All the appropriate titles—Three's Company, One Day at a Time, What's
Happening—have been preempted. So suffice it to say that this is about
actress Charlotte Rampling, 31, and recall that when last heard from
(PEOPLE, Feb. 3, 1975) she was fresh from choosing press agent Brian
Southcombe over male model Randall Lawrence, thus breaking up their
London ménage à trois. Charlotte was also saying she had had Brian's
baby "to keep us together."
Since then the green-eyed British colonel's daughter has
replaced hapless Southcombe with a new man: Jean-Michel Jarre, 29, a
celebrated French composer of electronic music.
They met in May 1976 at dinner in a friend's restaurant, Chez
Nano, in St.-Tropez. Rampling and Southcombe were living nearby in
apparent bliss with their son, Barnaby. Sampling the fondue Chez Nano
that balmy evening, Southcombe, a New Zealander public relations
consultant who helped guide Charlotte's career, could hardly have
dreamed that in less than a week he would be saying goodbye to his
partner of 11 years and wife of four.
"After that meal," says Jarre, from a sofa in Charlotte's
rambling apartment in the fashionable Eighth Arrondissement, "the next
time we were together was two days later here in Paris. After that there
was no need for further discussion. We have been together since that
time."
They went public early in their affair, appearing together at
the Cannes film festival where Charlotte was a judge. Jarre slept in her
room, and whenever they went out an avalanche of photographers pursued
them. Rampling was under heavy career pressure at the time. With an
uncertain record (Georgy Girl was her best-remembered credit), she had
starred in the sadomasochistic Night Porter, then rejected "a variety of
extraordinary women's roles—perverse, degenerate, frightening." Three
roles she did play added little to her professional stature. One was
Jackpot, with Richard Burton as co-star, which ran out of money after 70
minutes of film were in the can. The second was Farewell, My Lovely, a
humdrum private-eye film with Robert Mitchum. This year she appeared
with Richard Harris in a whale epic, Orca, which bellied up.
And yet today, eight months after bearing Jarre's child, David—a
half brother for Barnaby, now 4, and Jarre's 3-year-old daughter Emilie
by his estranged wife—Charlotte seems undisturbed by her flagging
career. Though she is pale, the chain-smoking and nervous foot twitching
that once characterized her are gone.
Is this new demeanor the result of the change in partners? (Her
divorce is final. Jarre's from a Paris public relations woman is not.)
"I can't begin to explain," she says. "I could write a whole book about
it if you want, but it concerns so many different elements, all mixed
together..." Her voice trails off as she gropes for a summarizing
phrase. "It comes out with certain results that I can't begin to tell
you, really. Perhaps it's something that even I haven't absorbed yet."
(For his part, Southcombe says, "I still love Charlotte and I'd have her
back tomorrow if she'd come. But it seems to be over.")
One notable difference about this new partnership is the status
of the man. When she was with Southcombe, Charlotte was the star. He was
Mr. Rampling. At the time of Chez Nano, Jarre too was relatively
unknown, but he was a musical innovator whose time was coming. It has
arrived.
He is the hottest performer on Europe's pop music scene right
now. An alumnus of the Conservatoire de Paris and the son of movie score
composer Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago),
Jean-Michel released an electronic music album, Oxygene, a year ago. It
consists of synthesizer tracks that he composed, performed and produced.
The album and a single have sold more than three million copies around
the world. (The LP hit the U.S. in September and has climbed to number
78 on Billboard's charts.)
Composers, especially electronic ones, are something new to
Rampling. "I'll never know where the music comes from," she marvels. "I
often wonder why he doesn't suddenly sit up in bed and start singing or
whistling something. He never does. The music just goes through his head
all the time. When he is working he shuts himself in the studio for
weeks on end. I don't hear anything till the job is finished."
Jarre nods: "I know what I am aiming for but I prefer to compose
in private. There I can spend eight hours at a time working out the
musical statement." He has a convert's passion about the role of
electronic music. While reading for a degree in French literature at the
University of Paris, he enrolled with the Groupe de Recherches
Musicales of Pierre Schaeffer, the French guru of synthesizers. Jarre
left after three years, charging that avant-garde sectarianism was just
as lifeless as that of the Conservatoire. That same year, at 22, he
wrote a stunning electronic ballet score, Aor, which created a minor
sensation at the Paris Opera.
Now he creates new kinds of sound and helps create new
instruments as well. On Oxygene he plays four synthesizers and a battery
of new devices, one of which, the Rhythmin' Computer, was built to his
order. For this reason Jarre likes to compare himself to the 17th-and
18th-century founders of classical music. "When one of those pioneers
heard a sound in his head, he popped around the corner to an instrument
maker and asked him to invent the clarinet," he says. More seriously, he
observes, "Beethoven becomes an electronic composer when his music is
played on the radio or through amplifiers. I'm just using the
instruments of my time."
Jarre and Rampling's thinking comes together in the "New
Philosophy" of Jean-Michel's friend, essayist Bernard-Henri Lévy. Lévy
has outraged the French Left with his criticism of static ideologies and
especially of Marxist theory.
The need, according to the New Philosophy, is for individuality,
compassion and experience. To Charlotte and Jean-Michel that means
marriage. "We have been busy, but next year we plan to get married," he
says. They are already looking for a house—in the country, for the
children's sake. "There are those who say that marriage is a restrictive
formalism," Jarre adds. "In fact, marriage predates religion and law.
It is a celebration of love between two people which is at the very base
of our Western civilization."
Charlotte agrees, and says she is looking forward to "being
fulfilled and developing as a woman and a wife and a mother." Could
their life together be La Petite Maison dans la Prairie?
December 05, 1977
By Kevin Dowling
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