Burn, Baby, Burn: Johnny Hallyday

Johnny Hallyday had ‘something broken in his soul’ — you could see it when he belted out his Gallic-toned rock’n’roll. He had been an abandoned child, and the trauma never left him, though by the end he belonged to France.

Burn, Baby, Burn: Johnny Hallyday

Le rockeur national’, ‘the biggest rock star you never heard of ’, and ‘France’s Elvis’: none of these shorthands comes close to capturing the reach of Johnny Hallyday. During 50 years in the spotlight, this averagely talented singer of the rock’n’roll era became a national treasure, with few equals anywhere in the world. While the real Elvis faded into a niche obsession, and Britain’s nearest equivalent — Cliff Richard — became a cosy granny’s favourite, the man they called just ‘Johnny’ continued to fascinate and excite to a degree that only increased as it should have fallen away. 

It wasn’t so much what Johnny did as who he was. Compared to the handful of other French music stars who transcended the rock era, he was gauche and unsophisticated. He had none of the originality or iconoclasm of Serge Gainsbourg, couldn’t compete with the wit of Jacques Dutronc or the adventurousness of Michel Polnareff, and never approached the effortless chic of Françoise Hardy. But the French, amazingly for a nation with such a fiercely guarded sense of identity, loved him for being the archetypal rock star. Johnny was their very own part of the American century, delivering not only rock’n’roll they could understand but also chiselled film-star looks and a soap-opera life that took in all the women, fast cars, drink, drugs and self-destruction anyone could ask for. 

Hallyday in Sylvie Vartan’s dressing room after one of her concerts.

Aside from being born in the wrong country, Johnny had the perfect show business start: a miserable childhood and a performance career that began before he knew it. Coming into the world as Jean-Philippe Smet in the rundown 9th arrondissement of Paris, home to the Moulin Rouge and the red-light district, he was abandoned by his Belgian father before he was eight months old, and quickly passed on to his aunt by a mother more interested in her small-time acting career. With Aunt Hélène came two cousins, Menen and Desta, who were touring dancers. The new arrival was soon on the road, where he fell under the influence of Desta’s American boyfriend, Lee Halliday, who put him on stage during costume changes.

He was the soap opera that had all the women, fast cars, drink, drugs and self-destruction anyone could ask for.

In Saint-Tropez, 1963.
Readies himself to perform for the first time in Paris, at the Alhambra.
Signs autographs in France.
During some downtime while on tour in France.
A French poster of Hallyday’s 1963 film D’où viens-tu Johnny?
Hallyday poses with a doll in his likeness.

Seeing an Elvis Presley movie took him out of cabaret and into the studio, and by 1959 he was leading France’s tentative response to rock’n’roll, cutely christened ‘yé-yé’. His attempts to convert a nation accustomed to the measured emotion of the chanson form met with serious resistance from the brittle French establishment, but his album Salut Les Copains (‘Hello, kids’), packed with French-language rewrites of the likes of Let’s Twist Again, made him a star. No one outside the Francophone world was ever going to choose  his versions over the originals — as he admitted himself, “You just can’t sing rock’n’roll in French, our words are too long” — but for his compatriots he was the real thing. 

For a while he was happy to be an Elvis impressionist, but the arrival of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones forced him to move with the times. He embraced the beard and shaggy hair of the era and tried out a series of British musicians, recording with Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and the Small Faces and taking inspiration from Jimi Hendrix’s jet-powered take on rock’n’roll. His version of Hey Joe and songs such as À Tout Casser (‘Going All Out’), featuring Page’s imitation of Hendrix’s Purple Haze, are pleasing sixties curios, but the seventies were altogether more comfortable, as he expanded into country music and rock ballads that suited his gruff tones. 

No one, Johnny included, would claim he could compete with Hendrix or the Beatles, and he certainly didn’t sound like Elvis. For a start, Johnny was more of a shouter, in the vein of Tom Jones, and only came into his own as a vocalist in the 1980s, when life experience and French-level chainsmoking gave him a Johnny Cash-like combination of gruff authority and vulnerability. He was, though, a world-class performer from the start, with the kind of stage presence that holds the attention regardless of the material and that can sustain a music career even when the hits aren’t coming. As his friend Carla Bruni remarked after his death, “He was one of these artists who burns. He would sing like he was going to die the very next minute.”

Life experience and French-level chain smoking lent him a gruff authority and vulnerability.

Making a house of cards in France.
Overlooking the Croisette during the Cannes Film Festival.

Johnny was obsessed with le spectacle, forever on tour, always pushing for a bigger venue and a more dramatic show, with an ever-expanding support crew of stuntmen and dancers. He was a draw on a scale beyond even the international rock titans, able to sell out three nights at the Stade de France national stadium and in 2009 drawing a crowd estimated at close to a million people for a free show at the Eiffel Tower. 

He was also brilliant at publicity. Though he was always happy to conduct a photoshoot for Hello! predecessor Paris Match, appearing on the cover a record-breaking 60 times, it was on television that he was at his most fascinating. At first brooding and confessional, using his ice-blue eyes to project James Dean levels of intensity, he would break out into a sweet, open smile that won over even the hardest interviewer, and every viewer. And there was, it’s fair to say, truth in this play of light and dark behind the eyes, beyond the standard rock-star moodiness: by all accounts, including his own, he remained an abandoned child his whole life, restless and unsatisfied. As Bruni put it, “He had something broken in his soul, something damaged, and being on stage, being a superstar artist, made him very happy”. 

Offstage, he tried to fill the hole in his soul in all the usual ways. His five marriages began in 1966 with fellow yé-yé star Sylvie Vartan and ended 30 years later with the actress Laeticia Boudou, in between which he squeezed in one lasting just 65 days and another, shamefully, with the 18-year-old daughter of his best friend, as well as an unlikely four-year relationship with high-minded actress Nathalie Baye. There were many more women in his life, their ebb and flow reflected and often affected by his use of alcohol and drugs, in particular cocaine. As central to his life as the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll were cars and motorbikes. Asked in an early television interview for his greatest moment of joy, he said it was when he touched his first car, a Triumph TR3, and he went on to buy and crash a long succession of Porsches and Lamborghinis. In later life, he would spend months on end driving across America on a Harley-Davidson. 

Hallyday with a girlfriend in Paris.
Driving a novelty car in Paris.
With Sylvie Vartan, presenting his first ready-to- wear collection in Paris.
Dancing with the actress Daliah Lavi.
Hallyday and Elke Sommer on the beach in Cannes.
In racing gear after a spin in a Ford Mustang.
At the premiere of Dalida’s show in France.
At a dinner party with Aristotle Onassis in 1970.
With his wife, Sylvie Vartan.

Johnny followed the rock-star template all the way to tax exile, moving first to Switzerland and then to Los Angeles. The French overlooked even this insult because, above all things, Johnny remained loyal to them. After his brief period as a hip young rock’n’roller in the sixties, his appeal was to the silent majority of France living outside Paris, where life had barely changed since the war and few wanted it to. In the French heartlands, they identified with Johnny’s conservative Franco-American style in the way the U.S. Midwest identified with its series of billionaire country stars. Just like them, Johnny might be friends with the president but he was still the kind of guy you could imagine in a pick-up or tinkering with his Harley in the yard, who played it tough but liked a ruggedly sentimental ballad to get drunk to.

His appeal was to the silent majority of France living outside Paris, where life had barely changed since the war.

Hallyday on stage in the seventies.
Ray Charles is welcomed at Orly airport by Hallyday.
With Sammy Davis, Jr.
Hallyday in Brussels.
On a T.V. show in 1976.
On his chopper.

Embracing this audience in the 1980s was Johnny’s cleverest move, whether intentional or not. It led to even greater levels of success and, ironically, the grudging approval of the critics, for whom he had long been an embarrassment. France’s sixties intellectuals had briefly flirted with adopting him as a symbol of a new masculinity, or tried to equate his rock’n’roll exhibitionism with existentialism, but this time he was embraced with affection rather than objectification. It paved the way, too, for an acceptance of his genuine talent as an actor. Sporadic attempts at the start of his career had left him unsatisfied, yearning to return to the relative control of his life onstage. By the 1990s, though, he was offered more than the traditional stunt - casting cameos, and he lent his extraordinary presence and self-possession to a series of proper films, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Détective, the comedy Conseil de Famille, the hyperactive Honk Kong gangster flick Vengeance, and, with a performance that hinted at true greatness, the 2002 psychological thriller L’Homme du Train. 

More unexpected than this, though, was his simultaneous conversion into an icon of cool. With a trimmed quiff, goatee and a remarkably successful facelift that somehow made his eyes even more piercing, he entered the new century looking effortlessly up to date, somewhere between imperial-period U2 and the cast of The Matrix, give or take his abiding taste for leather bolero jackets. This metropolitisation might have been a gamble, risking the loss of the great French public, but by then he was beyond judgment. For the next decade and a half, regular visitors to France, glancing at a newsstand, could be forgiven for thinking that the nation cared only about Johnny’s latest adventure. He embarked on a stadium-filling lap of glory that seemed destined to fulfil the title of his 2008 single Ça ne finira jamais — ‘ThisWillNeverEnd’.His death, in 2017, at the age of 74, shocked a nation that had lived with him so long and so closely they believed it never would. 

Hallyday performs in Germany.

Photo credits: Getty Images