His private life was key to his creativity. Brel said, “I’ve never wanted my
daughters to see me as a pipe-and-slippers man. I prefer them to see me as a
stage star.” I had been warned his daughter France could be a bit prickly.
She could not have been warmer. She admitted she understood why most people
would find it difficult to comprehend why she loves him and his memory so
much, when he spent so much of her childhood away from France and her
sisters Chantal and Isabelle, and in the arms of women who were not their
mother.
“He was not like other fathers, certainly. We maybe saw him three or four days
a month and he was a strict father, very bourgeois in his attitudes to us
considering so many of his songs were anti-bourgeois. He had a phenomenal
energy and when he came home it was sometimes like he came from a different
planet. On his planet, it was not about children. He did not succeed as he
did without being something of an egotist.”
Jean-Michel Boris says that all the great artists to some extent love
themselves more than anyone else, yet he talks of the fabulous relationship
Brel had with stagehands, ticket sellers or bar staff. “They loved him,
every one of them,” France says. “He gave us something far more important
than most fathers give – a heritage for the whole public, not just three
daughters.”
She concedes many wives would not have tolerated his lifestyle, yet her mother
says she would not have changed a thing. “She was in love with him, but knew
she could not have him all the time. He was always on the move, whereas my
mother liked to be in the same place. She was like a good number two to him.
She made his life work, she understood what he needed. People could not
understand the relationship, but when you saw them together, you got it.”
She admits her sisters were not as enthusiastic as she is about her father’s
way of living his life. “Every child is different.” She disputes the
commonly stated view that he was a misogynist. “It was more that he never
really stopped being an adolescent.” Brel himself, I learnt from Mel Smith’s
file, said, “To my mind paternity doesn’t exist. Maternity does and
mother-love is indispensable. On the other hand, it’s almost impossible for
a father to have any real contact with his children. You can always go
‘coochy coochy cooo’ but it doesn’t get you very far.” As to the charge of
misogyny: “The real misogynists are the blokes who hold open the doors for
women the better to rub their hands on their arses. I love women because
they’re women. I hate them because they play around with love.”
Everyone I interviewed for the programme spoke of Brel’s belief in his own
liberty. Brel said, “All the misery of life comes from being tied down.” His
wife Miche said his liberty was more important to him than anything. He
needed to be free to adventure. She allowed him to live that life, long,
passionate affairs and all. It perhaps explains why he left everything to
her, not his mistresses, even if he spent the last years of his life with
Maddly, who took his remains to be buried on the island where they had
shared several years. “I was the first,” said Miche, “and the one he always
came back to.”
The extent of his double life, and the unpleasant things he sometimes said to
his children, and about women, were perhaps the biggest surprise of my
research. Yet I was pleased to hear from those who worked with him that, to
them, he remained a hero. Pleased too that he was politically aware and,
though not very active, basically left-wing. I was stunned to learn that he
wrote perhaps his second best-known song, Quand On n’a Que l’Amour,
during a conference on economic distribution. “When there is only love to
share among ourselves…” I had gone 30 years thinking it must have been
inspired by another great love affair, only to learn he had said it was
about the economy, stupid! Likewise I had always assumed Ne Me Quitte Pas
was a plea to his wife not to leave him. Instead, it was written to beg a
mistress who had already gone, singer Suzanne Gabriello.
France remembers vividly her father’s last concert, also the growing sense in
him then that he needed a new adventure, which became the cinema. He was,
despite considerable wealth, his own plane and boat, both of which he
piloted, avowedly anti-materialist. “Everything is packaged. The whole world
is becoming toothpaste. There are even singers, my God, who mime on stage.”
Not him. I sat with Jean-Michel Boris in the Olympia, where he staged Brel’s
farewell concert on October 7, 1966. “I have never known such emotion,” he
said. “We had 2,600 people in here. And when Brel said it was his last
concert, you knew it was true. There would be no Sinatra-style comebacks.
When the show was coming to an end, the hall was filled with people in
tears, because we knew this was the end of something special. Then he took
his bow and went to his dressing room and people were on their feet,
shouting and screaming for him to come back. It was the longest demand for
an encore anyone has ever witnessed – 20 minutes. We had to go to his
dressing room and he was naked, having a beer and smoking a cigarette. We
said, ‘Jacques, they won’t leave, you must go back out there.’”
And so the final shot of Brel the live performer was of a man in a dressing
gown, smiling broadly. “Ca justifie ces 15 ans d’amour, merci,” he said.
That justifies these 15 years of love, thank you. With that, he was gone.
But he never turned his back on music. He continued to write songs, starred
in a hit musical about Don Quixote, sang in some of his films. But it is on
the performance of his own great songs that the legend is built. “If you sat
in the front row of a Brel concert,” says Jean-Michel Boris, “you left
covered in his spit and sweat. He sweated gallons.”
In the UK, Brel remains less well known than in any other part of the
developed world. “I just think it is marvellous the interest there is in him
still, all around the world. Perhaps your programme will kick-start
something in the UK,” says France. Yet in this she and I are conspiring in
doing something Brel said he did not want. As he neared death he said, “By
and large my life has surpassed my wildest dreams. I consider it to have
been a fantastic gift. Life is an adventure. I can go now. I trust that
nobody will talk about me when I’m gone. If you love me, keep your traps
shut.”
It is not possible. The pleasure he gave, the passions he aroused, the music
he left behind, it is just not possible.
Alastair Campbell’s Brel et Moi is on Radio 4, September 6,
10.30am
