TEEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (20)

By: Lucy Sante
May 30, 2023

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of heartthrobs from our adolescences). Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

FRANÇOISE HARDY

Françoise Hardy entered my life as lifelong muse and role model probably around 1966, when I was 12. My paternal aunt and uncle, small-town newsagents in Belgium, had been sending us periodic care packages of random reading material from their stock since we emigrated to the United States. They weren’t very literary themselves and never really figured out my father’s tastes, but they got me right, sending me the French teen magazine Salut les Copains at just the right age. I barely remember what else was in its pages, the usual French teenpop litter: Sylvie Vartan and Adamo and Barbara and Michel Polnareff, of little interest. As far as I was concerned, the whole magazine was Françoise Hardy.

Note that I was years away from hearing what her music sounded like, since I lived in suburban New Jersey, where the radio didn’t play her and the record store didn’t stock her. (I came to love her 1968 album Comment te dire adieu in particular.) So my fixation was purely visual. But just look at her! She had an allure unlike anyone else’s, at once forthright and reserved. She was tall (5’9″) and lanky, an unfamiliar body type in showbiz then. She had high cheekbones, a full jawline, a passionate and determined mouth, slightly slanted eyes, and that curtain of hair, her bangs getting longer by the year. Her height and her jaw tipped her image just a bit toward androgyny. I could not stop looking at her, and if I hadn’t been wary of my mother I would very likely have covered the walls of my bedroom with pictures of her. Note that she was fully clothed in every photo.

The stupid thing is that I still can’t stop looking at pictures of her. I have dozens of her pictures saved on various media, and her 1965 cover for Elle is framed on my office wall. Studying her pictures has over the years become a powerful narcotic for me, but it is only in recent times that I’ve figured out why. Of course I was drawn erotically to the image of Françoise Hardy, but there was a little more to it than that, as I realized when I began transitioning. It wasn’t just that I desired what I could see of her, but that I wanted to be her.

The transgender erotic ideal was augmented by her bourgeois reserve, which I could read immediately because I had been inculcated with the same thing. As it turns out, that demeanor of hers translated into a political stance as well. She is still a Gaullist, and chillingly unconcerned with others’ miseries. A recent biography in French was revealing. She, her husband (the singer Jacques Dutronc), and their child each occupy a separate floor of their house in Paris. In hers she lives “like a nun,” with a narrow bed, no decor of any sort, using only cheap supermarket brands of health and beauty products, rarely leaving the house. Her consuming passion is astrology, about which she has written several books (she has also produced several memoirs and a novel). I’m not sure we’d get along.

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TEEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (20)

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