The story of Johnny told by Laeticia.Five years after the death of the French favorite innkeeper, M6 pays tribute to him on Thursday December 8 with a new documentary directed by William Karel. The opportunity for the public to discover during this evening personal and unpublished archives on the couple and their famous clan, which his widow promoted, as well as a museum in tribute to his life (to be discovered between Brussels and Paris ), this November 28 in Daily.
In the first minutes of the documentary that Planet was able to view, André Boudou’s daughter returned to her meeting with Johnny in March 1995. “We met in Miami, Florida. Johnny was shooting a clip in Santa Fe, New Mexico”, begins the young woman facing the camera. After this filming, the singer planned to return to France before changing his mind. “It was on my way to return to Paris. I had decided to stop in Miami, which I did not know very well”, he said (his voiceover) in the documentary.
While her father was “invited to this dinner with Johnny”, Laeticia was going through a sad period of her life. “I was not supposed to be at that dinner, I was at the bottom of the hole of a complicated period of my life, quite tortured, quite fragile. I was clinging to life more, it’s like a silent suicide”, has she confessed with emotion.
If the young woman ends up accompanying her father to the meeting, the ex-husband of Sylvie Vartan and Nathalie Baye gave them a cold reception. “Johnny was waiting for us, we were late, he was not happy,” recalls the forties. Despite this disappointment, the famous singer spent his evening sitting next to the young blonde, 31 years his junior. And their eyes met. “Throughout dinner, he never stopped looking at me. He spent the whole evening looking at my hands.”
An unexpected love at first sight that was tied during and after the evening. “At the end of dinner, we go out and there, we really start talking to each other. We both walk and we start having an exchange”, says the mother of Jade and Joy. “We didn’t leave until six in the morning, we told each other about our lives, our despair, our dreams. He confided in me that evening as if I were his best friend. And I confided in him like he was my best friend.”
Before ending this meeting by exchanging their first kiss on a Deux-Horses in a service station in Miami. “From there, we never left each other,” concludes Laeticia Hallyday. If their idyll caused a lot of talk in its early days, Johnny Hallyday proved his love by marrying his fiancée the following year in Neuilly-sur-Seine. A romance that lasted for 22 years.