No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  Amused by their easygoing rapport, the couple called each other mémère and pépère (Mom and Pop). But, although Pills was no prude, he soon found that his wife needed more than the quantities of good wine they drank together. Addicted to morphine for chronic pain, cortisone (the new drug prescribed for her arthritis), and sleeping pills, she required greater care than Pills may have imagined at the start of their courtship. By November, Edith had lost her high spirits. “In America,” she told Bourgeat, “you are tired as soon as you wake up.” Still, while performing at the Versailles, she also found the energy for a UNESCO benefit, another Ed Sullivan show, and, with Pills, two broadcasts for the French radio. Looking ahead to their December engagement in Hollywood, she promised to keep to her diet in order to be svelte.

  Before leaving to tour the Western United States, the couple flew to Montreal to perform together and see Edith’s sister, Denise, who had lived there since her marriage. The young woman was shocked by the changes in Edith brought on by cortisone: “Her face was puffy, she had gained a lot of weight.… Her hands were not yet deformed but her feet hurt terribly.” But she was relaxed enough to cajole Pills into promising her a mink coat as well as one for Denise. Her sister amused her by taking credit for her success, since Edith had begun singing in the streets after Denise’s birth changed the dynamics in their household. “I never thought of that,” the star replied. “I’m famous because of you.”

  Once they reached Los Angeles, it was clear that Piaf was far from famous there. Despite her appearance at a Hollywood gala for John Huston’s Moulin Rouge and the publicity for her stint at the chic Mocambo Club, her New York success had had little impact. In January 1953, she and Pills appeared for a week at the Curran Theater in San Francisco, where Judy Garland, to whom Americans often likened her, had recently performed. On their return to Los Angeles, the couple met Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, and Humphrey Bogart, and Edith befriended Lena Horne, who had come to her opening night at the Playhouse in 1947. Edith admired Lena as a highly professional performer who, like herself, had had her share of adversity. (Horne and Lennie Hayton, the white musician who become her second husband, had fled to Paris in 1947 to escape the widespread hostility toward interracial marriages.) After a two-week gig in Las Vegas, where they applauded Horne’s glamorous show at the brand-new Sands Hotel, Piaf and Pills flew to Miami Beach. “You’ll weep, sob, thrill, you’ll stand up and cheer,” her Riviera Lounge poster promised. But even though the local critics deemed her show a “smash hit,” she missed Paris, her friends, and their way of life.

  Edith planned to come home in March, she told Cocteau. “What a joy it was to read and reread your letter. I know how many people love you, but if you could only know how much I love you in spite of the rare times that we see each other. I have a funny feeling each time I see you that I want to protect you against the world’s meanness, then I realize each time that it’s you who make me feel better and give me the strength to deal with this hard world. Don’t you think it’s marvelous to love someone without needing him, to love him just for himself? Well, that’s the way I love you.”

  In March, Piaf and Pills moved into the Boulevard Lannes apartment, which had remained empty during their six months in America. “It was too big for Edith,” Jacques’s sister Simone recalled. “She felt lost.” When Simone came to live there after their return, she found little furniture but many signed editions of French classics, including the works of Cocteau. Edith preferred the bedroom, the kitchen, and the salon, where aspirant composers waited by the Bechstein piano until she was ready to receive them. (She preferred to pick out tunes on its companion, an electric piano called an Ondoline.) “From the start,” Simone said, “I was seduced by Edith’s intelligence, her desire to keep learning, her enormous talent.”

  Simone soon learned to do everything Edith’s way. When she writhed in arthritic pain, her sister-in-law called the doctor for more cortisone. When she had insomnia, Simone sat with her while she told the story of her life. Each day, at 1 p.m., she stroked Edith’s wrist to awaken her, then handed her a cup of black coffee and France-Soir, with the latest installment of Edith’s favorite comic strip, the tale of a wrongly incarcerated man who finds marital bliss following his release. After bathing, Edith doused herself with Arpège, made phone calls, took up the sweater she was always knitting, or jotted ideas for songs in the lined notebooks meant for schoolchildren that she favored. Later in the day, Simone watched show-business people file into the salon in hopes of winning Piaf’s esteem: “Some were good, some less so, some were dishonest, but all were intelligent. Edith couldn’t stand dummies!”

  In the evening, friends often called to find her serving only white wine, her response to her husband’s efforts to limit her drinking: “Naturally, everyone had to eat and drink the same things,” her sister-in-law recalled. Meals consisted of the same dish for weeks at a time, such as chicken with sauce suprême (mushrooms, shallots, white wine, and cream). If a melody came to the star, she ran from the table to the Ondoline or summoned Chauvigny for his opinion—even at 3 a.m. Simone observed, “No one dared to tell her no.”

  Rehearsals started at midnight. Her entourage watched while Piaf worked with Chauvigny, who doubled as her pianist, on the fine points of performance—timbre, articulation, gestures—and gave notes for the accompaniment or made changes in the lyrics. After a restorative meal at 3 a.m., Edith entertained the group with the tunes of her youth, American melodies (often those interpreted by Lena Horne or Billie Holiday), and, to their surprise, Fauré songs, all in her private repertoire. Rehearsals ended at dawn, when the singer went to bed.

  Piaf earned large sums of money in these years, but most of it went “into the stomachs and pockets of her friends,” her sister-in-law recalled. “Anyone could help himself from the refrigerator at any time, but it was the army of so-called friends who borrowed from her without paying her back that ruined her.” Piaf also paid the salaries of the Bonels, Chauvigny, several musicians, and the domestic staff, which consisted of her cook, Chang; two or three maids; and other personnel. (Chang went home with the champagne and other luxury goods after his employer’s parties.) When Barrier noticed her picking up the restaurant tab for twenty people, some of them unknown to her until that night, Piaf protested, “It’s my money.” She had long seen to the needs of old friends like Camille Ribon, but many acquaintances now took advantage of both her generosity and her drinking.

  Taking herself in hand, Piaf underwent a series of “cures” at a clinic specializing in aversion therapy. The night before the cure began, she downed bottles of wine like a child defying the grown-ups. The next day, the clinic staff had her drink whatever she liked and, a few hours later, administered drugs to induce vomiting, a treatment that made her detest alcohol but required weeks of recuperation. “We took her there three times,” Simone wrote. “She struggled and finally overcame this temptation”—in Edith’s view, with divine help.

  God was a presence in her daily life, her sister-in-law observed. But though she “brought God into everything, Cerdan had become an obsession.” The household accompanied her to masses held in his memory at the Auteuil Church. Edith gave Marinette and her sons expensive gifts and had them stay for months at a time in her apartment. Simone had little to say about her brother’s adjustment to Edith’s obsessions. For the most part, he humored her. “I was happy with Jacques,” Piaf recalled. “He’d understood that I couldn’t bear to be caged, that as soon as I felt shut in I would smash everything and run away; he didn’t try to keep me from living and thinking.… I often made him unhappy without meaning to. But he was as solid as a rock.” Pills’s equanimity served him well as Piaf’s consort. The day after their wedding, he watched from the Toast of the Town studio wings as she sang Aznavour’s torrid “Jézebel” and the haunting “Padam” (“This melody … seems to mock me for my past sins,” she lisped in English.) Ed Sullivan joked that Piaf’s spouse could now collect her salary and asked “Monsieur Peals”
to take a bow. On November 16, as a regular on the Sullivan show, Piaf performed “La Vie en rose” in French and English against a backdrop of roses, then “L’Accordéoniste,” running her hands up and down her torso. (Sullivan did not censor her gestures, as he had Elvis Presley’s that fall, presumably because the audience did not know that she was singing about a hooker.) Between 1952 and 1959, she would appear on eight Toast of the Town programs, each time smiling up at the tall, ungainly Sullivan when he called her a “petite little French star” and patted her on the head.

  Americans never learned to spell Pills’s name, but he was acclaimed as Piaf’s partner when they returned to Paris. In April 1953, they sang separately and together for a month at the Marigny Theater while also rehearsing Cocteau’s Le Bel Indifférent, planned to follow their engagement at this elegant venue. After poking fun at their audiences (“good citizens glad to go slumming for a night by hearing the most famous muse of the streets”), Paris-Presse noted that Piaf owed her fame to “the art with which she extracts from daily life all the particles of poetry it contains.” In the slums, the critic wrote, she had discovered “dreams of all sorts—of perfection, pity and compassion for human suffering, a generalized tenderness … pure romanticism barely camouflaged.” As for Pills, this “charming” singer brought the audience back to earth with “a marked personal triumph.”

  Despite the success of her heartbreaking new song, “Bravo pour le clown,” some reviewers were less than enthusiastic about the Piaf-Pills partnership. Their joint appearance was “conjugated and conjugal,” France-Soir ironized, as if this coupling of professional and private lives meant that the singer known for her unconventional ways had joined the bourgeoisie. The public remained unaware that in order to perform each night, Piaf had recourse to the morphine prescribed for her chronic pain. When the revival of Le Bel Indifférent ended, on May 28, she went back to the rehab clinic; three weeks later, after a successful treatment, she left, determined to find a new focus.

  Since many believed that a chanteuse réaliste should not forget her origins, the singer took this view into account when choosing projects. The two films in which she acted that summer seemed tailor-made for her. For a cameo appearance that winked at the “conjugal” side of her life in Boum sur Paris, a musical starring Pills, the couple performed the tune that had brought them together, “Je t’ai dans la peau,” along with Piaf’s “Pour qu’elle soit jolie, ma chanson,” a witty “dispute” about music that dramatized their relations. For Si Versailles m’était conté, a reconstruction of court life at Versailles, Piaf, in peasant garb, sang the revolutionary anthem “Ça ira.” (She nearly fell off the ladder from which she called for the death of the nobility.) Leading an insurrectionary mob, even a pretend one, inspired her to add “Ça ira” to her concert repertoire, but after performing the song in costume, Piaf dropped it when she saw that she could not change fast enough for her modern songs. When the film came out, audiences applauded her as France’s pasionaria, ignoring the debate surrounding its tremendous cost and its vilification of the monarchy.

  Pills may have wondered whether his wife’s revolutionary ardor would manifest itself during the holiday they planned in the conservative Landes region of southwestern France in September. Rather than return to New York and the Versailles, they were to spend three months at his family home—playing Ping-Pong, taking walks, and writing the occasional song. Villagers watched the couple ride tandem down the region’s long, flat roads and cheered at their benefit for the local school, an idea of Edith’s. While Jacques and Simone held their breath, the star behaved “like a real lady” at a reception in her honor: “She answered all the questions put to her by the local dignitaries, who seemed surprised, even disappointed, to find that she was a normal woman with good manners.” For their livers’ sake they drank only mineral water, Pills told a journalist who had arrived to find them playing Monopoly. They returned to Paris a few days after a pilgrimage to Lourdes, with holy medals for the household.

  In December, better able to cope with the stresses of her career, Piaf spent her time preparing radio and television broadcasts and at the Pathé-Marconi recording studios. Of her new songs she particularly liked “Heureuse,” by René Rouzaud and Marguerite Monnot. Its view of true love as the shared experience of the best and the worst in life—“Le meilleur et le pire, nous le partageons / C’est ce qu’on appelle s’aimer pour de bon”—described her situation: rather than an ode to sensuality like “Je t’ai dans la peau,” it evoked the desire for lasting love. At Christmas, Pills welcomed the Cerdans as part of their extended family, which included Jacqueline Boyer, the daughter of his first marriage. The couple’s public and private lives seemed in balance. Though there was still something undomesticated about the star, she had created a home.

  The year 1954 brought several occasions for looking backward. In January, Pathé-Marconi gave a reception to celebrate Piaf’s millionth record since her first recording session—at that time an unusual accomplishment, even for a singer of her renown. On the same occasion, Pills gave his wife a belated anniversary gift—bronze molds of her expressive hands, the bearers of the signature gestures with which she illustrated her songs. “Last time I asked for your hand,” he teased. “Today you’re getting two of them.” It was no doubt touching to receive sturdy duplicates of parts of herself that suffered arthritic pain yet fluttered like birds at each performance.

  After touring the south of France later that month, the couple prepared for their spring season. In February, Piaf recorded a new song by Rouzaud and Monnot, “La Goualante du pauvre Jean.” “It was easy to write for Edith,” Rouzaud said. “She inspired you, and it was stimulating to work with Marguerite Monnot’s music.” His goualante, or “lament,” an updated medieval form, would be known worldwide as “The Poor People of Paris”—the homonyms of “Jean,” the poor man of the title, and gens (people) conveyed its universality. What was more, the song’s slangy lyrics suited Piaf’s persona, and its refrain—“Sans amour on n’est rien du tout” (“Without love you’re nothing”)—conveyed her personal and artistic beliefs.

  By this time, the singer’s long-standing collaboration with “Guite” had resulted in twenty-seven songs composed together, and scores of tunes with lyrics by others since they had met through Asso. Like Piaf, Monnot had married. At the height of her career, she too was attempting to adjust to domesticity, though her husband, the singer Paul Péri, was as temperamental as Jacques Pills was calm. Monnot’s way of blending poetic feeling with popular form had enhanced the construction of Piaf’s persona. “Thank you for helping me to be Edith Piaf,” the singer told Monnot on a 1955 television show celebrating the composer’s life.

  In 1954, the two women wrote “Les Amants de Venise,” on the mind’s ability to turn dross into gold, or a slum into Venice, and “Tous mes rêves passés,” an address to their former selves: “J’ai dépensé toutes mes illusions / Suis revenue riche de souvenirs.” (“I’ve spent all my illusions / I’ve come back rich with memories.”) Though successful veterans of a music business that had rarely welcomed women, each was at heart the fleur bleue of “Tous mes rêves passés”—a dreamy young girl in search of love.

  Conjugating marriage and careers proved to be more complicated than it had seemed when Pills and Piaf remet in 1952. After her third stay in the clinic, the couple rehearsed for separate engagements in March, Pills at the Moulin Rouge and Piaf at the Alhambra. It was difficult to appear on the same program, they told a journalist who asked why they were not performing together. Still, each sang on the other’s television special: Piaf’s, on April 3, brought together people from all phases of her professional life, including Bourgeat, her former secretary Suzanne Flon, Emer, and Contet. As Contet came onstage, Edith said, “Now we’ll have fun!” Bourgeat’s reading of his poem on Piaf as the Magdalene made a somber note in an otherwise joyful evening.

  Piaf recorded “Ça ira” before leaving with Pills to tour France with Achille Zavatta’s
Super Circus, an extravaganza combining circus acts with big-name stars. The year before, Tino Rossi had earned a small fortune as the featured entertainer. This year, Pills would end the first half of the program, and Piaf—“the most famous female singer in the world,” according to the poster—would close the show. Zavatta no doubt knew that her family had been circus people. Piaf’s memories of touring with her father may have made her look with favor on the engagement, but the chance to earn a handsome salary would have been hard to refuse in any case. One can imagine her camaraderie with Zavatta, who clowned, did acrobatics, trained wild animals, and played the trumpet, drums, and saxophone; he was also a freethinker who belonged to the Masons. What Edith may not have envisioned was the grueling nature of their tour, eighty cities in nearly as many days.

  On May 23, to the delight of those who remembered her as a child, the Super Circus performed in Bernay. The Bernay cinema ran Boum sur Paris in Edith’s honor. The local paper boasted, “After applauding Edith Piaf, Jacques Pills, and the orchestra, you’ll want to hear them all over again.” Edith barely had time to see her relatives in Bernay and Falaise before touring the rest of Normandy and all the towns along the Atlantic coast. By July, her health had deteriorated. A local doctor who treated the star for a pulmonary infection and probably gave her morphine ironized, “She’s fortunate to have been vaccinated by a phonograph needle, which lets her touch people’s hearts when she has another kind of injection.”

  Edith left the tour in July to return to the clinic. After her treatment, Pills took her to his family home, where she spent most of the next six weeks in bed. Her illness, diagnosed as peritonitis, required surgery and another period of convalescence. By late October, she was able to go onstage but had to intersperse concerts with less demanding engagements, including brief television appearances. With Gilbert Bécaud she wrote “Légende,” a ghostly tale of ill-fated love (the narrator speaks from beyond the grave). Introduced by her long spoken prelude, it was a departure in Piaf’s effort to reach the audience, like another new song in a different vein, the anti-war “Miséricorde.” Both would be recorded with lush orchestration and dramatic background choirs, a popular (though intrusive) device at that time.