http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6806429.ece
Matthew Campbell in Paris
August 23, 2009
THE son of Jean Seberg, the American actress and icon of France's
"new wave" cinema, has accused the FBI of fuelling the psychological
pressure that drove her to commit suicide with an overdose of drugs
and drink three decades ago.
"My mother felt persecuted," said Diego Gary, referring to a
"destabilisation campaign" against Seberg by the FBI on account of
her support for the Black Panthers, a far-left group dedicated to
promoting "black power" in America.
"There were moments when she was very afraid," he said in an
interview last week. "She hired two bodyguards to protect her because
she had received so many threats."
Seberg is best remembered as the elfin American called Patricia who
befriends a gang-ster played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc
Godard's 1959 film Breathless, a key work of the new wave in French cinema.
Subsequently Seberg attracted the attention of J Edgar Hoover, the
FBI director, through her political activism. There were suspicions
of foul play when her naked body was found wrapped in a blanket in
the back of her Renault not far from her Paris flat in September 1979.
However, Gary, son of Seberg and Romain Gary, a revered French
novelist, does not believe she was murdered. She apparently took a
massive overdose of barbiturates and the quantity of alcohol in her
blood alone might have been fatal. She had previously made several
attempts at suicide.
"She left me a note that was definitely in her handwriting," said
Gary, whose book about the tragic family story his father also
killed himself appeared recently under the title S. or Hope of
Life. "She said that she could no longer live with her nerves. "
In the years following her death it emerged that the FBI had Seberg
under surveillance and her telephone was tapped. The actress knew
that she was being watched but her friends at the time thought she
was "paranoid", Gary recalled.
Seberg was devastated when an American columnist published an item,
planted by the FBI, claiming that she was pregnant from an affair
with a Black Panther. She delivered the child prematurely and the
baby died four days later. She ordered a "glass coffin", said Gary,
so that people could see the child was white.
Gary says that as a child he resented the way that Ahmed Kemal, one
of the Panthers, monopolised his mother's attention. One day, aged
seven, at lunch with Seberg, he hit Kemal over the head with a
candelabra. "He came towards me with his fists raised," Gary recalls.
"He was shouting at me, 'I'm gonna kill this little bastard!'"
Gary took refuge in the next room and Seberg had to intervene to stop
Kemal hitting him: "He's just a kid, don't hurt him, don't hurt him
please!" he remembers her screaming.
He believes that his mother, from Iowa, was manipulated by the
Panthers, who extracted large sums of money from her.
"She allowed them to play on her guilt about being a white, Lutheran
cinema star from the impoverished Midwest." He described the Panthers
as being "more thugs and pimps than apostles of freedom and equality
for people of colour".
As a child Gary spent more time with Eugenia, the nanny whom he
called "Maman", than either of his parents. "You have little time for
a child when you are a star travelling from one set to the next
around the world," he says.
He will never forget how his father, winner of the Goncourt literary
prize, announced at a press conference that he was divorcing Seberg,
citing her affair with Clint Eastwood, Seberg's co-star in the
musical Paint Your Wagon.
The young Gary became his parents' go-between. Staying in her
apartment was a traumatic experience for the teenager. "Sometimes,
she would sit there talking to the refrigerator," says Gary,
recalling his mother's slide into insanity. He remembers her bursting
into his room at 5am one day to ask whether she could borrow a pair
of his shoes.
Another time she woke him up when drunk to introduce him to a woman
friend. "You see, I'm being picked up by lesbians now, what do you think?"
A year after Seberg's death, Gary's father shot himself in the head,
leaving a note saying only, "Nothing to do with Jean". Gary inherited
money, hired a butler and studied literature. He worked for a while
asa television producer. The family's painful legacy was too much for
him, though, and he drowned his sorrows in drink.
He toured the brothels of Europe and said, at the age of 47, that he
had finally found happiness in the arms of a Lithuanian hostess he
met in Barcelona. They married and are expecting a daughter.
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