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The collective memory of Bernard Pivot’s guests has preserved many male names. However, the show had its best moments thanks to the women. From Marguerite Duras to Brigitte Lahaye.
Jean d’Ormessot, Charles Bukowski, Simenon, John Le Carré… The collective memory of Bernard Pivot’s guests has preserved many male names. However, the show at Pivot was inspired by a woman, Françoise Giroux, whom he heard say on a television show in 1975: “Sir, you called me.” For Pivot, the term was both technical, literary, and a source of debate. The show was on. And its history was marked by several female figures, acclaimed authors or transient figures, who found space there to tell their stories, often at length. Also to rebel.
1979 In December, the program began with pictures from the US of Marguerite Yourcenar’s home in Maine, where she had lived for thirty years. Pivot gives him poetic praise in his introduction. Yourcenar was one of his best clients, often invited and always precise and powerful in his words and analysis, especially when he evokes the character of the Japanese writer Mishima, to whom he dedicated an essay.
The other big guestapostrophes, Time for a special program dedicated to his book The lover became a bestseller, Marguerite Duras September 28, 1984: both a biography and a literary manual, the show can still be seen as a life lesson, Duras recounts both her illnesses and her writing style when she received the Goncourt Prize. “Why this journey with life, and from which we cannot escape?” The televised thought of Duras is an era in itself. Did you go?
On a lighter note, the show with Jane Fonda was, according to Pivot, a moment of glamor to which she succumbed to the detriment of the other guests. We will not take it again. More incongruous, but equally exciting, is the show in which Bernard Pivot takes on one of the biggest stars of French cinema, or rather French cinema X, that is, classified as porn. , I scandalous. It was 1987, and the actress left the set to invent a different life. “In my eyes, it’s a very healthy thing, joy, happiness, love,” this is how the actress responded to Pivot, asking to talk about her work. “It’s maybe an extreme form of desirability, but it suited me,” adds Brigitte Lahaie, who causes trouble for Bernard Pivot by telling her she’s a porn actor’s double.
In recent years, with the publication of Vanessa Springora’s book on Gabriel Matznef, a sequence that we could not see or hear at the time, but which has great power today: the day Pivot invited Matznef, who told about his sexual relationship. preferences, and the Canadian writer Denise Bombardier, who rebelled against him, alone, on the grounds that he would be held accountable. It was 1990 and he was thirty years early.
Source: Le Figaro
