The first thing is that Jane Birkin does not sound very French. That she is not at all French, actually, doesn’t much figure as a fact, not compared with the truth of her life in the collective nostalgia. Everybody knows Jane Birkin as the princess of ’70s Paris; the girl that held onto Serge Gainsbourg, ne plus ultra of French louche-bags, the longest; the one with the Hermes bag named after her (well, the other one). Her famous songs are French. Her films, not quite so famous, are French. When you imagine Jane Birkin speaking it is with a violety, Franglaisey smoke puff of a voice. But that was a long time ago and now she’s on the phone, not sex-breathing, not seeming to breathe at all, just talking gaily and quickly in her sweet crisp English way. She’s apologizing. We were to speak earlier, but it was her manager, Philippe or something, who rang at 6:30 a.m. EST. Philippe informed me with cold politesse that Ms. Birkin had missed her flight and was taking the train from Holland, so we would have to speak at 9:30. I said of course. Strange things often happen in dreams. When I woke at 9 a.m. I remembered the interview was real and got instantly super-awake with panic. What could I ask? I knew everything about her, but had no idea what she was like. 
A lot like your cool aunt who got spiritual after the divorce and grows her own herbs in New Mexico, it turns out. “I love travelling and when things go wrong I find it even more exciting,” she is saying with a delight that can only come from not worrying about one’s own expenses, but is pretty irresistible nonetheless. “And so today was a complete fulfillment.” And then: “What I love most about touring is the people. The constant surprise of people. People’s curiosity, people’s interest, people caring. I always think I can change people’s opinion if you just talk to them, and if you learn things from others.” And later: “I’ve always just believed that you should take life as it comes along. Usually the best things have happened because the tram broke down and you were picked up by someone else who took another route and it made life more interesting. I used to wait for the ferry at Isle of Wight with my mum and when we would miss it I would think, oh good, now we can have an adventure.” Well, hasn’t she had them? All of them? Married at 17, had a baby at 18, appeared in Blow-Up at 20, found love and fame in the same year, recorded “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus,” got banned by the Pope, played Brigitte Bardot’s girlfriend, posed nude so much it didn’t even seem posed, had three kids, kept her looks, made dozens of films and 20 albums, and never stopped loving Serge Gainsbourg. And also, does not seem to be tired. And even now, in the middle of her 30-city “Serge Gainsbourg and Jane via Japan” tour, after her ten-hour train ride from Holland to her “little home” in the fifth arrondissement, she just sounds happy someone wants her to talk. 
Talk she does. Birkin’s voice, though not that imagined coo, is lovely still; she must think so too. If uninterrupted, she will keep talking, rambling down some Champs de Souvenir in her mind. When I do presume to ask a question, she seems startled. She goes on for almost an hour, and since she has so much to say and such a thrilling way of speaking, as though everything is an old secret she’s just now remembered, and also because she’s Jane Birkin, I listen. But had I quietly put down my phone and gone out for a cigarette, a glass of wine and a whole pizza, I’m not sure she would have noticed. She talks about her causes (Amnesty International, for one) and her travels to places like Burma, Sarajevo, and Japan to help with disaster relief. She talks about her three accomplished daughters–Kate Barry, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Lou Doillon–but especially the youngest (and the one who looks most like her), Lou, because the brilliant actor Charlotte “has had so much” and “now it is Lou’s year.” Mostly, though, she talks about Serge. Always Serge. Asked what her favourite song of hers is, she says, “That Serge wrote for me?” No, I say. That she wrote herself. Surprised, she names “A Grace de Toi.” And of Serge’s songs, then, her favourite? “It would be ‘Les Dessous Chis.’ It is the most chic song that could be written about a separation. That really is him, not me. I think of with what elegance he managed to do our separation and write this Baby Alone in Babylone album and how difficult it was for him, and how if you’re feeling miserable you might as well get it out in a song, or twelve songs as it happens. Somehow we could both be proud of something we produced out of this misery. After which I was determined to get on a stage so that he would see me sing, because he always thought that I couldn’t, really.” This is the side of Jane Birkin–rather, of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, which is, after all her solo accomplishments, how she is most remembered–that must have irked second-wave feminists. Serge called Jane his “fragile half.” When she wanted to sing a Leo Ferre song, he refused. (“He said ‘you don’t need other people, you’ve got me,’” she recalls. “Then he said I could sing songs by Americans and dead people.”) He hated everything she did without him, held her jealously close while drinking himself further and further away, and made her–or at least urged her to–pose naked, chained to a radiator. Easy enough to think she was shackled. But how do we know she didn’t like being naked and chained to a radiator? (Let she who’s never begged to be tied up cast the first stone.) Birkin’s willingness to expose paved the way for two generations of S&M-loving starlets: Madonna, Britney, Gaga, Rihanna. They’ve all been called pro-sex feminist icons; too bad none of them look much like they’re getting off. At least Birkin not only looked, but so famously sounded, like she was. 
As for the rest of it, who can say? In Birkin’s recollections–tendererer even than recollections tend to be–she wasn’t captive to a man, but to their love. “It was a thirty-year relationship that turned into friendship and started with not passion, but because he was heartbroken over Brigitte Bardot, and I was broken over John Barry [her first husband], and slowly, slowly we made the bandages,” she says. “We thought it would be forever, but we did last 13 years and that’s not bad. You have that love and faithfulness once in your life.” For what it’s worth, she has lived alone since Serge’s death. That’s some Titanic shit right there. Birkin turns 65 in two weeks. She has long since cut her hair short and renounced the $9000 bag named after her, wearing instead a leather pouch slung around the waist of her beloved mens cord trousers (“my agent, John Wood, took them off his body and gave them to me three years ago, and everybody asks me where I got them!”). She still likes YSL trousers and Charvet shirts, but says, proudly, that she’s happiest in her “old stuff.” When she’s not touring the world singing Serge’s songs, crusading for humanitarian causes, or rehearsing for the one-woman play Wajdi Mouawad wrote for her (La Sentinelle, to be performed again in Ottawa early next year), she prefers being home with her dogs and cooking roast ducks and potatoes for her family. She lives in awe of her daughters and how they mother. “They fix up everything and they’re never nasty to their ex-husbands and they pick up the kids at 7:30 in the morning,” she says. “I wouldn’t even get home til 6:30 in the morning, from the restaurants, with Serge. I was a great deal of fun, but I don’t think my daughters thought so.” 
I ask Jane Birkin what she misses most about being young. For a second I think she is going to say she’s still young, which wouldn’t, by the sounds of her, be wrong. Even over the phone she exudes that curious mix of frank sex and pure romance, of heartbreak and innocence, that stares back at you from her cornflower-blue eyes in old photographs. But no. “Nothing,” she says. “I didn’t have much talent at 20. I was just a very pretty English girl.” And still she cannot believe her luck, all her adventures, cannot believe that when the tram breaks down there is always somebody to pick her up. “That people still ask me to do things is incredible,” she says. “That they ask me to be in films and sing at these concerts. How lucky that they ask me to do it and not someone else.” But of course, if there were anyone quite like her, they would have. Jane Birkin sings Serge Gainsbourg via Japan at The Great Hall on December 7. Tickets from $34.50 available online, at Rotate This, and at Soundscapes.
