Editor’s note: French rock icon Johnny Hallyday, credited with having brought rock-and-roll to France in the early 1960s, died in Paris on December 6 at age 74. His funeral on Dec. 9 brought nearly a million people into the streets of the French capital. Unlike the similarly popular Edith Piaf, his phenomenal success in France never brought him a global reputation. The first of his 57 albums was entitled “Hello, Johnny.”
What better send-off for a rocker than Saturday’s vast, silent concert on the steps of a church?
And what better goodbye for a great performer than the one delivered by the immense crowd chanting around a body that seemed to have arranged, from the great beyond, this last demonstration of enthusiasm and love?
Herein lies the confusing part about the funeral of France’s national singer.
His way of of stage-managing his destiny, right up the final hour.
The star power that his being retained even in death.
The costume he chose for his last performance was oblong and white.
Of his swaying hips and his howls, of the pale eyes perpetually on the verge of laughing or crying (you never knew which), nothing remained.
And yet there he was, charisma and presence, the spell of a shaman inviting you one last time to dance the eternal chorus in the aura of his mystery and his smile: young and old, princes charmed and sovereigns conquered, the French president and two of his predecessors, celebs, friends Philippe Labro and Daniel Rondeau, artists, fans from fifty years ago wearing Apache fringe for the occasion, a mixture of Church in leather and stolid State animated by guitars, the sadness of Line Renaud, a remembrance of the striking miners of Lorraine, words of Jacques Prévert, tears shed by ordinary people—in short, the spirit of France.
There was the moment when a great actor faltered, suddenly starkly human and at a loss.
The moment a tear appeared on the cheek of an old crooner who prided himself as unsentimental.
There was the wonder who, from his tomb, seemed to have ordered the chief of police to arrange for a column of bikers to descend the Champs-Elysées, which never wore its funereal name so well.
There was the Place de la Madeleine, usually so staid and cold, which, to the rhythm of strings, echoed one moment with the swing of the Louisiana bayous and another with the memory of the concert at the Olympia, so close as the crow flies but half a century away, where the saturnine firebrand upended ten thousand hearts.
There was the upswelling of emotion the likes of which the nation had not seen since the funerals of Victor Hugo and Edith Piaf, since the catafalque of Jean Jaurès went up the Rue Soufflot, an upswelling that left a million mourners not knowing whether to cry, sing, throw the chairs around, request a recall, or light candles.
Disappearing in a last parade of passion and energy, of restlessness and quiet rebellion, of inner fissures and desire for harmony, was someone who had spent his life trying not to survive and who, on that day, was so well mourned that his absence seemed like something that had been managed, something that somehow made us forget that he was no longer with us: abiding in each of us was the Johnny that moved us all.
The show-business childhood; the youth spent with a traveling act, like Gautier’s Captain Fracasse.
The father, a character out of Modiano, who, between bouts of drinking, pawned the gifts given to him by his abandonned son.
The ‘60s rocker with the eyes of a sad wolf and cheekbones hewn by Giacometti, the Catcher in the Rye mood, and a melancholy so intensely hopeless that it seemed to condemn him to live on the edge of every form of excess.
The consummate artist of the French scene, a chameleon beamed out on satellite TV, dripping with fake sweat and real glitz, an artist who, like a novelist, confessed as a way of lying.
The child of a generation that watched American GIs enter Paris and that invented for itself an American ascendance. America, for Johnny, was cigarettes, Levis, and Coca-Cola. But it was also the langor of the blues, Nashville, and the green light that, like his forebear from Gatsby’s novel, he saw gleaming at dawn after nights soaked in alcohol and amphetamines.
The distraught colossus of sorrow, the unsleeping and suicidal cowboy who, when he offered his body in sacrifice to the camera and to the mob of entranced fans, struck François Mauriac as a Mephistophelean figure.
The hero, motley and scarred, whose glory seemed like a wound, whose victories were stigmata, and who, from metamorphosis to metamorphosis, embodied what is wrongly called pop or variety but that was, in him, more like fallen greatness or the lament of a cleverly disguished poet.
And, at the end, King Lear triumphant, the wax face with the periwinkle gaze, survivor of an era whose heroes perished before the age of 30, one who knew that his survival was a miracle. And then those near-deaths in the manner of Bossuet—“Johnny is dying! Johnny is dead!”—and, each time, he would revive, right up to the very last time, when he lived again in Paris for a few hours under a cold December sun.
To this I would add that, in fifty years of living alongside politics, the unhappy child of forlorn London theaters, the solitary adolescent of the mean streets of Pigalle, the star of a people who liked to see reflected in their star what it knew of brokenness and unavowed temptations never once tipped toward worst, as so many others did.
Since the Vatican of literature that is the Nobel academy has, with the coronation of Bob Dylan, rescued song from its canonical hell, and since, in the case of Johnny Hallyday as presented by Louis Aragon, “poetry always wins,” it is perhaps not too farfetched to believe that this man of Sphinx-like mystery is now, like Baudelaire, “a block of granite surrounded by vague fear” whose “fierce nature sings only to the rays of the setting sun.”
