Marisa Meltzer, IT GIRL: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked Live here at the Whitby Hotel in New York City, where we are having season two of amazing guests coming on in person to talk about their fabulous books and today we have Marissa Meltzer, who has written
[0:18]The Life and Legacy of Jane Birken and Marissa was on my podcast already once before, and it is to light happy back. Welcome so happy to be back. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here.
[0:29]Okay, we've gone from Weight Watchers, the topic of your last book, and really the founder and genetic and all that, but and you had another book, and now we're back to it girl.
[0:40]Well, why Jane Birken? How do you pick your topics? Why this book now? Well, Jane Birken is kind of at the nexus of all my nerdiest interests in a lot of ways. I was always for better or for worse, a francophile. I love music and film, and of course I've spent a lot of my career writing about fashion, and so it just seemed like I knew enough about her life, but I knew that I didn't know enough that there was be a lot to uncover.
[1:11]And, you know, just wanted to explore a woman who had been kind of seen as a muse her whole life, or whose name is more famous as bag than as a person.
[1:24]And yeah.
[1:26]So, to get a bag from pomest, did they give you one? To see if it's for the pomest is no, or this is not giving anyone a bag.
[1:35]My hope is that I don't expect a free bag from anyone, but my hope is sometime on this book tour. Someone will be like, I was going to sell my bag to the real real, but I'll just give it to you for like a good deal, so I don't have to deal with the intake process or something like that.
[1:51]Like, I want a hotline on a, on a, like a used black burkin or something like that.
[1:57]Anybody have a hotline?
[1:58]Yeah.
[1:59]And he's a market for it right here.
[2:02]Yeah.
[2:03]Yeah.
[2:04]I was really surprised by mostly everything in Jane Birkin's life, and how many dark moments that she had.
[2:11]I mean, she's someone who was with three different men, had three children with three different men.
[2:16]She had a lot of loss. She started with a terrible boarding school experience, which I feel like infused the rest of her life with this feeling other.
[2:26]I think having banished from her house, maybe just give a little bit of a backstory of her life before she became famous and then how that even really happened.
[2:35]Yeah.
[2:36]So she was born in England to like a pretty upper class, upper middle class family.
[2:42]And her mom was a famous stage actress named Judy Campbell, who was one of Noel Coward's muses.
[2:49]And her mom was beautiful in a very different way than Jane Birkin once.
[2:54]Jane Birkin was kind of boyish, skinny, flat-chested, very much the 60s look, but her mom was kind of old Hollywood looking and glamorous.
[3:03]She always from the start felt like she was kind of like not pretty because her mom was this kind of like big personality glamorous woman.
[3:12]And yeah, she was sent to boarding school like everyone in her family and many people of that class and she hated it.
[3:20]And she was always trying to get like hospitalized to be kicked out like eating rocks and scratching it herself.
[3:27]She was really unhappy and her parents finally let her leave.
[3:32]And she was, she had a kind of rocky team here.
[3:35]She didn't really know what she was doing with herself.
[3:37]She went to Paris as kind of like a finishing school kind of thing and decided to try acting when she was, you know, probably like 16 or 17.
[3:48]And she was fairly successful in a small way. She was in some plays.
[3:52]A small role in that movie blow up. She was in this movie, the neck and sort of all of these kind of hot young movies of the moment.
[4:00]So she was an hit girl in the 60s and she married.
[4:05]She started dating James Bond's composer, John Berry, who was this like hot 30-something guy and she was 17.
[4:13]And they married when she was 18 and they divorced almost right away but still, you know, had a kid.
[4:19]And so she was, you know, 20, 21 years old figuring out what to do with her life with a baby and a divorce and feeling kind of a mess and got offered this role in a European film in Paris with this guy of Serge Gansberg, who she knew was a big star in France, but she didn't know who she was.
[4:40]And she moved to Paris for work and she never moved back.
[4:45]And that's kind of the story of the beginning of her life.
[4:49]And who is a comfortable hit girl today?
[4:53]Maybe like a Chloe 70, Alexa Chung, I think, you know, in some ways you could also say like,
[5:04]Haley Bieber is an hit girl because she managed to straddle different kind of areas of fame and stuff like that.
[5:13]It's a very different era because of course Jane Birkin was doing all of this for the internet before social media.
[5:20]But it's that combination, I think, of an hit girl is like, you can't call yourself one.
[5:26]Someone has to bestow you the term, so the term on you.
[5:31]And then, you know, I also think it's sort of best if your career is hard to describe.
[5:37]Like, well, she kind of acts and she kind of sings and she designed clothes and, you know, multi-hyphenists are art girls.
[5:44]So we're not going to go on Instagram and find it some in bio.
[5:47]Like, it girl.
[5:48]That would be perfect.
[5:49]That's a tell.
[5:50]That's a tell.
[5:51]That's a tell your manufacturing out.
[5:53]Yeah.
[5:54]Why should we care?
[5:56]Why?
[5:57]What is it about Jane Birkin aside from the bag and her fabulous life?
[6:00]What is it that makes it her so relevant to us today?
[6:04]Well, there is this level of glamour which is fun to read about, of course.
[6:08]You know, she was friends with the Beatles and she had the most famous bag of the world named after her.
[6:13]And, you know, a lot of that.
[6:16]But beyond that kind of glossy outer self, she was a woman dealing with a really complicated and sad life, you know, dealing with children with drug addiction,
[6:29]dealing with domestic violence, suicide attempts, depression, falling madly in love with someone having affairs, professional jealousy.
[6:41]You know, like she was on this grand stage in scale.
[6:46]And yet it was still these sorts of things that any person, any woman deals with in some way or another in their lives.
[6:56]And I think that, you know, that humanizes her and, you know, shows a portrait of a very nuanced human being towards the end of her life.
[7:09]And she became a grandmother at 39.
[7:11]Yes.
[7:12]Yeah.
[7:13]She had kids young and then her kids had kids young.
[7:16]And yeah.
[7:17]So she was, yeah.
[7:19]She had children everywhere.
[7:21]She also thought about having another kid when she was like in her 50s.
[7:25]So she didn't.
[7:27]But she's, you know, but one of her daughters has like a 22 year old and a two year old.
[7:32]So yeah, they're just, they're French.
[7:35]Yeah.
[7:36]They're European.
[7:38]But tragically, her daughter Kate ended up dying early.
[7:43]And I mean, early.
[7:44]It's all early.
[7:45]But she ended up passing away quite a young age found in the street after a history of drug addiction and other battles.
[7:52]And you write beautifully in the book about that was it for her.
[7:57]Like she was never the same.
[7:58]Jane was never the same after.
[8:00]How could you be?
[8:01]But that her, her life and even in the public eye and everything else just took such a turn.
[8:06]Can you talk about that turning point in her life?
[8:08]Yeah.
[8:09]That was, you know, I think that her daughter Kate Barry, her oldest child, started dealing with, you know, alcohol and drug problems.
[8:19]Quite young, you know, 14, 15 years old.
[8:23]And Jane Birken had raised her somewhat uncommentially.
[8:27]She was young and she was going out.
[8:29]And at one point she holds her, I think her 12th birthday party at midnight at a nightclub.
[8:34]So they can all go dancing.
[8:36]And so she was exposed to an adult world, which is not an excuse.
[8:41]But she started dealing with these addiction issues and depression very young.
[8:46]And then, you know, spent 30 years in and out of rehab.
[8:52]And sometimes doing okay, sometimes not.
[8:54]So this was a very long family issue.
[8:58]And she died in uncertain circumstances, falling off of a balcony, whether it was by suicide or from being, you know, inebriated or on drugs.
[9:11]It's no one's ever really known.
[9:13]And I think at a certain point the family was like, it doesn't matter.
[9:16]It's a tragedy.
[9:17]So that is when it's pretty much when Jane Birken stops acting.
[9:22]It's when she stops writing in her diary.
[9:25]And right around the same time, she was diagnosed with leukemia, which she spends about 15 years in treatment for in and out.
[9:36]And so her life just became unspeakably hard.
[9:41]The love of her life, Serge Gansburg, had died maybe 10, 15 years before.
[9:47]Her father died a few days after Serge.
[9:50]Her mother had passed away at an older age, but still she was very close to her family.
[9:56]And so it just, you know, her nephew died.
[9:58]It was like this series.
[10:00]of every few years someone very close to her died and then cancer and I think that she was
[10:08]just bereft and the beautiful thing is she kept touring even though her doctors hated her
[10:15]for doing it and kept saying she could get, you know, deep vein thrombosis or various
[10:20]other things but I think that the, you know, being in touch with her creativity and with
[10:27]her fans really was a life sort of blood for her but at a certain point I, you know,
[10:34]I think that the illness became unbearable and it seems from all the evidence that, you
[10:41]know, she had some sort of assisted suicide or decided, you know, that her suffering and treatment
[10:48]of this, you know, incurable cancer was enough. She was 76.
[10:53]So don't we feel a little odd toting around bags with her name on it? I mean this is a
[10:59]complicated woman with a lot of pain in her life and yes she was carrying the first crochet
[11:05]bag and setting all these trends but is this really like the right thing to do who has right
[11:11]over their names and doesn't it raise a lot of questions about it?
[11:16]For sure. I mean I think one thing you can do to kind of put it into perspective is the
[11:21]Birken came out I think the exact same year as Air Jordan and look at all the money that
[11:26]Michael Jordan has made off of his name and his business partnership with Nike but of course with
[11:33]fashion with women it's very different, you know, you're a muse. You are someone that someone
[11:39]takes inspiration from and you're just so lucky to have your name be put on something and I don't
[11:44]even think that that's a bad thing. It's just that she, it was a different approach, you know,
[11:49]it was kind of a happy accident instead of going in and kind of saying, you know, this is who I am,
[11:55]this is what I'm worth and that sort of thing. I think it's okay to carry the bag because she wore it,
[12:01]you know, she wore them all her life and she had five total and she destroyed them. She would put
[12:08]like, you know, doctors without borders and uniseff stickers. She's very politically minded and
[12:15]would keep a nail clipper on a chain to one because she liked to keep her nails short and,
[12:21]you know, she loved the bag and used it and it was part of her day to day life and she,
[12:27]the thing is I think people are much more wound up and unhappy about the Birken bag one way or
[12:33]another than she was. She had a very carefree relationship with it in some ways I think it was like
[12:39]the least complicated thing of her life. For most people would be the most complicated,
[12:43]most exciting, you know, thing that ever happened to them and for her, it's barely,
[12:51]she barely ever mentions it, you know, except for kind of later in her life when people keep
[12:56]wanting to ask her about it. And maybe just explain, I know you talk about it in the book,
[13:00]the chance meeting on our plane where she tells somebody from Hermes, like, you should really
[13:05]make a bigger bag. Like, yeah, lots of pockets. Like, what can you do? Yeah, she was on a flight from
[13:11]London to Paris and it's like a meat cute and a rom-com. She had been carrying a literal basket
[13:17]for years as a bag and like everything is falling out of it. And the guy who is her seatmate
[13:23]is sort of like, you should get a bag with a zipper at least. And she sort of says, well, when
[13:29]Hermes makes a bag like that, I'll buy one and he goes, I am Hermes because he was part of the
[13:36]Hermes family and was basically like the equivalent of the CEO. And Jane Birkin was actually a
[13:42]very good artist, really good at sketches. And they got to kind of sketching what her ideal bag
[13:49]would be. It was kind of an elevated diaper bag because she had a baby at the time and was trying
[13:54]to tout all her stuff. And she was the kind of woman that would keep a Dostoevsky novel and lipstick
[14:01]and cigarettes and, you know, change in a passport, another passport, you know, all with her
[14:08]who can't relate is, you know, city people. She didn't have a car necessarily. So Hermes has a
[14:14]long tradition of making custom bags for special clients. I don't know how to do it. So please don't
[14:21]ask me. I don't think you have to be kind of not a mere mortal. And they made it for her and they
[14:27]liked it so much. They said, we want to produce it and we want to call it the Birkin. And so it's a
[14:32]very cute story, but then it became the most famous bag probably in the world. Eventually they
[14:40]instead of her being paid that they donated about 40,000 euros or so a year or two charities of her
[14:46]choice. But considering that the cheapest Birkin is probably around $15,000 right now, it was about
[14:53]$6,000 when it came out in the 80s, which is, you know, a lot of money or who would have been
[14:59]about that much. It's not that much money. They weren't donating that much. So, you know, it's a
[15:05]it's a fascinating story. And how tell me about how you became this interested in her and how
[15:11]you have picked all your subjects to date and what you get out of doing deep dives into other
[15:17]people's lives. I mean, someday I might write about men, but they've always been women so far.
[15:23]I love women. And I love someone who is emblematic of a certain time period. Like I was on
[15:30]your podcast from my book, This Is Big, Came Out About Gene Knightage, who founded Weight Watchers
[15:35]and she was a Jewish woman in the outer boroughs in the mid 60s and 70s. And I love having a world,
[15:44]especially one that I that I wasn't in, but could kind of understand to recreate and to feel like
[15:50]you're living in and you're eating the weird like two hot dogs, but no ketchup and, you know,
[15:57]diet that she's been figuring. I don't know how I said a lot of points. So maybe she wasn't eating
[16:00]that. This is pre-point. So she never, yeah, no, the first, yeah, she's also stuck to the original
[16:06]diet. I think her whole life, she never converted points to confusing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also, of
[16:14]course, they were called Frankfurters. No, that's yeah. But um, anyway, we're talking about with the
[16:18]points. Wait. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go to Weight Watchers. Yeah. Okay. So you can all admit,
[16:23]I was a leader for a while by the way. She was. This is one of my favorite things about Zoe. Yeah.
[16:28]Little known fact. Yeah. Well, someday I will try to bring her back from the dead. She
[16:33]can talk about it's not big with us, but before it. But so yeah, I like people with
[16:39]interesting personalities. I like people who women who seem maybe like I can understand them a
[16:46]little bit. Maybe it's a city I've lived in, but who are also fundamentally different from me.
[16:51]And then I just love research. It's my favorite thing. So for this book, it was like, oh, twist my arm.
[16:59]I guess I should go live in Paris for two months. And, you know, the building I was living in
[17:06]being sold. So I put all my stuff in storage and took my dog with me. And we flew to Paris for a
[17:13]few months. And I, you know, went to private archives and interviewed people and all of the
[17:20]magazine collections, reading everything. I speak French. So I was able to, you know,
[17:26]listen to and read old interviews. And, you know, just kind of as much as I can. And some of it
[17:32]is a little bit like a puzzle where one person introduces you to someone else who introduced you
[17:38]to someone else. And so that's what it was for a few months. And then I kind of take all of that
[17:43]information and then start thinking deeply about it and shaping it into a narrative and kind of
[17:49]thinking how would I tell this story to my best friends at dinner? And so what are you working on now?
[17:56]Do you have a new topic? I don't. I'm very open. Yeah, I would love to do another biography,
[18:02]but, you know, it's all about finding the right person. I mean, you could call Chloe
[18:07]Syvinge to see what happens. Too young. My right her own memoir. Yeah, too much. She's a little bit
[18:13]older than me. But yeah, we'll take your ideas later. We'll give you a finder's fee. No, no, it's
[18:22]fine. Thank you. So after doing all this research on Jane Birkin, what is the most important thing
[18:30]you feel like you've taken away from her life? What have you learned and has it affected how you
[18:35]live your own life? Yeah, I've thought about it a lot. I think one is that everyone's life has
[18:43]tragedy. Everyone's life has beautiful, you know, high points and that connecting and
[18:51]understanding that kind of universality is good for all of us. But the other thing is that I can be
[18:59]kind of reserved. I think there's a lot of pressure on women to not be too big, too bold, especially
[19:06]in their romantic lives, to not be too dramatic or needy. And Jane Birkin was not concerned about
[19:13]any of that. She literally dove into the send ones to like make a point in an argument. She wasn't
[19:19]afraid to have a big shouting match in public. That is not me. I don't think it will become me,
[19:25]but there was a little bit of me that allowed myself while I was dating people and just, you know,
[19:31]kind of to be myself and to give myself permission to just be like, yeah, I'm a person with
[19:38]needs or like I can have this argument and I don't always have to seem composed and like I'm,
[19:45]you know, I don't want to be crazy or anything like that. And I think just a little bit of that
[19:50]craziness that sort of, you know, European drama was good for me. I think could be good for a lot
[19:57]of us. There's some mean really, really empowering in it.
[20:00]that I don't think we're told enough to just, yeah, let yourself go. Be a little loose.
[20:06]Love it. Yeah. Live like you have Dostevsky in your bag, along with the passport and see what
[20:13]happens. Yeah, yes. Marissa, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for teaching us
[20:19]that you did, girl. Thank you. Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi,
[20:25]formerly momstone have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend,
[20:30]leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much.
[20:36]Go and buy the books.