She rubbed shoulders with Katherine Hepburn, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty: the fabulous destiny of an assistant editor who became a journalist in Hollywood

Dany Jucaud, une vie aux mille facettes. Richard Gianorio

Journalist at Paris-Match, Dany Jucaud lived in Hollywood where she had a thousand fascinating encounters. She tells her story in her latest book published by Stock, “I had a house in Los Angeles.”

Dany Jucaud amazes because she had a strange, great and beautiful life. She found herself, for a few decades, facing her destiny, and she was, in her own way, the queen of a paper kingdom. Yes, Dany Jucaud, journalist, reigned over an empire and made the small world, the beautiful world, the great world of American cinema, march to his wand.

Dany, blonde beauty, model's allure, lively, fine, slender, slender, and, sorry, "a very nice ass", according to the words of the connoisseur Robert Mitchum, is a creature who found herself, as much by chance as by necessity, in Los Angeles, in a magnificent house with a sublime view, at 8 365 Sunset view drive, 90069 West Hollywood, from where she orchestrated, for four decades, the sweetness of things and the disorder of the planet of people of cinema.

Assistant film editor Emmanuelle

In Paris in the 80s, associating with a crowd of baroque show-offs and finding herself assistant editor of the erotic film Emmanuelle, she regularly stopped by to kiss a girlfriend in the offices of Paris-Match on the Champs-Élysées.

There, a melting pot of a thousand encounters and as many awakened desires, she was offered a plane ticket for a report with Coppola in Los Angeles. She left there and never came back, did not do this report but hundreds of others, thousands of others, finding a field of action for her desires and our dreams. It was then the triumphant era of Paris-Match.

The sentimental crowds in France and Europe dreamed of love, glory and beauty. Dany orchestrated these desires and fueled the factory by inventing the position of correspondent of the magazine in the Mecca of cinema. There was no one.

She was the age of a Catherinette, the stunning physique of a cheerleader, the delicate romanticism of a New England writer, culture and wit that sparkled, a magnificent fiancé, the immense Pierre Rey, who followed her to California and found a dream home there, once inhabited by Alain, Nathalie and Anthony Delon. Everything was flashing. The spotlights were on. She was a triumph.

A beginner but gifted, uprooted but resourceful, determined and determined to hit the jackpot, she was lucky because she had talent, the art of meeting people, a taste for conversation, a desire to discover, a sense of listening and the attraction of good stories.

Directed by no one

She loved it and found the right people for the readers of the time. Led by no one but herself, trusting her instincts and focusing on phenomena, literally camping in a trendy restaurant, Dany knew how to interest Katherine Hepburn, titillate Jack Nicholson, get friends with Margaux Hemingway, seduce Warren Beatty, dazzle Jacqueline Bisset, amuse Ursula Andress and so many others, all without exception, whom she never stopped crossing paths with in this enchanted principality of Hollywood whose borders were flowers and whose fountains were rivers of venom.

Thanks to her dream job that she had created for herself, the world was hers. Living with a writer who slept during the day and worked at night, she inhabited, in the best of terms, Hollywood as others tan in the sun, with ease and voluptuousness, but without burying her soul there. Hollywood, which inhabited her in the same way, was, then, the center of sweet follies and unfulfilled passions. Dany excelled and in her story, sometimes cruel, she does not spare herself, her adventures are read with delight.

At once a loving confession of a child of the century, an ecstatic story of someone who is fooled by nothing, a disenchanted chronicle of a life shared, not without clashes sometimes, with Sharon Stone, Sean and Micheline Connery, Kirk, Anne and Michael Douglas, an ode to the sweetness of life, a tale of the present time, “I had a house in Los Angeles” invites you to travel, to lucidity, to melancholy, to solitude.

All the stars of the world

As the pages turn, Bono, Harvey Weinstein, Kim Novak and her llamas show the tip of their noses, Barbra Streisand too, Julio Iglesias, Stéphanie de Monaco do three turns while dancing and all of it has, under the cover of glossy paper, the appearance of eternity. Captured in the moment by someone who does not feel idolatrous admiration for them, these people with gilded faces are in fact only telling us about our lives.

All the stars of the world appear in these pages, approached, cajoled, scrutinized, laid bare in a sort of great, hectic fresco, with spirited writing. Which ends with an emanation of irremediable sadness, because we know very well that we will never live like this again. Only Dany, an outside journalist and a woman of the interior, keeps track of what was and remains her but also our best years.

“I had a house in Los Angeles”, by Dany Jucaud. Éditions Stock, 20 euros I subscribe to read the rest