We are in November 1963. In her dressing room at the Théâtre des Capucines, Barbara scribbles the last words of a song on a piece of paper. Trembling, all dressed in black, the 33-year-old young woman enters the scene and almost faint. In the room there is Esther, her mother, and other members of her family. Despite the emotion, the singer rushes forward and comes to the end of this text that she took four years to write. The public is upset. The leaders of the record companies are won over. Barbara’s career begins.
The song in question is called Nantes. She tells about the missed meeting of a girl with her dying father, in an unknown city. This is Barbara’s story. That of a father who disappears when she is only 19 years old, and whom she will never see again.
A childhood between war and intimate drama
From her childhood in the Parisian district of Batignolles in the 1930s, the singer has kept nothing. She even burned the photos. The first years of little Monique Serf, her real name, were not, however, unhappy. She grew up in a modest family, the father worked in fur, the mother held a civil servant position.
Her beloved grandmother, born in Imperial Russia, bakes her apple strudels and currant pastries. In exchange, the little girl plays music for him, using the kitchen table as an imaginary keyboard. The child dreams of being a pianist. The greatest pianist of all time, even.
But the reality is war. The Jewish family must flee. She hides in Marseille, Roanne, Blois… Parents and children separate, meet again, cross disastrous France, narrowly escape the bombardments. But that’s not what traumatizes the future Barbara. Another intimate drama is playing out. While the family is reunited in Tarbes, the little girl is the victim of incestuous sexual violence from her father. She is ten and a half years old. At 16, she ran away to the gendarmerie and told everything. But we don’t listen to him.
The thankless time of the first scenes
To survive, the teenager has only her dreams. A cyst in her hand, badly operated, prevents her from becoming a professional musician. So she turns to singing and plays the piano for herself. Monique loves Piaf, leaves Paris for Belgium and begins to sing in cabarets under the name of Barbara.
The first years are very hard. Between France and Belgium, Barbara gets by and lives odd jobs: diving at La Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons, a cabaret that has just opened rue de Grenelle. At Cheval-Blanc, in Brussels, she holds the cash register and can sometimes go on stage to sing Ferré, Brassens or Brel.
Barbara is too short-sighted to distinguish her audience but not deaf enough not to hear comments. “Ah, how ugly!” She hears burst out. Some even throw apple cores and full ashtrays at him.
Painful loves, missed dates and ghosts of the past
However, as time goes by, its services gain in confidence and the public is at the rendezvous. Returning definitively to Paris, Barbara continued her cabaret life, in particular at the Écluse where she performed from 1958. Before her 30 years, Barbara only sang the words of others. It is when she finally begins to declaim her own that success arrives.
However, his texts are not light. They are marked by the lexical field of death, loneliness, despair… Barbara sings about painful loves, missed appointments, ghosts of the past. Black is very present, in the titles of his songs as on stage. Long black sheath dresses, very deep kohl features and jet-black hair became her trademark.
We find her strange and mysterious, this “long brunette lady”, as some describe her, with her tragedian look and her theatrical performances. In order not to attract bad vibes to the venues where she performs, Barbara’s stage costumes should never see the light of day.
A musical universe going against the grain
“She has a grain, but a beautiful grain”, summarizes a Jacques Brel, “a little in love”, he will admit, with whom she maintains a long friendship. Barbara lives a bit in her world. To those around her, the singer signs checks for astronomical amounts, without the slightest notion of what they represent. Completely insomniac, she spends her nights in front of the TV, does not follow any fixed schedule and eats almost exclusively Zan, liquorice candies, and pickles.
Musically also, Barbara is against the tide. She opts for the sobriety of the piano-voice, while the time is at the disco, and throws her flute voice in the madness of the yéyés. Yet the success is immense. In 1964 released the album Barbara sings Barbara, and the singer is a hit with Bobino, opening act for Georges Brassens. The black Eagle, huge success, appeared in 1970.
She then leads musical and cinema projects, which however do not arouse the same enthusiasm. In the mid-1970s, the lady in black began to be more discreet but signed all the same, in 1986, a musical show, Lily Passion, which staged it alongside Gérard Depardieu. In the public, a sign of the importance of the two artists, we meet Danièle Mitterrand, Lionel Jospin and Catherine Deneuve.
A funny and mischievous personality
The story of the play is that of a loving but murderous passion. A dark, black, terrible subject, which fits perfectly to the image of Barbara. But only in his image. In reality, Barbara is not the depressed woman who can be easily caricatured. In the privacy, as in some of the lesser-known songs she sang on stage, the singer even reveals a whole different personality.
“Black is a sublime light”, has taken the habit of saying the artist. Her stage costumes, she calls them moreover her “clothes of light”, as dark as they are. Her fans are not mistaken and see all the clarity that emerges from her on stage. But those who know her less can easily reduce the Lady in Black to a sad, almost funereal figure.
“She is always imagined with an eagle on her shoulder, when she was very funny,” says Roland Romanelli, who accompanied her on stage for 20 years. Behind the scenes, Barbara is mischievous, facetious. On tour, she sings Stone and Charden headlong into the car.
At home, she invites her friends and cooks their favorite meals, organizes fun evenings in front of cartoons, horror movies, or around feverish games of Scrabble. The star is also full of self-mockery. To a friend, one day she gives an autographed poster of her show and, when he wonders where to hang it to admire it every day, she answers: “Well, put it in your toilet!” Barbara refuses the label of left bank intellectual, which the press easily sticks to her. “Intellectual is an extremely serious word,” she laughs.
A great altruistic and eternal lover
The singer loves love. In her life, there are many men, among whom a few well-known names and faces: Serge Reggiani, Pierre Arditi… She also loves others a lot, especially those who are suffering. To the point of saying, a bit provocatively, “If I hadn’t sung, I would probably have been a good sister or a whore”.
In the 1980s, Barbara took a stand in favor of François Mitterrand, candidate for the presidency of the Republic. She even pays homage to him in a song, Looked. She then became involved in the fight against AIDS. We see her visiting the sick at the Bichat hospital.
The insomniac is also setting up a telephone line at home so that AIDS patients can call her directly, at any time of the day or night. Regularly, she buys hundreds of toys from hospitalized children. She is also interested in the conditions of detention and sometimes plays in prison, always with the greatest discretion. The media then know nothing about it.
In 1994, after a last gala in Tours, Barbara decided to stop the scene. She feels exhausted, drained. The long brunette lady died three years later. His memoirs, begun a few months earlier, remain unfinished. Their title, He was a black piano, remains as a last tribute to his favorite color.
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