Hier ist der Nachruf auf die Dame aus der New York Times. Anscheinend war sie in den USA in den späten 50ern ein Fernsehstar. Leider habe ich momentan keine Zeit, den ganzen Artikel zu übersetzen, ich hoffe, dass viele Leser hier auch von der englischen Fassung profitieren....
Geneviève, 83, French Singer Who Mutilated English on TV
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Published: March 17, 2004
Geneviève, the French chanteuse best remembered for her unfailing ability to mangle the English language during regular appearances on Jack Paar's ''Tonight Show,'' died Sunday morning at her home in Los Angeles. She was 83 and also had a home in East Hampton, N.Y.
The cause was complications of a stroke, said her stepdaughter Hilary Mills Loomis.
Virtually unknown when she joined Mr. Paar's show in November 1957 (it was only its second night), Geneviève started out singing.
''I was on for two or three weeks,'' she told The Easthampton Star in 1985, ''and one night I had a terrible fever, a flu.'' During a commercial break, Mr. Paar learned she was sick. ''He took me back onstage to sit with him and explained to the audience that he was going to take care of this little French girl with a fever. Someone brought me a cup of hot rum and butter, and even though I could barely speak English we talked and I drank. The audience started laughing. I realized I was getting drunk and saying funny things.''
She became a regular until the show went off the air, gradually singing less. As Gilbert Millstein wrote in the The New York Times Magazine in 1959 -- shortly after George Abbott announced that he and an associate were writing a musical comedy for her -- she was ''encouraged to be piquantly voluble in an English that has resolutely withstood improvement in almost five years of residence in this country and to bat her eyes at Mr. Paar.''
He continued: ''These eyes are, in the accepted Montmartre tradition from which she sprang (or was sprung by an enterprising agent named Barron Polan), large, liquid, brown and doelike; gay, despairing, hurt, hopeful, reproachful, flirtatious, prim, passionate, veiled and wide. The rest of her is diminutive and attractive, if rumpled, and, it has by now been made abundantly plain to viewers, much in need of the same coddling she gives pigeons, poodles and Paar.''
Mr. Abbott's plans for her did not work out although she played in several other musical comedies, among them a touring company of ''Can Can'' (1958).
Ginette Marguérite Auger was born in Paris on April 17, 1920, the first child of Edouard Roger Auger, a prosperous construction contractor whose work often took him to Africa, and Marthe Auger. She acquired the name Geneviève when her baptizing priest insisted that Ginette, first of all, was the diminutive of Geneviève, and, second, broke a church rule that an infant's given name include that of a saint. In 1949 she opened a small nightclub, Chez Geneviève with $4,000 from her father.
Intended as a place to entertain her friends away from her home, the tiny club attracted painters, poets and musicians, for whom the owner cooked -- after she had to fire her chef -- served tables and, at the urging of her friends, sang.
Impressed by the aplomb with which she switched her various roles, as well as with her singing style, Mr. Polan invited her to America. She accepted immediately.
In 1960 she married Ted Mills, a film producer and writer, whom she first met when he interviewed for a film he was making, ''Maurice Chevalier's Paris.'' He died last August. His two daughters, Ms. Loomis, of New York, and Alley Mills Bean, of Los Angeles, and son, Tony Mills, of Oakland, survive her.
