New Faces: Understanding Electra

Françoise Hardy is perhaps the newest and prettiest star from France, but she says that she can't sing or act—and "to pick up a mirror is to become demoralized." Her modesty is becoming, and her countrymen obviously forgive her. At 22, she sells more recordings than any other French songbird; she has been put into films with some success by Vadim, and only men become demoralized by her figure.

Her foot-long champagne-colored hair frames a face of intricate refinement. She has got the stringy look of a well-paid mannequin (5 ft. 9 in., 114 Ibs.); when she is not singing or acting, she is in great demand as a model. And she gets nearly as much press as De Gaulle: 20 French magazines have put her on their covers, and she is literally updated every day in France-Soir. When her tune Hi Pals! became a hit, a hungry publisher turned the unlikely name into the title of a magazine — which three years later sells nearly 1,500,000 copies a month.

"Devil's Instinct." The same kind of response is beginning to hit the U.S. Françoise has a couple of pages of photographs in December's Vogue, and she has been shot for Mademoiselle, Harper's Bazaar, Town & Country, Look and Esquire. And that is undoubtedly just the beginning. Her first major U.S. film, Grand Prix, premièred last week in Manhattan. Her role as a race-circuit follower consists of little more than ten walk-on scenes, but she walks off with every one of them.

For all this feminine force de frappe, Françoise is right when she insists that she really is not a singer of unusual gifts or an actress at all. "The only time I'm good," she says, "is when I'm playing myself." But what an ineffable presence that self is. Painter Bernard Buffet saw her on TV in 1962 and immediately told his wife: "This girl is Electra in a black raincoat. Tomorrow all the French girls will want to look like her, to sing her song." Bruno Coquatrix, director of Paris' most coveted show case, the Olympia Music Hall (where Françoise signed on for three weeks and stayed for eight), sees her as "a symbol of the mystery of youth, the instinct of the devil." Others call her "the Françoise Sagan of French singing," even though the song lyrics that she writes are hardly literary. "I never erase or start over," she says. They are mostly banal ballads for the yé-yé lovelorn:

If sleeping with you is not the end of the world

Yet it becomes so as soon as you are no longer there

Life close to you may be long

But far from you it's worse . . . it doesn't end

Perhaps I love you.

"Unlimited Nonchalance." Probably the best proof of Françoise's intelligence is that she does not kid herself about her work. Her songs invariably leave her "dissatisfied four or five months after." Of her first film, Sagan's A Castle in Sweden, she recalls how "all the critics said everybody was bad but me. I was not good, but I wasn't as bad as they expected."