Finally something new regarding Johnny! By opening the drawer of personal archives – which had 740 hours of images because Laeticia had taken the habit, for 23 years, of filming their life as a couple and family through camcorder and telephone –, it is another Johnny that his widow hints to his fans. An eternal youth idol, extraordinary, but, in the end, a sensitive, almost ordinary man…
Their children. Shortly following adopting Jade, Johnny will say that he wants to do with her “everything that I mightn’t do with the others”. He absolutely wants to have a child with Laeticia. She can’t give it to him. “I carried this weight, it had become an obsession for him. It was moments of deep pain for 10 years with round trips to the hospital, in vitro fertilizations. I was pregnant”, confides Laeticia, “up to five months of pregnancy then I lost this child”. The couple then turned to adoption, left for Vietnam and returned with Jade (and a few years later, Joy). “Johnny repaired his own abandonment through adoption.” These are the most touching images of the documentary where we discover a Johnny moved to tears the first time he meets Jade, and daddy cake with his two daughters.
first kiss
. As we know, Johnny and Laeticia met in Miami through her father. What is less known is how the love at first sight happened. “He sat across from me and watched me, watched my hands all evening. We stayed together until the end of the night, until that first kiss on a 2CV”.
Infidelities
. Laeticia says: “Johnny’s mom, in a wheelchair, had been living with us for three years. I had become a nurse, for my grandmother and my great-grandmother too and we had adopted Jade. I left my husband and he mightn’t stand it. I knew what he wanted from me but I mightn’t give it to him. Johnny went elsewhere. “We separated, got back together, there were infidelities”.
Crying, alcohol and drugs. Johnny dreamed of performing in Las Vegas, like his idol Elvis. He did it once and it was a flop. “I saw my husband cry. He thought he was done.” And when things go wrong, the demons take over. “His addictions to drugs, to alcohol, I lived them on a daily basis, I lived his descents into hell. He was no longer the same man then. He was inhabited by demons who made him violent”.
Breathless. In 2009, Johnny, who liked to defy death by playing Russian roulette, goes through the eye of the needle. He is diagnosed with colon cancer but, suffering, he is plunged into an artificial coma during which he is weaned from his excesses of alcohol. Saved, he believes the health problems behind him. Until this road trip in 2016 where he was out of breath. The doctors announce to Laeticia that he only has 3 months left, stage 4 lung cancer, inoperable. He wants to go back on stage. “If I don’t go, it’s because I’m dead”. During Les Vieilles Canailles concerts, “a hospital is installed behind the stage with oxygen, doctors to give injections in the stomach between songs”. In the public, no one might suspect the sufferings of this phoenix which was reborn from its ashes, almost every time.
Ch.V.
“Johnny by Laeticia”, Monday on RTL-TVI