when you’re french new wave
(from here)
Jean Seberg was known to have supported the Black Panther Party. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover considered her a threat and in 1970, when she was seven months pregnant, created a story [1] to leak to the media that the child she was carrying was not fathered by her second husband, Romain Gary, but by a black civil rights activist. The story was reported by Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times newspaper, and Newsweek magazine. She miscarried shortly thereafter. In a press conference after the miscarriage she presented the press with a picture of her fetus to demonstrate that the child did not have a father of African heritage. Seberg stated that the trauma of this event brought on premature labor and her child was stillborn. The child was named Nina Gary; the baby was actually fathered by Carlos Navarra. According to her husband, after the loss of their child she suffered from a deep depression and became suicidal.
She became dependent on alcohol and prescription drugs. She made several attempts to take her own life (each year on the day of her child’s death), including throwing herself under a train on the Paris Métro.
In August 1979, she went missing, and was found dead 11 days later in the back seat of her car in a Paris suburb. The police report stated that she had taken a massive overdose of barbiturates and alcohol (8g per litre). A suicide note (“Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves”) was found in her hand, and suicide was ultimately ruled the official cause of death. However, it is often questioned how she could have driven to the address in the 16th arrondissement with that amount of alcohol in her body, and without the distance glasses she always maintained she absolutely needed for driving.
(wikipedia…)
