Excerpts From Truffaut: A Biography

by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana

Translated from the French by Catherine Temerson

© University of California Press (2000)

NEITHER WITH YOU NOR WITHOUT YOU

In December of 1979, Truffaut, like a million of his countrymen, had been captivated by a series of five televised episodes on Antenne 2, Les Dames de la côte (The Ladies of the Coast), produced by Mag Bodard and directed by Nina Companeez. This historical saga covered a good part of the twentieth century through the fortunes and misfortunes of a French family. It had an illustrious cast -- Edwige Feuillère, Françoise Fabian, Martine Chevalier, Evelyne Buyle, and Francis Huster. The female lead was played by Fanny Ardant, a thirty-year-old stage actress who had had very few prior screen appearances. Laura Truffaut, who was vacationing in Paris at the time, recalls being with her father at Avenue Pierre 1er-de-Serbie when they saw the first episode of Les Dames de la côte. "I saw my father charmed the first time he saw Fanny Ardant on television; he was really bowled over." Confessing to "television love at first sight," Truffaut wrote to Ardant at the end of December, suggesting they meet at Les Films du Carrosse.

Their first meeting took place when Truffaut was getting ready to shoot The Last Métro. "The next film will be for you," he promised Ardant. They saw each other regularly thereafter, eating lunch together at the boulangerie, on the corner of rue Marbeuf and rue Robert-Etienne, one of the director's favorite spots. They discussed his next film, which was already being written, and got to know each other.

The daughter of a colonel in the cavalry, born in Saumur, Fanny Ardant first followed her father in his various missions around Europe, in Sweden, for instance, where Colonel Ardant was military attaché, then, in the sixties, in Monaco, where he was one of the advisers to Prince Rainer's personal guard. His daughter's education was in the pure aristocratic tradition, "à la Don Quixote", as Ardant would put it. Even though the family was not very wealthy, she lived in high style -- private schools, good French lycée abroad, formal balls, and horse races. At twenty, she followed a three-year course of study in political science in Aix-en-Provence, where she wrote a paper on surrealism and anarchy. She then went to live in Paris after a short stay in London. But in the mid-seventies, she was lured away from the university by the theater. After taking an acting course at the Ecole Perimoni, she started to get her first parts. She played Pauline in Corneille's Polyeucte, produced as part of the 1974 Festival du Marais in Paris; then she was cast in Montherlant's Le Maître de Santiago, Racine's Esther, Giraudoux's Electra, Paul Claudel's Tête d'or. Finally, in 1978, she was noticed in a television drama based on Balzac, Les Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (The Memoires of Two Young Newlyweds). The following year, Mag Bodard and Nina Companeez gave her the lead role in Les Dames de la côte.

On the evening of the César awards, January 31, 1981, Truffaut's first impression of the actress was reinforced. During the traditional supper at Fouquet's following the ceremony, Truffaut was surrounded by all the actors from The Last Métro: "Fanny Ardant came to join us, Gérard Depardieu and me, at our table. When I saw them together, it became plain to me that they were to be my lovers." He was referring to the lovers in the script that he had started working on "clandestinely." The desire to cast them together impelled him to speed up the preproduction work on this new film; he started drafting the dialogues daily and on weekends. Later, in talking about Fanny Ardant, Truffaut would admit that he had been seduced "by her large mouth, her deep voice and its unusual intonations, her big black eyes and her triangular face." He liked the vitality of her acting, her enthusiasm and humor, her "penchant for secrecy, her distant, slightly unsociable side, and, above all, her vibrancy."

........

The film (The Woman Next Door) fits in the category of Truffaut's happy shoots, like Jules and Jim and Mississippi Mermaid, made when the director was in love with the actress he was filming. As was his habit, Truffaut was secretive about his new affair. "François was extremely discreet," says Gérard Depardieu. "One night, coming home to the Hôtel du Commerce at around midnight, I was talking to the porter, as usual, when the elevator door opened and I saw François, who lived in town. He shut the door and I looked away as though I hadn't seen him, because I sensed his discomfort. What was he doing there? At first, I told myself that he had probably come to 'coach' Fanny. It was only later that I understood their relationship." This love and harmony was apparent in Truffaut's praise of his actress: "As soon as a scene is shot, her face lights up, she remains silent and breaks into a smile that seems to say: 'I am satiated, I am fulfilled, I am gratified.' "

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A SINGULAR COUPLE

François Truffaut's last great love reinstilled passion and intensity in his romantic life. After the editing of The Woman Next Door, he rented a large house not far from Paris, where, from the end of June to the end of August 1981, he hoped to spend what he called in a handwritten note "the FT/Fanny vacation in Fontainebleau." But Fanny Ardant wasn't free, for she was working for most of the summer in the Bordeaux region, on a made-for-television movie, Le Chef de famille (The Head of the Family), directed by Nina Companeez.

Fortunately, in mid-September, he was reunited with Fanny and they took several trips together over the next two months, promoting The Woman Next Door in the provinces and abroad. At the beginning of October, Fanny Ardant and François Truffaut presented The Woman Next Door at the New York Film Festival and stayed for a week at the Carlyle Hotel. They no sooner returned to Paris than they set off again for the United States, on November 4, 1981, for a longer stay -- first in Chicago, where they attended a tribute to Truffaut, then in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the couple stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Truffaut introduced Fanny to his Californian friends, among them Dido Renoir, who was charmed by the young French actress.

François Truffaut and Fanny Ardant formed a singular couple. By mutual agreement, they had decided not to live together and to keep their independence, even though they were practically neighbors in the sixteenth arrondissement. "I adore large families," said Fanny in Figaro Madame, "but for me love must remain illicit, with no ring on the finger. I also love large houses, but not couples. The priest's benediction is like signing a contract to get trapped! One shouldn't live together. It's so wonderful to have assignations and be like a guest in each other's house." At thirty, Fanny Ardant had arranged to live on the fringes. "Unconventional people like me often come from very strict, repressive families...because such families give you a fanatical taste for freedom," She lived alone with Lumir, her daughter born in 1975, named after the Claudel heroine in Crusts. She and Truffaut shared this "fanatical taste for freedom" and had the same sense of humor, a certain lightness, a pleasure in telling stories, a desire to work together, and a mutual admiration. They had in common a passionate love of reading. At Fanny's, there were books everywhere, a piano, and some prints adorning the white walls. They both loved Balzac, Proust, Miller and James; and Fanny also liked Julien Gracq, Jane Austen, Elsa Morante, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. They saw each other several times a week, in a restaurant, at the movies, at each other's house. Their quasi-illicit love began to mean everything to them.

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THE LAST VACATION

It was a rather bold decision on the part of A.A.A., the distribution company founded by Gérard Lebovici, to release Confidentially Yours! in the middle of the summer, on Wednesday, August tenth, in a deserted Paris, overrun by tourists. In the meantime, François Truffaut contemplated taking a vacation.  At the end of May (1983), he gave himself a few days off in Rome, where Fanny Ardant was finishing the shoot of Benvenuta, directed by the Belgian filmmaker André Delvaux.

........

Truffaut and Fanny Ardant left for a vacation on the Norman coast. It was there that Truffaut and Fanny Ardant settled in the beginning of July.

By then, it was no longer a secret to anyone close to the couple that Fanny was expecting a child, due in September 1983. Having recently turned fifty-one, Truffaut felt no great eagerness to become a father again, yet he didn't feel he had to justify himself vis-à-vis his daughters, Laura and Eva, who were initially somewhat upset on hearing the news.

Thanks to his heralded birth, he seemed to believe in a new start. His optimism even led him to forsake his usual secrecy and to tell his friends the news: "I won't be coming to New York this year," he wrote to Annette Insdorf in June 1983, "mainly because I'm expecting a baby; Fanny Ardant won't be coming either for the same reason!" Fanny Ardant wanted a second child, "a quasi-visceral desire," she confided to Figaro Madame in the spring of 1981. In this early summer of 1983, she felt happy, fulfilled: "The child that will turn my life upside down," she said.

........

On the morning of August 12, Gérard Depardieu was passing through Normandy with his daughter Julie, who was the same age as Fanny Ardant's daughter, Lumir. The two men discussed common projects. On the same day, Truffaut worked until late in the afternoon with Claude de Givray. But at dinner, he suddenly felt faint, "as though a firecracker had exploded in his head," de Givray recalls.

While Fanny Ardant closed the vacation house in Honfleur, François Truffaut was transferred at once by ambulance to Paris; at his own request, he was checked into the American Hospital in Neuilly and examined by Professor Bernard Pertuisé, an internationally known neurosurgeon.

The physicians at the American Hospital tried to reassure Truffaut about his condition. In his letters, Truffaut described "an aneurysm that will be lessened by opening my head,"  The word tumor  was never mentioned in his presence. But Professor Pertuisé did explain to Madeleine Morgenstern that Truffaut had a malignant tumor, a glioma, in the right frontal region of the brain, which had bled on the evening of August 12 and caused his malaise. The condition was incurable and terminal. François Truffaut had only a few months to live, a year at most.

Before his operation, Truffaut wanted to legally recognize his unborn child, but French law doesn't allow a child to be recognized prior to birth. Truffaut then considered marriage, but time was short. The surgery was scheduled for September 12, and Truffaut had to enter the clinic on the 10th.

One week after his surgery, on September 20, Truffaut was back in his apartment. On the 24th, in a paparazzo photo published "exclusively" in the France-Soir weekly supplement, he could be seen coming out of the hospital, looking tired and weak, his head completely shaved, supported by Madeleine Morgenstern and his servant Ahmed. Less than a week later, on September 28, Fanny Ardant gave birth to a baby girl named Joséphine, François Truffaut's third daughter.

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OBSERVING SILENCE

In the eighties, in France, cancer was still poorly understood, the word itself was still taboo. Truffaut himself seemed not to want to know the truth. And most of his immediate entourage, even Fanny Ardant, were not aware of just how seriously ill he was.

........

In the weeks following his release from the hospital, it was easiest for Truffaut to return to his own apartment; he gave up the idea of moving into a large apartment near Passy with Fanny Ardant. Fanny came every day, so he could see his little girl. But that year, the actress had a great deal of work. Two months after Joséphine's birth, she replaced Isabelle Adjani on short notice in Strindberg's Miss Julie, opposite Niels Arestrip. In spite of fatigue from his radiation sessions, Truffaut attended a performance of the play, and he was happy and proud of Fanny's triumph.

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THE DIMINISHED LIFE

In June (1984), Truffaut spent his days in his room, in peace and quiet. He made some summer plans, including spending a holiday in Brittany with Fanny Ardant and little Joséphine. Ardant had asked Claude de Givray to accompany her to the region around Roscoff to find a house to rent. But Truffaut could no longer travel. It was then that Fanny learned the truth.

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THE FAREWELL CEREMONY

On the afternoon of September 28, François Truffaut returned to the American Hospital, for his condition had suddenly worsened. He remained in the hospital for the last three weeks of his life, and he suffered a painful death. Fanny and Madeleine were by his bedside, and they were soon joined by Laura and Eva. He died on October 21, 1984, at 2:30 p.m.

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