Genevieve, the gamin-like French singer and comedian whose fractured English enchanted American viewers of Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show” in the late 1950s and early ’60s, has died. She was 83.
The Paris-born chanteuse, who had lived for many years in East Hampton, N.Y., died Sunday of complications from a stroke at her home in Venice, Calif., said her stepson, Tony Mills.
Discovered by an American agent at Chez Genevieve, her Montmartre cafe where she not only did the cooking but entertained customers with her singing, Genevieve arrived in New York City in 1954.
Six months later, Genevieve was headlining at the Plaza Hotel’s Persian Room.
Her change in fortune primarily came as a result of one appearance on the “Blue Angel” summer TV showcase of her future son-in-law, Orson Bean. Her singing prompted critics to hail her as a female Maurice Chevalier and possible heiress to Edith Piaf’s crown.
But it wasn’t until she became a regular on the “Tonight Show” in 1957 that the singer with the large brown eyes and short, reddish-brown hair became a household name.
Her on-air mixture of gaiety and innocence captivated Paar’s viewers.
But she had no idea she had a natural flair for comedy until a few weeks after her Paar show debut, when she showed up with a high fever to sing one night.
“I didn’t know that I could call in and say I was sick,” she recalled in a 1975 interview with the Los Angeles Times.
“So I went in and started to sing and was so sick I forget half the words. Nobody really knows it, except me and the musicians, not even Jack. But I went backstage and started to cry. I knew I was going to be thrown out.”
During the commercial break, she said, “Someone told Jack that the French girl was crying. He came back. I couldn’t speak English, and he didn’t speak French. So he speak loud, and slow. `What’s . . . the . . . matter? You . . . cry?’ he ask me. I point to my head and say, `Hot.’ So he brings me onstage to talk and gives me a big cup of hot rum and honey.”
She giggled. “You weren’t supposed to drink alcohol on the air, so he tells the audience it’s tea. But I was ha-ha-ha by the end of the show–loaded.”
The more she drank, the funnier she became, and the more the audience laughed.
Paar knew a good thing when he saw it, and on her subsequent appearances he had her sing less and talk more.
She was born Ginette Marguerite Auger but became Genevieve when the priest at her baptism told her parents that Ginette was the diminutive for Genevieve and that the church required that an infant’s given name include that of a saint.
In 1960, she married television producer Ted Mills, whom she had met four years earlier when she appeared in the NBC special “Maurice Chevalier’s Paris.”
Her husband died last August.
In addition to her stepson, Genevieve is survived by her two stepdaughters, Hilary Mills Loomis and Alley Mills Bean.
