When Bob met Françoise
I guess this is why it was called “The Swinging Sixties.” Things always get tricky when you mistake an ideal for the real, falling in love with the former whilst having no idea about relating to the latter. Bob Dylan had written a poem to her and put it on the back of 1964's “Another Side of Bob Dylan.”
Françoise and Dylan met just the once, May 1966, when Dylan performed at the Olympia, Paris. Having noticed that Françoise was in the audience, Dylan refused to go back on stage to perform the second half unless she came to see him in his dressing room. “It was surreal, but I went.”
As she recalls, “the audience was getting restless and screaming and shouting for him to come back - it was getting quite violent actually - so I went backstage and met him. I wasn't aware of all the drugs and everything but I had this bad feeling about him. He was so thin. He was very frail. He really seemed to be sick. He wasn't well in himself. I honestly thought he was at death's door.”
She wasn't impressed: “the concert was poor.” “He looked very thin and sickly, which may explain why the concert was so bad.”
Later on, Bob invited her to his suite in the Four Seasons Hotel George V, where he played her the early pressings of "Just Like a Woman" and "I Want You,” before they had been released.
“He took me to his hotel room after inviting me to a show in Paris, and played me two tracks he hadn't yet released, I Want You and Just Like a Woman, but he wasn't a very attractive man, and didn't seem well in himself.”
“I was delighted! But he wasn't in love with me, he was in love with my image, which is different.”
“He looked even worse than he did backstage. So thin, so pale, so strange. I honestly thought he did not have long to live.”
It was put to her that his intentions could hardly have been clearer. “I know,” she responded, hooting with laughter, “but I was too busy listening intently to the songs, which sounded like something entirely different to anything I had heard before. Plus, I was so impressed and petrified to meet him. Maybe if he had sung the songs to me, I would have got it.”
Some people really do seem to need things spelling out in large block capital letters. Whatever it was Bob was trying to say, she totally missed it and carried on listening to the records.
“I had no interest in him as a man, only as an artist,'' she says.
“It was truly a shock to see him,” she says, still looking perturbed after all these years.
“They were new songs then - can you imagine the thrill? When he came to Paris not so long ago, he still asked for me - or at least that's what I read in the newspapers. I am too afraid to go and say hello now. He probably remembers me as I was."
She tells a remarkable story.
In 2018 an American couple made contact with her after years of trying. Back in the 60s they had owned a café where Dylan used to go daily to compose lyrics. They told her that he had left behind some typewritten drafts, and two of them were letters about her, which they handed over to her. “So, this is how, only a year or so ago, I realise that in the early 60s, Bob Dylan maybe really had a romantic fixation on me – as only young people can have.”
"... I was very moved. This was a young man, a very romantic artist, who had a fixation on somebody only from a picture. You know how very young people are... I realised it had been very important for him."
Asked whether she would reveal anything of what Bob wrote to her, she says. “Oh, no, no. Never could I do that. I can say that the two drafts are very moving, but I cannot reveal what they say. Also I don’t understand everything of what he has written. I do think, from the poem he wrote, which I did not take too seriously at the time, and now these letters, that I had quite a place in his mind at that time and even in his heart. I think maybe I was very serious for him. And, it moves me very much.”
In an interview in which she reveals her favourite songs, Françoise selected Bob Dylan's “Just Like a Woman.”
“Dylan has composed and recorded a lot of marvelous songs, but this one is really moving. When he played his songs for me [in a hotel room in 1966] he seemed very shy, and I was very shy too, so we didn’t say anything to each other. At the time, my English was worse than it is today, so I didn’t really understand the words for “Just Like a Woman.” I only understood, “You make love just like a woman/Then you ache just like a woman/But you break just like a little girl,” which was moving to me, very sentimental. He was impressed with me, but not by the singer; by the girl, I think. He had a kind of romantic fixation on a photo of me, but I didn’t take it too seriously at that time. Recently, I got two drafts of letters written by him for me, and I finally realized that he was very serious about this fixation when he was very young. It moved me deeply when I read those letters.”
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