POLL - Claudine Longet - should Alizée sing her songs?

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?

AlizéeInspired · #2 11-16-2010, 07:34 PM

I would totally buy an album if Alizée were to record her versions of Longet's songs. From what I've listened to so far from the videos you embeded and linked, Claudine has a pleasant voice and beautiful songs. I really enjoy a nice, pleasant song that is calming, and her songs do just that. Thanks for sharing

.

As for if the covers would appeal to many people or not, tough to say. Sadly, I don't think many "young adults" would buy

. I say this mostly because of what most young adults of today listen to. With the right advertising and promoting in the right places and to the right people though, I think she could possibly do well.

User22 · #3 11-16-2010, 09:49 PM

5 votes for "buy the album" I think this is because...if Alizee is singing on it, people would buy it

DrSmith · #4 11-16-2010, 10:07 PM

I chose the last option. I have to insist that Alizée does not kill anyone.

wasabi622 · #5 11-16-2010, 10:10 PM

I'd have to buy the album. Just because Alizée released it. Will I listen to it often? Probably not.

Aayush · #6 11-16-2010, 11:01 PM

Alizée sings, we buy

SaintÀlizee · #7 11-16-2010, 11:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aayush

Alizée sings, we buy

Which I'm sure is the reason why the poll is so one sided.

wasabi622 · #8 11-16-2010, 11:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aayush

Alizée sings, we buy

1st Law of Lilly Town I believe.

FanDeAliFee · #9 11-17-2010, 09:11 AM

Let me risk stating the obvious. Licensing a song written long ago can reduce the cost (and hence the risk) of making an album. It might be an especially appropriate strategy for an artist dealing with today's ever-shrinking recording market, and one who is depending heavily on loyal fans rather than newcomers. Fans can care a lot more about the performer than the composer and lyricist, which enables the use of decent old songs which are not necessarily blockbusters in their own right. Alizée has said that writing songs is not a skill she has, which is why she depends on others to do that part of the work. Since she is not making money as an author, it makes sense to save money on that part of the budget if possible.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by DrSmith

I chose the last option. I have to insist that Alizée does not kill anyone.

Never let it be said I let a good straight line go to waste when I had time to do something about it,

I included the last option in the poll when I reflected on what Alizée had told us about herself. When she appeared on the French TV show La Méthode Cauet in January 2008, the following conversation ensued:<blockquote>Cauet: Do you have a phobia, a fear of something?

Alizée: Spiders

Cecile: Oh yes, oh la!

(dead silence, everybody looks around)

Cecile: Telling us what it is was a bad idea

Alizée: No, no

Cauet: We know it now

Alizée: No... stop it...

(She blushes and hides her face)</blockquote>And recently, the old slambook published at AAm seemed to assert that not only did Alizée just fear spiders - she maybe even hated them! Its text states:
<blockquote>She hates : ... spiders ; ...</blockquote>None of this would matter of course - until you remember that the lifelong nickname of Claudine Longet's unfortunate domestic partner had been... "Spider" !

Alizée on a "bad hair" day
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FanDeAliFee · #10 11-21-2010, 02:03 PM

Claudine Longet could sing beautifully

I simply had to let you hear Longet perform in a scene she did in a 1971 episode of the short-lived US TV series Alias Smith & Jones, in which she played a 19th century Cajun woman who barely escaped.her sea-captain kidnapper. In the clip below, she sings in French all but a cappella, backed only by light guitar and muted casino room noises. (i.e. No catsup here!) Her voice is beautiful, and this proves that she really learned to sing well.

Her character's name was Michelle Monet - the very same one used in her 1968 film with Peter Sellers, The Party. I suppose this reveals either the laziness or sense of humor of the TV show's writers. In her acting career, Longet would portray multiple characters using the name of Alizée's mother, Michelle - five times in all, and more than any other. In a 1975 TV movie, she played Queen Marie Antoinette, the subject of a recent film which became a favorite of Alizée. Not unreasonably given her obvious French accent, Longet was all but typecast as French or Cajun on the US screen. The only exception seems to have been the role of "Sharhri Javid" on Mr. Novak in 1965 - the name sounds Hindustani.

Longet would act as well as sing on screen and the short clip below comes from The Party. In it, a Hollywood executive played by Gavin MacLeod confronts the Indian actor played by Peter Sellers, calling him crazy in Yiddish, a language known better in Hollywood than Bollywood. The misunderstanding which follows leads Longet to giggle, as she struggles to keep the towel concealing her lovely young body from falling.

In real life, Sellers was a British Jew, and MacLeod the Indian - well, of American Indian descent anyway. MacLeod and Longet had worked together multiple times a half decade earlier in McHale's Navy, both on television and in the film, her first. (More on this below.) MacLeod rose from lowly ordinary seaman on McHale's Navy to become the captain of the luxury cruise ship Pacific Princess on the television show The Love Boat in later decades. Sellers had a distinguished career - which included the portrayal of an important character in a 1962 film named Lolita.

Speaking of who is whose sugar, it turns out that in 1974 Longet recorded her last album, the third for her second label, the creature of her separated husband Andy Williams. It had to "wait almost 20 years before it was finally released," writes an essay at the IMDB. The title track, Sugar Me, is rather weak, but can be audited here. The same essay asserts Longet "...had four hits reach the US top 100 singles chart including Love is Blue and Hello Hello." You can listen to these two at the following links:

L'Amour Est Bleu (1968) - perhaps her best French recording

Hello Hello (1967) - wherein Longet flatters your "pwetty hair," promises never to "tweet you mean," and memorably asks "Would you like some of my tangerine?"

You can find a synopsis of all Longet's albums and singles, accompanied by lay reviews and ratings here.

In the 21st century, Longet's work is sometimes being heard again, with new releases in Japan and even US TV air play, such as a 2001 episode of Gilmore Girls. The latter inspired the following comment at the IMDB in 2005:<blockquote><i>I am so sad that Claudine Longet was before my time. I am 14 years old and it's a pity that noone around me knows about her She is a beautiful french chanteuse and my friends have no idea about her. It's just so sad that she isn't being as appreciated as she deserves to be. I got interested in her through Gilmore Girls and now can't stop thinking about her...</i></blockquote>We know little about Longet's own minority and background. She was born in occupied Paris in the middle of World War II, not a happy time and place. Her first memories would have been of the postwar city. A story, likely the imaginative work of publicity agents, claims that, most remarkably, on his trips to Paris as a young man, her future first husband, Andy Williams, would often notice her, a mere child, rollerskating on one skate by the Louvre, close to her home near the Pont Neuf.

Longet's mother, Danielle Longet, would appear on the Christmas specials of The Andy Williams Show. What had become of her father is a mystery. An unsubstantiated comment here suggests there was a brother Claude in Paris many years ago.

As I wrote previously, with World War II still vividly alive in the memories of people then, there were many US television shows about it, and Longet appeared in multiple episodes of several of them, five serials in total. Two of them are advertised in the clip below from late 1963.

Although both shows were set in military environments during wartime, they could not have been more different.

Combat! was deadly serious and the weekly guest stars had about as much a chance to survive as the guys with red shirts in a Star Trek landing party. The action followed an American infantry squad at the front-line in France. (Aside: the late actor who speaks first in the clip above played the squad leader. He was the father of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.) A plot device which let the GIs interact with French civilians was the presence of PFC Paul LeMay in the squad. Played by a Canandien actor, the character was a US Cajun, which is why he was always called - what else - Caje.

Longet appeared in two episodes. The first, in 1964, had her use her own name - Claudette. The second, a 1967 episode, was the very last of the entire series and in it she was called Babette. (More on this name below.)

Despite the presence of legendary Hollywood stars Mickey Rooney and Ramón Novarro in the 1964 episode, it would have been odd if the 22-year-old Longet did not spend the most time off-camera speaking with Pierre Jalbert (who played Caje), as he was probably the only one there whose mother tongue was French. Jalbert had been the captain of Canada's 1948 Olympic ski team, and the episode featured lots of snow-choked winter hardship, recalling the Battle of the Bulge. One wonders if this occasion gave rise to Longet's interest in skiers. She would eventually become the domestic companion of an unfortunate 1968 Olympian, an American skier named Sabich. (By the way, the Mexican-born actor who played Longet's grandfather, Novarro, had been the leading "Latin lover" of the Silent Film Era after Rudolph Valentino, achieving stardom as Ben-Hur in the silent film of that same name. Ironically, in real life, he was clandestinely gay, and so presumably played "Ben-Dover"! Rooney had been the frequent leading man of gay icon Judy Garland, who portrayed Dorothy Gale in the memorable 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, a role Alizée herself would play in childhood.)

The other TV serial advertised in the clip above, McHale's Navy, was the complete opposite of Combat! A comedy originally set in the South Pacific, the only time you heard an explosion on it was when it would be used to make the audience laugh. It followed the crew of the US Navy's PT-73, who seemed preoccupied with the sort of REMFish escapades typical of Sargent Bilko's peace-time soldiers, rather than dangerous combat. The crew even clandestinely included an unguarded Japanese POW who served as the ship's amiable cook!

McHale's Navy premiered during the administration of US President John Kennedy, who gave his name to the street in Ajaccio on which one finds Ecole de Danse de Monique Mufraggi, at which Alizée received her early instruction in the arts. Everyone then knew that Kennedy had been the commander of the PT-109, the same type of "patrol torpedo" boat featured on the TV show. His unhappy defeat at the hands of a Japanese destroyer, which somehow managed to ram and sink Kennedy's much smaller and much more maneuverable PT boat, was spun into a heroic tale in a song by Jimmy Dean. The show would sometimes briefly allude to the unnamed skipper of the PT-109 after his demise in real life.

It turns out that Andy Williams and wife Claudine Longet, the latter of whom played in two TV episodes of McHale's Navy, as well as in the 1964 film, became close friends of President Kennedy's brother, Senator Robert Kennedy. Both Kennedy men would be gunned down by assassins during the 1960's. TV cameras caught Longet openly sobbing at the funeral mass of their friend in New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral. She and her husband would name their third and last child, born the next year, Robert after their slain friend. (The same year as the killing, an American skier competed in the winter Olympics in Grenoble. While in Europe, his police-officer father would buy a working replica Luger pistol, passing it onto his son for domestic protection. Ironically, it would be the very instrument of his youthful death.)

On McHale's Navy, the mythical PT-73's crew included a machinist's mate named Harrison Bell, who on account of his job was called "Tinker." That's right, Alizée, "Tinker" Bell got to ride on a boat for a living - what could be cooler?

In the final season, the PT-73 was redeployed to Ally-occupied Italy, near a mythical village called Voltafiore. (The name may be translated a number of ways, including as "blossom time." Or, it could be a reference to evasion ("turn") from the famous Fiore dei Liberi, a medieval doctor of the military arts.) There we learned that McHale, his surname notwithstanding, was very conveniently fluent in Italian. This was pretty easy to pull off. because he was portrayed by an actor who not only had spent a decade in the navy, but was the son of a pair of Italian immigrants.

We were never told the name of the waters the PT-73 sailed, but it's hardly impossible it was the Ligurian Sea which separates Corsica from the Italian mainland. (In fact, US PT boats operated out of Bastia on Corsica.) Alizée's grandma, one of the first Corsican women to work in a fishing boat, might be amused to learn that in one episode, Voltafiore's always-scheming Mayor Mario Lugatto conned the usually-wily PT-73 crew into working for him as fishermen!

While the PT-73 had been in the South Pacific theater, its crew had encountered many French people, because the US Navy headquarters was in Nouméa, on French New Caledonia. But Longet's TV character on McHale's Navy in early 1963 instead lived on a mythical island named "Hanaloku" - which oddly means "her cover" in Icelandic. of all languages! She played Yvette Gerard, the daughter of French planter Emile Gerard. (The planter was portrayed by Marcel Hillaire, a German born Erwin Ottmar Hiller in Cologne. His IMDB biography asserts that his musical grandfather, a Kapellmeister from a family of clandestine Jewish origin, had encountered Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner and Mendelssohn!)

In the McHale's Navy film made the next year, Longet played a different French character, Andrea Bouchard, who was indebted to an old planter who harassed her romantically. This is not the only time a male Kennedy menaced a pretty young woman, but in this instance it was actor George Kennedy, of no relation to the famous political family, LOL.

While as mentioned above, Longet would play a character named Babette in the final episode of Combat! she was never given this name in her McHale's Navy work. But it turns out that an episode of the latter show without Longet DID feature a character named Babette, whose escapades are shown in a short clip below, complete with fake French accents

As you can see, it is not impossible for a high-spirited young French woman to cause a lot of trouble when she gets her hands on a dangerous weapon. If Longet ever saw this episode, it seems it made no impression on her, particularly that horrible day she pointed the aforementioned loaded Luger replica at domestic partner Sabich. She had seen what a simple handgun had done to her friend Robert Kennedy in real life. Did her many World War II TV roles contribute to a dangerously playful state of mind? We'll never know. But unlike Babette, she was too old to spank for her reckless transgressions, and instead was sanctioned with 30 days in jail - not to mention a lifetime of guilt.

All that said, to please me, I would still have Alizée change her 1960s-era American Andy W. from Warhol to Williams!

View Poll Results: If Alizée recorded an album of old Claudine Longet songs, I would...
buy the album	16	72.73%
steal the album tracks after they get pirated	1	4.55%
just listen to some Longet originals on YouTube	0	0%
do nothing	4	18.18%
buy the album, as long as Alizée did not leave Jérémy and shoot to death a future domestic partner	1	4.55%
Voters: 22. You may not vote on this poll