When Romain Gary left a famous note
Dream couple: Jean Seberg her husband Romain Gary
What: akg-images
Romain Gary had the most beautiful wife of the 1960s: Jean Seberg. When our columnist visits the two, the relationship is already in crisis. When Jean Seberg is later found poisoned, one of Gary’s novels suddenly has meaning.
Lhe was also in search of himself. He was born as Roman Kacew in Lithuania. His dearly beloved mother emigrated to France with him and ran a small boarding house in Nice. But she will never tell him who his father really was. Was it the great Russian actor Mosyukin? Was it a Tartar prince? Or, God forbid, a little ghetto Jew named Katz? To transform remains his supreme law. During the war he becomes a fighter pilot in de Gaulle’s army in exile. Then a diplomat, he made it to the consul general in Los Angeles. He now calls himself Gary after the Hollywood idol Gary Cooper.
Then he turns into a writer. His first successful novel is called “The Roots of Heaven”. Its hero is a conservationist fighting for the survival of elephants in Central Africa who are being hunted to death by poachers. The book received France’s highest literary prize, the Goncourt. So I move my first interview with Gary to the “Factorerie”, a hip bar near the Madeleine, whose guests are surrounded by glass cages in which big cats are kept. Enter Gary, a melancholic dandy and self-promoter who can be asked anything as long as it relates to him: “Monsieur Gary, what is your favorite pastime?” – “I mustn’t say it out loud. In second place, anyway, writing novels in which I play the leading role. However, in ever new disguises.”
Now to Jean Seberg. Director Otto Preminger selected her from thousands of American schoolgirls in a competition to embody his Saint Joan. A flop. Jean then only had her breakthrough with Godard’s “Out of Breath”, as the playmate of the charming gangster Belmondo. In real life she becomes Gary’s great love and his wife. I visit them several times in their elegant Parisian apartment Rue du Bac.
At a film party in 1964: Sofia Loren lets Romain Gary light her, Peter Ustinov on the right
Quelle: Picture-Alliance
The second time, however, Gary has already built a wall right through the apartment. Little son Diego wanders from one part to the other. Jean soon ended up back in Hollywood, apparently having an affair with Clint Eastwood. Gary: “Of course I challenged him to a duel, but he just laughed.” Divorce follows. Jean now begins to get involved in politics. Only deals with “Black Panthers” and Algerian resistance fighters. Intercourse also in the sexual sense. (FBI Director Hoover is said to have created a thousand-page file on her as a “Communist,” much like Thomas Mann.)
The second Goncourt
Meanwhile, Gary has become entangled in his own character. He publishes his new novel under the pseudonym Émile Ajar. Supposedly to find out whether his work can assert itself through quality and not simply thanks to the author’s fame. The novel You Have Your Life Ahead of You actually wins the Goncourt Prize.
But Gary is accused of having written under a pseudonym, because the coveted prize cannot be awarded twice to an author. The press calls him dishonourable, the only thing the ambitious cannot get over. And then one night Jean disappeared. Ten days later, she is discovered in the back seat of her parked car, the bottle of poison still in her hand. A year later, Gary shoots himself in his apartment. The farewell letter is bitingly ironic: “Has nothing to do with Jean. Heartbroken lovers are asked to look elsewhere.”
Georg Stefan Troller, writer and documentary filmmaker, born a Jew in Vienna in 1921, met all the intellectual greats of the 20th century. How was it? Ask him at weltliteratur@welt
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