Alizée America Forum - View Single Post - POLL - Claudine Longet

FanDeAliFee · #1 11-16-2010, 04:22 PM

In the United States a half-century ago (the 1960's) as Rock and Roll was transmuting into Rock, there also still was an enormous amount of sedate and even sedating music, and it was not merely restricted to romantic themes.

In that decade, broadcast television, which already was a mass-market medium, transitioned to the regular use of color imagery. This was often exploited to feature variety shows featuring lots of singing and dancing. Among these was The Andy Wiliams Show. Its eponymous host was then one of the most accomplished singers in the nation and "at one time he had earned more gold albums than any solo performer except Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis and Elvis Presley."

At the start of the decade, this superstar met a French teenager named Claudine Longet, who then was a dancer at the new franchise in Las Vegas of the Folies Bergère. (After a half-century run there, it closed last year.) The two spent the following decade married, and together had three children.

I remember Longet as a very fetching, delicately-built brunette, whom I found quite attractive at the dawn of my adolescence. But until now, I was unaware of her singing career, which certainly was unhurt by her appearances on her husband's enormously popular TV show. (Not all 1960's American mentors named Andy W. failed rising starlets badly!) Rather, I recall her many guest appearances on TV serials, including several shows (Wikipedia counts five!) set during World War II, which was then still in the vivid personal memory of the large majority of viewers.

I was ASTONISHED how many of her performances one can find today on YouTube! All of them illustrate the style of what Time magazine called the "whispery chanteuse." English speakers are typically inclined to hear French pronunciation as inherently "musical," perhaps because of the practice that swallows the terminal consonants of words. Thus, many French speakers with not unpleasant voices, but little true musical talent, can credibly present themselves as singers to them. (That said, virtually no French-lyric music can make a big impression in the US market.)

It is not hard to find those who deprecate Longet as a non-singer. While I enjoy SOME of her recordings, I would hardly claim she is a talented singer, but rather someone who translated her pleasing appearance and voice and her high public visibility into a singing career. Her recordings are often elaborately produced, to more than hold up that part of the overall experience. (Critics might sarcastically observe that with enough catsup, even the worst cut of meat cannot be tasted.) By the frequent use of heavy instrumentation, choral backing, echo/overdubbing and having her do poetic narration whenever possible, Longet's producers endeavored to minimize the shortcomings of her singing voice. Unlike Alizée, we have never heard Longet's singing voice at robust volume, I suspect because at that intensity it "breaks." But whatever Longet's artistic merits, her first album in 1967 went gold all the same. And she was of sufficient international interest during her career to record multiple songs in each of English, French and Japanese.

Longet's English lisp is a constant hazard to the seriousness of her singing. This is very evident in the TV duet with her husband of My Favorite Things, where she pointedly renders the very first words of the song as "Waindrops on woses" - a la Tweety Bird. The relative vocal talents of the two singers are also manifest.

The French Wikipedia article begins <blockquote>Claudine Longet, née à Paris le 29 janvier 1942, est une chanteuse et actrice française, populaire aux États-Unis dans les 1960 et 1970.</blockquote>The English Wikipedia article is much more comprehensive.

Several postings at this Web site have remarked how Alizée's UEdS-era appearance style reminds them of the late Audrey Hepburn. It happens that Hepburn and first-Longet-husband Andy Williams share Moon River as their signature song! But perhaps it is also to the credit of Longet's modest musical skills that a YouTube tribute to Hepburn episodically uses Longet's performance of It's Hard to Say Goodbye as background music.

In the only Blake Edwards film staring Peter Sellers in which he did NOT play the bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the French Sûreté Nationale, Claudine Longet co-stared as a character much like she herself was in real life, a French starlet. In a scene shown in the video below, she got to play her guitar and sing Henry Mancini's romantic bossa nova-style Nothing to Lose.

Note that Mancini had earlier done the sound track for the film Breakfast at Tiffany's, in which Audrey Hepburn had played her most memorable role, singing Moon River, a composition designed not to overwhelm her limited musical talents.

Another bossa nova song Longet performed well is Meditação (Meditation).

The Longet performance I like best is of the 1967 song Wanderlove, whose simple but touching romantic lyrics and subtly arranged instrumentation does not overwhelm her voice, whose nature is used to intrinsic advantage here. Indian and Russian fans of Alizée might especially enjoy its use, respectively, of the sitar and balalaika. As the target of a cover by Alizée, I will note that the lyrics of this song refer to the mountains and sea - so important to the natural geography of Corsica - and there is even mention of the wind and sailing. The thoughtful mood is a sober complement to the exuberant and independent spirit of JPVA, making it a good choice for a romantic singer closing in on age thirty.

Longet also does a good job performing the (French version of the) worldwide hit (but 1967 Eurovision reject) L'amour est bleu. In the United States the song is known as Love Is Blue and uses rather different lyrics. Wikipedia writes that its 1968 US debut accounted for "the only performance by a French artist ever to top the Billboard Hot 100."

The macabre theme song of Rosemary's Baby, a 1968 horror film which dealt with the gestation of the Antichrist, a tune called Sleep Safe And Warm, exploits Longet's permanently lullaby-volume singing voice performance to great irony.

The development of Longet's whole musical career is detailed here.

It is interesting that a singer whom Alizée once identified as a role-model, Vanessa Paradis, was once compared to Longet. The web site nsnews.com wrote on November 13, 2000 that <blockquote><i>French superstar Vanessa Paradis makes her latest record a family affair... Paradis' soft vocal style is an acquired taste (think Claudine Longet in The Party) but there is much to admire here.</i></blockquote>Alizée has much more talent as a singer than Longet ever did. Yet maybe it is not unreasonable to suggest she might do well by covering Longet songs, whose sedate style she always handles well.

Since Alizée likes Motown, I'll point out Longet's (mainly French) choral-backed spoken performance of Ain't No Mountain High Enough and her tepid version of The Jackson Five's I'll Be There.

As musical styles changed, Longet tried to change with them, but the domestic sex kitten of the 60's proved too unexciting and untalented to pull it off. An example is her her performance of Make It With You at the end of which she vaguely gasps in vain imitation of the moans pulled off by Jane Birkin. "Wuv can be wight or wong" indeed!

In real life, it seems Longet eventually experienced a proverbial seven-year-itch with respect to her first husband, 14 years her senior, and didn't wait many more years before scratching it. As the 1970's dawned, she was romantically linked to others. She finally became the domestic partner of an Olympic skier named Sabich nearing the end of his glory days, taking her three children with her. Longet and Williams both also found recording success elusive as the 1970's proceeded, but they remained business partners despite no longer being domestic partners. By mid-decade they had legally divorced. Shortly thereafter a famous tragedy changed Longet's life forever.

Everyone agrees that Sabich died of blood loss in an ambulance because of a single bullet earlier fired into his body by Longet from a pistol his policeman father had given him many years earlier. Longet successfully explained it was accidental and was convicted in a short trial of a misdemeanor charge. But that event snuffed out what remained of her career. Today she is still married to the man who was her defense attorney in the case, and also remains friends with Andy Williams, whose support never wavered,

Both her music and the end of her career is unknown ancient history to many millions of young adults. Would Alizée covers of old Longet songs appeal to them? What do you think?