Lionel Rotcage can rest. This man with hundreds of lives died at 58
This man with hundreds of lives, including that of journalist, died at 58.
Lionel Rotcage can rest.
Journalist, press boss, humanitarian adventurer, business leader, financial and strategic gray eminence, record producer, artist manager, television producer, radio host, Bahamian hotelier, taxi driver, seducer, musician ... Lionel Rotcage, the son of the singer Régine and son-in-law of filmmaker John Boorman, finally succumbed yesterday at 4 AM to lung cancer, diagnosed since 2003.
"I am a journalist", he announced at the age of 14, to the host daughter of the magazine Vieux France Candide. Jacques Chancel, head of section stunned, sends him interview Nicoletta. A few months later, via Paris-Jour, still a minor, he is a reporter for Match. We find this Marc Dacier of the rock generation in the Amazon jungle, where he catches malaria and the blow to use weapons with the garimperos. In the colonels' Greece, alongside Melina Mercouri, he one day discovers one of his articles, partly censored, in an international version of the Obs.
Disgusted, he joined his father in the textile, orders a hundred thousand meters of denim in the United States, and is slapped by dad. Pique, it will sell thirty-three million meters on its behalf in the following years, amount of offshore companies, running the world in jet to visit its factories, from Somosa (Nicaragua) to Hong Kong. America, where he has his sequel to the year on Sunset at Chateau Marmont, China, Italy, where he invents jeans of bright colors, make his fortune.
Dennis Hopper and the Tuaregs
But in 1971, a car accident in which his 11-month-old son died shakes him. In Adoor, Kerala, in the valley of the seven hills, he reaches the eighth vedanta with a master stumper who introduces him to the "circular river" concept that will carry it to the end, against pain and morphine. In the meantime, he was adopted for two years by the Jicarilla Indians of New Mexico, presented to him by Dennis Hopper and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, before rallying the Tuaregs and Dogons as ethnoreporters. However, he collaborates at Rock & Folk, Liberation, the Morning of Paris, directs the Doctor's Daily or the World of Music. In July 1978, he presents the Montreux Festival live on Europe 1, where he will also perform, among other things, an illustrious night of terror with Gainsbourg.
The press remaining his passion, he launches with Marshall Chess, heir to the prestigious Chicago blues label and a time manager of the Stones, the French edition of Rolling Stone in 1988. Similarly, he will lead the economic magazine Challenges, these two titles attesting to him a notorious Dauphin of the tycoon Claude Perdriel a serious quarrel ending the episode.
Previously, he will have assisted Bob Geldof, who slept at his home, on an old sofa, avenue Parmentier, in the historical charity operation Band Aid, which he will relay in France for three years in School Shares (which makes him enter the class books) with Daniel Balavoine, France Gall or Michel Berger. After the death of the latter, he becomes his legatee, producing and managing a time parallel to the career of France Gall.
Simultaneously with these three years devoted to famine in Africa, he goes into advertising (for Mercedes, Nestle, etc.), and television.
He will produce on M6 fifty-two issues of the cultural magazine Sixth Dimension, will partner for a series of prime-time on TF1 director and producer Guy Job, making documentaries and launching TV programs Fnac.