No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  Edith’s friends wondered how she kept going in the face of such trials—her complicated affairs, her distressing rapport with Line, the loss of Cécelle to P’tit Louis. “She took strength from her love of singing,” one of them wrote. “She never dared to hope for success, just to be able to live and to keep singing.” Edith sometimes mentioned her “secret,” the inner strength that helped her to cope with what fate had dealt her. Her admirers took this secret to be her reliance on her talent: like most people over the course of her life, they knew nothing of her other secret, her spiritual belief.

  Piaf’s devotion was a private matter. Few saw beyond the medal of Thérèse de Lisieux that she wore around her neck—a common practice in Catholic France. Fewer still knew that between street performances she often slipped into nearby churches to pray. Her faith in Saint Thérèse never wavered. According to Danielle Bonel, Piaf’s confidante in later years, “she prayed to her to find peace, beauty, lightness of spirit, joie de vivre.… To feel safe, she needed the protection of a supernatural power.” But she rarely went to mass, preferring her private devotion to institutionalized ritual.

  Edith’s faith was tested when Cécelle became ill in the summer of 1935. P’tit Louis came to her cabaret to tell her that the two-year-old had meningitis, then considered incurable. She had been rushed to the Children’s Hospital, on the Left Bank, for a lumbar puncture—a treatment that required a waiting period to see if the patient would survive. Thinking back to this time, Piaf said, “For eight days I believed in miracles.” On July 6, she walked all the way from Pigalle to the hospital in time to see Cécelle open her eyes. She spent the night praying to Saint Thérèse, but learned the next morning that her daughter had died.

  Accounts differ about what took place that day. Piaf remembered being alone with her sorrow; Berteaut claimed to have accompanied her to the hospital and back to Pigalle, where she put Edith to sleep by drugging her with Pernod. (Momone probably came back into Edith’s life after she left Valette.) Their immediate task was to find money to bury Cécelle. After Edith’s friends took up a collection, ten francs were still lacking. In Piaf’s version, that night she was accosted by a man who asked what it cost to go to bed with her. Without thinking, she replied, “Ten francs.” He took her to a hotel room, where she burst into tears and told him why she had accepted his offer. “I saw that he felt sorry for me, that he would let me go without demanding what he’d paid for. It’s in memory of that unknown man that I’ve helped others whenever I could, without asking anything from them.”

  In Berteaut’s account, the man got what he paid for but gave Edith more than the paltry sum she requested. Piaf corroborated this version in an interview with Jean Noli, the journalist who helped her write Ma vie toward the end of her life. The truth would shock readers, he thought. Why not say that the man had felt sorry for her? “You’re right,” Piaf is said to have replied. “It’s better that way, more moral.” Piaf also told Noli that she had Cécelle’s coffin blessed at Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, the small church in the shadow of Sacré-Coeur, and, with P’tit Louis, buried their daughter in a pauper’s grave at the Thiais Cemetery.

  “It was a very dark moment in our lives,” Berteaut wrote, “one of the rottenest times we ever went through, … but to tell the truth, it didn’t last long.” In Berteaut’s recollection of that summer, when Edith was nineteen and she was seventeen, they just stopped thinking about Cécelle: “We were only kids, and we didn’t give it another thought.”

  Momone may have forgotten the little girl, but Edith never stopped thinking about her—though she rarely mentioned her name. Near the end of her life, Piaf told the photographer Hugues Vassal that, had Cécelle lived, she would be thirty and have children of her own. Although the little girl hadn’t been baptized, Piaf was sure that she had gone to heaven. “She must have been a big help to my guardian angel,” Piaf joked, “because where I’m concerned he’s had quite a time!” Then she asked Vassal if he was a believer. “You must have faith,” she told him, “because when you bring life into the world, at that moment you also sign a death sentence.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1935–1936

  Piaf recalled the years from 1933, when she left Belleville, to 1936, when she began extricating herself from Pigalle, as an endless walk—one punctuated by intermittent gigs, countless street songs, and many narrow escapes from both the milieu and the authorities.

  She did not attend to the political scene, except perhaps to notice that Parisians had fewer coins to spare and that soup kitchens’ lines were growing longer. By 1933, 1.3 million Frenchmen were unemployed. In 1935, the week after Edith buried Cécelle, an alliance of four hundred thousand members of the Radical, Socialist, and Communist parties marched through Paris on Bastille Day, calling for “bread, peace, and liberty.” The following spring, under Léon Blum, the leftist Popular Front government accorded major reforms to the working classes.

  But the topics of the day—workers’ rights, the growth of right-wing groups modeling themselves on Hitler’s Brownshirts, the rise of anti-Semitism, the Third Republic’s wobbliness—were of little concern when what mattered was just getting by. Having grown up outside established social structures, Edith did not identify with the working-class ethos of social betterment through class struggle. As a girl of the streets, she knew that her only chance to transcend them would depend on her determination and talent.

  Leaving Belleville had allowed Edith to imagine another way of life, though, like most people she knew, she was almost penniless—in part because she spent whatever she earned right away. Yet she was sure that her luck would change. “People have the wrong idea about Edith,” Berteaut wrote of this time. “She wasn’t sad. She loved to laugh. She used to split her sides all the time, and what’s more, she was sure she’d make it.” She would put “this stinking poorhouse” behind her.

  In these years, the music business was being transformed in response to the availability of records and radio broadcasts featuring well-known singers. Although working-class fans of la chanson could not afford tickets to the Folies Bergère, where stars like Mistinguett, Maurice Chevalier, and Josephine Baker performed, music came to them in the city’s open-air theaters—street markets, bals-musettes, outdoor fairs. Some found the time to visit the record shops on the boulevards, where one could hear one’s favorite songs in a sound booth, as Edith did in order to learn popular lyrics. But this form of enjoyment was limited to those who could pay for it, as were radios and gramophones, which were too expensive for working-class families.

  Since Edith could not read music, she relied on her ability to memorize songs. When she performed this “borrowed” material (often without sheet music), “the pianist who accompanied her played however he felt like playing,” Berteaut recalled, “and Edith would sing without paying much attention to him. The surprising thing is that it worked out anyway.” Although an untrained singer, she surely sensed that speeding up or slowing down the tempo as she did (the technique called “rubato”) served to enhance a song’s emotional qualities, and that her intense, velvety vibrato suited her repertoire. She knew everything instinctively, her friend Rina Ketty observed: “Her songs expressed all she had suffered in childhood. At the end of her life she had more technique, more métier, but she couldn’t have given any more of herself, since she gave her whole heart from the beginning.”

  It was this quality—giving everything she had—that led to Edith’s first engagement outside Pigalle. For the rest of her life she described her discovery at nineteen in mythic terms—“Fate took me by the hand to turn me into the singer I would become.”

  One gray day in October 1935, she and Momone decided to work the area near the Arc de Triomphe, in the rue Troyon. As Edith warbled “Comme un moineau” (“Like a Sparrow”), passersby may have reflected that its image of a poor hooker—“Elle est née comme un moineau / Elle a vécu comme un moineau / Elle mourra comme un moineau” (“She was born like a sparrow / She’s lived like
a sparrow / She’ll die like a sparrow”)—suited the singer’s waifish appearance. A well-groomed bystander with silvery hair declared that she would ruin her voice if she kept belting out songs that way. When Edith said that she sang in order to eat, he introduced himself as Louis Leplée and asked her to audition at his cabaret, le Gerny’s. Leplée gave her five francs and an appointment a few days later.

  After checking out le Gerny’s, an elegant nightspot near the Champs-Elysées, Edith and Momone spent the night celebrating in a Pigalle bar. When Fréhel arrived, they announced their good fortune to the older singer, who said to be careful. Leplée might “inveigle” them into something underhanded, like white slavery. Having decided that Fréhel was jealous, Edith went to the audition, her flyaway bangs slicked down with soap and her one black skirt spot-treated for the occasion. Berteaut recalled, “We were so petrified we couldn’t talk.”

  It would not have been obvious that le Gerny’s portly impresario was himself a habitué of Pigalle. The nephew of the successful music-hall artist Polin, Leplée had performed at the Liberty’s Bar, on the Place Blanche, with his partner, “Bobette”—a duo that flaunted their sexual orientation. A few years before taking on le Gerny’s, Leplée had run the basement club at the Palace Theater in Montmartre, to which district he still came to find young men at homosexual hangouts. That these places were linked to the milieu only enhanced their allure. That they were also dangerous—clients were sometimes victimized by their lovers—was seen as a fact of life by those who liked rough trade.

  Leplée’s underworld connections were not apparent to Edith when she came to his club. She noted his elegant manners and “the tender blue of his eyes”—marks of distinction in a man, where she was concerned—as well as his limp, from a war injury. Above all, she was impressed by his kindness. “I put all my heart into my songs,” she recalled, “not so much to get an engagement, which seemed unlikely, as to please the man who had shown an interest in me and with whom I now felt a mutual trust and sympathy.”

  After hearing her, Leplée asked whether she could start on October 24 at forty francs a night. He had two requirements: she was to learn some new songs, and wear something more presentable. Edith accepted on the spot, promising to finish the sweater she was knitting. (Piaf continued to knit throughout her career, but most projects were never completed.)

  Her stage name came as an afterthought. She wasn’t Russian, so Tania wouldn’t do, Leplée reflected; neither would Denise Jay or Huguette Hélia. She must have a name to match what he felt as he watched her. A true Paris sparrow, she should be called La Môme Moineau, but that name was taken. Why not use the slang for sparrow, which was piaf? The singer remarked years later, “I was baptized for life.”

  Like the experienced showman he was, Leplée knew how to make the most of his protégée. He would present her not as a glamorous chanteuse but as herself: the contrast between her childlike mien and her assaultive vibrato would move audiences as it had moved him. The songs he chose for her, réaliste classics about the “dangerous classes” from which she came, would play up her origins and undernourished form. “Nini peau de chien,” a Montmartre classic, portrayed its heroine’s life on the streets as a poor girl’s fate; “La Valse brune,” an insinuating prewar waltz tune, wrapped its “chevaliers de la lune” (crooks who prowl by night) in the poetry of dark corners; “Si petite” voiced the états d’âme of a woman who tells her lover that she feels so small in his arms. Edith was to rehearse each afternoon with Leplée’s pianist; the house accordionist, Robert Juel, would arrange the accompaniment to suit her.

  By the twenty-fourth Edith knew her repertoire but had not completed her sweater, which lacked a sleeve. Dismayed by her appearance, Leplée found a solution with the help of Maurice Chevalier’s wife, the actress Yvonne Vallée, who was in the audience that night. Vallée gave Edith her white silk scarf for good luck and to distinguish her from other réaliste singers, who draped their shoulders in red ones. “I was dressed like a pauper but she paid no attention to that and treated me … like an artiste,” Piaf said years later.

  Nearly paralyzed with stage fright, she made the sign of the cross while Leplée told the audience that he had found his new attraction in the street. “Her voice overwhelmed me,” he continued. “I am presenting her to you as she was when I first saw her: no makeup, no stockings, in a cheap little skirt.”

  Edith came onto a stage lit by harsh orange spots, the “in” color of the moment. Standing motionless to hide her bare arm, she launched into the most theatrical of the songs Leplée had chosen for her, “Les Mômes de la cloche”—about the feral girls who “drag their soiled hose and love stories along the boulevards”: “C’est nous les mômes, les mômes de la cloche, / Clochards qui s’en vont sans un rond en poche, / C’est nous les paumées, les purées d’paumées, / Qui sommes aimées un soir, n’importe où.” (“We’re the poor girls, the poor kids / We roam around broke, / We’re the rejects, outcast girls, / We’re loved for a night, it doesn’t matter where.”)

  It was as if a guttersnipe had invaded the inner sanctum where sophisticates like Chevalier, Vallée, and the aviator Jean Mermoz sat drinking champagne. Yet as the guests, electrified by her voice, put down their glasses, Edith sensed that she held them. She threw up her arms at the end of the song; the scarf fell from her shoulders. There was silence, then wild applause and shouts of “bravo.” “That kid sings straight from the guts,” Chevalier cried.

  She finished her repertoire in a trance. “You really had them,” Leplée kept saying. “You’ll have them again tomorrow and every other day.” Mermoz, a French national hero who was said to love poetry, offered her champagne and, on another night, bought the contents of the flower seller’s basket to show his appreciation—the first time Edith had ever received flowers. “These courtesies, from someone like Mermoz, astonished me,” Piaf said years later.

  Still, the young performer lacked confidence. “When I think of the way that I sang in those days, I have to confess that my ‘talent’ was of an extremely dubious nature.” She knew that certain patrons came to gape at her as if she were a specimen, that some thought her vulgar. Her ignorance of conventions made her doubt herself. “You’re doing fine,” Leplée assured her. “When you recognize your shortcomings you can do something about them. It’s a matter of determination and hard work.”

  She did not immediately take his advice. With Momone in tow, Edith returned to the Pigalle bars, where Fréhel listened scornfully as she raved about her new friends. Edith was no one until composers wrote songs just for her, Fréhel said; this lucky break would not last unless she made her name with recordings. The denizens of the Clair de la Lune were also skeptical about Leplée, but Edith insisted that he was like a father to her—he was helping her take herself seriously.

  Two of Leplée’s friends asked to meet Edith as soon as they heard her sing. The first, a middle-aged man named Jacques Bourgeat, had fallen in love with her voice and wanted to help her career. An autodidact who spent his days in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Bourgeat wrote poetry when he was not studying French history. “Jacquot” would become Piaf’s mentor, confidant, and spiritual guide. He often walked her from her hotel to le Gerny’s and home again, reveling in the piquancy of her slang. Because the feeling was mutual—Edith admired the way he spoke—he began teaching her proper French and gave her Baudelaire’s poems, which they read aloud to each other. When she asked Bourgeat to write lyrics for her, he composed “’Chand d’habits,” a réaliste number about an old-clothes peddler that would have suited the classic film of Paris street life, Les Enfants du paradis. With Bourgeat’s support, Piaf recalled, “I felt that I was on the path to success. Helped by my true friends, I was happy.”

  Through Leplée she also met Jacques Canetti, whose influential program, Radio-Cité, was broadcast on Sunday mornings. A few days after her debut at le Gerny’s, she began appearing on this popular revue. “I felt a sense of compassion for the poor little thing,”
Canetti wrote, “and at the same time, enormous admiration for this burning fire, this voice that came from her heart rather than from her head.” When listeners began phoning to find out who she was, Canetti had her perform each Sunday for the next twelve weeks. By November, La Môme Piaf was such a sensation that newspapers sent reporters to le Gerny’s to interview her.

  She was “a singer who lives her songs,” Le Petit Parisien declared. Their critic told readers to “imagine a pale, almost ashen visage” with “a sort of secret, pathetic nobility.” La Môme Piaf was poorly dressed, he wrote, and didn’t know how take a bow: “In fact, she doesn’t know anything. But she sings. This girl of the streets gives to her street songs the same poignant, piercing, sweetly poisonous poetry as is found in Carco’s novels.” Recognizing the literary dimension of her performance, its nostalgic poetics of Paris life, he predicted that within the year she would be singing in New York.

  Another critic noted La Môme’s awkwardness onstage: she seemed “embarrassed at being so small.” But then there was her voice: “the color of oysters … that indescribable voice, which is both harsh and ample, ordinary and unique … still childlike and already full of despair, that voice that hits you in the stomach just when you’re not thinking about it.” He could not explain why it was so moving to hear her sing an old chestnut of Parisian folklore like “Les Mômes de la cloche,” since she did nothing “except to be really little, really thin, poorly coiffed … and to have that voice.”

  Edith slept late and spent afternoons at the music publishers in the attempt to build her repertoire. But despite her good reviews, publishers were reluctant to entrust their new tunes to someone who had not made a record. At best she could perform those that were not under contract to better-known singers. One afternoon, in the studio of one of the few publishers willing to help, she listened to the popular soprano Annette Lajon run through a song about a sailor that sounded like one of Edith’s brief affairs. Called “L’Etranger,” it would become the prototype for Piaf’s love songs in the future: “Il avait un air très doux, / Des yeux rêveurs, un peu fous, / Aux lueurs étranges.… / Il s’en allait je ne sais où.” (“He seemed gentle / He had dreamy eyes, a little crazed, / With strange lights in them.… / He drifted away, I don’t know where.”) Edith memorized the song while Lajon rehearsed and performed it that night at the club. When Lajon showed up there a few days later, she forgave Edith, despite her annoyance.