Tin Pan Allee: Frere Johnny

TIN PAN ALLÉE

From Cannes to Calais, he has caused tumult and bloodshed. Hoods in Paris, inspired by the sounds from his lips, tore three subway cars apart in his honor. But the words that provoked riot and rampage were not, as one might expect, Algerian battle cries. They were “itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini,” sung by Johnny Hallyday, France’s first and only authentic rock ‘n’ roller, the Elvis Presley of Thither Gaul.

Despite his Anglo-exotic surname, Johnny Hallyday is thoroughly French, and his fans easily outnumber De Gaulle’s. The highest-paid popular singer on the Continent ($1,000 a night), he is the idol of a range of foot stompers including old burghers, young nobility, teen-aged renegades from Paris’ fashionable 16th arrondissement, and black-jacketed teddy boys (blousons noirs). More than 2,500,000 of his records have sold in the past year, a phenomenon in France, where a 45-r.p.m. single costs $2. This week, he begins a feature movie called Les Parisiennes (written by Roger Vadim, the man who made Bardot), in which he will be up to his hips in nymphettes, doing le twist.

Counterpoint & Cowpunching. Tall and blond, Hallyday comes on stage in a prim dark blue suit, picks at a pink guitar, swings his jelly hips, pokes his microphone suggestively at girls in the audience, and shouts: “Je cherche une fille!”

“Je cherche une fille!” the crowd roars back, and plainclothesmen throughout the hall go up onto the balls of their feet for fear the next quiver may start World War III. Singing easily, about half the time in English, he is more reserved than Presley (“I used to flop down on the floor, but I stopped that because I didn’t think it was respectable”); but his diction is remarkably similar: somehow, in French, he has acquired a unique hillbilly accent.

Until recently, his French fans actually thought he was a transplanted U.S. yokel. Partly through pressagentry, partly through pure myth, he was described in the French press as the 18th offspring of a poor Oklahoma homesteader. As a youth, he had played the guitar, punched cattle, and studied counterpoint by candlelight. And so on to Paris, where, the story had it, he was sending home his hard-earned francs to his schizophrenic mother in the Dust Bowl.

200 Years at Yale. On the assumption that someone, somewhere, believed the story, Hallyday called a press conference shortly after his 18th birthday last spring and told the truth. He was born in Paris of a French mother and a Belgian father, and his name is Jean-Philippe Smet. After his parents separated, he was reared from age six by his aunt, wife of an American vaudeville hoofer named Lee Hallyday. With his foster parents, he traveled the world from Cairo to Mexico City, eventually joining their song and dance act.

Pale, better looking than Elvis Presley, he drinks nothing stronger than milk and could be a U.S. college freshman. And despite all his rock and riot, he has received critical praise that Elvis Presley would be unlikely to get even if he spent 200 years at the Yale School of Music. “In the domain of modern music,” the music critic of the respected cultural weekly Arts has written, “Johnny Hallyday has raised several original points. He is probably the best abstract singer the world has ever known.”