her to leave Camden on June 15, 1948.
The first week they were together, the sheriff said he was told, La Salle and the girl had sexual relations, that these relations continued until three weeks ago when a school chum in Dallas, Texas told Sally that what she was doing was wrong.

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 22—(AP)—A plump little girl of 13 told police today she accompanied a 52-year old man on a two-year tour of the country, in fear he would expose her as a shop-lifter.
The girl, Florence Sally Horner of Camden, N.J., was found here last night after she appealed to Eastern relatives “send the FBI for me, please?”
Her companion, Frank La Salle, an unemployed mechanic, was said by County Prosecutor Michael H. Cohen in Camden to be under indictment for her abduction.
Officers said the girl told them La Salle had forced her to submit to sexual relations.
The nice looking youngster, with light brown hair and blue-green eyes, attributed her troubles to a Club she joined in a Camden school. One of the requirements, she said, was that each member steal something from a ten-cent store.
She stole an article, she related, and La Salle happened to be watching her. She said he told her he was an FBI Agent; that “We have a place for girls like you.”
Sally said she went away with him, under his threat that unless she did, he would have her placed in a reform school.

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — A 13 year-old girl’s telephoned plea “send the FBI for me, please!” has ended her 21-month trans-continental travels with a 52-year old man.
Sheriff’s deputies placed Florence (Sally) Horner in a juvenile detention home last night, after finding her in an auto court. They were awaiting word from her mother Mrs. Ella Horner of Camden, N.J. about sending Sally home.
And they jailed Frank La Salle, 52, an unemployed mechanic, pending word from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 23—(INS)—A 52-year-old mechanic with a long record of morals offenses faced a multiplicity of charges today for making a common law “child bride” of the bobby-soxer he is accused of abducting.
Frank La Salle was arraigned before U.S. Commissioner Marshall Hall yesterday on a Mann act charge of transporting a girl across state lines for immoral purposes. Bail was fixed at $10,000.
La Salle is accused of kidnapping 12-year-old Florence Horner from her Camden, N.J., home two years ago and forcing her to submit to sexual relations while traveling the continent. He allegedly bound the girl to him with threats to “turn her in” for a five-cent theft.
The chubby, mature looking teen-ager caused his arrest when she managed to telephone a sister that she wanted to go home so “please send the FBI.”
San Jose police, alerted by Camden authorities, found the girl in an auto court Tuesday night and a few hours later arrested La Salle when he returned to the trailer in which the two had been living.
La Salle protested he was Florence’s father but New Jersey authorities said the girl’s father had been dead for seven years. <…>
Less than two weeks after his arrest, Frank La Salle pleaded guilty to a charge of kidnapping and was sentenced to a jail term of 30 to 35 years.

From The Lima News
Thursday, March 23, 1950, p. 5

The second part of Lolita abounds with echoes of the story. Lolita’s captivity lasting nearly two years, the “extensive travels” of Humbert Humbert and his “child-bride” all over the United States, from New England to California, their soujourns in innumerable “motor courts,” a stay in Beardsley where Lolita goes to school, the hero’s constant claims that he is the girl’s father, “not very mechanically-minded [a hint at La Salle’s profession] but prudent papa Humbert” (208)—all these elements of the novel’s nightmarish plot seem both to derive from the real-life precedent and to refer back to it. The sequence and time-span of events are strikingly similar. Sally Horner lived with Frank La Salle for twenty-one months, went to school in Dallas where she confided her secret to a friend, resumed travels with the kidnapper and finally, three weeks later, made a crucial telephone call asking for help, escaping her captor. After twenty-one months with Lolita, when the pair stays in Beardsley, Humbert suddenly realizes that she has grown up and is slipping away from his power. He suspects that she has told everything to her schoolfriend Mona, and might be cherishing “the stealthy thought … that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose [Humbert] without getting penalized herself” (204). They have a terrible row, but Lolita manages to escape and make a mysterious phone call, afterwards telling Humbert: “A great decision has been made” (207). They resume their travels and about a month later Lolita manages to escape. When in the final chapter of the novel Humbert states that he would have given himself “at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges,” he mimics Frank La Salle’s sentence.

Several details transposed by Nabokov from newspaper reports seem to underscore an affinity (or, better, a “rhyme”) between Sally Horner and Dolly Haze. Both “nice looking youngsters” are daughters of widowed mothers; both have brown hair; Lolita’s “Florentine hands” and “Florentine breasts” evoke not only Boticcelli but also the first name of Florence Sally Horner. It was in the sad story of the New Jersey girl that Nabokov found a psychological explanation of Lolita’s acquiescence in her role of sex-slave. Copying La Salle, Humbert terrorizes his victim with threats that if he is arrested, she “will be given a choice of varying dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home…” (151). In fact, talking to Lolita about her situation, Humbert even alludes to the case of Frank La Salle:

Only the other day we read in the newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender who pleaded guilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to transporting a nine-year-old girl across state lines for immoral purposes, whatever they are. Dolores darling! You are not nine but almost thirteen, and I would not advise you to consider yourself my cross-country slave <…> I am your father, and I am speaking English, and I love you (150).

Changing the age of the girl, Nabokov indicates that in the inner calendar of the novel the allusion to the case of Frank La Salle is an anachronism: Humbert is talking to Lolita in 1947, that is a year before the real abduction when Sally Horner was nine or ten years old. Yet the legal formulae used by the narrator as well as his implying that he, in contrast to La Salle, is really Lolita’s father, leave no doubt that the passage refers to the newspaper reports of 1950 quoted above.

What makes Humbert’s phrasing even more poignant is that it betrays his knowledge of the tragic finale of Sally Horner’s story. Fate showed no mercy to the molested bobby-soxer. As the Associated Press reported in August 1952, twenty nine months after La Salle’s arrest, Sally Horner was killed in a highway accident when the car in which she was riding plowed into the rear of a parked truck. In fact, Nabokov’s handwritten note concerning Sally Horner, in the Library of Congress archive (cited by Brian Boyd) is a shortened copy of a newspaper report on her death dated by August 20, 1952:Woodbine, N.Y. — Sally Horner, 15-year-old Camden, N.J., girl who spent 21 months as the captive of a middle-aged morals offender a few years ago, was killed in a highway mishap early Monday. … Sally vanished from her Camden home in 1948 and wasn’t heard from again until 1950 when she told a harrowing story of spending 21 months as the cross-country slave of Frank LaSalle, 52.
LaSalle, a mechanic, was arrested in San Jose, Calif. … he pleaded guilty to charges of kidnapping and was sentenced to 30 to 35 years in prison. He was branded a “moral leper” by the sentencing judge.
At the end of August 1952, Nabokov was travelling by car from Wyoming to Ithaca, so it is impossible to identify which newspaper was the source of the note. (I have found a slightly different version of the same report in The Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, August 19, 1952. There La Salle is more bluntly called “a middle-aged sex offender” and Sally Horner, his “cross-country love slave.”) In his copy Nabokov crossed out the very euphemisms—“a middle-aged morals offender” and “a cross-country slave”—that Humbert Humbert uses in his conversation with Lolita. Above the text he scribbled: “in Ench<anted> H<unters> revisited? … In the newspaper?” He is referring to a scene (Chapter 26, Part II) in which Humbert revisits Briceland and in a library browses through a “coffin-black volume” with old files of the local Gazette for August 1947. Humbert is looking for a printed picture of himself “as a younger brute” on his “dark way to Lolita’s bed” in the Enchanted Hunters hotel, and Nabokov evidently thought of making him come across a report of Sally Horner’s death in what the narrator aptly calls the “book of doom” (262). Eventually Nabokov rejected the idea but dispersed bits and pieces of Sally Horner’s “harrowing story” throughout the second part of Lolita.

The story of Sally Horner haunts Humbert Humbert, who can’t help noticing its similarity to his own tale but would never concede that, in spite of his pretensions to poetic grandeur, verbal skills, and sensitivity, he is no better than La Salle, a common criminal and “moral leper.”2 This is why he gives La Salle’s profession and appearance to minor characters, both of whom he scorns: Dick Schiller, Lolita’s husband, is a mechanic, while Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov), a friend and collaborator of his arch-enemy Clare Quilty, has a hawk face.

Humbert’s numerous references to the story of Sally Horner undermine not only his claims to originality but also the very status of the “Confession of a White Widowed Male.” According to the narrator and his fictitious editor, “suave John Ray,” Lolita was written in less than two months, from late September to November 16, 1952, when Humbert was in prison awaiting trial for the murder of Clare Quilty. Yet his use of old newspaper materials betrays careful preparation and contradicts his assurances that the text is an honest memoir. In a sense, the cunning humbug does to his readers what a barber in Kasbeam once did while giving him “a very mediocre haircut”—“he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, … and every now and then … interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize … that the mustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years” (213). Producing and editing his own “newspaper clippings,” Humbert Humbert conceals the fact of Sally Horner’s death, which might imply that he hides a similar secret concerning Dolly Haze’s fate. (Some critics have argued that Lolita does not run away with Clare Quilty, but dies in Elphinstone hospital when she is just fourteen years and six months old, and the parallels to Sally Horner’s story support this reading.)

For the implied author of Lolita, the “perfect dictator” in his imagined world, the short and unhappy life of a chubby brown-haired American teenager has a different meaning. In The Gift, Nabokov wrote that a most important source of creative imagination is a piercing pity—for the tin box in a waste patch, for the cigarette card from the series National Costumes trampled in the mud, for the poor, stray word repeated by the kind-hearted, weak, loving creature who has just been scolded for nothing—for all the trash of life which by means of a momentary alchemic distillation … is turned into something valuable and eternal.
Trampled Sally Horner enmeshed in a terrible pattern of doom—a fatherless childhood, a strange, as if preordained, meeting with La Salle, a grotesque car ride across America with her abductor, the suffering and pain of the lone child turned into a sex slave, a successful rebellion against the abuser and a sudden untimely death, again on the road, again in a car—was a deserving object for Nabokov’s “piercing pity,” and for the transformation of her story, through art, “into something valuable and eternal.” Refering to her in the novel about an abused American girl somewhat like herself, Nabokov not only paid tribute to his “given world” source but, in a sense, redeemed the cruelty of Sally’s fate, which otherwise would have been forever buried in the “trash of life.” He wanted us to remember and pity the poor girl whose stolen childhood and untimely death helped to give birth to his (not Humbert Humbert’s) Lolita—the genuine heroine of the novel hidden behind the narrator’s self-indulgent verbosity.

In the Ramsdale scene, just before naming La Salle and Sally Horner, Humbert Humbert is passing by his old house and notices that “somebody had attached a found black velvet hair ribbon to the white FOR SALE [for Sally?] sign” (288). The attentive reader may remember a similar “velvet hair ribbon” (123, 125) that Lolita removed before going to bed in The Enchanted Hunters and evidently left there, together with her childhood and her freedom. Now it has been found by the invisible god-like author of the book and hung as a mourning wreath in memory of the “daisy-fresh girl” destroyed by Humbert and of her real-life prototype. Nearby, he suddenly sees “a golden-skinned, brown-haired nymphet of nine or ten”—a composite ghost of younger, still inviolate Sally Horner and Dolly Haze. The girl is looking at him with “wild fascination in her large blue-black eyes”:

I said something pleasant to her, meaning no harm, an old-world compliment, what nice eyes you have, but she retreated in haste and the music stopped abruptly, and a violent-looking dark man, glistening with sweat, came out and glared at me. I was on the point of identifying myself when, with a pang of dream-embarrassment, I became aware of my mud-caked dungarees, my filthy and torn sweater, my bristly chin, my bum’s bloodshot eyes (289).
This is a rare moment in the book when Humbert understands what he might really look like in the eyes of his eternal jury: children and their protectors.

(This is a slightly modified version, supplemented with references and an image, of an article originally published in the Times Literary Supplement [TLS], September 9, 2005, pp. 11-12. It is reprinted here by permission of the TLS.)

Notes
1. Henceforth all page numbers in brackets refer to Appel’s edition.

2. Nabokov used the same device in Despair, in which the insane narrator copycats real-life murders that have made headlines in German newspapers but vehemently denies any resemblance, saying: “They and I have nothing in common.”

Voir enfin:

The Real Lolita
Sarah Weinman
The story of 11-year-old Sally Horner’s abduction changed the course of 20th-century literature. She just never got to tell it herself.
November 20, 2014

Nabokov refers directly to La Salle’s Mann Act arrest in Lolita, but changes the age: “Only the other day we read in the newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender who pleaded guilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to transporting a nine-year-old girl across state lines for immoral purposes, whatever they are. Dolores darling! You are not nine but almost thirteen, and I would not advise you to consider yourself my cross-country slave…I am your father, and I am speaking English, and I love you.” [150]
3Edward Baker did not respond to letters or voice mails, closing down the most direct avenue to information about how he met Sally, how well he knew her, and the car accident that killed her. I subsequently learned he died on July 28, 2014, aged 82, having lived in Vineland his entire life. Baker also may not have wanted to talk because Sally’s death paralleled another cruelly ironic family tragedy: On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 17, 2007, Baker’s 48-year old son, Edward Baker Jr., fell asleep in his Mercury Grand Marquis, crossed the lane and into the median, and slammed into a tree along the shoulder of Route 55. Baker Jr., too, died instantly.

Sally Horner walked into the Woolworth’s on Broadway and Federal to steal a five-cent notebook. She had to, if the girls’ club she desperately wanted to join were to accept her into its ranks. She’d never stolen anything in her life; usually she went to that particular five-and-dime for school supplies and her favorite candy. But with days to go before the end of fifth grade, Sally was looking for a ticket to the ruling class, far removed from the babies below her at Northeast School in Camden, New Jersey.

It would be easy, the girls told her. Nobody would suspect a girl like Sally as a thief. Despite her mounting dread at breaking the law, she believed them. On the afternoon of June 13, 1948, she had no idea a simple act of shoplifting would destroy her life.

Once inside, she reached for the first notebook she could find on the gleaming white nickel counter. She stuffed it into her bag and sprinted away, careful to look straight ahead to the exit door. Then, right before the getaway, came a hard tug on her arm.

Sally looked up. A slender, hawk-faced man loomed above her, iron-gray hair peeking out from underneath a wide-brimmed fedora. His eyes, set directly upon Sally’s, blazed a mix of steel blue and gray. A scar sliced across his cheek by the right side of his nose, while his shirt collar shrouded another mark on his throat. The hand gripping Sally’s arm bore the traces of an even older, half-moon stamp forged by fire. Any adult would have sized him up as well past 50, but he looked positively ancient to Sally, who had turned 11 just two months before. Sally’s initial nerves dissipated, replaced by the terror of being caught.

“I am an FBI agent,” the man said to Sally. “And you are under arrest.”

Sally did what many young girls would have done in a similar situation: She cried. She cowered. She felt immediately ashamed.

As the tears fell, the man froze her in place with his low voice. He pointed across the way to City Hall, the tallest building in Camden, and said that girls like her would be dealt with there. If it went the way they normally handled thieving youths, he told her, Sally would be bound for the reformatory.

Sally didn’t know that much about reform school, but what she knew was not good. She kept crying.

But his manner brightened. It was a lucky break he caught her and not some other FBI agent, the man said. If she agreed to report to him from time to time, he would let her go. Spare her the worst. Show some mercy.

Sally felt her own mood lift, too. He was going to let her go. She wouldn’t have to call her mother from jail—her poor, overworked mother, Ella, still grappling with the suicide of her alcoholic husband, Sally’s father, five years earlier; still tethered to her seamstress job, still unsure how she felt about her older daughter Susan’s pregnancy, which would make Ella a grandmother for the first time. Sally looked forward to becoming an aunt, whatever being an aunt meant. But she couldn’t think about that. The man was going to let her go.

On her way home from school the next day, though, the man sought her out again. Without warning, the rules had changed: Sally had to go with him to Atlantic City—the government insisted. She’d have to convince her mother he was the father of two school friends, inviting her to a seashore vacation. He would take care of the rest with a phone call and a convincing appearance at the Camden bus depot.

His name was Frank La Salle, and he was no FBI agent—rather, he was the sort G-men wanted to drive off the streets, though Sally didn’t learn that until it was far too late. It took 21 months to break free of him, after a cross-country journey from Camden, New Jersey, to San Jose, California. That five-cent notebook didn’t just alter Sally Horner’s own life, though: it reverberated throughout the culture, and in the process, irrevocably changed the course of 20th-century literature.

Vladimir Nabokov’s 1956 essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita” was an essay he never intended to write. He disdained literal mapping of nonfiction to fiction, as well as the search for moral meaning: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”The essay exists because, by then, Nabokov felt he had to explain himself—that he was a novelist, not a purveyor of smut. Lolita was so notorious that four American publishers refused to publish the manuscript, one saying flatly to Nabokov that, “if he printed Lolita, he and I would go to jail.” The book had a readership thanks to the French publisher Olympia Press, which printed its first, error-filled edition in 1955. Olympia was known as much for publishing workmanlike pornography as it was for mass market, not-exactly-legal editions of James Joyce’s Ulysses, J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, and Henry Miller’s novels. Nabokov’s experience with Olympia was an unhappy one, largely because of the many mistakes introduced into the text, and he would not find proper peace until Lolita was finally (and at significant cost) cleared for US publication in 1958 by Putnam.

Nabokov said he conjured up the germ of the novel—a cultured European gentleman’s pedophilic passion for a 12-year-old girl resulting in a madcap, satiric cross-country excursion—“late in 1939 or early in 1940, in Paris, at a time when I was laid up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia.” At that point it was a short story set in Europe, written in his first language, Russian. Not pleased with the story, however, he destroyed it. By 1949, Nabokov had emigrated to America, the neuralgia raged anew, and the story shifted shape and nagged at him further, now as a longer tale, written in English, the cross-country excursion transplanted to America.

Lolita is a nested series of tricks. Humbert Humbert, the confessing pervert, tries so hard to obfuscate his monstrosities that he seems unaware when he truly gives himself away, despite alleging the treatise is a full accounting of his crimes. Nabokov, however, gives the reader a number of clues to the literary disconnect, the most important being the parenthetical. It works brilliantly early on in Lolita, when Humbert describes the death of his mother—“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three”—or when he sights Dolores Haze in the company of her own mother, Charlotte, for the first time: “And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnaped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side.” The unbracketed narrative is what Humbert wants us to see; the asides reveal what is really inside his mind.

Late in Lolita, one of these digressions gives away the critical inspiration. Humbert, once more in Lolita’s hometown after five years away, sees Mrs. Chatfield, the “stout, short woman in pearl-gray,” in his hotel lobby, eager to pounce upon him with a “fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity.” But before she can, the parenthetical appears like a pop-up thought balloon for the bewildered Humbert: “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle [sic], a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?”

*

Sally and La Salle—he used the alias “Frank Warner” at that time—moved into a rooming house at 203 Pacific Street in Atlantic City. She called her mother on several occasions, always from a pay station, to say she was having a swell time. For six weeks, Ella Horner thought nothing was amiss—she believed her daughter was on summer vacation with friends.

After the first week, Sally said she’d be staying longer to see the Ice Follies. After two weeks, the excuses grew more vague. After three weeks, the phone calls stopped. Ella’s letters could no longer be delivered. Sally’s last missive was the most disturbing: she and “Warner” were leaving for Baltimore. Something woke up inside Ella’s mind: she’d been duped, her daughter snatched away not with violence, but with sweet-talking stealth. Ella received Sally’s final letter on July 31, 1948. She called the police later that day.

Cops in Atlantic City descended upon the Pacific Street lodging house, where they learned the man called Warner had posed as Sally’s father. They’d found enough evidence to arrest him, but it was too late: he and Sally had disappeared. Two suitcases full of clothes remained in their room, as did several unsent postcards from Sally to her mother and friends. There was also a photograph, never before seen by Ella or the police, of a honey-haired Sally, in a cream-colored dress, white socks and black patent shoes, sitting on a swing. Her smile was tentative, her eyes fathoms deep with sadness. She was still just 11 years old.

sallyswingbig.jpg
Sally Horner in a photo believed to have been taken in Atlantic City in 1948 (courtesy of the author)
It was terrible enough that the police couldn’t bring Sally home. Far worse was the news they had to break to Ella: the man called Warner was really Frank La Salle, and only six months before he abducted Sally, he’d finished up a prison stint for the statutory rape of several pubescent girls.

*

It took 50 years for someone to connect the dots between Sally Horner and Dolores Haze. Packed as Lolita is with countless other allusions, leitmotifs, and nested meanings, excavating a real-life case wasn’t top priority for Nabokov scholars. Sally’s plight was written up extensively in local newspapers at the time, but the New York Times never bothered, and eventually, even the hometown media forgot about the case.

Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd mentioned Sally’s abduction in passing in 1990’s Nabokov: The American Years as part of a list of several other crime stories Nabokov clipped from the papers (Sally appears on page 211, as indexed). Alexander Dolinin, a professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, investigated further for an essay published by the Times Literary Supplement in 2005: Not only did he find that Sally’s story “reads as a rough outline for the second part of Lolita,” but “the very consonance of the names of the kidnapped girl and her abductor—Sally and La Salle—sounded as if they had been invented by a bilingual punster playing upon the French adjective sale (dirty or sordid).”

Both Sally and Dolly—there, too, concordance—are brunette daughters of widowed mothers, fated to be captive to much older predators for nearly two years. They are similarly threatened, too, with Humbert telling Dolores she “will be given a choice of varying dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home…” Nabokov transplants the big trip to start a year earlier, in 1947, and end, more or less, in 1949.

Dolinin further asserted that a handwritten note accompanying a crucial newspaper clipping in Nabokov’s files indicates how much the author knew of Sally’s abduction. Nabokov crossed out the phrases “a middle-aged morals offender” and “a cross-country slave” from the article, and scribbled above the text: “In Enchanted Hunters revisited…in the newspaper?” Apparently Nabokov thought to have Humbert find reference to the Sally Horner case in the “book of doom” he encounters at the motel where he consummates his relationship with Dolores Haze, but rejected the idea, opting to be more subtle about interspersing bits of Sally’s story throughout Lolita.

Additional resonances show up with deeper reading. The car accident that kills Charlotte Haze after she confronts Humbert about his diary is all the more horrific for the real-life accidents it emulates and foreshadows (more on those later). Yet the parallels between Lolita and Sally were almost as strong as the ones between Dolores Haze and another similarly named young woman instrumental in Frank La Salle’s life.

*

Unlike Humbert Humbert, there was nothing erudite or literary about Frank La Salle. When he was employed, which was irregular, he worked as a mechanic. His prison writings lacked the silky sheen of unreliability that is Lolita’s narrative hallmark; grammatical mistakes peppered La Salle’s rambling and incoherent oral and typewritten declamations. We know little of La Salle’s first 40 years, save that he was born in Chicago and eventually made his way to Philadelphia and neighboring South Jersey towns, operating under at least five different pseudonyms. But like Humbert, La Salle preferred his ladies young and almost never legal. That included his onetime wife Dorothy Dare.When La Salle met Dorothy, she was not quite 18, a brand-new high school graduate, brown curly hair framing an openhearted face (a description that fits Sally Horner as well as Dolores Haze). Fights with her father over his strict parenting style grew so testy she looked for any chance to escape. Apparently, she found it by running off with La Salle.

Dorothy’s father was, to understate, displeased with the situation. She was a minor, and Frank, even after shaving off five years from his actual date of birth, was still more than twice her age. Dare got local police to swear out an eight-state teletype warrant for La Salle’s arrest on July 22, 1937, and 10 days later, the jig was apparently up. Cops arrested La Salle, going by the alias of Frank Fogg, in Roxborough, Pennsylvania, where he was working, and picked up Dorothy in the nearby town of Wissahickon, where the two had rented a room. Police took the two of them into custody, where Frank dropped a surprise on the arresting officers: the couple had legally married in Elkton, Maryland, and they had the certificate to prove it. The charges couldn’t stick.

For a few years, the marriage was a happy one. Frank—living openly under his real name again—and Dorothy moved to Atlantic City. They were still there when the census-takers came knocking in 1940, and noted an addition to the family: a one-year-old daughter named Madeline (not her real name). The marriage began to curdle later that year when Frank was arrested on bigamy charges, few details of which remain other than that he was acquitted. Two years later, when Madeline was three, Dorothy sued Frank for desertion and nonpayment of child support. Family lore had it that Dorothy discovered her husband in a car with another woman, and grew so enraged she hit her over the head with her shoe. It’s also possible Dorothy discovered an even darker truth.

On September 4, 1942, Frank La Salle was indicted in Camden County Criminal Court for the statutory rape of five girls between the ages of 12 and 14. He wasn’t arrested until February 2, 1943, though, and pleaded not guilty to the charges in court the following week. A little over a month later, on March 22, La Salle changed his plea to “non vult,” or no contest, and received a sentence of two and a half to five years in Trenton State Prison. Fourteen months later, on June 18, 1944, La Salle was paroled.

He didn’t make it on the outside very long. La Salle got his social security card within two weeks as a free man. He worked car mechanic jobs in Philadelphia, but an indecent assault charge landed him in more trouble just a few months later, in October 1944 (Camden County prosecutors dropped the matter on Halloween). The next time La Salle got indicted, in September 1945 for “obtaining money under false pretenses”—he forged a check for $110 at the Third National Bank in Camden—his luck turned, and he headed back to Trenton State Prison on March 18, 1946. Not only was La Salle set to serve 18 months to five years on the new charges, but the clock began on the remainder of the statutory rape sentence for which he’d received parole immediately thereafter. La Salle finished up those sentences in January 1948, and he was paroled again on the 15th of that month.

Dorothy and Madeline’s whereabouts didn’t interest the news, and they faded from public view.

*

Captivity narratives, such as the recent “found alive” stories of young women including Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, and the trio Ariel Castro held in Cleveland, never fail to fascinate. They allow us to understand how kidnappers subjected these girls and women to years of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse. No matter that some, like Smart and Dugard or Colleen Stan, the “Girl in the Box” under her tormentors’ sway for seven years, left their abductors’ homes, shopped at supermarkets, and even traveled (Stan visited her parents during her captivity period). They survived by adjusting their mental maps so that brutality could be endured, but never normal.

If Sally told the truth, who would believe her story? Who would comprehend she had been abducted when, to all appearances, it seemed Frank La Salle was her father, and a loving one at that?

Day after day of their confinement, their kidnappers told these women their families had abandoned and forgotten all about them. Year after year, their only knowledge of love came from those who abused, raped, and tortured them. Such cognitive dissonances attach themselves, vise-like. Dugard’s 18-year manipulation, compounded by bearing two children fathered by her abductor, caused her to deny her real identity to the police at first, only revealing the truth when she felt secure of permanent separation from her kidnappers. Smart, too, needed the same slow-burning trust to tell law enforcement who she really was.

Smart, Dugard, and the Cleveland three published or will publish books about their long-running ordeals. They can tell their stories the way they wish and when they choose, and attempt to make something meaningful of their lives. Sally Horner did not have that choice. While we don’t have many details of her day-to-day time with Frank La Salle, what we know speaks to the missed signs, the frustration that no one stepped in, and Sally’s own internal strength, damped down until the opportunity to escape finally presented itself.

Dolores Haze, of course, did not tell her own story in Lolita. Instead we have the word of Humbert Humbert, whose charm and erudition allows the reader to forget—briefly for some, completely for others—that he is a monster. The genius of Nabokov is in how his narrative allows for all manner of interpretations of Humbert’s motivations, leaving us to confront uncomfortable ambiguity in a way we wouldn’t dare with manipulators such as Ariel Castro, Philip Garrido, or Frank La Salle.

*

Having cleared out of Atlantic City, knowing the police were in pursuit, La Salle and Sally settled in Baltimore by September 1948. They kept up the father-daughter pose in the Barclay neighborhood on the east side of the city—at the time a middle-class enclave—until April 1949. She attended Saint Ann’s Catholic School at 2200 Greenmount Drive, likely within walking distance of her new home. The Church of Saint Ann’s is still open; the school closed in the mid-1970s (a different school, Mother Seton Academy, reopened in the same building in 2009). If records remain of the Saint Ann’s years, they’re difficult to come by: the Church had none, and neither did its parish.

They left Baltimore and headed southwest to Dallas, the timing of the move appearing to coincide with Camden County indicting La Salle a second time. Back in 1948, prosecutor Mitchell Cohen indicted La Salle for Sally’s abduction, which carried a maximum sentence of three to five years in prison. This second, more serious indictment, for kidnapping, handed down on March 17, 1949, carried a sentence of 30 to 35 years. If La Salle did get word of the new indictment—he told Sally they needed to leave Baltimore because the “FBI asked him to investigate something”—he didn’t want to be in striking distance of Camden, where police could find them.

Using the last name of LaPlante, they lived on Commerce Street, a quiet, well-kept trailer park in a more run-down part of Dallas, from April 1949 until March 1950. Their neighbors regarded Sally as a typical 12-year-old living with her widowed father, albeit one never let out of his sight except to go to school. But she seemed to enjoy taking care of her home. She would bake every once in a while. She had a dog. La Salle provided her with a generous allowance for clothes and sweets. She would go shopping, swimming, and to her neighbors’ trailers for dinner. And while La Salle, as LaPlante, set up shop again as a mechanic, Sally attended Catholic school once more, at Our Lady of Good Counsel. (It, too, no longer exists, absorbed into Bishop Dunne Catholic School by 1961. The trailer park will be replaced this year by a posh apartment complex.)

A copy of Sally’s report card from her time at Our Lady of Good Counsel between September 1949 and February 1950 indicates she was a good student, with her only C+ grade coming in Languages in her final month there. Otherwise, she got primarily A’s and A-minuses, with the occasional B, the latter mostly coming towards the end of the school year. Her worst subjects were Geography and Writing. She also missed 10 days of school in September because she was hospitalized for appendicitis, spending at least three nights at the Texas Crippled Children’s Hospital (now the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children).

Sally’s apparently happy demeanor in Dallas grew more pensive after the operation. Josephine Kagamaster, the wife of La Salle’s business partner in the shop, remarked Sally did not move like “a healthy, light-hearted youngster,” and heard La Salle say the girl “walks like an old woman.” Otherwise, the consensus about Sally and her “father” was that they “both seemed happy and entirely devoted to each other.” Nelrose Pfeil, a neighbor, said, “Sally got everything she ever wanted. I always said I didn’t know who was more spoiled, Sally or her dog.” Maude Smilie, living at a nearby trailer on Commerce Street, seemed bewildered at the idea of Sally being a virtual prisoner: “[Sally] spent one day at the beauty parlor with me. I gave her a permanent and she never mentioned a thing. She should have known she could have confided in me.”

Sally might have stayed late at a neighbor’s watching television, or even in hospital for several nights, but if she told the truth, who would believe her story? Who would comprehend she had been abducted when, to all appearances, it seemed Frank La Salle was her father, and a loving one at that?

It turned out one woman did believe Sally. And her belief emboldened Sally’s nerve to escape.

*

“So my nymphet is not in the house at all! Gone! What I thought was a prismatic weave turns out to be but an old grey cobweb, the house is empty, is dead.” – Lolita, pp. 49-50

Ruth Janish1 was married to an itinerant farm worker. Little else is known about the couple. They moved where there was work and didn’t stick around long where there was none. During a fallow period at the beginning of 1950, the Janishes lived in the West Dallas trailer park at the same time as Sally Horner and Frank La Salle. Soon after she met them, Ruth began to suspect that Frank was not, in fact, Sally’s father. “He never let Sally out of his sight, except when she was at school,” Mrs. Janish recounted. “She never had any friends her own age. She never went any place, just stayed with La Salle in the trailer.” La Salle, to Ruth, seemed “abnormally possessive” of Sally.

Ruth tried to cajole Sally, still recovering from her appendectomy, to tell her the “true story” of her relationship with La Salle in Dallas. Sally wouldn’t open up. The Janishes left for California in early March 1950, thinking they’d have better luck finding work there, but on arrival, Ruth hatched the beginning of a plan. First, she wrote La Salle, urging him and Sally to follow them to the San Jose trailer park, where they could be neighbors again. The Janishes had even reserved a spot in the park for them.

La Salle was in. He and Sally drove from Dallas to San Jose, the house-trailer attached to his car, and arrived in the park by Saturday, March 18, 1950. For some reason, it made more sense for La Salle to take the bus into the city to look for work than to drive. He’d left Sally by herself countless times before, and was confident she would stay put. But this wasn’t Dallas, or Baltimore, or even Atlantic City. This was San Jose, on the opposite coast—the farthest Sally Horner had ever been away from home. And change had been brewing inside her, too.

Before leaving Dallas, Sally mustered up the courage to tell a friend at school of her ordeal at La Salle’s hands. The friend told Sally her behavior was “wrong” and that “she ought to stop,” as Sally later explained. As her friend’s admonishment sank in, Sally began refusing La Salle’s further advances. And on the morning of March 21, 1950, Ruth Janish’s determined concern and Sally’s burgeoning need for change collided in a San Jose trailer park.

With Frank La Salle safely away for several hours, Ruth invited Sally over to her trailer. Knowing this was her only chance, Janish gently coaxed more honesty out of the young girl. She wanted to go home. She wanted to talk to her mother and older sister. Janish then showed Sally how to operate the telephone in her trailer so the girl could make long-distance phone calls.

*

Phones are a recurring motif in Lolita. The incessant ringing of the “machine telephonica and its sudden god” interrupts the narrative, showing Humbert’s psyche beginning to fissure as the monster underneath wages war with the amiable surface personality he presents to the world, allowing for Dolores to find some means of freedom. Humbert’s paranoia grows as he suspects Dolores has confided the truth in Mona, a school friend: “the stealthy thought … that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose [Humbert] without getting penalized herself.”

Dolores’s first escape, after she yells “unprintable things” and accuses Humbert of murdering her mother and violating her, occurs as the phone rings and she breaks free of his grip on her wrist (mirroring La Salle’s of Sally at the five-and-dime). That escape only lasts a few hours, as Humbert finds Dolly “some ten paces away, through the glass of a telephone booth (membranous god still with us).” After that, she asserts authority as to where they should go next, and then, though the reader is not privy to it, makes a final, mysterious call, presumably to Quilty (whom, earlier in Lolita, she jokes is female) to help her escape. Telephones, Humbert concludes, “happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch.”

*

Sally called her mother first, but the line was disconnected; she later learned Ella had lost her seamstress job and, while unemployed, could not afford to pay for a phone line. Next, she tried her sister Susan, who lived with her husband, Al Panaro, and their baby daughter Diana, in Florence, New Jersey, about 20 miles away from Camden, where the two worked together in a greenhouse. The greenhouse phone rang, and Al picked up. “Al, this is Sally,” she said. He tried to contain his excitement. “Where are you at?” “I’m with a lady friend in California. Send the FBI after me, please!” Sally cried. “Tell mother I’m okay, and don’t worry. I want to come home. I’ve been afraid to call before.” Sally’s brother-in-law assured her he would do that if she would stay where she was.

After Sally hung up the phone, she turned to Ruth. “I thought she was going to collapse,” Mrs. Janish said. “She kept saying over and over, ‘What will Frank do when he finds out what I have done?’”

But Al Panaro came through. He notified the FBI’s New York office, which in turn notified the sheriff’s office of Santa Clara County. Federal agents and sheriff’s deputies sped to the motor court where they found Sally, alone. She was relieved to be rescued, but terrified that La Salle would return. “Please get me away from here before he gets back to town,” Sally said. Police took Sally to the county detention home for juveniles, where she underwent a medical examination.

Having rescued Sally, federal and state agents lay in wait for Frank La Salle’s returning bus to the trailer park, and arrested him the minute he stepped off. La Salle not only denied kidnapping Sally, but claimed he was her father, that he had “reared her since she was a small girl,” and was married to Sally’s mother. Ella Horner, he told them, “has known where I am and where the girl is every day since I’ve been gone.” He crowed that the authorities “could have found me at any time. I had a business in Dallas. I always registered my cars in my right name.”

The next day, La Salle was charged with violating the Mann Act2 for transporting a female along state lines with the intent of corrupting her morals. The police required Sally to be in court to hear the charges. She cried and screamed, seeing her abductor for the first time since her rescue. She also denied La Salle was her father: “My real daddy died when I was six and I remember what he looks like. I never saw this man before that day at the dime store.”

*

Ella was overjoyed to learn her daughter was still alive. “Many times it seemed hopeless,” she said. “But I’ll be thankful when I see her and know she’s all right.” She also firmly denied any connection whatsoever to La Salle: She had only met the man as he led Sally to the bus that day in 1948. Besides, Sally’s father was long dead, and surely La Salle’s prior prison record spoke for itself.

It certainly did to the authorities, who decided La Salle was best off with the state of New Jersey. They dropped the federal charges, with California governor (and future Supreme Court Chief Justice) Earl Warren signing an extradition agreement. Camden County prosecutor Mitchell Cohen and city detectives Willard Dube and Marshall Thompson flew to San Jose to escort La Salle back East by train, all shackled to one another, as airlines did not allow prisoners to be handcuffed on flights.

Cohen accompanied Sally, clad in a navy blue suit, polka dot blouse, black shoes, a red coat, and a straw Easter bonnet, on a United Airlines plane arriving in Philadelphia just before midnight on March 31, 1950. It was Sally Horner’s first-ever flight. She steadied her mounting nerves by talking about how much she looked forward to seeing her family. She only threw up once, when the plane ran into turbulence just outside of Chicago.

Ella waited at the airport with her family in the back seat of assistant prosecutor William Cahill’s car. Several other planes landed first, each one lifting Ella’s spirits before crushing them anew. “Why doesn’t it come,” Ella said, her face pressed against the car window. Her anguish was short-lived: Sally’s plane, delayed 33 minutes, finally landed. Sally’s own excitement grew when she noticed her brother-in-law in the mounting crowd, but Cohen told Sally to wait for the other passengers to leave first.

Then Sally spotted her mother. “I want to see Mama!”

“All right, Sally,” said Cohen. “Let’s go.”

Sally stood at the doorway, peering into the crowd, then slowly descended the ramp. Ella ran in a frantic flash towards her youngest daughter, holding out her arms. Sally raced down the steps, her face lit up with joy and tears. “Mama! Mama!” Sally cried. She and her mother clung to each other for several minutes, both oblivious to the myriad flash bulbs in their faces looking for the perfect photo to run in the papers the following morning. At first, they wept too loudly to speak. Then Sally wailed what had been uppermost on her mind for nearly two years: “I want to go home,” she sobbed. “I just want to go home.”

Safely in prosecutor Cahill’s car, she explained to Sally that that couldn’t happen just yet. Instead, they were en route Camden County Children’s Center in nearby Pennsauken, New Jersey, which would care for Sally “until the trial is over.” As their car arrived at the center, so did another one holding Sally’s aunt, Al Panaro, and her sister. “Susan!” she cried upon spotting her older sibling.

“I kissed you at the airport but you didn’t recognize me!”

Susan was holding her daughter, Diana, who had been born two months after Sally disappeared. Sally reached for the niece she’d never met and hugged her tightly. “Gee, she looks like pictures of me taken when I was a baby!”

Cohen, exhausted from the trip, gently informed the family that Sally needed to get some sleep. Visits from anyone but Ella were kept scarce to ensure Sally stayed in a calm frame of mind before and during the trial. But thanks to an unexpected development, Sally’s stay at the center didn’t last long at all.

La Salle arrived in Camden on Sunday, April 2. The very next day, he pleaded guilty to the abduction and kidnapping charges, waiving his right to a lawyer. “I don’t need any counsel,” La Salle said in a barely audible voice. “I am guilty, and I am willing to go in and plead guilty.” Asked when he wished to plead, he said, “The sooner the better, I want to get it off my chest, and I want my time to commence to run, and I want to avoid this girl any further unfavorable publicity.”

Sally, dressed in the same navy blue suit she’d worn at the airport, sat in the rear of the courtroom. She wasn’t asked to testify, never said a word, and did not once look at La Salle. Judge Rocco Palese sentenced him to 30 to 35 years at Trenton State Prison, with the shorter sentence for abduction to be served concurrently. Palese minced no words as he sentenced La Salle, calling him a “moral leper” and declaring: “Mothers throughout the country will give a sigh of relief to know that a man of this type is safely in prison.”

The wire services’ coverage of the discovery of Sally, compared to the more sympathetic, comprehensive reports of the Camden Evening Courier and Morning Post, was a curious mix of sympathy and victim-blaming. The papers often described Sally as “plump” or “husky,” despite 110 pounds on a five-foot frame being nowhere close to fat. (“A little pubic floss glistened on its plump hillock,” Humbert remarks in Lolita, referring earlier, too, to Dolores’s “curiously husky voice.”) Not only did the press repeatedly publish her name, a practice now frowned upon, but they wrote that Sally had been “sexually interfered with” at La Salle’s hands, and printed when and where she had sex with him. One UPI report had her admit that although sometimes La Salle “was mean and scolded me a little… the rest of the time he treated me like a father.” Societal norms even invaded Ella’s state of mind. A few days after her daughter was found, Ella was photographed holding a picture of Sally, post-rescue. The quote: “Whatever Sally has done I can forgive her.”

*

Humbert Humbert, in the final chapter of Lolita, remarks he would have given himself “at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges,” echoing the sentence Frank La Salle received. That long prison stint meant the Horner family never had to think about Sally’s abductor again. The New Jersey court systems, however, weren’t so lucky. La Salle may have pleaded guilty immediately and shrugged off his right to an attorney, but he still thought he could find a way out of prison. Unfortunately for him, La Salle preferred outlandish, transparent stories to the truth of those 21 months. Unlike Humbert Humbert, who tried to attach some grander meaning to his delusions of exemplary parenthood, La Salle’s machinations were crude, obvious, and disappointingly bland.

He applied for, and received, a writ of habeas corpus from the Mercer County Court (Trenton State Prison fell under their jurisdiction), and testified at length on September 24, 1951. While the transcript wasn’t available to me, a later court filing by Camden County prosecutor Mitchell Cohen revealed the outcome: La Salle perjured himself on the stand, and ended up serving an additional 30 days in the Mercer County Jail.

La Salle’s lengthy Camden County appeal document, submitted to the court in waves between 1954 and 1955, revealed the likely reason for his perjury sentence: he refused to acknowledge that Sally was not, and never was, his daughter, repeatedly referring to her as “Natural Daughter Florence Horner La Salle,” having convinced himself, through the selective reading of past legal outcomes, that “a father cannot be convicted of kidnaping [sic] his own child.”

He spun a shambling yarn about living in Camden, but “not with his family” in January 1948 (because he had just been paroled on the 15th of that month for statutory rape); “doing what he thought right by giving money in sufficient sums to his former common-law wife for the care and maintenance of his [daughter]” (he never knew, let alone had any domestic relationship, with Ella Horner); and seeing Sally “on the streets by herself as late as 12 AM midnight,” at which point he would make her go home and give her money.

He justified his kidnapping of Sally (both in writing and, later, to his actual daughter, Madeline) on the grounds that he was saving her from a mother who was “always out with some man or is in bed,” or, putting words in Sally’s mouth, that her mother “does not care what becomes of me. She seems to hate me, and never buys any clothing or take care of me and is never at home.” These poorly written fantasies of devoted fatherhood to a daughter he never saw manifested further when La Salle described Philadelphia trips “to see his other daughter by his legal wife who he was at the time separated from, but there was nobody at home.” (Dorothy, of course, had sued La Salle in 1942 for not paying child support.)

La Salle attested, time and again, to having “sworn proof” that Sally was his daughter, but could never deliver the goods. He even reproved the media for publishing Sally’s name when she was found in San Jose on the grounds of “a statute against such publicity for a child.” He claimed his quick guilty plea resulted from being afraid of “MOB VIOLENCE” (the caps are La Salle’s) and that the prosecutor, Cohen, “told the defendant there was no use of his trying to get an attorney as no attorney could do any good.”

La Salle’s appeal documents include purported affidavits that bolster his claims of loving fatherhood. If the documents are real, they present a series of missed opportunities, in keeping with the times when one simply didn’t talk about terrible things that happened at home. If the documents are forgeries, they amplify the grimy, sordid truth of Sally’s abuse: that La Salle’s fantastical need to present himself as a well-adjusted human compelled him to bury his misdeeds so deep that he lied, above all, to himself.

La Salle never saw the outside world again. He died of arteriosclerosis in Trenton State Prison on March 22, 1966, 16 years into his sentence. He was just shy of 70 years old.

*

Lolita has an unhappy ending, though it’s played for irony and comedy. In Humbert Humbert’s telling, Dolores escapes him by running away with the much older, much more corpulent playwright Clare Quilty, only to end up meeting, marrying, and becoming pregnant by Dick Schiller, a mechanic (La Salle’s occupation), by the age of 17. No longer the beloved nymphet, her skin sallow and her demeanor dampened deep into her third trimester, Lo still holds Humbert in her thrall for what she once was and still represents, and it is for that lost ideal that he returns to Ramsdale, confronts Quilty, and kills him in a bizarre parody of a duel.

Sally’s fate was simply tragic.

When I mentioned the word “abduction” to La Salle’s daughter, she interrupted me with some force. “That’s not the way he described it to me,” she said, proceeding to parrot the version La Salle presented in his appeal—a version the court had soundly rejected as fantasy.

Details grow sparse after Sally’s return to Camden, just before her 13th birthday, and the commencement of La Salle’s prison sentence. Though she stayed briefly with her mother upon leaving the juvenile facility in Pennsauken, Sally spent the summer of 1950 in Florence with her sister Susan and her family. Al Panaro is now 91 years old and lives in a nursing home facility near Florence, New Jersey—the same one where Susan died in 2012, at the age of 86. He and his daughter Diana Chiemingo, a year into retirement after working nearly three decades as a Burlington County educational assistant, shared their memories of Sally in separate summertime conversations.

Sally finished up eighth grade—she was a year behind—at Clara S. Burrough Junior High School on the corner of Haddon and Newton Avenues, graduating with honors. All recalled Sally being “very smart, an A-student,” and that “it seemed like she knew a subject before it was taught.” She eagerly awaited the next step, high school, and looked forward to college and getting a good job. She looked healthy, if older than her years, ate well, and had reached her full height of just above five feet, two inches tall.

Sally loved everything about the outdoors: the sun, swimming, and especially the Jersey Shore, spending a great deal of time there both before and after her abduction. She seemed happy to most people, but there were moments when “she was not all there,” Al said. “She never said she was sad and depressed, but you knew something was wrong.” She never mentioned Frank La Salle again, and the family maintained the same silence throughout their lives. “We’re very private people,” Diana said. She didn’t learn of her aunt’s abduction until her late teens.

Ella found intermittent work as a seamstress, and mother and daughter still lived in the two-story rowhouse on Linden Street. When not in Florence with the Panaros, Sally worked summers as a waitress. She had plenty of friends. One of those girls, 15-year-old Carol Starts, a Burrough classmate, accompanied Sally on a trip to the shore town of Wildwood one weekend in mid-August. It would be Sally’s last.

No one knows if Ella had reservations about letting Sally go. But on Saturday, August 16, she gave her 15-year-old daughter permission to take the bus with Carol to Wildwood, where the girls planned to stay at a resort. What happened next, the local papers reported the following Monday: Carol fled the resort by bus on Sunday evening, August 17, arriving in Camden that night, but Sally stayed on—she had met a young man at the resort earlier that day, and he promised to give her a lift back to Camden early the next morning. Ella had no idea who the man was. It was entirely possible he and Sally met for the first time that Sunday.

Sally and the young man, 20-year-old Edward John Baker of Vineland, a sparsely populated South Jersey town, set out as planned in the early morning hours of August 18, 1952. Just after midnight, somewhere along the Woodbine-Dennisville Road (now part of Interstate 78), Baker drove his 1948 Ford sedan into the back of a parked truck on the road, knocking it into another parked truck. Baker emerged from the four-car collision with minor injuries, which he had treated at Burdette Tomlin Hospital at Cape May Courthouse. The crash killed Sally instantly.3

Her death certificate, issued by Cape May County three days later, listed the cause of death as a fractured skull from a blow to the right side of her head. She’d broken her neck; other mortal injuries included a crushed chest and internal injuries, as well as a right leg fracture above the knee. The coroner didn’t bother with an autopsy. Sally’s death was swift and clear.

The damage to Sally’s face was so severe that the state police felt Ella would be too traumatized to identify her daughter. Instead, Al Panaro went to identify his sister-in-law. “The only way I knew it was Sally was because she had a scar on her leg. I couldn’t tell from her face,” he told me. A veil covered her at the funeral in Camden, attended by dozens of people, including a slew of aunts, uncles, cousins, and schoolmates.

Police arrested Baker and held him, while and after being treated for his injuries, on a charge of death by automobile for action by the Cape May County Grand Jury. Two years later, in June 1954, the prosecutor’s office dropped the charges. They gave no reason.

*

Frank La Salle made his presence known to the family just once: he sent a spray of flowers to Sally’s funeral. The Panaros insisted they not be displayed.

*

Dorothy Dare rebuilt her life while her former husband was in prison or on the run with Sally Horner in a manner that has some kinship with what Dolores Haze had in store for her as Dick Schiller’s wife. Dorothy spent the Second World War working at the Navy Yard, taking an apartment in Philadelphia and visiting her daughter, who spent summers in Brooklyn and winters at her grandfather’s house near Merchantville, whenever she could. After the war, when her daughter was 10, Dorothy met and married an army veteran several years her senior. He adopted Madeline and they had another child. Their marriage lasted almost four decades until his death in 1986.

When her children were grown, Dorothy got a job with a small advertising firm, and then with Campbell’s Soup, whose headquarters were, and still are, in Camden. She worked for Campbell’s for 30 years, retiring in 1991. For more than 50 years, Dorothy was active in her local Baptist Church, serving several years on the Board of Deaconesses. When Dorothy died at 92 in 2011, her survivors included her children, as well as almost a dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The longer Dorothy lived, the more distance she put between her turbulent early life with Frank La Salle and the more settled, family-oriented existence she likely always sought.

Madeline did not learn any details of her father’s imprisonment until she was in her early twenties, newly married with children. “There was an article in the newspaper, and my mother felt she had to tell me,” she said in a telephone interview in August. “I wanted to see him. I wanted to talk to him.” She re-established relations with La Salle in the final year of his life, visiting him in Trenton State Prison along with her children, pre-schoolers at the time. When he was up for parole, sick with lung and heart problems, Madeline volunteered to have him live at her place should he be released early. That did not happen.

“When I looked at him, I could see a lot of myself in his face,” Madeline, now 75, said. “My husband picked it up right away. We talked as father and daughter would talk. He made model boats and leather pocket books. There wasn’t a strain. He was just dad. Truth be told, I never thought about whether he was guilty or not guilty.” Just as John Ray, Jr. became the conduit for Humbert Humbert’s so-called confession, so did Madeline, unwittingly, become the keeper of Frank La Salle’s version of the story. When I mentioned the word “abduction” to Madeline, she interrupted me with some force. “That’s not the way he described it to me,” she said, proceeding to parrot the version La Salle presented in his appeal—a version the court had soundly rejected as fantasy.

*

Lolita has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide in the 60 years since its original, furtive publication. As with all great works of literature, readers return to it, finding meanings in the text they’d missed before. “When I first read Lolita, I thought it was the funniest book I’d read in ages. When I read it again, I thought it was one of the saddest,” said Elizabeth Janeway in her rave for the New York Times Book Review. (The paper’s chief daily critic at the time, Orville Prescott, panned it.) The novel could be a morality play, or completely amoral. It could be a cosmic joke played by the most unreliable of narrators, Humbert Humbert. It could be a paean to the romantic novel (a theory Nabokov accepted), or to the English language (even if switching from his “untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue” was Nabokov’s “private tragedy”). It also could be, as Nabokov abided with wry half-approval, an allegory about Europe’s debauching by America.

Books

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita’s many layers also hid the story of Sally Horner. Sally’s tragic tale wasn’t the initial spark, but the gas at the pump to keep the road trip going when the car was perilously close to breaking down. That apparently throwaway parenthetical, “Had I done to her…?” flashes neon bright with significance and warning. Not only must Humbert Humbert answer that question with a denial-stripping yes, but so too must Vladimir Nabokov. Readers can, if they wish, put aside Dolores Haze as a character in a novel, even a great one. Sally Horner can’t be cast aside so easily, her legacy to be remembered as a young girl forever changed by a middle-aged man’s crime of opportunity. A girl denied the chance to grow up. A girl immortalized, and forever trapped, in the pages of a classic novel of satire and sadness.

An earlier version of this story identified the Lolita character Clare Quilty as a dentist, rather than a playwright.

Voir par ailleurs:

Ces films que l’on n’oserait plus tourner aujourd’hui
Dans les années 1970, le cinéma se croyait tout permis. Le fait est que l’époque a eu quelque chose de spécial.
Eric Neuhoff
Le Figaro
28/09/2012

Nombre de films réalisés il y a quarante ans ne trouveraient pas de financement aujourd’hui, si tant est qu’un metteur en scène ait le culot de se lancer dans une telle entreprise… Les producteurs étaient-ils donc inconscients? Mai 68 avait-il paradoxalement permis une ouverture d’esprit inédite? Il faut bien constater que les sujets sensibles se bousculaient sur les écrans. La littérature n’était peut-être pas au mieux de sa forme, les sciences humaines ayant pris le pas sur la fiction, mais le septième art ­occupait le terrain. Ça y allait.

Les nouveaux films, tout le monde ne parlait que de ça. Avez-vous vu Le Dernier Tango à Paris? Et La Grande Bouffe, qu’est-ce que vous en pensez? Récupération intelligente d’une plaquette de beurre ou métaphore grinçante de la société de consommation, les réalisateurs fonçaient dans le tas. Dans Harold et Maude, un garçon suicidaire découvrait l’amour dans le lit d’une vieille dame indigne, sur les accords de Cat Stevens. Electra Glide in Blue répondait au convenu Easy Rider puisqu’à la fin les hippies y tiraient sur un policier à moto. Dans La Vie de Brian, les Monty Python suivaient à la trace le voisin de Jésus à Nazareth, manière pour eux de se moquer de toutes les religions.

Avec Salo, Pasolini adaptait Les 120 Journées de Sodome de Sade en les assaisonnant à la sauce fasciste, agrémentée de séquences scatologiques. Dans Le Souffle au cœur, Léa Massari couchait avec son jeune fils sans que cela ait l’air de les traumatiser. Louis Malle aggrava son cas, avec Lacombe Lucien, en filmant le destin d’un petit paysan quercinois devenu milicien presque par hasard. Les fils de famille ne détestent pas choquer. Avec Les Valseuses, Bertrand Blier donna un coup de vieux aux dialogues à la ­française. Avant de sombrer dans le maoïsme, Godard avait montré dans Le Petit Soldat des membres du FLN qui pratiquaient la torture. Jean Eustache signait La Maman et la Putain, long-métrage de trois heures et quelque, où Jean-Pierre Léaud n’arrêtait pas de déblatérer et faisait l’amour à une demoiselle qui avait gardé son Tampax. Ces gens ne se rendaient pas compte. Ça n’était pas des façons. Ils s’imaginaient peut-être que le cinéma était fait pour choquer, réveiller, réfléchir.

Aucun d’entre eux n’avait deviné que la télévision allait prendre le dessus, que les personnages seraient remplacés par des requins ou des extraterrestres, les émotions par les explosions. Bientôt, le politiquement correct gommerait les moindres aspérités. Les films ne seraient plus un sujet de conversation. À table, désormais, il n’est plus question que de patinage artistique ou de Miss France.

Voir aussi:

Famille
Klaus Kinski, un monument s’effondre
Pola Kinski, la fille aînée de l’acteur, publie aujourd’hui en Allemagne un livre sur son père. Elle l’accuse d’inceste et de pédophilie

Le Temps

11 janvier 2013

Kinski est-il digne du culte qui lui est rendu? Pas si l’on en croit sa fille. Pola Kinski publie aujourd’hui chez Insel Verlag Kindermund (Mots d’enfants), un livre-règlement de comptes avec celui qui ne faisait pas mystère de son attirance pour les mineures et qu’elle accuse de lui avoir volé son enfance. «Les premiers attouchements ont eu lieu lorsque j’avais 5 ans. Le premier viol – dans ma robe de communiante – à 9 ans. Et ce jusqu’à ce que je rompe tout contact avec lui, à 19 ans.» Les révélations de l’actrice provoquent en Allemagne un véritable tremblement de terre dans le monde de la culture.

L’Allemagne a toujours eu du mal à se positionner face à Kinski. Monstre sacré, bête de scène crevant l’écran, 130 films à son actif, mégalomane et peut-être schizophrène (il a passé trois jours en hôpital psychiatrique dans les années 50 pour avoir agressé une femme médecin et a commis trois tentatives de suicide), il était connu pour ses crises de colère et ses mauvaises manières. En public, il écrasait ses cigarettes dans les restes de son assiette de soupe, détruisait le mobilier de ses chambres d’hôtel, apostrophait ou insultait le public lorsqu’il était sur scène.

«En fait, c’était un pauvre type, assure aujourd’hui à 60 ans sa fille aînée dans le magazine Stern de cette semaine. Il était plein de complexes, et pas très cultivé. Il avait juste un véritable talent pour manipuler les gens… Il se plaçait au-dessus de tout et des lois… Avec lui, c’était comme une prison sans barreaux. Lorsqu’il me violait, il me disait «c’est la chose la plus naturelle du monde», puisqu’il irait en prison si j’en parlais… J’étais si seule que jamais je n’aurais eu l’idée de le dénoncer.»

Né à Zoppot, dans l’enclave allemande de Danzig, en 1926, Klaus Günter Karl Nakszynski était le dernier des quatre enfants d’un pharmacien d’origine polonaise et d’une infirmière allemande. Si on en croit ses dires, contredits par ses frères et sœurs, son enfance misérable a été marquée par la nécessité de voler pour survivre.

Sa carrière débute en 1944: Kinski, prisonnier des Britanniques après une courte participation à la guerre sur le front ouest, amuse ses camarades du «camp d’internement 186», près de Colchester. Sans véritable formation dramatique, Kinski s’impose vite sur scène, au lendemain de la guerre. Mais sa carrière prend son véritable essor bien plus tard, avec sa participation dans les films de Werner Herzog, qui lui confie des rôles diaboliques. Dans Aguirre, la colère de Dieu (1972), il joue le rôle d’un conquistador qui pousse ses hommes vers la mort. Dans Fitzcarraldo, il est l’aventurier fou qui veut construire un opéra en pleine nature. Herzog fait de lui un vampire dans Nosferatu, un esclavagiste et un pédophile dans Cobra Verde. Les relations difficiles que les colères de l’acteur entraînent avec les réalisateurs font l’objet du film documentaire de Werner Herzog, dont il était l’acteur fétiche: Ennemis intimes.

«Ses films sont des chefs-d’œuvre d’une violence incroyablement mégalomane qu’on n’a plus jamais revue dans le cinéma allemand», estime le Spiegel. «Il ne jouait pas dans ses films. Quand je regardais ces films, je le voyais tel qu’il était à la maison», corrige aujourd’hui Pola Kinski, qui a choisi de prendre la plume pour dénoncer «l’idolâtrie» et le culte de la personnalité – «toujours pire depuis sa mort» – autour de l’acteur. «Mon père n’a laissé ­derrière lui que terre brûlée», assure-t-elle. Sa demi-sœur, l’actrice Nastassja Kinski, 51 ans, déclarait pour sa part un jour au sujet de son père, décédé en 1991 à l’âge de 65 ans: «Avec certaines personnes, il est bon qu’elles ne soient plus en vie!»

De fait, l’opinion allemande a comme épuré ses souvenirs de Kinski, qui déclarait en 1977 à la télévision son incompréhension: «Ici, on vous met en prison si vous couchez avec une fille de 12 ans alors qu’en Orient, on vous marie avec une gamine de 11 ans. C’est incompréhensible!» Son autobiographie à caractère pornographique et pédophile parue en 1975, Crever pour vivre (le titre français est très éloigné de l’explicite titre allemand Ich bin so wild nach deinem Erdbeermund, «Je suis si fana de ta bouche fraise») a disparu depuis longtemps des librairies. Le titre a été réédité à sa mort en 1991 dans une version expurgée intitulée Ich brauche Liebe («J’ai besoin d’amour»).

En Allemagne, personne ne met vraiment en doute les accusations de Pola Kinski. «Je suis fière de la force qu’elle a d’écrire un tel livre. J’en connais le contenu. J’ai lu ses mots. Et j’ai longuement pleuré, explique sa demi-sœur Nastassja. Ce livre va aider tous les enfants, adolescents et mères qui ont peur de leur père et qui avalent cette peur pour la cacher au fond de leur âme.»

Que faire désormais du monument Kinski, sacré meilleur acteur d’Allemagne en 1979? Le quotidien Bild Zeitung réclame que soit retirée l’étoile à son nom sur le «boulevard des Stars», consacré aux stars du cinéma sur la Potsdamer Platz à Berlin. «Lorsque je lis ce qu’écrit sa fille, je me sens mal», explique Alfred Holighaus, membre du jury attribuant cette distinction, l’une des plus importantes du cinéma allemand.

Seule Alice Brauner, fille d’Artur Brauner, qui donna à Kinski son premier rôle au cinéma, prend la défense de l’acteur: «L’étoile célèbre l’artiste, pas l’homme et sa personnalité douteuse.» A quelques semaines de l’ouverture du Festival du film de Berlin, début février, le débat autour de Kinski ne fait que commencer.

«Il était plein de complexes, et pas très cultivé. Il avait juste un véritable talent pour manipuler les gens…»

La «Bild Zeitung» réclame que soit retirée l’étoile à son nom sur le «boulevard des Stars», à Berlin

Voir également:

Les obsessions pédophiles de Serge Gainsbourg
Staragora
05.10.2010

Une jeune fille vient de révèler son amour avec un Gainsbourg vieillissant. Rien de surprenant : l’artiste a toujours jonglé avec les très jeunes filles…

Est-ce un manque de respect ou un excès de moraline que de s’interroger sur Gainsbourg et la pédophilie ? Notre réponse est non : le poète-chanteur a toujours joué avec le concept de l’amour avec des adolescentes voire des petites filles, dans ses chansons, son livre et ses films.

Penchons-nous sur ce sujet, alors qu’une femme Constance Meyer, publie le 6 octobre 2010 un livre qui détaille sa relation d’adolescente de 16 ans avec un Gainsbourg vieillissant.

Gainsbourg portait au pinacle un livre sulfureux pour son époque, le chef-d’oeuvre de Vladimir Nabokov : « Lolita ». Une fillette de douze ans y entretenait une relation forcément complexe, illégale et vénéneuse avec un homme adulte.

Gainsbourg s’inspirera de Nabokov, et créera tout au long de sa carrière florissante des chansons qui s’y réfèrent. « Les sucettes », interprétée par France Gall, est la plus connue. Mais Cannabis, composée en 1970, est encore plus claire :

« La mort a pour moi le visage d’une enfant,

Au regard transparent,

Son corps habile au raffinement de l’amour,

Nous prendra pour toujours ».

Dans les années post-68, personne n’aurait songé à reprocher à un chanteur de talent des paroles impubliables aujourd’hui. Sentant que le thème pouvait être rentable, tant artistiquement que financièrement, Gainsbourg, poussera son avantage. En 1978, c’est « Melody Nelson, concept-album génial, qui abat une nouvelle barrière : Melody, fille aux « cheveux rouges, et c’est leur couleur naturelle », personnifiée par une Jane Birkin garçonnesque au corps d’ado amaigrie, est le véhicule artisque utilisé par Serge Gainsbourg pour populariser ses appétences pour les nymphettes :

Dès lors, l’esprit de liberté de l’époque (les années 80) et l’adolescence médiatisable de sa fille Charlotte seront le prétexte à une succession de productions cinématographiques et discographiques aussi hasardeuses artistiquement que révélatrices d’une obsession qui devient envahissante : le clip « Lemon Incest » fait scandale, le chanteur tourne autour du pot de l’inceste et de la pédophilie de manière assez lourdingue, et le film éponyme ou « Stan le flasheur » avec Claude Berri dans le rôle-titre sont du même acabit.

A la fin de sa vie, Gainsbourg n’utilise plus de faux-semblants. La provocation et la volonté de choquer le bourgeois dans une France blasée l’emportent sur l’ambition artistique. L’album « You’re under arrest » est le meilleur -et pire- exemple de cette dérive commerciale. « Five easy pisseuses », référence à un titre de film avec Jack Nicholson, Five Easy Pieces (mais qui n’a rien à voir avec le thème traité ici), est à la fois grossière et bas de gamme :

« De mes cinq petites pisseuses j’ai préféré la six / J’les avais limées limées limite jusqu’à l’intox / Ses petites socks / Me mettent en erex /Et je la fuck »

Tristes vers d’un pervers pépère pas vert du tout !

Beaucoup d’artistes ont flirté dans leurs oeuvres ou leurs vies personnelles avec la pédophilie ou l’éphébophilie (l’amour des adolescents). On pense à André Gide dans « Si le grain ne meurt », à Jean-Loup Sieff et ses photographies, à Gabriel Matzneff dans tout son oeuvre, à Visconti dans « Mort à Venise », à Charles Trenet à la ville, etc. Mais chez Serge Gainsbourg, c’est une ligne directrice qui, si elle permettait des envolées artistiques, s’est finalement fourvoyée dans un marketing dévoyé.

Voir encore:

Constance Meyer : La Jeune Fille et Gainsbourg

Paris Match

24/02/2011

Propos recueillis par Marie-France Chatrier

Il y a vingt-cinq ans, Constance Meyer a vécu une histoire avec le chanteur qu’elle raconte dans un livre paru récemment, « La jeune fille et Gainsbourg » (éd. l’Archipel). Nous avons rencontré cette jeune femme aujourd’hui amoureuse et mère de famille. A peine assise, avant que l’on pose la première question, elle s’inquiète : « Surtout ne faites pas un papier trash sur notre relation qui ne ressemblait en rien à cela »… Extraits.

La rencontre

En 1985, Constance a 16 ans. Ses parents sont professeurs de faculté, elle est bonne élève au lycée Victor Duruy. « Je deviens adulte doucement auprès de ma mère, divorcée, entourée de mes frères. Un jour, sur mon Walkman, j’entends « Love on the Beat ». Le choc. Vacances en Californie l’été qui suit, je ne fais qu’écouter ce titre qui, pour moi, est une révolution. »

A la rentrée des classes, elle découvre que Gainsbourg chante au Casino de Paris. « J’enfourne mon Ciao, une heure avant le concert, il reste quelques places dans le fond de la salle. Je prends. Quand la lumière s’éteint, je rampe jusqu’au premier rang, jusqu’à toucher la scène. » « Pour moi ce type sur scène c’est une évidence, il m’est familier. On est comme cela à l’adolescence, entier. » Elle retourne le voir quatre fois.

Un signe du destin

« Ma prof d’italien nous dit qu’elle habite rue de Lille, à côté de chez Serge… Je suis dubitative, je le lui dis. « Allez donc au 5 bis, rue de Verneuil si vous ne me croyez pas », me répond-t-elle. Je m’y précipite, la maison, les tags, aucun doute. Je sonne. Pas de réponse… Sur le trottoir d’en face, j’ouvre mon sac à dos et je lui écris. Cinq pages pour dire toute ma passion, mon engouement pour sa musique, je donne mon numéro de téléphone et je termine par « Quelle folie !»  »

Il est 14 h 30 à quand elle glisse la lettre sous la porte. Elle rentre chez elle faire ses devoirs.

17 h, le téléphone sonne, elle répond.

– Pourrais-je parler à Constance ?

– C’est moi…

– C’est l’homme qui a reçu la lettre… Elle est bien écrite, elle m’a touché. J’aimerais bien te rencontrer. Tu veux venir dîner avec moi ce soir?

Elle lui propose le lendemain, sa mère doit sortir….

Le RDV

5 décembre, 20 heures: elle sonne trois fois chez lui (c’est le code).

« Si je suis intimidée , il l’est plus que moi encore. Les silences s’enchaînent, il me propose d’écouter le dernier disque de Jane « Quoi ». Il met la musique à fond. Il m’emmène Chez Ravi, un indien délicieux rue de Verneuil. Tout le monde le connaît. En entrant dans le restaurant je repère un garçon qui est dans ma classe : Bertil Scali. Au restaurant, Serge, toujours timide, me raconte une foule d’histoires drôles parce qu’il ne sait trop quoi me dire. Moi je le trouve irrésistible. A la fin du repas, je lui avoue que je ne comprends pas ce que veut dire « Je t’aime moi non plus ». Une Chanson devenue un film. Il me propose de venir le voir chez lui, en cassette.

Je découvre l’étage de son hôtel particulier: moquette noire au sol avec de gros motifs blancs. Je visite sa petite bibliothèque : livres précieux, objets et sa vieille machine à écrire Remington… Il y a aussi sa collection de poupées anciennes, la salle de bain de Jane restée intacte depuis leur séparation… Serge me dit de m’installer sur le lit et je découvre les merveilles d’une technique ultra inconnue de moi : un écran descend du plafond, il lance le film et s’en va téléphoner, vaquer à ses occupations. Quand le film est terminé, il me propose de voir « Equateur », son second long-métrage…

Je suis épuisée quand le film se termine. Serge me propose de rester dormir, nous dormons ensemble. Au matin, Fulbert son homme de ménage a préparé du café… Serge a du travail … on se quitte… Sur le pas de la porte, il me fait un signe de la main quand je démarre mon Ciao .

Ils deviennent amants

Mars 1986 : « Je passe chez lui, sonne trois fois, pas de réponse. J’écris sur son mur un poème pour qu’il le voit… Il me rappelle… Me propose notre second dîner. Après le restaurant créole, cette fois, rue de Verneuil, on rentre, on parle, on se rapproche. Je découvre sa gentillesse, sa douceur, sa faculté à mettre en valeur la personne avec laquelle il se trouve… D’une certaine façon il me rend plus belle, plus importante en me mettant tellement en valeur… Sa chambre, son film préféré « Les sentiers de la gloire » de Kubrick, le lit gigantesque recouvert de vison, les bouteilles de parfum Guerlain. Je me sens bien, déjà familière en ce lieu. Après le film, il me demande si je veux faire « dodo avec lui »… J’en meurs d’envie. C’est tendre… »

« J’ai presque 17 ans, une vraie maturité, Serge ne fait pas son âge, il n’a pas d’âge. »

L’histoire se poursuit cinq ans « régulièrement », dit-elle. Beaucoup de lettres (il n’y a pas de portable à l’époque), beaucoup de télégrammes.

« Je le retrouve en fin d’après-midi, chez lui, en studio, en tournage, à l’hôtel. On reste toute la nuit ensemble, on dort peu, on parle énormément… Il me raconte sa vie, me parle de sa solitude, de ses moments de déprime, de ses doutes. »

«Il dit ne pas connaître le bonheur… Il a un stock d’anecdotes incroyables que j’adore écouter… Quand il parle de sa mère, il pleure. Il parle de sa première femme, de ses enfants, de Jane et de sa rencontre avec Bambou… et aussi de Charlotte et de Lulu. »

Elle assiste à de nombreux épisodes connus, souvent cachée dans les coulisses. Elle est ainsi présente sur le plateau de Michel Drucker quand il dit à Whitney Houston « I want to fuck you ». Malgré, ou peut-être à cause de l’éducation stricte qu’il a reçu, Serge adore la trangression. Sur « Tenue de Soirée » , elle est en studio avec Bertrand Blier, Serge compose sur un clavier électronique. Elle dit l’avoir vu dicter d’une traite le synopsis de « Charlotte Forever » à une dactylo.

Au fur et à mesure que leur histoire avance, Serge la transforme physiquement, lui demande de s’habiller autrement, de ne plus porter de vêtements informes, de se couper les cheveux.

Elle dit n’avoir que très peu connu Gainsbarre… Ce qu’elle a vu elle c’est un homme qui n’a jamais cessé d’être un enfant, timide, doux. Jamais blasé.. Quand un gamin de six ans le reconnaît dans la rue, cela le met en joie, de même lorsqu’il entend ses chansons à la radio.

« De ma vie je n’ai jamais rencontré un homme aussi généreux, attentionné et drôle. Dépourvu de vulgarité, de méchanceté. Un dandy, avec une allure folle et unique. Depuis je n’ai jamais cessé de chercher un tel homme. Si je pense à Serge , je pense à son eau de toilette Van Cleef &Arpels pour homme , bouteille noire. Il a en six exemplaires, la même veste, le même jean, les mêmes Repetto. Et détail important: il relève toujours le col de sa veste ou de sa chemise.

Il a beaucoup souffert de sa laideur; d’elle il dit : « Elle a ceci de supérieur sur la beauté c’est qu’elle dure. » Les deux dernière années, Serge fume de plus en plus, des Gitanes qu’il allume avec un Zippo, boit de l’alcool, beaucoup de pastis.

C’est en tournant « Charlotte For Ever » que la fille de Gainsbourg rencontre Constance. Celle-ci est couchée dans une chambre de l’hôtel Raphaël où elle a dormi avec Serge. « J’ai beaucoup attendu les appels de Serge pendant toutes ces années. Je ne sais jamais quand je vais le revoir. »

Dernier Acte

1989 à 1991: Plusieurs hospitalisations. Serge doit arrêter de fumer, de boire. Il est déprimé, il a peur de perdre la vue. Il se referme sur lui-même.

Dernier appel en décembre 1990… Il fume et boit à nouveau. Parle de la mort en blaguant. Dit qu’il faudrait faire un musée de sa maison, après.

« Il est mort avant de vieillir, tu es encore jeune, tu as 62 ans », lui dit-elle.

« Avoir pour premier grand amour un tel homme fait que le retour à la réalité est terrible. A seize ans je découvrais des sommets et ne pouvais ensuite que tomber de ce piédestal. »

« La jeune fille et Gainsbourg », de Constance Meyer, éd. de l’Archipel, 160 pages. 14,95 euros.

Voir de même:

Masterpiece

The Stars of ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ On the Riveting Lesbian Love Story
It’s the interview that sparked a huge fight between director Abdellatif Kechiche and actress Léa Seydoux. The 10-minute graphic lesbian sex scene in the masterful French Drama ‘Blue is the Warmest Color,’ winner of the Palme d’Or, stunned Cannes. At Telluride, Marlow Stern spoke to the film’s two onscreen lovers about ‘that scene’ and why they’ll never work with Kechiche again.
Marlow Stern
The Daily Beast
09.01.13

Film festival reviews are, as is their wont, often prone to hyperbole. Even the most weathered of movie critics can get swept up in the wonder of it all.

But make no mistake about it: the French drama Blue is the Warmest Color is filmmaking—and acting—of the highest order.

Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, and based on a graphic novel by Julie Maroh, Blue tells the story of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), an awkward but beautiful 15-year-old girl whose initial sexual forays leave much to be desired. All that changes when she crosses paths with Emma (Léa Seydoux), a blue-haired college student studying art. It’s love—or is it lust?—at first sight, and before long, the two are inseparable. But, like any first love, the pair’s hidden quirks and desires begin to reveal themselves, and they struggle to remain afloat.

In a Cannes Film Festival first, the Palme d’Or was awarded to the entire Blue is the Warmest Color team—Kechiche, Exarchopoulos, and Seydoux—and the three-hour film has received universal praise from critics and audiences alike for its honest and poignant portrayal of first love.

The film’s two stars, who deliver two of the best performances of the year, sat down with Marlow Stern at the Telluride Film Festival to discuss the hellish-sounding making of the film, including why they’re embarrassed by the film’s talked-about 10-minute sex scene, and how they were terrorized on set by Kechiche. 

Do you remember the first time you thought you were in love?

Léa: For me, I was maybe ten years old. I was in love with my cousin, I remember. Every time he came in, I could feel my heart beating so fast. At the time, I was crazy about Barbie but I was kind of a tomboy, so I was hiding my passion for Barbie’s because he said, “I hate girls who like Barbies.” I told him my favorite color was blue, even though it was pink. Once, I remember he came in and saw me playing with my Barbies and I turned red and felt so embarrassed.

Adèle: The first people that I started to feel something for in that way were my cousins, too. You go on vacation with them, spend a lot of time with them, and they’re a little bit older than you. But when I really fell in love and discovered how stupid you can be and everything, I was about 14. But it was a bad story. I regret it.

This is a very immersive role that demanded a lot from both of you. You must have had a lot of trust in Kechiche before signing on to this.

Léa: The thing is, in France, it’s not like in the States. The director has all the power. When you’re an actor on a film in France and you sign the contract, you have to give yourself, and in a way you’re trapped.

Adèle: He warned us that we had to trust him—blind trust—and give a lot of ourselves. He was making a movie about passion, so he wanted to have sex scenes, but without choreography—more like special sex scenes. He told us he didn’t want to hide the character’s sexuality because it’s an important part of every relationship. So he asked me if I was ready to make it, and I said, “Yeah, of course!” because I’m young and pretty new to cinema. But once we were on the shoot, I realized that he really wanted us to give him everything. Most people don’t even dare to ask the things that he did, and they’re more respectful—you get reassured during sex scenes, and they’re choreographed, which desexualizes the act.

Right. They pause the action for new camera angles, etc.

Adèle: Exactly. I didn’t know [Léa] in the beginning, and during the first sex scene, I was a little bit ashamed to touch her where I thought I wanted, because he didn’t tell us what to do. You’re free, but at the same time you’re embarrassed because I didn’t really know her that well.

Wait. You two didn’t meet at all before filming?

Adèle: We met once for a camera test before, since she was already cast, but that was it until the shoot.

And was it difficult to shoot that 10-minute sex scene? I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen a sex scene that long in a movie—gay or hetero.

Léa: For us, it’s very embarrassing.

Adèle: At Cannes, all of our families were there in the theater so during the sex scenes I’d close my eyes. [Kechiche] told me to imagine it’s not me, but it’s me, so I’d close my eyes and imagined I was on an island far away, but I couldn’t help but listen, so I didn’t succeed in escaping. The scene is a little too long.

Were the sex scenes between you two unsimulated? They look so real.

Léa: No, we had fake pussies that were molds of our real pussies. It was weird to have a fake mold of your pussy and then put it over your real one. We spent 10 days on just that one scene. It wasn’t like, “OK, today we’re going to shoot the sex scene!” It was 10 days.

Adèle: One day you know that you’re going to be naked all day and doing different sexual positions, and it’s hard because I’m not that familiar with lesbian sex.

Me either.

Léa: The first day we shot together, I had to masturbate you, I think?

Adèle: [Laughs] After the walk-by, it’s the first scene that we really shot together, so it was, “Hello!” But after that, we made lots of different sex scenes. And he wanted the sexuality to evolve over the course of the film as well, so that she’s learning at the beginning, and then becomes more and more comfortable. It’s really a film about sexual passion—about skin, and about flesh, because Kechiche shot very close-up. You get the sense that they want to eat each other, to devour each other.

So are you two really good friends now? You know each other a lot more intimately than I know most of my friends.

Adèle: Yeah! [Laughs] Thankfully we’re friends.

And the shoot was very long in general.

Léa: Five-and-a-half months. What was terrible on this film was that we couldn’t see the ending. It was supposed to only be two months, then three, then four, then it became five-and-a-half. By the end, we were just so tired.

Adèle: For me, I was so exhausted that I think the emotions came out more freely. And there was no makeup artist, stylist, or costume designer. After a while, you can see that their faces are started to get more marked. We shot the film chronologically, so it helped that I grew up with the experiences my character had.

And same-sex marriage wasn’t legalized in France until May—well before you finished shooting the film. This is an important film. It’s rare to see such an honest depiction of the love between two young women onscreen.

Léa: It is amazing. In France, it’s not out yet but at Cannes it was huge, and I think this is one of the reasons. This film is very modern. It’s a new way to make films. We never saw a film like this before—a love story this realistic. And it says a lot about the youth of today. It’s a film about love. I don’t really think it’s a film about homosexuality—it’s more than that. Homosexuality is not taboo anymore—even if it isn’t considered “moral” by everyone—which is how it should be.

Adèle: Without being a militant, Adèle was already very partial towards this movement because of how she was brought up. So for her, it’s just normal. There are some things that you can’t control, so she thinks it’s very bizarre when people say it’s against nature, and has no idea why anybody would give a fuck. Before gay marriage was legalized in France, there were huge demonstrations in France with even mothers with small children shouting terrible insults.

Right. I grew up around plenty of gay people, so it’s all about experience. People are afraid of what they aren’t familiar with, or don’t understand. But sex scenes aside, what was the toughest scene for you two to film? 

Léa: Any emotional scenes. [Kechiche] was always searching, because he didn’t really know what he wanted. We spent weeks shooting scenes. Even crossing the street was difficult. In the first scene where we cross paths and it’s love at first sight, it’s only about thirty seconds long, but we spent the whole day shooting it—over 100 takes. By the end of it, I remember I was dizzy and couldn’t even sit. And by the end of it, [Kechiche] burst into a rage because after 100 takes I walked by Adele and laughed a little bit, because we had been walking by each other doing this stare-down scene all day. It was so, so funny. And [Kechiche] became so crazy that he picked up the little monitor he was viewing it through and threw it into the street, screaming, “I can’t work under these conditions!”

Adèle: We were like, “Sorry, we’ve shot this 100 times and we just laughed once.” And it was a Friday and we wanted to go to Paris and see our families, but he wouldn’t let us. But me, I always took trains in secret to see my boyfriend.

So… was this filmmaking experience enjoyable for you at all? It doesn’t sound like it.

Léa: It was horrible.

Adèle: In every shoot, there are things that you can’t plan for, but every genius has his own complexity. [Kechiche] is a genius, but he’s tortured. We wanted to give everything we have, but sometimes there was a kind of manipulation, which was hard to handle. But it was a good learning experience for me, as an actor.

Would you ever work with Kechiche again?

Léa: Never.

Adèle: I don’t think so.

But you don’t think that the proof is in the pudding at all? It is such a brilliant film.

Adèle: Yeah, because you can see that we were really suffering. With the fight scene, it was horrible. She was hitting me so many times, and [Kechiche] was screaming, “Hit her! Hit her again!”

Léa: In America, we’d all be in jail.

You were really hitting her?

Adèle: Of course! She was really hitting me. And once she was hitting me, there were people there screaming, “Hit her!” and she didn’t want to hit me, so she’d say sorry with her eyes and then hit me really hard.

Léa: [Kechiche] shot with three cameras, so the fight scene was a one-hour continuous take. And during the shooting, I had to push her out of a glass door and scream, “Now go away!” and [Adèle] slapped the door and cut herself and was bleeding everywhere and crying with her nose running, and then after, [Kechiche] said, “No, we’re not finished. We’re doing it again.”

It’s funny that you mention the runny nose, because watching the scene with you two in the diner, I was really worried that the stream of snot was going to go into your mouth.

Adèle: She was trying to calm me, because we shot so many intense scenes and he only kept like 10 percent of the film. It’s nothing compared to what we did. And in that scene, she tried to stop my nose from running and [Kechiche] screamed, “No! Kiss her! Lick her snot!”

So this was clearly a grueling shoot. What was the first thing you did when shooting wrapped?

Léa: Well, thank god we won the Palme d’Or, because it was so horrible. So now it’s cool that everyone likes the film and it’s a big success. But I took five days off and did like… three films in a row.

Adèle: I went to Thailand with my boy with no cellphone, no one to tell me “do this” and “do that” and “hit her again.” I was like [flips two birds], smoking weed, massages, woo!

Voir enfin:

Des techniciens racontent le tournage difficile de « La Vie d’Adèle »

Sept intermittents du spectacle, embauchés sur le  film d’Abdellatif Kechiche, décrivent un climat lourd et des comportements proches du « harcèlement moral ».

Clarisse Fabre

Le Monde

24.05.2013

Il faut parler, vider son sac, fouiller dans sa mémoire pour que certains détails finissent par revenir, enfin. Le tournage de La Vie d’Adèle, d’Abdellatif Kechiche, sélectionné en compétition officielle à Cannes, est fini depuis neuf mois. Les souvenirs se sont estompés. Mais ils ont été ravivés subitement, jeudi 23 mai, par la publication d’un communiqué musclé du Spiac-CGT. Le Syndicat des professionnels de l’industrie de l’audiovisuel et du cinéma a dénoncé tous les manquements au Code du travail durant les cinq de mois de tournage, de mars à août 2012.

Il a aussi déploré un climat lourd, des comportements proches du « harcèlement moral », au point que certains ouvriers et techniciens auraient abandonné le navire en cours de route. Chose rare, et terriblement frustrante. Le syndicat a choisi de taper fort le jour où l’équipe du film montait les marches du Palais des festivals pour la « première mondiale ».

Hier, sur la Croisette, Abdellatif Kechiche savourait les critiques dithyrambiques, tandis qu’à l’autre bout du pays, dans la région Nord-Pas-de-Calais, certains se repassaient le film du tournage. « Une grosse, grosse galère », témoigne ce salarié. « On n’a même pas été invités à la projection. Il paraît, aussi, qu’il n’y a pas de générique de fin. C’est comme si nos noms avaient été effacés, on n’existe plus ! », s’indigne un autre. Dans un communiqué, l’association regroupant les techniciens et ouvriers du cinéma du Nord-Pas-de-Calais, l’Atocan, fait cette remarque grinçante : « Si ce long-métrage devait devenir une référence artistique, nous espérons qu’il ne devienne jamais un exemple en termes de production. »

Bien sûr, un tournage n’est jamais un fleuve tranquille. Il y a toujours des moments de tension. Mais, bien souvent, il reste le sentiment joyeux d’avoir participé à une belle aventure. C’est le plus important, et ça permet d’oublier le reste. Visiblement, tout le monde n’a pas réussi à sublimer le tournage de La Vie d’Adèle. Des intermittents du spectacle, embauchés sur le tournage, ont accepté de témoigner, sous couvert d’anonymat, car ils tiennent à retrouver du travail. L’un d’eux résume : « Le tournage était prévu pour deux mois et demi. Finalement il a duré le double, à budget constant. Et pour faire du Kechiche, il faut être là à 100 %. Sur cinq mois, c’est pas tenable. »

Commençons par les tarifs au rabais, et autres entorses au droit social. Certes, La Vie d’Adèle ne sera pas le premier tournage à avoir contourné les règles. La future convention collective du cinéma, quelle qu’elle soit, est d’ailleurs censée mettre de l’ordre dans les contrats de travail. Mais, dans La Vie d’Adèle, « les choses sont allées beaucoup trop loin », constate ce technicien, rompu à tous les arrangements sur les films d’auteurs fauchés. Figurants embauchés à l’arrache, au coin d’une rue, devant le magasin d’un disquaire lillois ; planning modifiés avec des cycles de travail sur six jours payés cinq jours, etc.

BEAUCOUP DE STAGIAIRES…

La Vie d’Adèle a pourtant bénéficié d’une enveloppe de 4 millions d’euros, ce qui n’est pas rien. Mais le tournage s’est éternisé. Est arrivé le moment où il n’y avait plus d’argent : du moins, c’est ce que disait la personne chargée de la paie, issue de la société Quat’ Sous du réalisateur. Abdellatif Kechiche est aussi coproducteur du film, ce qui n’a pas arrangé les choses. « Il avait tout pouvoir », comme le dit un technicien. Il ne restait plus qu’à faire le bras de fer pour obtenir son chèque, quand une journée déclarée huit heures avait été « oubliée ». Du travail bénévole a même été proposé à certains sur le thème : travailler auprès de Kechiche est une si belle carte de visite. « C’est vrai qu’il s’entoure de jeunes, leur confie des responsabilités. On apprend énormément. Mais c’est aussi parce qu’il cherche des gens malléables. Pour lui, quelqu’un qui a trop d’expérience est formaté. » Il y avait donc beaucoup de stagiaires…

Certains, en revanche, n’ont eu « aucun problème d’argent » avec la production. Tous leurs frais ont été payés. Mais ils gardent un sentiment mêlé : l’atmosphère sur le tournage n’était « pas humaine ». « Il y a eu un mépris pour les conditions de travail, pour le repos de l’équipe, et sa vie privée, je n’ai jamais vu ça », dit cet ancien collaborateur. C’est ce qui le rend le plus mélancolique. « Kechiche peut être chaleureux avec l’équipe, demander aux uns et aux autres s’ils vont bien. Il travaille au plus près des comédiens, il y passe un temps fou. Il peut filmer un repas de famille pendant une heure et demie, en laissant improviser les acteurs, pour capter des éclats du réel, de l’intime. Le résultat est magnifique. Mais quand on connaît l’envers du décor, on se demande vraiment : ‘Elle est où cette beauté ?’ C’est à désespérer de tout. »

Le style Kechiche est mal passé, et même a fait souffrir. Sa « méthode », si l’on peut dire, consiste souvent à improviser. Le souci de privilégier l’instant est très important pour ce cinéaste qui recherche par-dessus tout l’authenticité. « Le soir, quand on quittait le plateau, parfois tard, vers 23 heures, on ne savait pas ce qui allait se passer le lendemain. » Il est arrivé à l’équipe de recevoir un courriel, dans la foulée, annonçant l’heure de la reprise. Parfois, c’est un SMS qui arrivait pendant la nuit…

Les proches du réalisateur, qui le placent très haut dans leur estime, et qui pour rien au monde ne rateraient l’aventure, se sont accommodés de ce rythme foutraque. Un technicien du Nord raconte : « Dès que Kechiche demande quelque chose, ils rappliquent autour de lui. C’est une véritable cour, ils supportent tout ! » Quitte à reporter le stress sur les autres. « Un jour, Kechiche a renvoyé une de ses fidèles. Tu es trop nerveuse, tu empêches tout le monde de travailler. Rentre chez toi ! » Une image vient à l’esprit de ce témoin : « On ne nous donnait pas les moyens de travailler. C’est comme si on vous demandait de repeindre un immense hangar avec un petit pinceau. »

« C’EST INCROYABLE LE TEMPS QU’ON A GÂCHÉ »

La nécessité de tout faire « à l’arrache » est en cause, une fois de plus. Le décor ne plaît plus à Kechiche, ou l’empêche de faire le plan dont il rêve ? Une heure avant le « prêt à tourner », le PAT, il faut démolir le mur. Autre exemple , un jour de tournage au lycée Pasteur, à Lille. « Il pleuvait, et bizarrement les costumes des comédiennes traînaient par terre. Pourquoi ? Tout simplement parce que quelqu’un a décidé d’emprunter le camion qui transportait les costumes. Et les vêtements ont été posés là, par terre, sans prévenir. Et tant pis pour ceux qui doivent ramasser ! »

Le mépris pour les techniciens revient comme un refrain. « L’histoire de la montre » est restée dans les esprits. Voici la scène : Léa Seydoux et Adèle Exarchopoulos sont habillées, assises sur un banc, prêtes à jouer. Soudain Kechiche dit à l’une d’elles : « Dans la scène, tu dois regarder l’heure, alors il te faut une montre. Allez chercher une montre ! », ordonne-t-il. Dans ces cas-là, il faut courir comme un lapin, partir toute affaire cessante. Quelqu’un fonce, donc. A son retour, il y a comme un malaise : Kechiche ne regarde même pas la montre qui vient d’être achetée. Car entre-temps, il a changé d’avis. Une autre fois, l’équipe a attendu huit heures que le tournage commence. Kechiche n’était pas prêt, ou réfléchissait. Mais personne n’avait été prévenu et tout le monde tournait en rond. « C’est incroyable le temps qu’on a gâché », se remémore un ancien salarié.

Parfois, le témoignage vire à la rigolade, ou au rire nerveux, tellement c’est gros. Cette fois-ci, l’équipe est sur le plateau. Les deux comédiennes principales ont puisé dans le stock de costumes et ont choisi elles-mêmes leurs vêtements. De toute façon, il n’y avait pas de consigne. Mais la tenue ne plaît pas au réalisateur. « Kechiche a dévisagé tous les membres de l’équipe, détaillant la façon dont chacun était habillé. Soudain, il a dit : ‘Le pull rouge, là, je le veux !' » Quelqu’un est allé négocier, demandant à la fille en question de bien vouloir prêter son pull le temps de la scène.

Morale de l’histoire ? « Je pense que Kechiche a un immense respect pour les comédiens. Mais pas pour les techniciens. » La preuve, poursuit-il, « c’était un jour de tournage dans un appartement. On était persuadés qu’on allait filmer. Au lieu de ça, Kechiche s’est assis à table, dans le décor de la cuisine, avec Léa Seydoux et Adèle Exarchopoulos. Il a demandé à l’un de ses proches d’aller chercher des huîtres et du champagne. Et ils se sont mis à manger. Nous autres, on attendait ». Heureusement, l’espace était suffisamment grand pour que chacun vaque à ses occupations, ailleurs que dans la cuisine. « On n’était pas collés devant la table, à les regarder manger ! Mais il régnait un sentiment bizarre. »

L’heure tourne. Ce technicien pourrait passer la nuit au téléphone à raconter « des tonnes d’anecdotes ». Une dernière avant de raccrocher. C’était un jour où Wild Bunch, producteur principal du film, venait assister au tournage, avec d’autres responsables. Il fallait faire bonne figure, donner l’impression que tout était sous contrôle. Il a donc été décidé de filmer quelques scènes bien ciblées, au lycée Pasteur, ou de refaire des prises qui avaient déjà été faites. A la fin de la journée, un des visiteurs a lâché : « Ben, ça se passe plutôt bien en fait… »

Voir de plus:

Abdellatif Kechiche, invité surprise d’un salon du porno

Pure people

11 mars 2014

Muet puisque absent des César du Cinéma 2014 d’où son film La Vie d’Adèle n’est reparti qu’avec un seul prix, soulevant bien des interrogations, Abdellatif Kechiche était en revanche tout sourire, en chair et en os, du côté de Las Vegas où se déroule actuellement le salon AVN, le rendez-vous incontournable de la planète porno.

Un invité surprise découvert au détour d’une vidéo relayée ici par L’Express, où l’on suit les tribulations d’une jeune actrice X, Carla Cat, et dont c’est la première participation à ce prestigieux rendez-vous du hard. Parmi ses rencontres, un certain Abdellatif Kechiche, dont on entend une bribe de conversation, face caméra. « Je vous ai rencontrée chez un réalisateur de… Qui nous avait fait la cuisine un soir », lâche le cinéaste français. Ce à quoi l’actrice lui répond : « Vous étiez chez John B. Root [un réalisateur porno arty, NDLR] ? » « Oui, c’est mon pote », avouera le metteur en scène franco-tunisien, très souriant.

La discussion va ensuite porter sur la sulfureuse Palme d’or La Vie d’Adèle – alors même qu’Abdellatif Kechiche n’est pas venu à ce salon du X promouvoir son très beau film un brin érotique – que Carla Cat et sa complice Nikita ont découvert peu de temps auparavant. « Les scènes de sexe ont été coupées pour l’avion« , informe Abdellatif Kechiche devant le début d’enthousiasme des deux filles à propos des scènes très chaudes entre Léa Seydoux et la jeune césarisée, Adèle Exarchopoulos. Tous trois se quittent alors sur une promesse : les deux complices reverront La Vie d’Adèle dans la version sortie en salles en octobre dernier.

Mais alors, que venait faire Abdellatif Kechiche dans un lieu si éloigné de son univers artistique ? Bien qu’on sache déjà que son prochain long métrage portera sur une histoire d’amour impossible prenant place en plein Moyen Âge, Abdellatif Kechiche n’aurait pas tiré un trait sur un biopic immortalisant à l’écran Marylin Chambers. En septembre dernier, on apprenait en effet que Kechiche voulait adapter à l’écran « l’histoire de Marilyn Chambers, une star du porno américain des années 1970 qui a fait scandale en couchant à l’écran avec un Noir et qui est morte l’année de l’élection d’Obama« . Au salon de Las Vegas, Carla Cat résume sa rencontre avec le réalisateur : « Il s’intéresse beaucoup au porno. Il aurait apparemment un projet. »

Pour Kechiche, comme il l’avait déclaré dans Télérama, l’histoire de Marylin Chambers est « une histoire magnifique, qui raconte l’Amérique moderne et montre comment des hommes et des femmes exerçant un métier que tout le monde regarde de travers ont fait bouger les mentalités ». Mais bousculé avant la sortie de La Vie d’Adèle, il confiait ses envies d’abandon : « On m’encourage à la réaliser aujourd’hui, mais je crois que je vais dire non. Je n’ai plus envie de cinéma, j’ai besoin de calme. » Mais à en croire sa présence à Las Vegas, il semblerait que le metteur en scène n’ait pas totalement fermé la porte à ce biopic…

Voir par ailleurs:

Les 25 groupies qui ont marqué le rock

“Un rocker peut se sentir une vraie star quand il a au moins une groupie” : le succès des stars du rock s’évalue avec des applaudissements, des ventes d’albums et la plupart du temps avec le nombre de groupies qu’ils possèdent. Ces divas fanatiques représentent le glamour d’une époque. Certaines d’entre elles ont survécu aux excès de ce temps révolu. Voici les plus célèbres reines des coulisses…

1. Pamela Des Barres –  Mick Jagger, Gram, Parsons, Jimmy Page

Pamela était connue pour sa beauté, sa personnalité captivante. Pamela a été la groupie de Mick Jagger des Rolling Stones, Gram Parsons, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon et bien d’autres…

2. Tawny Kitaen – David Coverdale, Tommy Lee

Tawny a eu une relation avec David Coverdale, Tommy Lee du groupe Motley Crue, Robbin “Ratt” Crosby et John Taylor de Duran Duran. Elle a été introduite sur la scène glam metal par son petit ami du lycée, Robbin Crosby, fondateur du groupe Ratt.

3. “Cynthia Plaster Caster” Albritton – Frank Zappa, Eric Burdon

Cynthia Albritton a obtenu son nom parce qu’elle a plâtré les membres des musiciens avec lesquels elle a couché. Albritton a couché avec beaucoup de musiciens et a même un plâtre des parties génitales de Jimi Hendrix. Le groupe KISS à dédié une chanson à Cynthia Plaster Caster. Cette chanson est intitulée à juste titre “Caster Plaster”.

4. “Sweet Connie” Connie Hamzy – David Lee Roth,  Alice Cooper

Connie Hamzy était aussi connue comme “Sweet Connie” parmi les musiciens pour être une groupie très entreprenante… Elle a même été immortalisée dans une chanson de Grand Funk Railroad appelée “We’re An American Band”.

5. Bebe Buell – Steven Tyler

Bebe Buell est connue pour être l’une des plus belles et célèbres groupies, mais aussi pour être la mère de Liv Tyler. Buell lui a dit la vérité sur son vrai père (le chanteur d’Aerosmith, Steven Tyler) quand elle était adolescente. Bebe est tombée enceinte de Liv en 1977. Mais avant cela, elle était groupie et muse de nombreuses stars du rock dans les années 70.

6. Roxana Shirazi – Steven Adler, Dizzy Reed

Roxana Shirazi a détaillé ses exploits en tant que groupie dans son livre The Last Living Slut. Née en Iran, mais scolarisée en Angleterre, elle a couché avec Steven Adler, Dizzy Reed et Matt Sorum de Guns N Roses, Nikki Sixx de Motley Crue, Joe Leste de Bango Tango, The Rev de Avenged Sevenfold, Tracii Guns de LA Guns et la totalité de la bande Buckcherry.

7. Tura Santana – Elvis Presley

Tura Santana est principalement connue pour avoir couché avec le jeune Elvis. Elle a commencé comme danseuse burlesque et elle a même joué dans quelques films, y compris dans “Des friandises Pussycat!”

8. Sable Starr – Johnny Sable, David Bowie, Iggy Pop

Sable Starr était une célèbre groupie américaine, elle a été vue avec Iggy Pop, Sylvain Sylvain, Stiv Bators, BP Fallon, et plus encore… Une jeune blonde sexy avec une attitude brillante, elle était très appréciée dans le milieu de la musique. Malheureusement Sable est morte à son domicile dans le Nevada le 18 Avril 2009 d’un cancer du cerveau à l’âge de 51 ans.

9. Chris O’Dell – Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan

Chris O’Dell était la célèbre groupie et confidente de certaines des stars de la musique des années 60. Elle était connue pour sa relation avec Ringo Starr des Beatles, même si elle a aussi séduit George Harrison et Paul McCartney.

10. Lori Maddox – Jimmy Page, David Bowie, Bebe Buell

Lori Maddox a commencé à fréquenter le guitariste de Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page, quand elle avait tout juste 14 ans. Elle a été la source d’inspiration de la chanson “Sick Again”.

11. Marianne Faithfull – Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, David Bowie

Connue pour avoir été la petite amie de Mick Jagger. Elle était l’un des emblèmes de la révolution sexuelle. Elle a quitté son premier mari pour Jagger, leur relation était un mix de drogue et de sexe. Elle a eu de graves problèmes de dépendance à l’héroïne qui l’ont amené à vivre dans la rue.

12. Bianca Jagger – Michael Caine, Mick Jagger.

Elle a séduit l’acteur britannique Michael Caine et ensuite, le chanteur Mick Jagger.

13. Anita Pallenberg – Michael Caine, Mick Jagger

Elle est connue pour avoir été la maîtresse de trois des membres fondateurs des Rolling Stones : Brian Jones (en 1965) puis Keith Richards, et elle a eu une liaison avec Mick Jagger.

14. Incident du Mud Shark

Elle est la plus connue de toutes les groupies. En 1969, selon le livre “Hammer of the Gods” Led Zeppelin souille une groupie sans nom à Edgewater Inn Seattle.

http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/mudshark.asp

15. Nico la chanteuse – Lou Reed, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison et Iggy Pop

Nico était une icône du rock. Les conquêtes de la chanteuse allemande incluent Lou Reed, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison et Iggy Pop. Elle est morte en 1988 à 49 ans, après avoir fait une crise cardiaque alors qu’elle circulait à vélo à Ibiza.

16. Cleo Odzer la journaliste

Une journaliste spécialisée dans la musique, originaire d’une famille aisée de New York, Cleo Odzer a été surnommée par le magazine “Time” la “super Groupie”. Elle est ensuite devenue un modèle en Europe, une hippie en Inde et enfin une anthropologue aux USA.

17. Penny Trumble – Jimmy Page, Robert Palmer, Eric Clapton, Rick Springfield, Roger Daltrey, Peter Wolf

Elle s’est permise trois années sabbatiques, de 17 à 20 ans pour répondre et satisfaire les rock stars qui ont croisé son chemin. À 20 ans, elle est allée à l’université, puis s’est mariée et a écrit sa biographie. Le livre a été adapté dans le film “Almost Famous“.

18. Jane Asher – Paul McCartney

A seulement 17 ans, elle a eu la chance d’être embauchée par une émission de la BBC, où les Beatles jouaient et ils ont été captivés par sa beauté. Un an plus tard elle vivait avec Paul McCartney. Elle était très aimée par les fans qui ont vu en elle la compagne parfaite pour leur idole. Mais une nuit Jane trouva Paul avec une autre groupie, Francie Schwartz, et la relation a éclaté à partir de ce moment.

19. Pattie Boyd – Georges Harrison, Ron Wood, Eric Swayne, Mick Jagger, Rod Weston, Eric Clapton

Elle a épousé George Harrison, membre des Beatles. Leur relation a été affectée par les infidélités présumées de l’ancien Beatle. Pattie a alors quitté son mari pour se marier avec Clapton.

20. Uschi Obermaier – Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Rainer Langhans, Matthias Schweighöfer

Elle est tombée amoureuse de Langhans et est allée vivre dans une communauté hippie. Là, elle a connu la révolution sexuelle. Elle a connu une grande passion pour Jimi Hendrix qui l’a quittée quand elle est devenue accro aux drogues dures et à l’héroïne.

21. Edie Sedgwick – Bob Dylan

Elle était l’exemple type des filles riches et bien éduquées. Elle est arrivée à New York avec l’intention de connaître le monde fou du rock et de la mode. Elle a obtenu des jobs en tant que modèle et a été la muse de nombreux musiciens. Elle est morte d’une overdose à 28 ans. Bob Dylan était le plus célèbre de ses amants.

22. Morgana Welch – Led Zeppelin

Elle a été la chef de file des groupies appelé L.A. Queens au début des années 70. A seulement 16 ans elle a été la favorite de Led Zeppelin. Elle a écrit un livre sur ses expériences appelé Hollywood Daily.

22. Morgana Welch – Led Zeppelin

Elle a été la chef de file des groupies appelé L.A. Queens au début des années 70. A seulement 16 ans elle a été la favorite de Led Zeppelin. Elle a écrit un livre sur ses expériences appelé Hollywood Daily.

24. Kim Kerrigan – Keith Moon, Rod Stewart, Ian Mclagan

Keith et Kim se sont réunis quand ils étaient encore jeunes. Kim, qui avait alors déjà passé plusieurs nuits dans le lit de Rod Stewart, était une belle et jeune femme peu timide… L’année où Keith Moon est mort, elle a épousé le pianiste Ian McLagan.

25. Chrissie Shrimpton – Mick Jagger

Ce fut la première petite amie officielle de Mick Jagger. Le chanteur avait de nombreuses maîtresses et Chrissie, furieuse, l’a quitté à de multiples reprises.. Jagger l’aura d’ailleurs suppliée de revenir avec lui, sans succès.

Voir aussi:

Lars von Trier: “I think working with actors is a little bit how a chef would work with a potato…”

It is well known that Danish director Lars von Trier has not visited America, though many of his films are set here, including his latest feature, “Antichrist,” starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. While his films are not generally known for being light viewing, the current film, which debuted earlier this year in Cannes and screened at the recent Toronto and New York film festivals, is especially layered with disturbing (yet beautiful) imagery and psychological trauma. Seeing the expressions on people’s faces as they exited screenings in Cannes gave a slight hint that, no matter what one ultimately thought of it, “Antichrist” certainly would not be forgettable. Screenings in North America have also been polarizing with critics falling strongly on both ends of the love/hate scale.

The only two characters in the film, Dafoe and Gainsbourg play a grieving couple who retreat to “Eden,” their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their troubled marriage and broken hearts following the accidental death of their young son. Despite their effort, things go from bad to worse, with a surreal degeneration into madness. It debuts on VOD tomorrow (October 21st) and in theaters this Friday (October 23rd) from IFC Films.

“Two years ago, I suffered from depression. It was a new experience for me. Everything, no matter what, seemed unimportant, trivial,” von Trier wrote in a statement. “I couldn’t work. Six months later, just as an exercise, I wrote a script. It was a kind of therapy, but also a search, a test to see if I would ever make another film.”

While von Trier does not travel to America, he nevertheless manages to make a presence, and insists on seeing his interviewers. So with the miracle Skype video, indieWIRE spoke with him from his Zentropa offices in Copenhagen last week. Though he speaks openly of debilitating depression and dishes out dark humor, von Trier is surprisingly funny and even jovial – at least during our 20 minutes with him.

In anticipation of speaking with him, indieWIRE solicited questions from our readers. We also threw in a few of our own for good measure. In the interview, von Trier speaks of his depression, airplanes, working with actors, and not wearing pants.

Lars von Trier: Sorry you can only see the top half of me, but I’m not wearing any pants.

Brian Brooks: (Laughs) Neither am I. I’m Brian and this is my colleague Eugene. This is my second time seeing you on video, talking about [“Antichrist”]. The first was at the Toronto [International Film Festival in September], and I know you did the same at the New York Film Festival. I’m just wondering what you think of the reactions in North America to “Antichrist” so far?

Lars von Trier: They are much more positive than I would have thought. Actually, I’m quite fine with any reaction, but I think they’ve seemed a bit more interested in the film. There was a tendency in Cannes, I think, to go a little bit after the man instead of after the ball — that it was very important, what I meant and what I felt — which is, you know, maybe not the best way to see a film.

Brian Brooks: So, as you may know, we solicited our readers for questions to ask you. So I’m gonna go ahead and start that…

Lars von Trier: Okay, so let’s see what happens… [laughs]

Brian Brooks: This is from a film student. His name is Jason Cooper. He said, “I felt that ‘Antichrist’ was very reminiscent of your early work, ‘The Element of Crime,’ and I was wondering if, at least stylistically, you were consciously moving away from your more stripped-down methods that were used in ‘The Idiots’ and ‘Breaking the Waves’?”

Lars von Trier: Yes, I must say I am. You know, doing “Dogville” and “Mandalay” kind of was an example of, you know, going to an extreme where you couldn’t go any further. So I had to kind of went one step back and used only some of the techniques I’ve used before.

Brian Brooks: This was a follow-up question from Jason. “Are you aware of the undercurrent of themes in your work (specifically in ‘Antichrist’), such as nature and its relationship with sexuality, as you write your scripts? Or is this something that comes about after the script?”

Lars von Trier: Yes, I am aware of that, but what I’m not aware of is that suddenly something turns out very simple.

Brian Brooks: Finally, was there a purpose behind only having two actors with this film thematically, or was this the ideal option because you know you would have to direct this film while suffering from depression?

Lars von Trier: No no no. It had nothing to do with that. But I think that any director at a certain time has a dream of making a film with only two persons in it. It’s almost a mini-Dogme thing. It’s interesting to see if you can make it work somehow. It’s egoistic.

Brian Brooks: Alright, different person. From Luke Moses — “Death takes grief and depression to an entirely new level. Knowing your portrayal of what a mother will do to save her child (as shown in ‘Dancer in the Dark’), is ‘Antichrist’ your view on what a mother can be capable of once these incredibly strong and forceful feelings become displaced?”

Lars von Trier: That’s a very good question. I can only say yes, I think so. Yeah, I have thought about that, but she was also in the same situation. Yeah, I can only apologize.

Eugene Hernandez: What do you mean by that?

Lars von Trier: When you put it like that, the film has the tendency to be more banal than it really is. The film is much more than just a foundation for a film. Of course, I work very much with the collisions between different things — sexuality and nature, sexuality and morals — all of these things, but when you have a mention like this, I hope the film is better than that.

Brian Brooks: Okay, probably a more straightforward question from our reader Michael Mohan, “How do you work with actors?” Has that process changed? Is the process different film to film?

Lars von Trier: Yeah, it’s different from film to film. I think working with actors is a little bit how a chef would work with a potato or a piece of meat. You have to kind of have a look at the potato or the piece of meat and see what kind of possibilities are in the ingredient. I know I’m using the wrong metaphor. I think my job is to see what potato is there and from there, just work under their conditions. I don’t think I have forced anybody. Bjork I may have forced here and there. For the good of the film, I just need to give them what they need.

Brian Brooks: Was the experience of working with Willem Dafoe different this time?

Lars von Trier: I was not feeling extremely well, so I didn’t have so much energy for the actors, and they knew that before going in. They were extremely kind to me. I think there’s an interesting thing going on with a director who’s made more than one film or a couple of films [in that] that the actors have a tendency to read your way of filmmaking. A Bergman film becomes a Bergman film because of the expectations of the actors and everyone involved [know] what they expect.

Brian Brooks: The next is from Mike Jones, a writer, “Would you ever make a horror film about flying?”

Lars von Trier: I don’t think so. If I should make a film about flying, it would be fantastic. I have been in airplanes a few times, and it is really a fantastic experience. And that’s not why I don’t go in them. You don’t need a lot of imagination to tell what could go wrong.

Eugene Hernandez: Is it that you don’t like to travel or are there means of travel that you like to avoid?

Lars von Trier: I’m very antisocial actually. Not with you guys, right now, but I’d rather stay home. I do have an auto camper. It would take me some years to be able to get back in a plane. I’m not very proud of this. It would have been nice for me to go take a look at the real world and then see the world and then tell stories about it, but that’s not how it is.

Brian Brooks: The next question is from a reader, Lucas Kollauf – a general question about Dogme. Why did you move away from the Dogme95 movement that you helped create? How does that experience influence or affect your work today if at all?

Lars von Trier: I make rules for all of my films. The Dogme rules were decided to make me concentrate on all the things I was beginning to get good at, like tracking shots. And so for every film, I had rules, I just change them so I don’t make the same film again. “Antichrist” was more of a miss in that sense. I was not on the top of my ability. But normally I would make some rules. There were rules in this film like how panning shots would turn into still shots, but not that many.

Eugene Hernandez: You’ve mentioned that you felt tormented during the film, that it was very challenging for you. Why did you feel like you had to continue making it if it was such a challenge?

Lars von Trier: First of all, I co-own the company and I couldn’t face the financial result of that. And for me, right now, I’m in a situation where I have a lot of mental problems and to me, it was important to make the film to prove to myself that I could make a film.

Eugene Hernandez: Do you feel good about the film now?

Lars von Trier: Some parts of the film I feel good about, but it took me a very long time to feel good at all about this film.

Brian Brooks: Now from Arin Crumley, he’s a filmmaker – and this is sort of a general question: “What is your belief about where fictional stories come from? How do you tap into stories when you write? And, what is the general intrigue of storytelling?”

Lars von Trier: These are questions I’m asking myself now, because I’m working on a new project. Some things that were much easier when we were younger are now much more difficult. It’s like an erection. I can’t really answer that. I wish I could because I would be better off right now.

Eugene Hernandez: What are you working on now?

Lars von Trier: I’m working on a script for a film called “Melancholia,” which has to do with some planets colliding with Earth, which is of course maybe not a happy ending, but an ending. But that doesn’t make me feel depressed at all. That’s fine. I’m just not as cheerful and good at things right now as I could be.

Brian Brooks: This is from the director of programming at Hot Docs, Sean Farnel, “What do you think is the funniest film ever made?”

Lars von Trier: There’s been some Marx Brothers film. I like very much this “Airplane!” The first time I saw it, it was extremely funny (laughs).

Eugene Hernandez: Do you watch a lot of movies while you’re in the writing process?

Lars von Trier: I might watch them, but they don’t [influence my] films. What I do is wrong right now, so maybe I should not watch films. Okay, I hope you guys cheer up before I talk to you again. [laughs]

Voir encore:

De Niro, retour sur un pseudo-martyr judiciaire. L’enquête de Frédéric N’Gguyen sur un réseau de prostitution inquiète beaucoup de monde.
Guy Benhamou
Libération
2 mars 1998

La longue plainte de Robert De Niro n’en finit pas de résonner.

Depuis trois semaines, la star américaine se livre à une véritable attaque en règle contre «la France des droits de l’homme», sa justice en général et le juge d’instruction parisien Frédéric N’Guyen en particulier. Lequel juge a osé mettre la star en garde à vue, le 10 février, afin de l’entendre à titre de témoin dans une affaire de proxénétisme international. Imprudemment soutenus dans leur croisade par le microcosme artistico-médiatique, l’artiste et ses alliés multiplient les déclarations incendiaires dénonçant la «chasse aux sorcières», le pouvoir «déplorable» accordé aux juges, la «sale besogne» d’un magistrat «narcissique», avide de «publicité». Au point que, vendredi, le Syndicat de la magistrature a fini par demander à la ministre de la Justice, Elisabeth Guigou, «d’assurer publiquement sa protection» au juge Frédéric N’Guyen, «qui fait l’objet, sans pouvoir y répondre, d’attaques personnalisées proprement inacceptables».

Injures. Pourtant, le sieur De Niro a bien bénéficié d’un traitement judiciaire particulier. Mais plutôt en sa faveur. C’est du moins ce qu’avouent en sourdine les enquêteurs, face à la multiplication des entorses aux règles judiciaires qui ont émaillé l’interpellation du célèbre témoin.

Ainsi, le mardi 10 février, lorsque les sept hommes de la Brigade de répression du proxénétisme (BRP), accompagnés d’une interprète assermentée, se présentent à l’hôtel Bristol, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, à Paris, De Niro refuse obstinément de leur ouvrir la porte de la suite numéro 450 qu’il occupe. Lorsqu’ils peuvent enfin pénétrer dans l’appartement, ouvert par un membre du personnel de l’hôtel, ils essuient sans broncher et pendant de longues minutes les bordées d’injures de l’artiste, visiblement très énervé. Ils laissent même Robert De Niro téléphoner à son avocat, Me Georges Kiejman, avant de recevoir l’ordre de quitter les lieux. Il n’existe qu’un précédent célèbre. C’était en juin 1996, lorsque les policiers accompagnant le juge Halphen s’étaient vu intimer l’ordre par leur hiérarchie de ne pas assister le magistrat lors de sa perquisition au domicile du maire de Paris, Jean Tiberi. Pour avoir couvert cette irrégularité, le patron de la police judiciaire, Olivier Foll, avait été privé pendant six mois de son habilitation de police judiciaire par la chambre d’accusation.

Au coeur du dossier. Au Bristol, les choses rentreront dans l’ordre vers 10 h 45, après l’arrivée d’un des patrons de la BRP muni d’une nouvelle commission rogatoire du juge. Robert De Niro consent alors à suivre les policiers, mais ni la fouille à corps, ni la perquisition de l’appartement, pourtant notifiées, ne seront exécutées. Alors même que ces deux exigences justifient le mode opératoire adopté. En effet, s’il s’était agi d’entendre De Niro à titre de témoin, une simple convocation aurait suffit. «Mais ce n’est pas un témoin de circonstance, explique un avocat du dossier. Monsieur De Niro n’est pas le quidam qui passe par hasard sur le lieu d’une infraction et à qui on demande de venir raconter ce qu’il a vu. Il est au coeur du dossier.» L’artiste est en effet l’un des clients présumés d’un réseau de prostitution qu’auraient mis sur pied le photographe de charme Jean-Pierre Bourgeois et une ex-mannequin suédoise, Anika Brumarck. La filière a été dénoncée par un informateur anonyme de la BRP en octobre 1996. Elle fonctionnait depuis 1994, comme l’établira rapidement l’information judiciaire, confiée au juge N’Guyen le 24 octobre 1996. Anika Brumarck gérait les opérations depuis son appartement du XVIe arrondissement parisien. Usant de sa profession de photographe, Bourgeois se serait occupé de recruter les jeunes filles, alléchées par des propositions de petits rôles au cinéma ou de modèle photo pour des campagnes publicitaires. «Il a un vrai don pour repérer des proies faciles», assure un enquêteur, qui évoque avec dégoût l’exploitation de ce «sous-prolétariat d’aspirantes à une carrière de figurantes». Catalogue. Etudiantes sans le sou, vendeuses de fast-food, filles de la Ddass se laissent attirer dans l’appartement de Bourgeois, pour une première séance de photos nues, au Polaroïd. Ces clichés sont la base du catalogue qui sera proposé aux «clients». Il comporte sept ou huit noms de prostituées professionnelles haut de gamme, et une quarantaine d’autres, non professionnelles. Ensuite, selon les témoignages de plusieurs filles, Bourgeois propose aux modèles de leur raser une partie du sexe, pour des raisons «esthétiques». Opération généralement suivi d’un rapport sexuel. A ce stade, certaines candidates se rebiffent. Quelques-unes portent plainte pour viol et tentative de viol. D’autres passent le cap, afin de préserver leurs chances de décrocher un contrat, sans savoir qu’elles vont se retrouver dans un réseau de prostitution. Et une partie de celles-ci, confrontées à la réalité de leur premier client, iront également se confier à la justice. Les accusations de violences sexuelles sont d’ailleurs si nombreuses dans ce dossier que le parquet de Paris a décidé de le couper en deux. Le juge N’Guyen instruit donc en parallèle le proxénétisme aggravé et les viols et tentatives liées au réseau, pour lequel il dispose d’une multitude de plaintes de gamines, à l’encontre des instigateurs comme de certains clients.

Branche américaine. Bourgeois se serait essentiellement occupé de la clientèle moyen-orientale, grâce notamment à ses relations avec Nazihabdulatif Al-Ladki, secrétaire du neveu du roi d’Arabie Saoudite. Bourgeois, Brumarck et Al-Ladki sont actuellement incarcérés à Fleury-Mérogis. La partie américaine aurait été l’affaire du Polonais Wojtek Fibak, ex-tennisman de renom et ex-entraîneur de Lendl et de Leconte. C’est notamment lui qui aurait présenté Bourgeois à De Niro et qui aurait assuré le développement de la clientèle américaine, tout en recrutant de son côté quelques candidates. Pas toutes consentantes, apparemment, puisque Fibak fait lui aussi l’objet d’une mise en examen pour «agression sexuelle et tentative de viol». Carnet d’adresses. La déposition de De Niro était nécessaire afin d’établir les faits de proxénétisme. Car l’artiste reconnaît avoir eu des relations sexuelles avec au moins deux jeunes femmes qui lui auraient été présentées par Bourgeois. «Dans ce cas très précis, explique un avocat de la partie civile, c’est le client qui induit le proxénétisme.» Habituellement, le client s’adresse à une fille, la paie et s’en va. Aux policiers de démontrer que le souteneur présumé reçoit une partie des sommes et qu’il vit aux crochets de la belle. «Là, c’est l’inverse, poursuit l’avocat. Le client est d’abord au contact de l’intermédiaire. Le proxénétisme est établi d’emblée. Et le juge était sans doute très intéressé par le carnet d’adresses et les agendas de l’artiste, qui auraient pu révéler d’autres contacts. Il lui fallait donc ordonner une perquisition, ce qui excluait le recours à la convocation ordinaire.»

Lors de son audition par le juge, Robert De Niro a longuement répondu aux questions. Ces informations, Frédéric N’Guyen les attendait depuis le 14 novembre 1997, date de la délivrance de sa première commission rogatoire visant l’acteur. Trois longs mois avant que les enquêteurs ne se décident. Le 6 février, ils se présentent au Bristol une heure après le départ de De Niro, retourné aux Etats-Unis pour quelques jours. Pas de chance. D’autant que ce ratage est accompagné d’une première fuite bien préparée vers la presse, qui évente l’opération. Fuite réitérée lors de l’interpellation de l’acteur, qui se retrouvera face à une meute d’objectifs et de caméras à sa sortie du palais de justice, vers 21 heures.

Offensive médiatique. A partir de ce moment, les choses tournent au vinaigre pour le juge N’Guyen. Le soir même de l’audition de De Niro, Me Kiejman dépose une plainte contre le magistrat pour «violation du secret de l’instruction» et «entrave à la liberté d’aller et venir». Après quelques jours de répit, l’offensive repart du Festival cinématographique de Berlin, passe par les pages du Monde, qui publie une longue interview de De Niro, et s’étale sur Canal +, lorsque Guillaume Durand invite la star dans Nulle part ailleurs. En fait, on apprend, grâce au Canard enchaîné, que Durand a reçu De Niro chez lui quelques jours avant. Et que, lors de cette petite sauterie organisée pour l’anniversaire de l’animateur télé, Elisabeth Guigou, ministre de la Justice, invitée elle aussi, s’est entretenue une demi-heure en tête à tête avec l’acteur, comme en convient le cabinet de la ministre. Sans compter une mystérieuse visite nocturne au bureau du juge, constatée par les gendarmes du palais de justice le 17 février. Show business. «Il y a une réelle tentative de déstabiliser le juge et de plomber le dossier, estime un avocat du côté des parties civiles. Et De Niro n’est qu’un prétexte dans cette opération.» Il pourrait dissimuler une tentative de sauvetage du producteur de cinéma Alain Sarde. Client présumé du réseau, Sarde est accusé de viol et de tentative de viol par deux jeunes femmes que lui aurait présentées Bourgeois. Sarde, qui nie les faits, est défendu par Georges Kiejman. Comme De Niro. Sarde bénéficie du soutien de grands noms du show business. Dont une partie de ceux qui défendent De Niro. Le patron de Canal +, Pierre Lescure, a adressé au juge une attestation de moralité en faveur d’Alain Sarde. Canal +, qui contrôle la société de production les Films Alain Sarde-Canal +, assure la défense de De Niro, via les interventions de Kiejman et de l’acteur sur son antenne. Effets du hasard, ou scénario bien écrit?

Voir enfin:

The sex scandal that wouldn’t lie down
John Lichfield
The Independent
15 November 1998

IT READS like the synopsis of a trashy airport novel: sex, movie stars, politicians, Arab princes, arms deals and the courageous investigation of an obstinate, incorruptible – and publicity-hungry – judge. But the evidence to be presented to a criminal court in Paris this week also has a disturbing side – or, rather, two disturbing sides.

The case uncovers the brutal methods used to snare young women – some as young as 15 – into a call-girl agency specialising in wealthy, high- profile clients. It also exposes attempts by the French government machine to block an investigation which might embarrass senior politicians and damage French interests abroad.

Six people are charged with the running of an international prostitution ring, whose call-girls entertained the actor Robert de Niro, the former tennis player, Wojtek Fibak, two senior (but unnamed) French politicians and several Gulf princes. The agency specialised in tricking, or trapping, star-struck teenage girls into selling their bodies with the promise of careers as models or actresses.

At one point, according to the report of the investigating judge, the agency became a kind of approved dealer in girls, operating with the connivance, if not the blessing, of the French foreign ministry and French secret services. By steering Middle East arms clients towards girls from a known, and closely watched, agency, there was thought to be a reduced risk of blackmail, or the leaking of secret negotiations.

Leaks from the French investigation last year suggested that the agency once brokered a $1m (pounds 625,000) deal for an Arab prince to spend a night with a Hollywood actress. The woman named by French magazines at the time has adamantly denied the story. The allegation does not form part of the final judicial report.

The two principal accused are Jean-Pierre Bourgeois, 51, a failed fashion and glamour photographer and Annika Brumark, 50, a Swedish former model and one-time beauty queen. They, and four others, will be charged before the Tribunal Correctionel in Paris tomorrow with procurement or complicity in procurement. (Prostitution is legal in France; procurement is not.) Mr Bourgeois also faces possible additional charges of rape.

The French Brigade de Repression de Proxenetisme (the equivalent of the Vice Squad) traced 89 young women – would-be models or actresses – who said they had been tricked or sometimes physically constrained by Ms Brumark and Mr Bourgeois into working for them. According to the judicial report, the girls were sometimes « sold on like cattle » to other call- girl agencies.

The files of clients’ names seized by the police are said to include many well-known members of the sports and show-business jet-set on both sides of the Atlantic. The only names to emerge so far are De Niro, Fibak and the French film producer, Alain Sarde.

De Niro, despite a much publicised « arrest » in Paris while filming a movie earlier this year, was questioned only as a witness and occasional client of the network’s prostitutes. He is suing the investigating magistrate, Frederic N’Guyen Duc Quang, following his highly publicised interrogation; the actor’s lawyers accuse the investigator of deliberate publicity-seeking. Messrs Fibak and Sarde are the subject of a separate judicial investigation.

The client list is also said to have included two senior French centre- right politicians, whose names have not been leaked. Both the French foreign and interior ministries tried to squash or limit the investigation in its early months – the interior ministry because of the possible embarrassment to senior politicians, the foreign ministry because it did not want to upset Middle Eastern buyers of French armaments.

Judge N’Guyen is one of a new breed of judicial investigators in France who refuse to bow (as their predecessors routinely did) to political pressure. Even so, he only began to make real progress when the centre- right French government fell in June last year and was replaced by a Socialist- led government.

According to Judge N’Guyen’s report, the photographer, Mr Bourgeois, hung about Parisian night clubs or casting agencies, scouting for possible victims. He picked on young women, often teenagers – mostly French, but also from Britain and eastern Europe – and invited them to his apartment in the respectable 17th arrondissement to take trial shots.

After gaining their confidence, the judge alleges, he persuaded them to pose for more revealing pictures. The girls were then convinced, if possible, that prostitution was the best way to get into modelling or movie careers. If they refused, they were blackmailed with the threat that the photographs would be sent to their families. In some cases, they were simply abducted. Several girls cited in the investigating judge’s report accuse Mr Bourgeois of rape.

Pictures of the girls were then circulated among possible clients. The presence on the client list of a well-known movie producer such as Mr Sarde allegedly helped Mr Bourgeois and Ms Brumark to perpetuate the myth that prostitution was a prelude to stardom.

The agency’s downfall came soon after it expanded to the lucrative Gulf market in 1996, with the alleged help of a third accused, Nazihbdullatif al-Ladki, a Lebanese businessman. Mr Bourgeois, according to the indictment, travelled to Latvia to scout for more victims, but his activities were reported by a local model agency and the French vice squad was alerted.

COMPLEMENT:

I called Hugh Hefner a pimp, he threatened to sue. But that’s what he was
Now that he’s dead, the old sleaze in the Playboy mansion is being spoken of as some kind of liberator of women. Quite the opposite
Suzanne Moore
The Guardian
28 Sep 2017

Long ago, in another time, I got a call from a lawyer. Hugh Hefner was threatening a libel action against me and the paper I worked for at the time, for something I had written. Journalists live in dread of such calls. I had called Hefner a pimp. To me this was not even controversial; it was self-evident. And he was just one of the many “libertines” who had threatened me with court action over the years.

It is strange that these outlaws have recourse in this way, but they do. But at the time, part of me wanted my allegation to be tested in a court of law. What a case it could have made. What a hoot it would have been to argue whether a man who procured, solicited and made profits from women selling sex could be called a pimp. Of course, central to Playboy’s ideology is the idea that women do this kind of thing willingly; that at 23 they want nothing more than to jump octogenarians.

Now that he’s dead, the disgusting old sleaze in the smoking jacket is being spoken of as some kind of liberator of women. Kim Kardashian is honoured to have been involved. Righty ho.

I don’t really know which women were liberated by Hefner’s fantasies. I guess if you aspired to be a living Barbie it was as fabulous as it is to be in Donald Trump’s entourage. Had we gone to court, I would like to have heard some of the former playmates and bunnies speak up in court – because over the years they have.

The accounts of the “privileged few” who made it into the inner sanctum of the 29-room Playboy mansion as wives/girlfriends/bunny rabbits are quite something. In Hefner’s petting zoo/harem/brothel, these interchangeable blondes were put on a curfew. They were not allowed to have friends to visit. And certainly not boyfriends. They were given an “allowance”. The big metal gates on the mansion that everyone claimed were to keep people out of this “nirvana” were described by one-time Hefner “girlfriend no 1” Holly Madison in her autobiography thus: “I grew to feel it was meant to lock me in.”

The fantasy that Hefner sold was not a fantasy of freedom for women, but for men. Women had to be strangely chaste but constantly available for the right price. Dressing grown women as rabbits – once seen as the height of sophistication – is now seen as camp and ironic. There are those today who want to celebrate Hefner’s contribution to magazine journalism, and I don’t dispute that Playboy did use some fantastic writers.

Part of Hefner’s business acumen was to make the selling of female flesh respectable and hip, to make soft porn acceptable. Every man’s dream was to have Hefner’s lifestyle. Apparently. Every picture of him, right to the end, shows him with his lizard smirk surrounded by blonde clones. Every half-wit on Twitter is asking if Hefner will go to heaven when he already lived in it.
Hugh Hefner in 2007 introducing the new season of his TV show “Girls of the Playboy Mansion”

But listen to what the women say about this heaven. Every week, Izabella St James recalls, they had to go to his room and “wait while he picked the dog poo off the carpet – and then ask for our allowance. A thousand dollars counted out in crisp hundred dollar bills from a safe in one of his bookcases.”

If any of them left the mansion and were not available for club nights where they were paraded, they didn’t get their allowance. The sheets in the mansion were stained. There was to be no bickering between girlfriends. No condoms could be used. A nurse sometimes had to be called to Hefner’s “grotto” if he’d had a fall. Nonetheless, these young women would have to perform.

Hefner – repeatedly described as an icon for sexual liberation – would lie there with, I guess, an iconic erection, Viagra-ed to the eyeballs. The main girlfriend would then be called to give him oral sex. There was no protection and no testing. He didn’t care, wrote Jill Ann Spaulding. Then the other women would take turns to get on top of him for two minutes while the girls in the background enacted lesbian scenarios to keep “Daddy” excited. Is there no end to this glamour?

Well now there is, of course. But this man is still being celebrated by people who should know better. You can dress it up with talk of glamour and bunny ears and fishnets, you can talk about his contribution to gonzo journalism, you can contextualise his drive to free up sex as part of the sexual revolution. But strip it all back and he was a man who bought and sold women to other men. Isn’t that the definition of a pimp? I couldn’t possibly say.

Voir aussi:

Hugh Hefner was the ultimate enemy of women – no feminist anywhere will shed a tear at his death
To claim that Hefner was a sexual liberationist or free speech idol is like suggesting that Roman Polanski has contributed to child protection
Julie Bindel
The Independent
29 September 2017

On hearing that the pimp and pornographer Hugh Hefner had died this morning, I wished I believed in hell.

“The notion that Playboy turns women into sex objects is ridiculous,” said the sadistic pimp in 2010. “Women are sex objects… It’s the attraction between the sexes that makes the world go ‘round. That’s why women wear lipstick and short skirts.”

Hefner was responsible for turning porn into an industry. As Gail Dines writes in her searing expose of the porn industry, he took it from the back street to Wall Street and, thanks in large part to him, it is now a multibillion dollar a year industry. Hefner operated in a country where if you film any act of humiliation or torture – and if the victim is a woman – the film is both entertainment and it is protected speech.

He caused immeasurable damage by turning porn – and therefore the buying and selling of women’s bodies – into a legitimate business. Hefner hated women and referred to them as “dogs”.

In 1963, Gloria Steinem (then a freelance journalist) decided to go undercover as a Bunny Girl, spending two weeks in the role at the Playboy Mansion. What Steinem found was that the women working there were treated like dirt. Bunnies had to wear heels at least three inches high and corsets at least two inches too small everywhere except the bust, which came only with D-cups. Steinem described it as a form of torture. A sneeze could break the zip, and when peeled off their torsos were bright red and swollen.

Steinem found grotesque misogyny towards the women, and commented that they were “dehumanised” by the punters – who were, after all, following Hefner’s lead.

“These chicks [feminists] are our natural enemy. It is time to do battle with them,” wrote Hefner in a secret memo leaked to feminists by secretaries at Playboy. “It is time we do battle with them… What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart.” As a response, feminists began picketing his businesses.

Admitting that he could only orgasm by masturbating to pornography, Hefner was a sexual predator. The young women who worked at the Playboy Mansion have spoken of their disgust in having sex with him, but said it was, “part of the unspoken rules”. “It was almost as if we had to do it in return for all the things we had,” said one.

British twins Carla and Melissa Howe, who lived at Playboy Mansion for a time, told a newspaper in 2015 that security was so strict that it was “like being in prison”. They also said of the men that visit the Mansion: “They were really pervy; all the girls were fighting to run away.”

Described as “modern, trustworthy, clean, respectable” by Time magazine in March 1963, Hefner has been regularly rebranded as a type of cultural attache rather than the woman-hating sleazebag he was.

To claim that Hefner was a sexual liberationist or free speech idol is like suggesting that Roman Polanski has contributed to child protection.

I would imagine that silk pyjama manufacturers are mourning Hefner, but no feminist anywhere will shed a tear at his death. And the liberal leftists that wax lyrical about how Hefner was a supporter of anti-racist struggles should perhaps ask themselves how such a civil rights champion squared this with the millions he made from selling the most vile racism in much of his pornography.

As I was writing this, a flagship news programme asked if I would take part this evening in an item in Hefner’s legacy. “We’re looking to discuss whether he was a force for good or bad. Did Hefner revolutionise feminine sexuality, or encourage the degradation of women by constructing them merely as objects of desire?”

Now he is dead I would imagine the scores of women he abused will come forward and force his liberal supporters to see him for what he really was – sexist scum of the lowest order.

Voir également:

California Journal: Hugh Hefner preached sexual liberation, but he never stopped exploiting women’s bodies
Robin Abcarian
LA Times
Sept. 28, 2017

Years ago, I pulled into a long driveway in Holmby Hills, then stopped in front of an imposing wrought-iron gate. I had been directed to announce myself to a large boulder on my left, which I did. The gates swung open.

Suddenly, I was outside the storied Playboy Mansion, a beautiful stone chateau that had become synonymous with orgiastic bacchanals (is that redundant?) tossed by its owner, Hugh Hefner, who died Wednesday at 91. Those parties — decorated by scantily clad young women — were rites of passage for scores of horny Hollywood types and professional athletes.

As I parked, I realized something was not quite right. A bright plastic baby swing hung from a graceful tree near the mansion’s imposing front door. Children’s toys were scattered about. Hefner was married — to Kimberly Conrad, a former Playmate of the Year. Their son, Marston, was a toddler.

People magazine had treated their 1989 marriage as a modern-day miracle: “Next week, Hell freezes over,” it declared.

After Hefner’s brief foray into domesticity, he reverted to his former sexual libertinism. He was frequently photographed with an evolving trio of buxom blonde young women. I’m sure there’s nothing sexier than being treated interchangeably by a man who has got at least half a century on you.

Hefner married again, in 2012, to a woman 60 years his junior, who has now become his widow.

Anyway, I’d come to the mansion to interview Wendy Hamilton, a 23-year-old from Detroit who had been selected to be Playboy magazine’s Miss December 1991. I was told by the magazine people that I was the first reporter they’d ever allowed to witness a centerfold shoot, which I had done some days earlier in the studios of the Playboy building on Sunset Boulevard.

It was the least sexy photo shoot I’d ever seen, but it was the culmination of a girlhood dream for Hamilton. When she was 10, she saw her father’s Playboy centerfold calendar in the garage and solemnly told him, “One day, Daddy, I am gonna be one of those girls.”

Who knows how many other little girls were infected by the idea that taking off their clothes for men would be the pinnacle of achievement?

::

Above all, Hugh Hefner was in the fantasy business.

Men’s fantasies, for sure. But women’s fantasies, too. Not their sexual fantasies, mind you. Their fantasies about male attention, self-esteem and success.

It is an enduring irony to me that Hefner, who pushed what he called a “wholesome” version of female sexuality in the pages of his magazine (pretty faces, big boobs, no pubes), probably did more to mainstream the exploitation of women’s bodies than any other figure in American history.

Really, he managed one of the greatest cons of all time: In the decades that American women were liberating themselves at home and in the workplace — and actually forcing the creation of new legal concepts like sexual harassment and date rape — he managed to convince many women that taking off their clothes for men’s pleasure was not just empowering, but a worthy goal in itself. The deception was also extremely profitable; Hefner became a multimillionaire along the way.

He did not coin the phrase “the male gaze” (credit for that goes to a feminist film critic) but he certainly embodied the aesthetic notion that images of women — and women themselves — exist to please men.

“Playboy,” he once said, “treats women — and men, too, for that matter — as sexual beings, not as sexual objects. In this sense, I think Playboy has been an effective force in the cause of female emancipation.”

That is denial of the highest order. Had he been truly committed to “female emancipation,” he would have embraced the idea that women, not just men, can be sexual their entire lives.

Instead, as you can see from his marriage, his dating history and the pages of his magazine, women have a well-defined shelf life.

After, say the age of 30, they not only expire, but also cease to exist, naked or otherwise.

::

The pajama-clad, pipe-smoking Hefner will remain a paradoxical figure in American culture.

His magazine was a repository of smart journalism. And in years past, the Playboy Foundation supported organizations devoted to laudable goals like reproductive rights and civil liberties.

Certainly, Hefner waged a much-needed battle against the forces of 20th century American puritanism, but sadly, in a way that liberated men (or at least their masturbatory fantasies) by objectifying women.

Eventually, as was bound to happen, the culture passed Playboy by.

The internet and the cellphone conspired to make Playboy-style nudity quaint. In 2015, the magazine announced it would no longer publish fully naked photographs of women, just suggestive ones. By that point, who even cared?

Playboy’s effect on the way young women are viewed and treated is irrevocably ingrained in the culture. Look no further than the grabby occupant of the Oval Office.

I wanted to get a male perspective on Hefner’s passing, so I walked over to my father’s house. At 88, he’s a retired Cal State Northridge English professor and a guy who became something of a swinging single himself after my parents divorced in the late 1970s.

“What did you think of him, Dad?” I asked.

My father leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment. “Well,” he said, “he really was a sexist.”

Well said, Pops.

Voir encore:

Hugh Hefner’s legacy has a dark side
Peggy Drexler
CNN
September 29, 2017

In remembering Hugh Hefner, who has died at 91, many are talking about his contributions to American culture. It must be added that – while those contributions loom large – they also cast a considerable shadow.

The founder of the Playboy brand was a media pioneer and icon of the left, an early and very vocal advocate for free speech, civil rights and sexual liberation.

There is no question: As an activist, “Hef” paved the way for open talk about sex and sexuality, giving people permission to admit that they too were sexual beings, and enjoyed – or at least wanted to enjoy – sex. In the Playboy clubs he opened in the 1960s, he hired black comics at a time when many clubs were de facto segregated. Meanwhile, as a publisher, he pushed boundaries with articles (yes, the famous “articles” that men claimed they sought in Playboy) that were groundbreaking: investigative pieces by writers like Hunter S. Thompson and interviews with heavyweights like Martin Luther King.

He was also a fine example of the American dream, having launched the magazine with $600 of his own and $1,000 borrowed from his mother.

But it’s also worth pointing out, in the spirit of the sort of open cultural dialogue he worked his whole life to encourage, that Hefner’s egalitarian society was one largely envisioned and created for men.

The terms of his rebellion undeniably depended on putting women in a second-class role. It was the women, after all, whose sexuality was on display on the covers and in the centerfolds of his magazine, not to mention hanging on his shoulder, practically until the day he died.

Hef’s notion of the freedom to express sexuality translated largely into freedom to express men’s desire for women, and the fantasy that those women would be always ready and eager to comply.

And it wasn’t just about business: Hefner himself bragged about sleeping with more than a thousand women. In her 2015 memoir, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” former Playmate and Hef girlfriend Holly Madison described the Playboy Mansion as a place where Hef would encourage competition – and body image issues –between his multiple live-in girlfriends. His legacy is full of evidence of the exploitation of women for professional gain. In creating Playboy, and maintaining its brand over six decades, Hef championed a world in which women serve to delight and entertain men, where their bodies are objects, where modification to appeal to male senses often took precedence over comfort (because who really wants DDDs?).

Why is Playboy giving up nudity?

Women were bunnies – the “lucky ones,” anyway. The smart pieces by well-known journalists that he ran in his magazine – even female journalists, like Margaret Atwood – were designed to enrich the intellect of the magazine’s male readers.

Even when, a few years back, the magazine rebranded with a “no more nudity” edict as a way to increase the magazine’s appeal to 20- and 30-something readers (who presumably did want to read it for the articles), it remained a place for men. And, of course, although Playboy did away with full nudity for at least a little while, back in 2015, and for a time featured actresses and models in their underwear, that did nothing to change the enterprise’s foundational principle: objectification of women. (Not surprisingly full nudity returned, inevitably, earlier this year.)

That’s another Hefner legacy: whetting the appetite for readily available sex, which the internet now provides in spades.

All of which is not to say that Hefner’s life should not be celebrated – in some way. He was a man of many facets, who certainly made an impression on American society.

But we should recognize that his legacy is not an unimpeachable one. It is, to say the least, a complicated one. Was Hefner a feminist? He may have thought he was. But perhaps like many men of a certain age, his definition of it was surely – and sorely – due for a tune-up.

Editor’s Note: Peggy Drexler is the author of “Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family” and “Raising Boys Without Men.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.

Voir enfin:

France Gets Its Weinstein Moment
Will the case of a prominent pedophile finally upend outdated ideas about sexually liberated French girlhood?
Valentine Faure
NYT
Feb. 20, 2020

PARIS — France has spent the last two years or so waiting for its Harvey Weinstein moment: a big trial, the fall of someone powerful, a viscerally indignant country.

The conversation around #MeToo in France has been undeniably intense. But when Frenchwomen have spoken up against film directors (Luc Besson, Roman Polanski) and intellectuals (Tariq Ramadan), they have always faced the usual victim blaming. That then leads to divided opinions, aborted prosecutions, and meditations on the French art of seduction.

Something seems to have happened, however, with the case surrounding the acclaimed writer Gabriel Matzneff, whose taste for teenage French girls and young Asian boys, is no secret — he wrote extensively about this habit for years — but who, as of this month, is finally facing charges for promoting the sexual abuse of children. The charges come shortly after the release of a book by Vanessa Springora, the head of a Paris-based publishing house, whose memoir of her abusive relationship with Mr. Matzneff seems to have finally cracked the dam.

What makes the story so powerful stems from the age difference of the protagonists — Ms. Springora became sexually involved with Mr. Matzneff in the mid-1980s, when she was 14 and he was 50. What makes this case so particular is also the fact that the victim’s account can’t be challenged; her abuser has already proudly confessed everything. But in her memoir, Ms. Springora has done more: She has unveiled the inner life of one of the children “Under 16 Years Old,” as one of Mr. Matzneff’s books was titled — one of those who, until now, inhabited his world as simply a docile character to be acted upon. In doing so, she has built a bridge between two moral revolutions.

One day, I hope, we will look back on these months and see that they marked the end of a long state of confusion around the French adolescent girl, the “jeune fille,” this liberated, daring, literate creature. My mother, who was 18 years old during the revolution of May 1968, told me that a man passing by in the street asked her if she would sleep with him. No, she told him, she wouldn’t. “Damn bourgeoise!” the man spat at her.

One can imagine the difficulties that must have faced the girls caught between the joy of being sexually liberated and the injunction to be so. And, looming on the horizon, the requirement not to be liberated too much. At that time, a woman could vote or inherit property only at age 21, but could marry at 15: things were certainly confusing. The French language doesn’t offer the linguistic crutch of “teen” years: You’re douze ans, then treize, quatorze, quinze …

The Matzneff story has brought back memories of the case for pedophilia made by a small intellectual elite who toyed with sexual transgression to the point of insanity in 1968. Most of France did not go quite so far. But the figure of the jeune fille did epitomize a confusion around a new sexual order that was not in order yet. In between the clear states of childhood and adulthood arose this new being. What would she be like? What was really permitted?

Vanessa Springora came of age at that time. I imagine that like me, she must have grown up watching movies on VHS by Maurice Pialat, Éric Rohmer, Claude Miller, Benoît Jacquot, all directors fascinated by adolescent girls and trying to understand them, in efforts that felt sometimes generous and delicate, and sometimes disturbing. Their girl characters were smart and deep and precocious, and their torments were taken seriously. Parents were often not in the picture; men, more or less reassuring, were never far away. These weren’t uplifting teen movies, but films for adults portraying girls in a way that probably shaped those of us watching in return.

My husband, who is American, is scandalized by the Rohmer movie “Pauline à la plage” (“Pauline at the Beach”), in which a small group of young adults share matters of the heart with a 15-year-old. I am almost offended by his outrage, for I would like to think of my adolescent self as Pauline, more clearsighted in her own desires than the adults around her. Was I?

I will spare him “Noce Blanche, (“White Wedding”) in which a 16-year-old Vanessa Paradis has an affair with her middle-aged philosophy teacher, or “Beau Père,” which tells the story of an affair between a 14-year-old and her stepfather almost as if it were a comedy, or “Un moment d’égarement” (“One Wild Moment”) — originally made in 1977, then remade in 2015 — in which a teenager sleeps with her father’s best friend. “Times have changed: It’s no longer with their wives that people cheat on their friends, but with their daughters,” said the critic of Le Monde when the original film came out.

But what did the real-life daughters really want? The director of “Noce Blanche,” which was a big success in France, would eventually be convicted of sexually harassing two actresses. But we would learn that later.

It is easy to imagine how the story of Vanessa Springora and Gabriel Matzneff could have made a typically French film of the ’80s: the literate Parisian teenager and the scandalous writer, a fascinating dangerous liaison in the arty St.-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood. There would have been an ambiguous supporting role for the mother, a little confused, a little jealous. The film would have ended when they broke up.

We might have secretly envied this girl, who had lived such a forbidden adventure. A writer I know, who is the same age as Ms. Springora and grew up in St.-Germain-des-Prés, told me, “I was lucky never to meet Matzneff, because I was completely fascinated by him. “

In her book, Ms. Springora does not deny that she consented to the affair. And yet there is no doubt in the mind of the reader that she is a victim. In the wake of the publication of her book, the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has repeated, with the same passion he showed when he defended Mr. Polanski, that “a teenager and a child are not the same thing” and that it was a different era. What Ms. Springora’s book demonstrates is that these may both be true, but they are by no means an argument. As Nabokov once said, “outside of Mr. Humbert’s manic gaze, there is no nymphet.”

Ms. Springora’s great contribution is to expose the ravages of a relationship that may have been desired. She sends the responsibility back to the adult with a simple sentence: “It is not my attraction that needed to be questioned, it is his.” Something has changed in the kingdom of the jeune fille.

A few weeks before the book’s release, the actress Adèle Haenel shocked the French public with a momentous interview with the online magazine Mediapart in which she described being abused when she was 12 to 15 by a 36-year-old director, Christophe Ruggia, who thought they were “in love.”

One can imagine how amazed the vain Mr. Matzneff must be to realize how he is remembered, to find out that young girls don’t disappear when they grow up. They age; they become women able to speak for the very young girls they once were, who got trapped in the dreams of others.

Valentine Faure (@FaureValentine) is the author of a book about the Jacqueline Sauvage case.