No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  In December, Piaf participated in Jean Renoir’s first film in France in fifteen years, French Cancan—a tribute to the fin de siècle Montmartre that gave rise to the chanson réaliste as well as to the cancan, the art forms that had recently been depicted in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge. A Frenchman from a great artistic family, Renoir meant to celebrate popular culture more authentically than Hollywood had done. To this end, he asked Piaf to play her precursor Eugénie Buffet in a reprise of Buffet’s “Sérénade au pavé,” a serenade to the streetwalker figure that clung to Piaf’s image. This time the star wore not peasant garb but the long skirts and bonnet of the 1890s. She received top billing and a salary of seven hundred thousand francs for a cameo lasting three minutes.

  On December 19, Edith’s thirty-ninth birthday, she may have reflected that 1954 had consisted of poignant returns to the past punctuated by bouts with illness and rehabilitation. In the new year, she took a holiday with Emer, Barrier, and the lyricist Jean Dréjac, whose songs of prewar life, particularly the nostalgic “Ah! Le petit vin blanc,” had made his name after the Liberation. Now, having recorded Dréjac’s latest hit, “Sous le ciel de Paris,” Piaf wanted him to write for her. Their collaboration produced one of the songs she would record in 1955, “Le Chemin des forains.” Dréjac’s ode to the forains (traveling artistes of the sort that Piaf had been as a child), set to a brassy score that included the ringmaster’s cracking whip, expressed the poetry of lives lived beyond social conventions: “Ils ont troué la nuit / D’un éclair de paillettes d’argent / Ils vont tuer l’ennui / … / Et Dieu seul peut savoir où ils seront demain / Les forains / Qui s’en vont dans la nuit.” (“They pierce the black night / With spangled silver / They’ll banish ennui / … / Only God knows where they’ll be tomorrow / The travelers / Take off in the night.”)

  Before she herself took off across the Atlantic, Piaf recorded another song with a bittersweet view of the traveling life, with lyrics by Claude Delécluse and Michèle Senlis, set to music by Monnot. “C’est à Hambourg, à Santiago / A Whitechapel, à Bornéo / … / A Rotterdam ou à Frisco,” it began, a geography of ports where men have one-night stands with women who solicit them in every language—“Hello boy! You come with me? / Amigo! Te quiero mucho!” Another of Piaf’s best-known tunes, “C’est à Hambourg” restaged the tale of the goodhearted whore multiplied by all the towns conjured in its credo: “J’ai l’coeur trop grand pour un seul gars / J’ai l’coeur trop grand et c’est pour ça / Qu’j’écris l’amour sur toute la terre.” (“My heart’s too big for just one guy / My heart’s too big and that is why / I send my love all round the world.”) The cliché kept returning to claim her, as if the image of the woman whose heart embraced multitudes was how her audiences, and the singer herself, wanted to see her.

  Piaf, Pills, Barrier, and Roland Avelys flew to New York on March 1, 1955, entrained to Chicago, then took the California Zephyr across the plains and through the mountains to San Francisco. While the rest of her party admired the scenery, Edith spent her time in the sleeper, attended by the train’s hostesses, the “Zephyrettes.” The Bonels joined them at the Clift Hotel. On trips to inspect local attractions, Edith remained indifferent to the redwoods: “Nothing special,” she said, taking up her knitting, “just a lot of wood.”

  Her new show, Edith Piaf and Her Continental Revue, featured a mime named Mimmo, dancers, acrobats, and “Jacques Peals” (in America it was unthinkable to use his medicinal-sounding name). After San Francisco, where she was hailed as “France’s greatest gift to the theater since Sarah Bernhardt,” they took the revue to Los Angeles and Chicago. Each night Piaf sang twelve songs, including “If You Love Me” and “Merry-Go-Round” (“Hymne à l’amour” and “Je n’en connais pas la fin”), “La Vie en rose” in English and French, and “C’est à Hambourg,” “Je t’ai dans la peau,” and “La Goualante du pauvre Jean,” an audience favorite. The critics raved when her songs came out on Angel Records’ Blue Label. “Piaf is France,” one wrote. “She makes one believe what Jefferson … once said: ‘Every man has two countries, his own and France.’ ”

  “I was so exhausted when I left Paris,” Edith told Bourgeat, “that I’ve been taking it easy in America.” Pills would soon leave the troupe to star in a musical in London; she would remain in the States. Meanwhile, she asked her mentor for more information about the aims and philosophy of the Rosicrucians: “This matters a lot to me, but let’s keep it entre nous.” What she kept for herself was the presence of the new man in her life—Jean Dréjac, who would later join this esoteric order. The lyricist had come to Chicago to be with her but was staying at a hotel under an assumed name. Even if Pills did not yet know that he had a rival for Edith’s affections, his decision to leave her show at the end of May suggests that their duo was unraveling.

  The troupe felt relief on arrival in Montreal, where Pills could appear with his name spelled properly. Piaf was “a deeply expressive soul. In her eyes one sees the light from within,” a local critic rhapsodized. Of the others, he singled out Mimmo (“another Chaplin”) and Pills (a performer “with class”). After an engagement in Quebec City, Pills and Avelys flew back to Paris, the latter in disgrace for having behaved as unscrupulously as Momone. Her court jester, Piaf hinted to Bourgeat, might resort to blackmail; for this reason, Jacquot should not speak to him. “One needs a heart of steel in this life,” she continued. Yet she felt fortunate, having met “a good man … the kind I never expected to meet again.”

  Although she omitted Dréjac’s name in letters to Bourgeat, the lyricist’s influence is clear when one reads between the lines. About this time, having also received a detailed account of the Rosicrucians’ beliefs from Bourgeat, Edith applied to join the order. She wished to do so, she wrote, “because I am passionately interested in the quest for truth and would feel closer to God while trying to deepen my comprehension of his marvelous mysteries.”

  With Dréjac as her companion (to allay suspicions, he was introduced as her doctor), Piaf displayed “a joie de vivre that has nothing to do with vanity or success,” a journalist noted; her smile was that of “a rebellious adolescent.” The lyricist went with her to Hollywood in July, when she again appeared at the Mocambo, despite her repertoire’s mildly incongruous note among the club’s cockatoos, macaws, and Latin ambience. She planned to prolong her stay in the United States to earn enough for a country house in France, a project that became feasible when the director of the Riviera Casino in Las Vegas paid her not to honor her contract there after learning at the last minute that she did not correspond to his idea of a glamorous chanteuse.

  Piaf spent the rest of the summer with Dréjac at an oceanside villa in Malibu, playing cards, entertaining French guests and stars like Marlon Brando (it is said that they had a fling), and using up her earnings from Las Vegas. “When I come back I want to dedicate myself to helping others,” she told Bourgeat. Certain that God had destined her for something more than singing, she was searching for what that might be. Jacquot would understand, since he and she were “the last of the romantics.”

  In September, Dréjac accompanied Piaf to New York for her sixth engagement at the Versailles, where Judy Garland, Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, and other stars came to applaud her. Dréjac and Edith shared an apartment with their “chaperones,” the Bonels. “It was a time of simple happiness,” Danielle recalled. Dréjac’s humor amused Piaf, especially when he tested pasta by tossing it at the ceiling: the strands that stuck were done, he said, but had to be taken down to be eaten. During this time, he also adapted two American hits for her. “Suddenly There’s a Valley” became the Rosicrucian-inflected “Soudain une vallée”: “Vous avez parcouru le monde / Vous croyiez n’avoir rien trouvé / Et soudain, une vallée / S’offre à vous pour la paix profonde.” (“You thought the world a waste / As you traveled all around / Suddenly a valley / Opens to peace that is profound.”) Dréjac also wrote a French version of a tune that could hardly be said to promote serenity—“Black
Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots,” by Elvis Presley’s composers, Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber. As “L’Homme à la moto,” the song, with its wild tempo and driven hero, made a striking addition to Piaf’s repertoire.

  About this time, Chevalier, with whom Piaf discussed her plans for a country house, became concerned for her equilibrium: “She’s a moving bundle of complexes mixing courage, talent, and frailty with a nervous energy that inundates her little body and shows in her anxious eyes.” In December, Dréjac sailed to France to look after his mother just before the return of Pills, who was booked to sing with Piaf during the holidays. She too felt like leaving, she told Bourgeat: “I’ll come home around April and stay in France for a long time. I’ve had enough of exile!”

  Nineteen fifty-six began with rehearsals for Piaf’s January 4 concert at Carnegie Hall, an exceptional event at this shrine to classical music. Though she performed two of Dréjac’s songs, his lilting “Sous le ciel de Paris” and the rocking “L’Homme à la moto” (while gripping imaginary handlebars), the singer’s black dress established “a stark mood,” in the view of the New York Times, which dubbed her “the high priestess of agony.” The Times critic seemed surprised when the huge audience nonetheless responded “with an enthusiasm which proved that heartbreak makes the whole world kin.” Almost in spite of himself, he praised the congruence of her persona, repertoire, and gestures—which were “of such naturalness and rightness that the performer’s whole body is merged into the essence of the song.” Won over by the end, after twenty-two songs in both languages, he allowed that watching the star, “You are no longer in Carnegie Hall but in a bistro on a side street on the Left Bank.”

  The next day, Edith flew to Havana, where she was booked for two weeks at the Sans Souci, a bucolic club outside of town that drew gamblers, Hemingway admirers, and fans who came to hear such performers as Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, and Dorothy Dandridge. Dréjac’s reappearance in Havana caught her by surprise. They quarreled, she accused him of being possessive. “Edith had already noticed someone else,” Danielle Bonel recalled. “The page had been turned.” Edith then took up with Dréjac’s replacement, the guitarist Jacques Liébrard—a member of her orchestra since 1953. Her intimates explained these affairs as necessary to her art: “She always needed someone to love in her own way,” Barrier observed. “It wasn’t just sexual desire or because she loved to be in love, as some have said.” Being far from Paris made it easier to forget that both she and Liébrard had spouses, though his union, with a woman twenty years his senior, had never been formalized.

  Edith wrote Bourgeat from Mexico, where she was booked for February, that she hesitated to tell him of certain things—such as her transfer of affections from Dréjac to Liébrard. “I’m caught in a struggle with my conscience,” she explained. “All I know is that each time it’s more difficult to find happiness. Maybe I ask too much of life.” But now she had a lover “with so much class that I feel overcome with admiration. That’s what I’ve always lacked, being able to admire the man I love (except, of course, Marcel).”

  In her struggles with her conscience, Edith did not forget her husband. From Mexico she counseled Pills about his next recital. He should send her copies of his songs, “so I can listen to your new repertoire.” Meanwhile, she told him to limit his movements and simplify his gestures: “The more sober they are, the more true they’ll be.” Above all, he should be himself—a recipe that always worked to her advantage. She hoped that her “little man” would take her advice: “I so much want you to be wonderful.” “I love Mexico more and more,” she added: “It’s a magnificent country!” Enthralled by the rhythms of Latin music and adored by her audiences, Piaf performed at three clubs in the capital, the Capri, the Patio, and the Tenampa, where she was adopted by the mariachis with whom she sang “La Vie en rose” in Spanish and a brooding ballad with an antithetical moral, “La vida no vale nada” (“Life is worth nothing”).

  Life seemed more than worthwhile when the star arrived in Rio de Janeiro at the end of March for a two-week engagement at the Copacabana Palace. “I found a marvelous country,” she told a French radio host. “It was the first time I said to myself, ‘I could live here.’ ” Each night her fans covered the stage with flowers; for them she sang “La Vie en rose” in Portuguese. But on May 6, after two more weeks of concerts in São Paulo, Piaf flew back to Paris via Rio, Recife, Dakar, and Lisbon, thus ending her fourteen months in exile.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1956–1959

  In exile, Edith had absorbed the New World’s rhythms while focusing on her art, the privilege of the foreigner to whom local concerns do not have the same resonance as matters at home. Despite (or because of) her many love affairs, she turned inward in hopes of finding what the Rosicrucians called the goal of the spiritual path—the serenity that belies the turmoil of daily life. But on her return to Paris in 1956, she felt the need to reconnect with her compatriots, her fans of long standing and the younger generations, whose taste for American-style music she kept in mind when recording “L’Homme à la moto” (which to this day is reprised by French singers looking for lively material). Piaf hoped to become their contemporary not as “Mlle. Heartbreak” (Life’s name for her) but as the queen of song, or, in Cocteau’s phrase, France’s nightingale. Her attempts for the next few years to balance these claims kept her on a merry-go-round whose pace threatened her equilibrium even as it generated themes so close to her life that her songwriters seemed to be translating its rhythms into musical form with their recurrent metaphors (especially the dizzying ones, like the merry-go-round).

  As if their marriage were about to resume, Pills greeted his wife at Orly with a bouquet of flowers. Their long-deferred reunion took place amid the embraces of Edith’s close friends Marguerite Monnot and her husband, the music publisher Raoul Breton and his wife, and Cerdan’s sons. Since the increase of anti-French hostility in Morocco, the Cerdan family had been living in Edith’s apartment, looked after by her majordomo, the new cook, Suzanne, and Suzanne’s daughter Christiane, the femme de chambre. Piaf moved back to the Boulevard Lannes with Pills that night, and a week later appeared with him on television to perform “Et ça gueule, ça, madame,” the song she had written when they were first a duo.

  Within a few days, she began rehearsals for her next engagement, at the Olympia, to start at the end of May. “I was scared, much more so than for Carnegie Hall,” Piaf told a reporter. In the fourteen months she had been gone, much had changed: “There were new songs, new stars. How was I to find my way?” Only the thought of all that she had overcome in the past allowed her to go on.

  The star need not have worried. Her Olympia audiences, only too glad to embrace the môme from Belleville who had conquered America, welcomed her with a standing ovation. The singer’s voice resonated through the large, dark theater, a spectator recalled: “It was galvanizing; the high notes seemed to come from her guts rather than her mouth.… By her seventh or eighth song I was in a trance.”

  Piaf’s new songs, several of which she had tried out in the United States, invoked popular myths. “L’Homme à la moto” struck a markedly “American” note with its driving tale of the motorcyclist who meets his death despite the pleas of his sweetheart. “Les Amants d’un jour” also ended badly—with the lovers’ suicide—yet its alternation of major and minor keys juxtaposed a vision of absolute love recalled by Piaf’s persona, the woman who watches the ill-fated lovers from her place at the bar of a tawdry hotel: “Moi, j’essuie les verres / Au fond du café / J’ai bien trop à faire / Pour pouvoir rêver / Mais dans ce décor / Banal à pleurer / Il me semble encore / Les voir arriver.” (“Me, I wipe the glasses / At the back of the café / I’ve too much to do / To dream my time away / Yet in this sad décor / It’s enough to make you cry / I can still see them / When they first passed by.”) Piaf also sang her classics, including “L’Hymne à l’amour,” which brought down the house. Her comeback was such a success that the management e
xtended it for another month.

  In a telling contrast to her triumphant return, Piaf’s empty apartment struck a visitor as “the image of a separation.” Earlier that year, Pills had told the press that he had had to leave her in the States to fulfill his contract. On June 6, the couple issued a press release announcing their plans to divorce. “We reached this decision together,” Piaf told reporters. “We’re apart too often because of our engagements.” What she did not say was that she had lost interest in Pills and that he could no longer bear the cost of being Monsieur Piaf. Still, their parting was cordial; they would remain friends.

  Piaf was right about changes in the music business during her absence. Mistinguett had died earlier that year, having kept her name and her famous legs in the limelight since her debut in 1895. Her death marked the end of an era, that of the entertainers who had dominated Edith’s start in show business. By 1956, new trends were apparent in French musical culture, to some extent reinvigorated by North American rhythms but also by the successes of Edith’s protégés. Montand was now a popular star, often in movies with his wife, Simone Signoret; Aznavour had found fame as a crooner whose emotional intensity resembled Piaf’s; Les Compagnons’ upbeat harmonies had made them an international success; Eddie Constantine was enjoying a film career as a private eye. Piaf’s mentoring had transmitted to each of them her sense of métier but often at a cost to herself that she acknowledged only to close friends like Jacques Bourgeat.