Last interview with France Gall.
During a meeting with the readers of the daily Le Parisien, France Gall looks back on several episodes of her long and rich career. Here, she talks about the movie "Cloclo" in which actress Joséphine Japy plays her role. Extremely rare, she also evokes Claude François. Modest and discreet, France Gall never spoke openly about the singer with whom she lived a passionate and devouring love affair, between the summers of 1964 and 1967. In fifty years, she did name mentioned twice the one that she elegantly called “the impossible man”: in 2015, in front of the readers of the newspaper Le Parisien, and in 2004, at the microphone of Christophe Nicolas for the radio Nostalgie.
They had met in the summer of 1964, at Saintes-Maries-De-La-Mer. France Gall is then 16 years old, Claude François is 24. For three years, they live a passionate and devouring story. An affair that Robert Gall, France’s father, does not see very well. But it is the career and the success of France that Cloclo takes a dim view. Described by other witnesses as a jealous and possessive lover, he would have preferred his girlfriend to remain in the shade. But despite her young age and her passion for the singer, France Gall, already, was not the girl to play the simple lady-in-waiting. And she lives her own whirlwind, aligning records, trips, galas and tours, television shows and reports for the press from all over the world. Where the young girl never fails to call her impossible man, eager for accountability. The general public, who knew nothing about it at the time, only today keeps in mind the famous crisis of jealousy that the young man offered to France Gall on the evening of her victory at the Eurovision Song Contest, sometimes forgetting that she is the one who put an end to this difficult and ineffective relationship. She took off on a summer day in 1967. “I knew that when love would fade, I would leave,” she confided years later, half-wording back to those past loves, never naming them.
She will then attend a man named Philippe Debarge for two years, before sharing, in 1969, the life of Julien Clerc, a young singer on the rise even as her own career is declining: she does not manage to initiate the turning point, the passage of the teenager turned young woman. It was not until 1974, with her first recordings of songs written for her by Michel Berger, that France Gall returned to success. The two artists then came together for a journey that would last for nearly twenty years: dozens of songs, millions of records sold, love, two children. “Finally, I got to be 100% happy. Because in the ten years before, or so I was in love and I wasn't "making records." Or so it worked, I won Eurovision, I had big hits, but I was unhappy in love. So, I had never been happy in music and happy in love, together. Sure, when it happened, I had everything.” she told in 2001.
In 1992, fate catches up with them. Strong and combative, France Gall will go through adversity. In 1995, she met Bruck Dawitt, a shy and reserved sound engineer, shortly before retiring from public life. He will be by her side until her last days.