By B.G.
Published
2 hours ago,
Update 2 hours ago
AFP/Fred Payet
On December 5, 2017, the death of the immense rocker shocked France. Almost 7 years later, the journalist Anne-Sophie Jahn recounts in a book (Grasset) the end of life and a little more about the one who will remain in the collective memory as the eternal idol of young people.
On December 5, 2017, more than six years ago, Johnny Hallyday died. France mourned its most legendary rocker. Today the journalist Anne-Sophie Jahn returns in a book entitled Johnny’s Last Days (Grasset), on his final hours on earth and also on the unique destiny of the man who in town was named Jean-Philippe Smet.
Dozens of biographical works have already tried to understand how the astonishing charisma of this Belgian artist was born who revealed himself to the world in 1957. At the time his pseudonym was still written Halliday, in honor of his mentor and model, Lee Halliday. Anne-Sophie Jahn wanted to go further by trying to discover the secrets of her extraordinary destiny which would lead her to dominate the French-speaking scene for 57 years.
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Johnny’s big secret lay, according to the biography, the good pages of which are published in Paris Match, in his energy and in a formidable spirit of resistance which pushed him to fight with all his strength the cancer which was inexorably diminishing him. To fight, he will confide his illness to his colleagues and friends. Patrick Bruel will remember this terrible confession made in spring 2017: “Well, I was found to have cancer. But I am well looked after. I’m fighting so that it’s just a bad memory.”.
Refusal to see David, Laura and Nathalie Baye
Johnny will love life until his last breath. Anne-Sophie Jahn recounts how he faced the events in 2017, where hope competes with despair: happy moments in Saint-Barth’ with his family and an attack of this evil that we dare not name during a concert with his Old Rascals always, Jacques Dutronc and Eddy Mitchell.
The journalist doesn’t want to hide anything. Not even Johnny’s incomprehensible behavior a few weeks, a few days before his disappearance. “ I don’t want to see them», he says to his wife while David, Laura and Nathalie Baye are on the doorstep. Laeticia, his last wife, wants to be the guardian of the temple. This is the thesis of the biographer who thinks that the latter will thus take revenge for the rocker’s deceptions.
*“The Last Days of Johnny”by Anne-Sophie Jahn (Grasset, 224 p., €19).
