The Happy and Sad Life of Jean Seberg

                    The Happy and Sad Life of Jean Seberg

What happened to Jean Seberg? At one point she was on top of the world, the darling of The French New Wave, the cutting-edge cinema of the 1960s and a glamorous beckoning pixie. And later on in her short life she descended into an overwhelming despair that didn't leave her.

Jean Dorothy Seberg was born in November 1938 in idyllic Marshalltown Iowa. Her father was the town pharmacist and owned a drug store on the main street eponymously named "Seberg's." Her father Edward Voldemar Seberg, was very conscientious and would open up his store in the middle of the night if need be to get a prescription for a sick member of the community. She was the second of four children and her mother Dorothy Seberg was a homemaker. Jean had a penchant for bringing home stray animals, "but they followed me home?" She grew up in the Lutheran Church.

She loved high school dramatics. She played the lead in her senior class production of "Sabrina Fair" at her alma mater, Marshalltown High School. Seeing Marlon Brando's first movie The Men at The Odeon Theater in Marshalltown changed her life. Until the last couple of years with Covid-19 raging 

 her hometown ran "The Jean Seberg Festival of Art"s put on by The Odeon Theater in conjunction with Iowa Valley/Marshalltown Community College, The Festival featured her movies with introductions by people who knew and worked with her, friends she grew up with, lectures and exhibits. I had been hoping to get down there and attend. Was/is her hometown ambivalent about her? Time has seen her in a different and more contemporary light. Jean always returned to Marshalltown to visit her family and lifelong friends. Surely some may have been scandalized by the events in her life?

In discussing Seberg's involvement with The Black Panthers, Kristen Stewart who played her in the unfortunately realized film "Seberg" talked of her activism with the view of contemporary Hollywood but I think they began to use her and badly. Jean Seberg deserves a good movie about her life with maybe an unknown like she was. And it's time for a good movie about Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker. Another fresh-faced innocent with the same projectory as Jean would do well although there is the conceit in movies of a young woman portraying the life story of a woman while looking like a young woman playing the subject in middle age, a young woman made to look like an older woman unconvincingly. But the movies are full of nothing if not artifice. Film is artifice after all.

Seberg always had a penchant for social justice and helping animals and people who she saw as the underdog beginning as a child bringing home strays, her involvement with March of Dimes and joining the NAACP as a teenager says so much about her. Seberg got deeper and deeper into debt trying to support the Panthers and more and more under the radar of J. Edgar Hoover who was among other things a transvestite. A gatekeeper with his own dark secrets. It seemed to disturb him that a beautiful blonde midwestern actress slept with a black man. A deep and scandalizing taboo in the 1960s and 1970s.

Hoover gave instructions to have her reputation destroyed. Hollywood columnist Joyce Haber wrote a scathing, somewhat vague, and ardently bitchy article about a certain Hollywood actress pregnant by a black man and a man who was not her husband. Seberg went into premature labor with a baby girl named Nina who died shortly after her birth. This was part of the fallout from the article and the harassment. Seberg never got over Nina's death and continued her suicide attempts on Nina's birthday. In all honesty, as sad as this is, Jean had a little boy Diego who was not always close by her and was raised largely by nannies. But maybe the things that vanish in the bud never to be are the things that haunt us most. There is a great plummeting of hormones after a pregnancy that may have contributed to her mental state at the time. With the recovery of pregnancy comes joy in the new life; with a miscarriage or stillbirth come the side effects but without the baby as consolation, She never got over the memory of that hurt, could never leave that pain and the enormous disappointment from overwhelming her.

Her story is inspiring in many ways and not all gloom and doom though. And really don't people love to root for the underdog and the inexperienced ingenue but that later become the worldly wise no longer young but not old either? It's the stuff of many Hollywood movies.

Playing the lead in Saint Joan, she does seem in over her head but then wasn't the real Saint Joan of Arc? Did Joan have the same youthful naivete and teenage enthusiasm? Perhaps. Never before had someone so close to Joan's age played her. And with such short hair. It was cut every few days on the set.

Jean was burned on the set of Joan of Arc preparing for the shooting of the burning at the stake scene. She was universally panned for her performance after the movie was released. It must've been so crushing for a 19-year-old appearing in her first film with a well-respected director to be so cruelly and sadistically treated. Shot down just out of the gate.

Otto Preminger is also responsible for her performance. He never stopped pushing Jean and bullying her rather than explaining, cajoling, and nurturing her to elicit a good performance. Actors can be fragile people when at work. Who wouldn't fold under that kind of direction? Plus the pressure of an unknown actress to lead a major film?

The film is clunky in places and sometimes the other actors' performances are not natural either. The story of the saint is one that lends itself to high spirits and enthusiasm. The truth is we can only speculate what the real Joan was like. She is our blank canvas. Would anyone follow a dispassionate teenage shepherdess lacking exuberance? Would she be played as surly teenaged infused with angst and a grating sense of the ironic in everything in today's world? To be young is to be dumb and confident. It goes with the territory of being an innocent.

An actor must be confident to make choices in a performance and interpreting their role. G.B. Shaw wrote Saint Joan from the standpoint of a disbeliever. So what was a director expecting when he ground down his lead's confidence to nothing?

Seberg gives a more confident performance of the troubled and colluding teenager in Bonjour Tristesse (Good Morning Sadness literally or Good Morning Heartache after the Billie Holiday song.) When Godard and Truffaut saw Bonjour Tristesse (written by the teenage Francoise Sagan ) they imagined a follow-up with a character that was a fully formed adult after Bonjour Tristesse ended, showing both a playful and mercenary side to her character.

Seeing Breathless for the first time at my small midwestern women's college I was so taken by Seberg. I had my hair cut in a very short pixie, "la coupee Seberg" I started to wear Breton sailor-inspired cotton boatneck striped shirts. (Never let your friends cut your hair when they're stoned without proper scissors in your dorm bathroom!) My boyfriend was quite shocked the next time he saw me with my new hair. Cutting your hair short for the first time as a young woman is a tried and true rite of passage and signals entree into full-fledged adulthood.

I went one year for Halloween as Seberg's character but despite carrying a homemade "New York Herald Tribune," and handmade "New York Herald Tribune" shirt no one got it.  I like to think if one person gets it, my job is done

 I dreamed of studying in Paris and wondered if could I survive in a small studio without a kitchen and a tiny bathroom like her character in Breathless? Could I succeed on my wits with my family so far away and my terrible Frech? Jean may have felt the same way. The music scene in my hometown of Minneapolis Minnesota beckoned. A friend once suggested, "you could always get a job selling Grit Magazine on the streets of St. Paul."

Seberg is the ultimate gamine replete with bed head, chipped nail polish; smoking nervously. Is this why she persists in our minds? For her refreshing style, open manner, and graciousness?  Breathless's main attribute is its naturalness. Seberg in the lead betrays her hoodlum boyfriend by the end only because she's tired of him. Even the artifice in unconventional shooting with jump cuts and its anti-hero and anti-heroine is natural. Who hasn't tired of the antics of a boyfriend who doesn't go away at some time or another? Does Patricia Franchini understand the gravity of turning her boyfriend Michel in to the police? Why does she do it? Ennui? Irritation? Spite? She always looks at home on the streets of Paris in her full skirt, ankle socks, trenchcoat, and striped shirt. Seberg paired clothing in refreshingly original ways. And enchanted.

But did she understand later what her support of the Panthers could lead to? Was she incapable of lifting herself out of the downward turn of severe mental illness and alcoholism? Mental illness was not acceptable and the drugs used to treat it were still in the dark ages. Women were at the hands of male doctors who had no idea what to do with them. 

Did Jean always carry that Midwestern openness and idealism with her? And how did she lose it and become a scared almost homeless paranoiac? Alcohol was definitely a huge factor. Hollywood certainly had no idea how to deal with actresses and approaching 40 was a death sentence (and still is to some degree) for Hollywood actresses. Marilyn Monroe was terrified of it and anticipated the eventual shift from a leading lady to character roles; playing mothers sometimes, only a few years older than the actors playing their sons. Jean was a fragile person in the best of times and people who die young fascinate us because we never get to see the rest of the story. We wonder "What if?"  "What if I had been there? Could I have saved them? Perhaps a more pertinent question is would they be alive with today's awareness and treatments? They take all the answers with them when they take their lives. Did they mean to complete the attempt? Another theory posits that Seberg was murdered by the FBI who were following her and bugging her apartment. What we have left is the light in their photographs as if from a dead star.

In the short film "Les Hautes Solitudes"  we see Jean looking tired and haggard in a nightgown in a dimly lit room. She looks fragile and we become scared for her as we continue to watch her pretend suicide with pills. She is restless and frantic. "Oh, Jean if only we could go back and save you!" But it takes work to save yourself and Jean seemed devoid of insight into her illness. By the time of "Airport," she's just going through the motions, walking through her part zombie-like after playing so many similar roles. The light is gone from her eyes. It could be any actress in that role. Can we blame her? American cinema still doesn't know what to do with women much of the time.

Mark Rappaport's The Diaries of Jean Seberg is a sad and gloomy movie. It dwells on the pain, regret, and sadness of her life. How did this young girl from Iowa become a charming stylish woman? Wife of a French diplomat who was a  winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt for Writing, to the world-weary, heartsick, self-destructive middle-aged woman? 

There are so many questions about her life. She certainly would not have been happy staying in Marshalltown. Was she murdered? Why didn't she get the help she needed or accept it?  Her graciousness and spry pixie girl charm and earnestness invite us but we are never given the full tour later on. 40 years on she still engages; for her Midwestern openness, great style, graciousness, kindness, and open vulnerabilities. I want to root for her and pull her back out of time. She seems to speak much more to our era than the one she lived in. Let's face it- the world bears down and pulls sensitive, caring souls under. It takes a lot of work to get back to baseline. It doesn't just happen because you talk to a psychiatrist or take medication. Things were different then and "the past is a different country. The rules are different there." A song written in her honor goes-

 Oh, Jean! 

"The world will leave you there,

All they talk about's your hair...

But you still burn bright...

Hey, Jean we still care!"

 And indeed we do.

--This article was greatly informed by the books "Played Out- The Jean Seberg Story" by David Richards and "Jean Seberg- Breathless" by Garry McGee" both of which I recommend