“I have never met this author, neither have my friends.
I am sad for all the people who are duped into buying his books which talk about me,” wrote Jean-Jacques Goldman on August 23, 2023 in a right of reply sent to Le
Canard Enchaîné
.
The missive followed the publication of a biography by the historian Ivan Jablonka entitled
Goldman
(ed. du Seuil), also written, and surely, with the aim of dissuading anyone who would attempt, in the future, to penetrate the ramparts of his life.
Because for the world-famous French singer, there is “Jean-Jacques” and there is “Goldman”.
There is the man of the crowds and the man of the private.
And the two don't mix.
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After a forty-year career, over 30 million records sold and hundreds of songs written for others - from Johnny Hallyday to Céline Dion - it was only natural that he withdrew from the spotlight in 2004 after a final concert at La Rochelle, to devote herself entirely to her family.
Because if he walked alone in his hit released in 1985, “JJG” is now, at 72 years old, the patriarch of a true dynasty.
Father of six children - including Michael Goldman, director of the “Star Academy” - and grandfather eleven times, he owes the peaceful and anonymous existence he leads today to his loved ones.
“We will talk about music, but not about him, ” composer Jean Bender, childhood friend of the singer and author of the work
Il suffira d'un signe
, published in 2021, immediately
asks
Madame Figaro
. there is to say, there is nothing to say.
Jean-Jacques is truly Mr. Everyone.
He has always been embarrassed by the star costume.
In fact, it's as if he had signed a loyalty pact with life from the start of his career.
His childhood at Sport 2000
Alter Moshe Goldman, father of Jean-Jacques Goldman, and his wife Jeannine, mother-in-law of JJG.
Getty Images
JJG discovered this life in 1951 in a clinic in the 19th arrondissement of Paris.
He is the third of four siblings.
First, there was Pierre, his half-brother, then his sister Evelyne and finally, two years after him, there was Robert.
His parents, Alter Moshe Goldman and Ruth Ambrunn, one Polish Jew and the other German Jew, both emigrated to France, to Montrouge exactly, where they led a rather discreet and deaf life, running a store. sports under the “Sports 2000” franchise.
Within the walls of their house, the family rarely talks about politics.
Although the father joined the Resistance at the start of the Second World War.
In the family, we don't brag about our feats of arms.
Question of principles.
On November 12, 1988, when the latter was decorated with the Legion of Honor for his acts of bravery during the Occupation, the son Goldman, who was then 37 years old, almost discovered the extent of his exploits.
In rare photos taken that day, we see him hiding among the crowd, so as not to steal the spotlight from his father, this hero.
Since childhood, Jean-Jacques has been silent.
Rather solitary, he learned the piano, the violin and the guitar, before founding his first group, the Red Mountain Gospellers, at the age of 15, then his second, the Phalansters.
But while the music scene of the late 1960s lived under the mantra "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll", Goldman had other concerns.
Anyone who joined the French scouts does not fantasize about the myth of the singer in a leather jacket and dark glasses.
To the world of debauchery, he prefers that of virtue and family values.
“Jean-Jacques had more of a sense of responsibility,” finally says Jean Bender, who was a member of the Phalansters.
We only thought about having fun at that time, he had a different state of mind.
Of all, he was the first to want to start a family.
“It was very important, just like writing songs.”
We only thought about having fun at that time, he had a different state of mind.
He was the first to want to start a family
Jean Bender
Pierre Goldman, the rebel
Pierre Goldman at his trial in 1974. Getty Images
This warm and reassuring scent of home, JJG will find it well before success.
In 1975, when he joined his third music group, the Taï Phong, the singer with the high voice married his first wife, Catherine Morlet.
He was then 24 years old.
Jean-Jacques had met her when he was a young boy and had promised himself, one day, to marry her.
It was done, he whispered years later in the teen magazine
OK!
: “I married my vacation sweetheart,” reads the cover.
Now that he is beginning to build the foundations for his future, Jean-Jacques is considering a solo career - not to be famous, but with the idea of composing for others in his name.
His wife is a psychologist, and pregnant with Caroline, their first child.
But this happiness is marked by a great tragedy.
Because in the Goldman clan, there is music, which Alter Moshe and Ruth practiced, and there is also the soul of the revolution.
And if the father was a man in the shadows, the eldest of the siblings, Pierre, does not hide his ambitions.
A vengeful communist, a rebellious son, he is known for his activism within the Anti-Fascist University Front, as an opponent of the Vietnam War or even an anti-imperialist member in Venezuela... “I was in a very rebellious family,” he said. interpreter of
I give you
in the documentary
Jean-Jacques Goldman, from the inside,
written by Didier Varrod and broadcast in 2017. I was a bit of a traitor because I was only interested in music and girls.
At the table, we were talking about Cuba, and I didn't even know where it was.
Returning to France after several trips to raise his fist in Latin America, Pierre committed several hold-ups at the end of the 1960s. In 1974, he was accused and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of two pharmacists.
An assassination that he will deny all his life.
After an acquittal two years later and his beginnings as a journalist, Pierre Goldman was killed in the street on September 20, 1979. Although he was claimed by members of a small far-right group, his murder was never elucidated.
In 2023, the film
Le Procès Goldman
, by Cédric Kahn, was released, retracing the second trial of the accused, before his release in 1976. If Jean-Jacques Goldman never spoke publicly about this affair, he was very present in the courtroom, played on screen by actor Ulysse Dutilloy-Liégeois.
Also read: Robert Carsen: “Maria Callas had a kind of genius, she lived entirely in the present moment”
Michael and Robert, a son and a brother in his footsteps
Michael Goldman and his father Jean-Jacques at Roland Garros in 1990. Getty Images
Two months earlier, Jean-Jacques had become a father for the second time, giving Caroline a little brother named Michael.
The latter has since become a known face in the music industry and French television.
After writing songs for Amel Bent and Lâam, in 2007 he founded the label My Major Company, pushed in part by his father who, in 2012, agreed to allow him to produce an album of covers called
Génération Goldman
, performed by Zaz or Matt Pokora.
The success is resounding.
Since 2019, Michael Goldman has also been the director of the new show “Star Academy”, broadcast on TF1.
A media exposure at odds with his father's personality.
“It really wasn't his thing, the glitter and the spotlight.
Already, with the Phalansters, he left before us at the end of the concerts, he went home, let us sign the autographs in his place.
It’s something he continued to do when he left the Olympia or Bercy,” confirms Jean Bender.
In 1981, then at the height of his fame, he asked his little brother Robert, who wrote songs under the pseudonym J. Kapler, to become his manager.
Rid of the fans and rid of the business.
He only vibrates to the sound of guitars.
To relieve himself of the weight of worldly affairs and negotiations, he founded the production house
JRG
(Jean-Jacques, Robert and Goldman) with him.
In the documentary
Jean-Jacques Goldman, Confidential
, produced by “Complément d’investigation”, Jean Mareska, former artistic director of the artist, explains: “When it was necessary to sign a contract with a record company, there was the good cop and bad cop.
Robert being the bad guy and Jean-Jacques the good guy.
It was a perfect separation of powers, one taking care of the money, the other the music.
Women psychologists
In 1984, the year of the hit
Encore un matin
, Nina was finally born, the last of the Goldman-Morlet marriage.
And if son Michael follows in his father's footsteps, the two daughters will choose psychology.
Another question of heritage and family.
Nina became a pediatrician.
Caroline Goldman, 48 years old today, is widely recognized in her profession as a psychologist, at the origin of the best-seller
File in your room
, which denounces the abuses of positive education, and author of the successful podcast
Caroline Goldman
.
On April 6, 2023, this mother of four children spoke at length in the columns of
Elle
magazine , about her family resources: “The women in my family are either child psychologists or pediatricians.
My mother (
Catherine Morlet, Editor's note
) was a psychologist in daycare and PMI.
For the record, she met my father at 17 and didn't know what to do.
My paternal grandmother, who was unable to study, was brilliant and passionate about Freud.
It was she who advised him to seek psychotherapy.
You know, at home, we love children, we do a lot with them and it's very joyful.
A “Goldman-style” education, one might say, which would consist of working like everyone else in order to understand and know the world... like everyone else.
In her book
In the Intimacy of the Goldman Brothers
(2018), journalist Ambre Bartok describes the patriarch as a “very very strict” man with his children, adding that he raised them “in a family where the value of money is important, and where the taste for work is very important.
He gave them the values that his parents instilled in him.”
Beautiful days in the countryside
Finally, in 1997, Jean-Jacques Goldman and Catherine Morlet decided to end their marriage after twenty-two years.
At the time, the songwriter had been living an epistolary romance for two years with one of his fans, Nathalie Thu Huong-Lagier, 19 years old.
Twenty-eight years his junior (he was 47 at the time), this Franco-Vietnamese woman is a mathematics student.
Their relationship began after one of his concerts in 1995, when the latter knocked on the door of his dressing room to congratulate him.
They wrote to each other before getting married and giving birth to three other children: Maya (now 19 years old), Kimi (18 years old) and Rose (16 years old).
At the beginning of the 2000s, the man who had previously lived in Paris joined his new wife in Marseille, where she was originally from, before moving to London in 2016, then returning to France, in 2021, in a villa in Roucas- Blanc, a chic district of Marseille.
Concerning his daughters, again the family remains discreet.
On social networks, the latter hide behind private accounts.
A certain Maya Goldman nevertheless appears on Linkedln.
Holder of a baccalaureate with honors at the Winston Churchill International High School in London, she has, for three months, been an intern at the Book Office at the French Institute in London.
An institution which describes itself on its site as “an information relay for British publishers and a crossroads for exchanges throughout the year”.
Despite the dispersion of the Goldman clan between Paris (for its oldest) and Marseille (for its youngest), the singer's six children and eleven grandchildren seem united, to say the least.
In May 2023, Caroline confided a new secret in the columns of
Marianne
,
about her large family.
Every summer, everyone would gather at a country house of the patriarch, located in Burgundy.
“This house is the family pillar, in the summer you almost have to book, it’s always full,” Michael Goldman confirmed a few days later, in the pages of the same weekly.
A place where someone who receives nearly 2 million royalties per year still likes to go in his modest Clio, recalls Jean Bender, smiling.